The Value of the Hard Reset

Any of you who have followed me or this column know that I am highly focused on the power of longevity, especially as it relates to relationships. While partly naïve, I have this vision of only working with brands and people who desire a long-term relationship, not a short-term solution.

This vision is not easy to attain. Just like every other business, we still lose customers, even when we feel we did everything right, because frankly, it just wasn’t a match.

Two years ago, we put in a quarterly grading structure at our agency, No Limit, to try to gain insight into what was working and what was not. I have written about this in many previous columns. While collecting feedback last year, I saw an incredible hole in our grading system. We were asking for relationship, service and results, but had been leaving out the score on strategy.

Since adding strategy to the grading process, I learned that strategy was not just in the positioning of a brand, a story, a product or a growth plan—it was also in the strategy of leading relationship, service and results.

Within my discovery, even when we, as an agency, were delivering higher quality in each of the initial three categories, we were still missing the value of the hard reset at the grading points. We were asking them to grade us, but not asking us to have a clean slate to start fresh and earn a better score.

Perhaps part of this is me being hard on our agency—but, we have this collective vision to be the best midsized agency that ever existed, therefore, this was necessary to improving our relationship, service and results.

I think the hard reset is not used enough in business. Far too often, businesses let things go until the situations just run their courses. I, however, believe stopgaps can be put in place to protect the possibility of a forever relationship.

Stopgaps can also come in all shapes and sizes: Customer service solutions, in-person meetings and, most importantly, listening.

This philosophy doesn’t just have to be applied to business—it can be applied to every part of life. The hard reset should give everyone involved in a business relationship or personal relationship the opportunity to take a deep breath, talk through constructive criticism and come out of that moment in better shape.

The hard reset certainly works (most of the time) with technology. It should also work with us as humans.

Many of us are afraid to hear that feedback, but fundamentally and foundationally, feedback, stopgaps and hard resets can be a simple solution to continuing a relationship.