Your Clients See a Different Company Than You Do

Ask a construction company owner what the firm does best and the answer comes fast. We're agile. We decide quickly. We stay close to the client. We deliver on schedule.

Now ask the same question of his biggest client. And of the supplier who has worked with him for eight years.

Sometimes the answers match. Often they don't. And the gap between those versions tells you more about the company than any one of them alone.

The company you see is the company that reaches you

An owner doesn't see the whole company. He sees the part that crosses his desk.

He sees the decisions he makes — and he makes them fast. He sees the problems that reach him — and he solves them. He sees the reports he asked for, with the numbers he chose to track.

What he doesn't see is what never arrived. The proposal that sat for three weeks waiting for a signature. The supplier who stopped following up because nobody answered. The client who complained twice to the project engineer and, the third time, simply made a mental note: not with this firm again.

None of that shows up as a problem inside the company. It shows up as silence. And to the person in charge, silence usually reads as a sign that everything is fine.

Why a fast decision-maker can look slow

This is the most common case, and the least intuitive.

The owner decides fast — once the decision reaches him. The problem is how long it takes to get there. From the inside, the company is agile: the principal resolves it in five minutes. From the outside, the company is slow: the request sat for ten days before those five minutes.

Both versions are true. But the client pays for the total, not for the five minutes.

The same applies to almost every strength a company believes it has:

• Closeness. To the owner, it means he handles things personally. To the client, it can mean only he can resolve anything — and he isn't always available.
• Flexibility. Inside, it means the ability to adapt. To a supplier, it can mean orders changed without notice and schedules rebuilt every week.
• Tight control. To leadership, it means safety. To the other side, it can mean pay applications that take weeks to approve and payments delayed for want of one sign-off.

None of these outside views is necessarily right. But each is information the company doesn't have — and that the market uses to decide whether to hire it again.

Your suppliers know before you do

Of all outside perspectives, the supplier's is the most underrated.

The client sees the project. The supplier sees the company from the back door: how it orders, how it schedules, how it pays, who decides and how long it takes. He works with ten or twenty contractors at once and holds a yardstick no owner has — comparison.

When a contractor starts to lose its grip, suppliers usually notice first. Orders become more urgent and less planned. Change requests multiply. Payments slip a few days. Nobody announces any of it, but they notice — and they start protecting themselves: prioritizing other customers, tightening terms, asking for deposits.

By the time the effect reaches project cost, the cause had been there for months. It was written in the perception of someone nobody asked.

The problem isn't the criticism. It's the gap.

Every company has flaws its clients can see. That's not a sign of fragility.

The signal is the gap. A company that rates itself one way and is rated very differently by the people who depend on it has a problem that comes before any specific flaw: it isn't getting feedback from the world. And an organization that gets no feedback doesn't correct course — it keeps accelerating in the direction it believes is right.

That's why, in our diagnostics, this gap is measured on its own. We call it the Perception Gap™: the difference between how leadership rates its own capability and how clients and suppliers rate it, on the same points. When the gap is small, the company knows itself. When it's large, some channel between the market and leadership is blocked — and it's worth finding out which one before growing on top of it.

Why asking directly doesn't work

The natural reaction is: then just ask the client.

That's not enough. A client won't tell the owner, face to face, that the firm is slow to decide. He'll say everything is great, the partnership is excellent — and hire another contractor for the next project. A supplier who depends on the orders will say even less.

Honest outside perception only surfaces under three conditions:

• Distance. The person asking can't be the person who awards the next contract.
• Structure. The same questions, on the same points, for everyone — otherwise there's nothing to compare.
• Confidentiality. Individual answers can't reach, identified, anyone with power over the person who gave them.

Without all three, what you hear is courtesy. Courtesy is pleasant and useless for making decisions.

Three questions to start with today

No consultant, no system — you can get a first sense of the gap:

• 1. Write down your company's three greatest strengths. Then ask your longest-serving manager to write his. If the lists don't match inside the company, imagine outside it.
• 2. Who was the last client that didn't come back? Do you know the real reason, or the reason you inferred?
• 3. How long, on average, does a supplier wait for an answer from your company? Not the answer you give. The one that reaches him — counting the time the request took to climb to someone who could answer.

If any of those answers was “I don't know,” that is the most important information in this article.

The real company is the one others experience

Every owner knows the company he built. Few know the company their clients and suppliers experience every day.

The first is the intention. The second is the operating reality — and it's what decides who hires you again, who gives you better terms, and who recommends you for the next project.

They don't need to be identical. But you need to know how far apart they are.

To measure the gap between how leadership and the market see your construction company, explore the Elevare™ Organizational Capability Assessment.

Renato Lerner

Founder, Elevare™

Renato Lerner has 30 years of experience in construction in Brazil, Angola, and the United States. He is the founder of Elevare™ and creator of the Organizational Capability Diagnostic.