The Trust Recipe

The Desert of Arizona
Rain 33 Degrees

It’s cold and wet outside today, so let’s head to the kitchen and bake something good…

Today, we’re going to talk about the recipe for baking a big batch of TRUST with your current clients and future clients.

How do you build trust exactly? Is trust some nebulous thing you just end up with after you’ve “been around” for a while?

No. Trust is very concrete. It can be engineered by you with little trouble. In fact, the recipe is actually very simple. You only need TWO ingredients:

  1. Promises made
  2. Promises fulfilled

When you make a promise to your prospective clients or your current clients and you deliver on that promise, trust is created.

Now like any recipe, YOU have to decide how much you scale it. You adjust the quantity of ingredients based on the amount of trust you want.

So the speed at which you build trust depends on the number of promises made and fulfilled and the size of those promises. The more promises made and fulfilled, the more quickly trust builds.

This is why the platform model of client attraction is so effective. A newsletter, podcast or some regularly repeating publication is all we’re talking about, so don’t get scared. The platform is a systematic way to build trust with far more people than you could ever work with directly.

Every day, I make a “promise” to you that I will show up with this email. And although I’m not perfect (gasp!), I fulfill on that promise to the best of my ability.

Promises made, promises fulfilled = TRUST

If you’ve been reading this Client Letter for some time and still don’t have your platform off the ground, then I’m afraid you’re out of luck at the moment.

You can’t “advertise” your way to trust. It’s not going to happen. So good luck with that.

But if any bits of what I’ve been talking about for years have made their way to your reality and you DO have a platform that’s working for you, ask yourself these questions:

  1. Am I building trust in the quantity and at the rate that I want?
  2. Am I making enough promises? Am I fulfilling enough promises?

This is a deliberate decision by the way. You’re looking for a frequency for your platform that makes it easy for you to produce and enjoyable for your prospective client to consume.

But what about the “almighty bottom line?” “You can’t eat trust,” they say… Does trust actually turn into money?

Ha! The only people that ask questions like this are the ones who are looking for an excuse NOT to do real work. Making promises and fulfilling on those promises is the REAL WORK very few are willing to do. So there’s plenty of room in the pool if you want to jump in. The water’s fine.