I talk about planning a lot. I am pretty good about planning my stuff, but I fail hard on planning for the relationship level. Mother’s Day, Valentines, Birthdays and Christmas are all things that I dread. I would guess that it is because I don’t have a lot of interest in those things personally. I could care less if I do anything different on my birthday or not. Others in my family think it is a national holiday.

I have been holding on to this story since June, I am not sure why but I thought that I would save it until I really needed an idea. I know that it was at least partially because I wanted to do the topic justice. I don’t think that is really today, but it seemed like a good day to use it.

I live in a small town. It is the kind of place that nearly everything is closed by 8pm. Maybe you can imagine what that looks like but often doesn’t leave a lot of options from a retail standpoint. I would best describe the environment like you can often find something that will work but may not be exactly what you want.

I am speaking about hardware, building supplies, sporting goods, clothing and electronics. I am sure that it applies to other things as well but these are the things that I am often in search of. I have definitely grown more accustomed to going directly online. But that doesn’t work well when you haven’t planned in advance, see paragraph one above.

June 1 was my mom’s birthday. Of course I wasn’t prepared so I thought that I would get some flowers. Little did I know the flower shop closed at 4pm and it was 4:15. Fortunately, we already have a non-business relationship and she was still at the shop. I suspect that she would have done it for most people but it at least made me feel like I got preferential treatment.

In building this relationship, I have also learned that how things are done matter. For instance, I have learned that ordering directly from the flower shop puts more margin in the owners direction. So, while you might pay the same ordering from the shop directly versus a national service when the owner does better on the sale, other things happen. I talk about this more at the end of this post.

I do try to give business in town when I can. Without patrons willing to frequent the business, they wont be there at all let alone limited hours. Sometimes I pay the extra 30-50% premium to do my part for the convenience. I should also mention the next bigger city is nearly half an hour away. You are trading time for money in many instances. Unless money is really tight, time is often much more valuable to me.

The second half of this equation is that relationships aren’t free. Of course there is the financial part of it but I am talking about the quid pro quo side. I agreed to transform a picture frame into a memory box by cutting some slots so slogans written on blocks of wood could be slid in for a daughters graduation/birthday party.

It probably took me two hours to do. I will say that I was way more careful than I would normally be because it wasn’t my frame to damage or mess up. But, that is a good lesson for me as well as I can be a little too casual sometimes and things don’t go the way that I think they should in my mind.

Getting back to the theme here. Sometimes the relationship occurs before the business or sometimes it is the other way around. When I was in college, I became friendly with a guy whose parents owned a Chinese restaurant. We did our fair share of buying meals, but usually we got something comped or brought out to sample as well. There were a couple of times that we were invited to the Chinese New Year dinner with the family. That was really cool.

I will throw in one last example. There was a local gas station that unfortunately developed a tank leak and had to be torn down for environmental cleanup earlier this year. He says the plan is to rebuild quickly, I hope so.

I was going to the station across the street because the price was the same and it was the easiest to get back on the road in the direction that I wanted to go. But several times, the attendant asked me to wait 15 minutes for their staff meeting (we do not have self-service gasoline in Oregon). After about the third time this happened, I left to the first station I mentioned and never went back.

I was one of his earliest repeat customers I am pretty sure because he had just purchased the station. Each time I would hand him my debit card he would take the time to read the name and thank me before I left. It wasn’t long and he knew my vehicle, what I wanted. This guy was a people person anyway and I noticed over the years people would pull into the station largely to talk.

He also employed local kids to work. But the real reason I kept going to buy my gasoline was that I began to notice his business was a frequent sponsor of youth sports teams, seasonal music etc. I have never seen the station across the street sponsor anything in this town. Even though I paid at least 10 cents per gallon more I made the choice to spend my money there because it was working harder at things that were important to me.

End Your Programming Routine: The point to all of this is that business can build relationship. And, when you have commerce with relationship that becomes community. Community is caring, the drive to belong and participate which allow both to business and relationship to thrive.