Many of you are likely familiar with the movie The Shawshank Redemption and the iconic image of Andy Dufresne looking toward the sky, getting pelted by rain, relishing his new freedom after crawling through 1,500 feet of sewer pipe in his prison escape.
And since you work in this industry, instead of being enchanted by this moment of pure cinema, you perhaps roll your eyes. Andy Dufresne should’ve died in that sewer pipe, right? I didn’t see him wearing the proper PPE.
It’s certainly not the first — nor last — time a movie has played it loose with the accuracy of its details. But it’s a moment that plays differently, depending on the amount of knowledge you have. Many people probably don’t question this scene. They fully buy in to it and get caught up in the rhythms of the narration of Morgan Freeman’s character, the ascending score and that final triumphant image of Andy Dufresne. That was me for most of my years watching The Shawshank Redemption — until I started working for COLE Publishing.
Now I know about the dangers of confined-space entry. I know that crawling through hundreds of feet of sanitary sewer pipe would almost certainly expose someone to an asphyxiating atmosphere, not to mention lethal concentrations of methane and hydrogen sulfide. I can’t help but think about those things now watching Andy Dufresne’s escape from Shawshank Prison, so the magic of that movie moment won’t ever hit in the same way ever again.
I thought about all this recently while considering the water and wastewater knowledge differences between you contractors — as a result of years of working in this industry — and your customers. What may seem like common sense to you perhaps is not for your customers. That means you should be doing whatever you can to educate customers. Informational blogs on your website, YouTube content, pamphlets left behind after completing a job, or just the way you talk to and explain things to a customer in-person. It all goes toward establishing yourself as a trusted expert in a customer’s eyes, making it more likely that you’ll have their business for life.
Remember: You don’t know what you don’t know. Even something simple and straightforward to you could be new, helpful information to a customer. For example, just last month in the July issue, I published an article that was intended to be a template for how you could go about helping customers develop some best practices so that they’re better prepared for a sewer emergency. Clogged pipes, basement flooding. You encounter these types of situations regularly, but customers don’t and may lack some very basic knowledge. The actual content of that article wasn’t revelatory to you, but it could be for some customers. That’s why it was presented as an educational piece, a way of informing customers who lack that basic knowledge.
You should be the one filling that knowledge gap, and in the process, you could be nicely rewarded with repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals.
Enjoy this month’s issue.
