17:01

Alex is a freelancer. He has his own limited company. Works twelve hours a day. Loves what he does.

His relationship with his customers is amazing. He sells his service himself. He talks to them all the time. He tries to deliver the best service ever. At the end of every project, he upsells. Overdelivers.

His customers feel his enthusiasm. He’s worth every cent he invoices.

Great.

The story continues.

Alex wants more profit. He hasn’t had a holiday in two years. He wants to secure his income for the time he’s sick. Stability comes with a cost.

So he hires.

Sally takes over sales. She’s amazing. New customers keep coming in. She upsells. Always on schedule with the check-in call.

Alex now has more delivery work than before, so he hires Brian. Brian is good at what he does. Maybe even better than Alex.

Brian is an employee, not the owner. Brian works 9 to 5. If the customer calls at 17:01, Brian is already closing his laptop. Of course, he calls back first thing in the morning. He follows the handbook Alex wrote.

But the customer waits.

Alex has more costs now: two extra salaries. So he raises his prices.

The customer feels cheated.

Nobody did anything wrong. Sally did her job. Brian did his job. Alex did the math. And delivery quality already decreased.

Last time we talked about external quality: whether the delivered value aligned with needs, requirements, and expectations. In Alex’s case, the value didn’t change.

Same service, same outcomes. What changed was the feeling around it. That’s delivery quality.

Delivery quality is the experience the person who matters feels before, during, and after the process of delivering a product or a service, shaped by multiple dimensions.

In Alex’s case, those dimensions changed the moment he scaled. Response time. Ownership. Emotional investment. Pricing. Nothing broke. Shifted. And the customer felt it all.

The Stoics called it the dichotomy of control. Some things are up to you. Most things are not. How your customer feels about your service is not up to you.

You can only influence.
Influencing is part of the job.
And influence doesn’t stop at delivery.
It runs before, during, and after.

My friend Pablo said this in our new podcast, Never Stop Learning: “When you deliver the software, that’s not when the software is done. The software is done when you have delivered and it lives its life in production, and it actually delivers the value you expect from it over time, without having to fix it very much.”

The before and the during get all the attention. Pablo is talking about the after. The part most organisations forget exists.

Alex didn’t forget. Alex was the before, the during, and the after — same person, same energy, same phone number.

Now Sally is the before and the after. Brian is the during. The customer’s feeling… well. Let’s try to influence it.

Thanks for reading.