We were walking the property when she stopped.
There was a stream cutting through the tree line and it dropped maybe six feet over a shelf of rock before settling into a pool below. Nothing dramatic. Just water doing what water does. But Alisha stood there for a moment and then turned to me with tears in her eyes and said, “You bought me a waterfall.”
I didn’t buy her a waterfall. I bought her 130 acres in Pennsylvania because owning a farm was her dream. I just didn’t know a waterfall came with it.
Here’s what I want you to understand about that moment. I was already happy before we found it. Not because I love the farm, though I do, but because she loves it. That was enough. I wasn’t executing a plan or waiting for a return. I just wanted her to have the thing she always wanted.
Thirty years of marriage have taught me that the moment you start giving to get, your partner knows—maybe not immediately, but eventually. And when they figure it out, you’ve lost the trust.
Business works the same way.
When I was an independent sales rep, I developed a habit that confused a lot of people. If a competitor had a better solution for my customer, I said so and sent them there—not reluctantly and not while making it clear I expected something in return. I sent them because it was the right answer for the person in front of me, and that actually mattered to me.
I wasn’t running a long game. I wasn’t stockpiling goodwill like a currency I planned to spend later. I just believed the person sitting across from me deserved the right solution, whether I could provide it or not.
When I launched FlexScreen years later, a product the industry had every reason to ignore, I had relationships with people who already knew who I was before I ever asked them for anything. That foundation held when I needed it most.
Zig Ziglar said, “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” I love that quote. But if you treat it as a formula, it stops working immediately. The moment helping people becomes a mechanism for getting what you want, people feel the shift. It stops being generosity and starts being something else entirely.
The only version of this that works is the sincere one. It has to be who you are, not something you do when the conditions are favorable. It has to live in your culture—in how your team treats each other, in how your people treat customers and in how your leaders show up every day. It can’t be a policy, but as a value that gets modeled from the top.
The question worth sitting with isn’t whether this approach produces results. It does. The question is whether you actually care about the people you serve.
That’s the only one that matters. And it’s the one that only you can answer.