“no, but… yes, and… ”

I was having lunch with my buddy Wes Gautreaux and he did that thing when someone says something that you've always said and thought but never heard anyone else say; so credit for this one goes to him.

Our business, S1 Technology? is an IT support service business. With any service business, the thing about our work that tells our story is happy customers. We don't build physical things and a rewired server rack never made anyone make a drastic business decision. Due to this, the way Jeremy Roth and I explain our business to prospective customers is with stories and maxims. We show data and we show systems but most small business owners don't care. They want to know what we can do for their business.

What we can do for their business is do all of the things the right way. The big stuff obviously like system configurations, security tools, and IT applications. The magic though is in the way we do the small things. One piece of that is in the way we say yes and no; what might seem to be a basic choice actually holds profound implications. Picture this: a healthcare client wishes to establish a direct link between their EMR and another hospital. Given our staunch commitment to security, an outright "No" might seem the easiest path. Yet, the simplicity of rejection isn't why our customers pay us the big bucks. Instead, we pivot, "No, but how about we build a secure method that lets them access the required EMR data without compromising your HIPAA compliance?" This nuance, subtle as it may be, elevates the customer experience.

No, but is an important tool, but it's not our best quality. Our best quality is YES AND. For example, the owner of one of our client businesses asked our service desk if we could help them migrate to Microsoft Sharepoint. Instead of just saying yes, we said, "Yes, and did you know that we can recreate that massive spreadsheet you're using into a power app to where you don't need to edit cells? You can just use this custom web app that we'll build for you." This ended up saving them 20 hours a week. That's over 1,000 hours a year... The YESAND doesn't stop there, we had a customer ask us to help with Quickbooks updates, no problem. When one of our technical consultants got talking with the customer, they realized that they HATED having to use VPN to connect to their Quickbooks server in their office and could really benefit from having Intuit QuickBooks in the cloud. The issue is that this business needed some of the functionality of Quickbooks Desktop and QB Cloud would not work. We recommended that we put Quickbooks Desktop in Amazon Web Services (AWS) for them so they could benefit from connection anywhere without losing the added features of the desktop version.

In a business like ours built on human connections, it's our effort and approach to problem-solving that stands out. The respect and understanding in our conversations, both within the team and with clients, define us. Our relentless drive to innovate and deliver beyond expectations is precisely why our clientele adores us. The S1 ethos isn't simply "Yes" or "No." It's the art of “yes, and… no, but…”