The 10-Cent Problem

If you're reading this blog, I already know something about you.

You're someone who values growth.

Just like me.

Many years ago, a mentor of mine helped me develop a framework for thinking that still sits with me today.

He called it the 3 C's of Business.

Now, this story could stop there.

He was my mentor. He had walked the path before me for considerably longer than I had. He had the grey in the beard to have earned the authority to simply give me the framework and send me on my way.

And that would have been perfectly acceptable.

It also would have taken about 15 seconds.

Instead, he chose a much more expensive path.

For him.

For the organisation.

And, in a roundabout way, for me.

But it was an investment that is still paying dividends today.

The Expensive World of Curly Cords

Let me set the scene.

As an operations manager, I was responsible for the telephony peripherals in the contact centre I was working in.

Headsets.

Cords.

Splitters.

Consumables.

And if you've ever had responsibility for buying commercial contact-centre equipment, you'll know the good stuff isn't cheap.

Need a headset that meets the privacy, audio and safety requirements of a contact centre?

That'll be a couple of hundred dollars.

Need the cord that connects it to the phone?

More money.

Want someone to listen side-by-side for coaching or quality purposes?

You'll need a splitter.

And another headset.

And another cord.

You get the idea.

But there was one particular expense that bothered me.

The curly cords connecting the equipment would regularly fail.

Except most of the cord was perfectly fine.

It was often just the tiny plastic connector on the end that was broken.

A part worth perhaps ten cents could render a considerably more expensive cable useless.

So we'd throw the whole thing away and buy another one.

And another one.

And another one.

It drove me nuts.

"Have You Heard of the 3 C's?"

One day, I mentioned it in passing to my mentor.

He could have solved the problem for me.

Instead, he saw something better.

A coaching opportunity.

And, as it turned out, one with a pretty healthy return on investment.

This particular mentor was fairly senior in the organisation and, truth be told, he wasn't even at our building to see me.

Our office was conveniently located far enough away from Head Office to escape Head Office, but close enough to everyone that it made a useful meeting point.

This was back in the days when people actually travelled somewhere to attend meetings.

After hearing me complain about the cords, he said two things.

First:

"Sounds like a great problem to solve differently."

Then:

"Have you heard of the 3 C's?"

I hadn't.

He told me he was in meetings for most of the day and probably wouldn't see me again before he left.

He'd call me the following day.

In the meantime, he gave me a challenge.

Work out what the 3 C's might be.

Excellent.

Thanks for that.

Cheese, Cards and Chaos

For what felt like the next 12 agonising hours, I tried to work it out.

I was stumped.

Customer?

Cost?

Capability?

Cheese?

Cards?

Chaos?

Who knows.

The following day, we sat down over a peppermint tea.

I refuse to drink coffee and occasionally feel the need to appear more adult than ordering a hot chocolate.

Rather than simply putting me out of my misery, he started asking questions.

Slowly, he guided my thinking.

Until eventually we landed on:

Customer.

Colleague.

Commercial.

Three lenses through which to consider a business decision.

What does this mean for the customer?

What does this mean for our colleagues?

And what does this mean commercially for the business?

Simple.

Useful.

And now we had a problem to test it against.

Those annoying curly cords.

The 10-Cent Problem

He started asking more questions.

What was actually broken?

Did the entire cord need replacing?

Could it be repaired?

What would that mean commercially?

Could repairing them create any risk for our colleagues?

Could we manage that risk?

Would there be any impact on the customer?

And somewhere through that conversation, something clicked.

We didn't need to keep replacing the cords.

We could repair them.

As luck would have it, I had an electrical engineer in the family.

Perhaps I could even learn how to do it myself.

After a quick lesson in crimping connectors, that's exactly what I did.

Then I wrote a procedure.

I considered the risks.

And I built the case using the framework I'd just learnt:

Customer. Colleague. Commercial.

Eventually, I presented the idea to my boss with the hope of rolling it out more broadly.

We did.

And it saved the organisation a significant amount of money.

There were benefits across all three C's.

And, as an entirely unnecessary bonus, to this day I can still repair a curly cord.

The Most Expensive Way to Give Me Three Words

If this story were simply about saving money, it would still be a good story.

A tiny part.

A simple repair.

A meaningful saving.

But that's not why I've remembered that conversation all these years later.

Think about the economics of what my mentor did.

He was a senior person in a large organisation.

He was well paid.

His time had value.

He could have walked past my desk and said:

"James, think about Customer, Colleague and Commercial. And while you're at it, stop replacing the whole cable and repair the connector."

Problem solved.

Thirty seconds.

Instead, he invested his time in helping me think.

From a purely transactional perspective, that's an incredibly expensive way to give someone three words.

But he wasn't trying to give me three words.

He was teaching me how to think.

That's a very different investment.

Why Would I Pay Someone Just to Talk?

It's a fair question.

From the outside, coaching can look remarkably simple.

Two people.

A room or a screen.

An hour.

A conversation.

No physical product changes hands.

There may not even be a PowerPoint presentation.

And at the end of it, the coach might have spent considerably more time asking questions than giving answers.

So what exactly are you paying for?

I don't think you're paying for the conversation.

You're investing in what can happen because of the conversation.

Clarity that changes a decision.

A question that exposes an assumption.

A perspective you hadn't considered.

The confidence to have a conversation you've been avoiding.

A behaviour you finally recognise in yourself.

Or perhaps a new way of thinking that you continue using long after the coaching relationship has finished.

That's what my mentor gave me.

The Return Wasn't the Curly Cords

Those repaired cords saved money.

Eventually they would have been replaced by newer technology anyway.

The contact centre changed.

The equipment changed.

The problem disappeared.

But the thinking didn't.

Customer. Colleague. Commercial.

I carried those three words into countless decisions afterwards.

Different businesses.

Different industries.

Different roles.

Different problems.

And eventually into the way I coach and develop other people.

That's an extraordinary return on one conversation.

And that's why measuring the value of coaching simply by the hour misses the point.

The question isn't:

"How much did that conversation cost?"

The better question is:

"What became possible because we had it?"

My mentor could have solved my 10-cent problem for me.

Instead, he invested the time to help me become better at solving problems for myself.

All these years later, I'm still earning a return on that investment.

And I suspect that's worth considerably more than the curly cords ever were.