Don’t promise, surpass
Keeping a promise shows discipline. Beating it shows value.
There are roadworks under the Vallcarca bridge in Barcelona that have been dragging on for years now, with no end in sight. What bothers me, though, isn't how long they're taking (I can accept a long project) but the string of broken promises along the way. The sign shows the latest expected completion date, but look closely and you'll notice it's just a piece of paper taped over the previous date. It still says May 2026, even though we're almost in July.
A few years ago, a client of mine who owned a chain of shops told me he was thinking of buying a motorbike to compete with Amazon by delivering across Barcelona within hours. It was his answer to Amazon's same-day delivery announcement. I told him two things: first, Amazon isn't a shop, it's a logistics platform, so you'll never beat them at their own game. Second, Amazon doesn't win business because of short delivery times, but because they keep their promises. During the logistics chaos of 2021, Amazon was quoting delivery times of two or three months, yet kept selling. Why? Because when Amazon says 8 days, it's 8 days. Not many companies can claim the same.
Good service is always about meeting (or beating) expectations, never about response time.
A large construction client of mine once told me they had figured out how to win more private tenders: promise shorter deadlines and lower prices. They knew it was impossible to build the warehouses being asked for within the timeframes their competitors were quoting, and impossible to do it at those prices. So we chose honesty instead: it will take longer and cost more. But there will be no delays and no extra costs. They went from billing 130 million euros to nearly 250 million in less than two years.
The same thing happened when I ran the family firm. Clients almost never called us with emergencies (something our competitors complained about constantly), and that was because we had a clear promise and stuck to it: if you brought us work today (a query, a filing), we'd do it tomorrow and deliver the day after. The truth, once new technology came in, was that we almost always delivered the next day. But we never promised it. Meanwhile, our competition kept promising (and failing to deliver) instant replies, which trained their clients to flag everything as urgent just to make sure they'd actually get an answer.
Make a promise, beat it by 1%, and your client will be happy.
© Oriol López Villena 2026