Category: Customer Relationship

He is a small time real estate developer in a neighborhood locality in Chennai.

He doesn’t advertise at all.

He doesn’t cut corners. Instead, he delivers a good quality.

He completes the project as promised, on time.

He lives in the same locality in his own house built by his company.

He follows the law of the land.

Here is what he does:

He converts a vacant plot as small as 2400 Sq feet into beautiful apartments. He has developed over 30 such projects of varying sizes in the neighborhood. Many of his projects are in a plot size of 9600 Sq feet.

I know of one smaller project of size 2800 Sq feet. He had built G + 2 floor where G was reserved for Car Parking and he had three units built in level 1 and 3 units in level 2. He had two units of 850 Sq feet and 1 unit of 1100 Sq feet in each floor. The flats were beautiful, compact and modern. All his apartments were made ready to live. He did all the wood work as well. His apartments were complete with cup boards, covered lofts in bedrooms & modular kitchens.

He had an agreement with the land owner. The owner gets all the four units of 850 sq feet and the builder gets to sell two 1100 sq feet in the market and make his money. Land Owner need not pay anything but gets 4 apartments of 850 Sq feet each in return for the land. Quite a deal, right?

He also agreed to pay the monthly rent for approx. 1 year [or till the time he completes the construction] to the land owner. The land owner was earlier living in the same plot in an individual house, the demolition of which was part of the contract. Hence, the builder agreed to pay the rent.

In Chennai, during that year, there were floods. The rented house was in ground floor in an individual house and it was flooded too. The owner moved out of that house and stayed with his relatives for few days. Then, he met the builder and explained his problem. The builder then arranged one of his unoccupied flats for the family to stay. They stayed there for about ten days. The water had receded by then and the land owner moved back to the rented house & stayed there till the builder handed over the apartment.

This is not how business is generally done. But this is how relationships are built. The builder could have easily said that the floods was not his doing and he could have referred the land owner to the force majeure clause of the contract. But he didn’t. He solved the problem by going the extra mile, by doing something outside the contract, by being simply human.

Now there’s some lesson for each one of us in this story.

Takeaways:

1. Go out of your way to help customers.
2. Respect the contract but do more than what is committed.
3. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes & think.
4. Timely help has more value.
5. Always be human.

Happy Selling!!

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