Growing up, the power would go out quite a bit where I lived. And as the years progressed, the more electronics I came to have in my possession. Then, right when I became a teenager, My dad bought me my very own computer! I couldn’t believe it! He took me to the Computer Show that happened at the Expo center once a year. This show is where vendors from all around came together to sell computers, peripherals, parts, you name it. And best of all, I got to have it custom built. Oh I knew what I wanted too!!! Pentium II – 300MHz with an 8MB AGP video card!
Coming home, I felt like I was king of the world. I couldn’t wait to share with my geek friends what my dad had bought me. My computer was by far the best out of all ours. (It was a group of 3 including myself that geeked out on the regular). I got a game I thought for sure was going to run great on my new pc – Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.
Launching the game, it looked good. Real good. But still, something wasn’t right. Some of the 3d Graphics just didn’t look the way I expected it. Well, I played it anyways, ignoring the strange graphics and such. A week later, I brought the CD to my friend Adam’s house. He had just picked up a new Video Card, a Nvidia Riva 128 PCI with 4MB of ram. Launching the game, I realized really fast that something wasn’t right. MY game looked far BETTER on HIS COMPUTER!!!!
I was pissed. And this prompted me to do some research about my video card. After all, mine had twice the RAM and was on a much faster, newer Bus than his, AGP. Turns out, I did get exactly what I wanted from the computer show. Except, there were things that I wanted, but didn’t think to ask for. See, my video card was a Matrox Millennium card. You probably never heard of Matrox video cards, and for good reason. THEY WERE JUNK. The 3D chipset that was on that card ran the bare minimal. No anistropic filtering, no anti-aliasing, no tripple buffering. Why?? For all the love that was good in my life why did this have to happen???? All I wanted was a great pc to play my pc games on!!! Well, it did render 2D very well. I played alot of Duke Nukem and DOOM.
The point that i’m getting, is those jokes at the computer show should have known what I was going to be using the computer for. After all, I had purchased several games from them too, and was bragging the whole time to my dad about how awesome this was going to be as I watched them insert the video card I had asked for as a special request. But, they didn’t care. They just wanted to make a buck. They were not looking after the little guy. And that experience made an impression that has lasted ever since.
When you do business with me, I’m going to give you what you ask for. But i’m also going to ask questions, lots of them, to make sure that you know what you are really wanting as well. I’m going listen to you, and get an understanding of your needs and what you want to accomplish even before we talk money. I don’t want what happened to me, to happen to any of my customers. Because i’m a small business, i’m going to be looking out for not just the SMB, but also the ‘little guy’ who knows what he wants, but not sure how to get it.
