Look.

I like data more than the average bear. You show me truth in numbers and I'm a disciple for life.

But f*ck AB testing.

Every decision is a March Madness bracket with only the best surviving… or at least the one that scored highest in one metric on that particular day.

In some places, of course it has been productive. We have climbed out of bad habits after finally confronting hard data that something wasn't helpful.

But we also seem to have abandoned (or at least devalued) things like taste, style, etiquette, and in some cases basic decency (I don't care what kind of results it gets - spamming calendars is over the line).

If the numbers show it works, it must be right, and so we do it.

Does it look terrible? Absolutely. But it stops scrolls.

Does it tell a story? Hahahahaha… no. But it gets a click.

Does it make a fan? Who cares! It gained a "follower"!

And I'll take some responsibility - accountants and analysts have been at the front of the charge (most of us never having any style or taste to begin with).

But businesses pursuing enduring and profitable success don't have the luxury of throwing themselves (and money) at the latest thing that converts.

And that is probably to our benefit.

We have to invest in undervalued, and in the cases below, less quantifiable assets. But the results do show up. Obviously there still has to be a positive impact — otherwise what are we doing here. But these are long term and directly attributable.

There's no instant feedback due to the nature of these things. Any feedback that does happen is vague and hard to directly tie back to these assets.

But they are there and they're valuable and you need to be investing in them.

Because these things are hard to quantify or define, it's also hard to write about them.

So understand from the start that we're going to be talking about things in broad nebulous terms that overlap and don't fit into clean borders. There's no satisfying click when they're put into place.

And reputation is certainly of that… umm… lack of mold.

If you find a way to quantify this well, congratulations, you have an automatic eight-figure research agency with a waitlist of Fortune 500 companies begging to hand you six-figure contracts.

My best attempt: I think of reputation as being the ability to tell a story without telling it. While competitors are spending money reaching customers, listing features, and explaining their value, you just exist. People know you. They know what they get with you. They know why it's valuable.

It's the whole funnel packaged up: awareness, interest, and desire with a thread of trust running throughout.

And in a world where anyone can spool up a product and generate 1,000 social posts promoting it in an afternoon with Claude code, the hard thing isn't finding a solution, it's picking one. It's separating from the noise and establishing trust.

When someone sees YOU did something, they know something about it without even trying it.

This isn't an ad campaign - Sprite doesn't have a reputation for quenching thirst.

It's deeper rooted and far harder to build than that.

It’s urban legends that Nordstrom once returned a set of tires (actually a true story) or that Oakley’s can stop a bullet (I still remember the store display).

It's built on years of showing up and delivering on a promise day after day.

Reputation takes heavy investment.

The cost is not just in time but also refunds, discounts, work done without charging, fixing mistakes others made, taking phone calls when you know they won't be a customer but you still believe you can help, or countless other "wastes" of time and money.

It's paying above market, paying promptly, or paying attention.

What you decide to build a reputation around is up to you but the investment is worth it even when, if not especially when you're building without the deep pockets of investors.

And here's where it shows up:

Experience is where reputation is often born. Reputation is the promise while experience is backing it up. And you could say that investing in one IS investing in the other. But I want to call this out separately because I think building a reputation starts with looking inward — for how you want to be known — while experience is looking at the customer and deciding how you want them to feel. They may overlap, but they are not always the same.

It's also more than customer service. It's how easy it was to book a call, how fast an email was responded to, and how clear next steps were communicated. It's the general impression accumulated through dozens if not hundreds of small data points often completely unregistered.

When I owned a coffee shop we often said that a customer decides if the coffee is good long before they try it even though they always cite the taste as informing their opinion. But really it was if the door stuck or was hard to open, if the line moved, if the floor was sticky, if the paper towels were stocked, if the table was bused, and yeah, if the latte art was good.

All those things informed their opinion on the taste of our coffee.

The true gauge of experience is not what you did, but how the customer felt. It's not the experience that you designed, it's the one they had that matters.

If they leave with all their deliverables but a lack of confidence in them, your clever packaging doesn't matter.

Your product is far more than the services offered and the friendly tone you deliver it with. It won't show up in an A/B test, but customers will pay a premium for a product that makes them feel more confident, more at peace, more heard, more understood, more taken care of.

You pay for it when you obsess over touch points and talk to hundreds of customers to understand what matters to them that even THEY don't realize. You pay for it when you invest in better talent who show up every day like they're a 5-star hotel concierge. You pay for it when you send packages celebrating their big milestone.

Let me be clear, this isn't about making everything fancy or even spending money at all. It's about intention and most importantly translating that into your culture where every single employee embodies the spirit of your customer experience.

And here's where it shows up:

This one is more literal.

Post-Covid, cutting office space was the easiest 3–8%+ savings a business could make. Just cancel those leases. Employee satisfaction went up, costs went down. Easy win. And while it was a nice boost for a lot of established businesses it lowered the bar to entry for a lot of new businesses.

You didn't need to go sign a lease and hang a literal shingle - you just needed a Squarespace account. And while you could do that long before the pandemic, it came with more stigma attached to it. A large office on Wilshire meant you were for real and established while just a website and a Zoom call where you are clearly in your bedroom didn't provide much confidence.

But when EVERYONE, including the Wall St analysts, Figueroa Ave lawyers, and Century City agents are calling in from their kitchen table, it doesn't matter any more.

So don't get me wrong. Saving money on office space is great. And this one isn't for everyone.

For me though, when I walk through the doors of my office each morning my brain signals 'it's game time'. I don't listen to audiobooks or podcasts about TV shows, I don't have a foosball table, and I don't watch YouTube.

I DO print and pin up things I find to be interesting or inspiring - an ad campaign, a newsletter quote, or maybe a framework I liked. I furnish it with whiteboards, tables, and chairs where other people can work in person with me or I can move about the space writing down ideas.

The space makes me better.

The cost is quite literal - about 1.5% of revenue as of now.

And here's where it shows up:

There are a lot of other intangibles to consider — education, brand, coaching, therapy, team retreats, etc. — and the point isn't that I endorse these ones or not and it's definitely not to just start spending money here.

It's to think about what intangibles aren't showing up on your P&L or Google Analytics but have a broader, less defined impact. Maybe you feel guilty about investing time in them, or feel irresponsible spending money on them.

Just because we can't quantify or clearly attribute numbers to something doesn't mean the value isn't there. And that is where the talent of an operator comes in. The gut to know what things will matter and what won't. Where to invest and where to save.

Build intangible assets and reap tangible rewards.

Some quick notes from around the Good Operator universe - the GOU? We’ll work on that…

Coming up in our Substack is something I wrote about the importance of celebrating milestones and what purchases I indulge in to mark occasions.

If you didn’t know, we’re relaunching the Substack as the “lifestyle” side of Good Operator. This is where we talk less about playbooks and more about the personal experience of being a founder/operator of a cashflow business. Check it out.

Additionally we’re going to be posting more narrow and technical (read: more substance, less prose) to the website blog - the stuff you want to reference sometimes but not always spend time reading a 2000 word article about in your free time. We’ll post links to interesting stuff here.

And lastly, if you’d like to guest write for Bootstrap Cashflow about topics of your own expertise that you feel the readers would benefit from - send them our way.

Best,

Chase “if the coffee comes in a glass, it’s good” Spenst

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