Everybody’s Chasing Scale. Nobody’s Answering the Phone.

I was at dinner a few weeks back and somebody asked me how I find the people I place. Not the tech, not the tool stack, just the actual method. And I told them the truth. I call people. I text people. I show up. And they looked at me like I told them I still use a flip phone.

That’s the world we’re in now. Everybody’s optimizing for scale, for automation, for the funnel that runs itself while you sleep. And look, I get the appeal. Fewer humans, fewer variables, fewer awkward conversations where somebody might actually say no to your face. But here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud. The businesses that actually win long term, the ones people trust with real money and real decisions, they’re not winning because they figured out a clever sequence of automated touchpoints. They’re winning because somebody vouched for them.

Word of mouth never stopped working. We just stopped trusting it.

Think about the last big decision you made. Not the small stuff, I mean the real one. Who you hired for the addition on your house. Who you brought in to fix the mess in your business. Who you trusted with something that actually mattered. I’d bet good money it wasn’t a retargeting ad that got you there. It was somebody you trust telling you, hey, talk to this person, they’re the real deal.

That’s not nostalgia talking. That’s just how humans have always made important decisions, and it’s how we still do, even while we’re pretending otherwise. We’ve built this whole industry around depersonalizing the sale. Chatbots that pretend to be people. Sequences that fire off at 9am regardless of whether anybody’s actually thinking about you at 9am. Personalization tokens that insert your first name into an email and call it a relationship. And at the end of the day, none of it moves the way an actual conversation moves. None of it earns the kind of trust that makes somebody pick up the phone when you call them back six months later.

The shortcut isn’t actually shorter

Here’s what gets me. Everybody’s chasing the shortcut because it feels efficient. Send more messages, touch more people, let the software do the heavy lifting. And I understand why, because relationships are slow and messy and they don’t scale the way a spreadsheet does. But go back and look at where your best clients actually came from. Your best hire. Your best partnership. I’d put money on it being a person, not a platform.

So the shortcut isn’t actually a shortcut. It’s a longer road dressed up to look faster. You send a thousand automated messages and maybe you get a handful of replies, and most of those replies are lukewarm because the person on the other end can tell they weren’t really seen. Versus you make ten real calls, you have ten real conversations, and two or three of those turn into something that actually matters, because the person felt like an actual person was on the other end of it.

Going analog is the advantage now

Here’s the part that I think people are missing. Because everybody else went digital and depersonalized, going analog isn’t old fashioned anymore. It’s a competitive advantage. When you call somebody instead of emailing them, when you remember the thing they mentioned three conversations ago, when you introduce two people because you genuinely think they should know each other and not because there’s an angle in it for you, that stands out now. It stands out precisely because it’s rare.

I think about it like this. If everybody’s shouting into the same automated megaphone, the person who leans in and has a real conversation is the one who gets remembered. Not because it’s clever strategy, but because it’s honest, and honest is in short supply right now.

Put the work in

None of this is easy, and I think that’s exactly the point. Relationships take actual time. You have to remember things about people. You have to follow up because you care, not because a task reminder told you to. You have to be willing to have a conversation that doesn’t immediately turn into business, because sometimes the business comes later, sometimes it comes from somebody that person introduces you to, and sometimes it never comes at all and you did it anyway because that’s just how you operate.

That’s the trade everybody’s trying to avoid. And I get it, because putting the work in is harder than automating it. But it’s also the only thing that actually builds something that lasts. Word of mouth isn’t some outdated concept we need to modernize our way out of. It’s the most trusted currency there’s ever been in business, and the businesses that remember that are going to be the ones still standing when everybody else’s automated funnel stops converting.

So yeah, call the person. Show up to the thing. Remember the detail. Put the work in. It’s old school because it works, and it’s always going to work, because people trust people. That part was never going to change, no matter how much software we throw at it.