The best $100 I ever spent

THE PROSPEROUS CONSULTANT

Turn your decades of expertise into a premium consulting practice built around the life you want.

Issue #36

My client Marcelo Passos made the trip to see me recently... a full day, face to face, working on his business. At lunch, we walked a block down the street to one of my favorite pizza places. Some of our most important work was done while breaking bread together.

No digital anything, just two men and a pizza, trading stories and finding things we have in common. Marcelo is Brazilian. I lived in Brazil for four years and learned the language, so once we got rolling, the stories came easy. I even told him about the time the Brazilian federal police pulled me over at a random checkpoint with documents that had expired twenty minutes earlier. (That one's worth the cliff hanger... I'll save it for the P.S.)

Somewhere between the first slice and the check, Marcelo told me the thing I want to pass along to you. He said the most valuable part of the whole day was connecting and brainstorming solutions... being in the same room, spending real human-to-human time, and a Zoom call can't quite chin that bar.

Maybe you've felt the same thing in your own business... a level of connection that just isn't... well... real enough.

In this issue:

• The vintage word for the force your business and your conversations have been missing (there's no app for it)
• What a 1950 housing study proved about who we trust, and why it still runs your pipeline today
• The most valuable minutes of any client day, and why your calendar keeps deleting them

Let me ask you something. When was the last time you were in the same room with a client, eye to eye, in three dimensions?

Not on a video call. In a room. Same air, same coffee, working at the same table.

If you're like most of the consultants I talk to, you had to think about it for a bit.

These days, it seems most client relationships live in a rectangle on a screen. The calls start on the hour and end at five till (or maybe not). Nobody walks anybody to the parking lot. Nobody says the second thing...at the meeting after the meeting, after the laptop closes.

And I'd wager you've noticed what I've noticed. The relationships don't fee as rich and full as they used to. Clients feel more like accounts. Prospects go cold faster. Referrals that used to flow in on their own need chasing now. You've probably blamed your energy, or the market, or told yourself business just got harder after everything went remote.

I don't think that's it. I think what's missing is connection at a higher level.

On of my favorite vintage words, which you hardly ever hear it anymore, helps describe it.

Propinquity.

Yeh, it even sounds old. Look it up in Merriam-Webster and you'll find two definitions. The first is "nearness of blood"... kinship. Family. The second is "nearness in place"... proximity. Seven hundred years ago, the folks building our language put kinship and nearness into the same word.

Nearness makes kin. It's why the old-timers said you don't really know a man until you've broken bread with him. And one thing that makes a family stronger is sharing meals together.

But here's the part that surprised me. Science measured this force, twice, and both times at MIT.

In 1950, a researcher named Leon Festinger and two colleagues studied a housing complex for married students... a couple hundred residents, nearly all strangers when they moved in. The researchers expected the usual suspects to predict who became friends: shared interests, age, background. None of them did. The strongest predictor of friendship was the distance between front doors. Next-door neighbors became friends most often. A few doors down, fewer. A different floor, hardly ever... unless you lived by the stairwell everybody used, in which case you had friends on both floors. The building was choosing their friends, and nobody noticed.

Twenty-some years later, an MIT professor named Thomas Allen mapped how often engineers talked to each other against the distance between their desks. The graph fell off a cliff. Past a short walk... roughly the length of a hallway... the odds of two colleagues talking regularly dropped to almost nothing. They call it the Allen curve.

And when email showed up, researchers went back to see if the curve had flattened out. It hadn't. The people who saw each other most in person were also the ones who called and emailed each other most. The screen didn't replace nearness... it followed it.

Now hold your business up against that. Somewhere in the last few years, your whole practice moved to the far end of the hallway. Every relationship became exactly as near as a screen allows... which is near enough to exchange information, and not near enough to make kin.

The fix isn't complicated, and you already know how to do it.

When a relationship matters, make the trip. Get in the car. Get on the plane. Not for every prospect and not for every meeting... for the ones where trust decides everything. I've watched one day in person do what months of calls couldn't.

And when you make the trip, stay longer than the meeting. The agenda is the reason for the meeting. The minutes around the agenda are the reason for the relationship.

Arrive early. Stay for the meal. Offer the ride. My best conversation with Marcelo didn't happen at the table where we worked... it happened at a table a block away, with a pizza and stromboli between us. No agenda has a line item for stories about being deported. Those only come out when the clock is off.

That's the whole method. Show up, and then don't be in a hurry to leave.

My friend Ryan Levesque calls what's coming the "return to real." As the digital flood is growing, the analog gets precious. Think about what's happening to your prospect's inbox this year. AI can write a thousand polished emails a minute, and every one of them lands with the same weight... none. The feeds are full. The inboxes are full. The calendars are full.

But nobody's calendar is stacked with visits from humans in the flesh. Nobody's inbox has a real handshake in it.

And this is where you're in better shape than you think.

You came up doing it the hard way. Four hours in the truck for a ninety-minute meeting. Walking the plant floor before anybody opened a laptop. Sitting at a man's kitchen table long enough that he finally told you the real problem, the one that was never on the agenda.

Nobody called that relationship building back then. It was just how you did the job, and you got good at it.

Now look around. Your competition sends a calendar link and calls it a relationship. A trip costs a day, a Zoom call costs nothing, and they've decided that settles it.

They're counting the wrong thing. What you learned back when there was no other way didn't expire on you... it got rare, and rare is what people pay for.

Which means you can be the only one who shows up.

P.S. Alright, the federal police story. During my years in Brazil, I got waved over at a random checkpoint, and the officer asked for my documents. They had expired twenty minutes earlier. Twenty minutes. He looked at the papers, looked at me, and gave me the kind of wink that said this problem could be made to go away. It was. It scared me half to death at the time. It's a funny story today... and the best $100 I ever spent. In all the years since, that story has never once come up on a video call. One pizza place a block from where we worked, and out it came. That's propinquity, doing what it does.

"A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world."
– John le Carré

Want to dive deeper? Check out these related articles:

👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #35
👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #34

You might also find these interesting:

🔎 The "First Impression Excellence" Prompt
🔎 Client Value Journey: Stage 6 – Ascend

P.S.: When you're ready, here are more ways I can help you...