Stop Selling What You Do. Show Why It Matters.

You know what makes your business valuable. But do your customers?

In this compilation episode of The Breakout Moment, Christina May revisits conversations with business leaders about communicating what makes their work different, earning customer trust, and helping the right people recognize their value.

Because being great at what you do is only part of the equation.

COLD OPEN

Mason Hale: And the cost of making a mistake was really high.

Christina May: It's the way we put unique ideas together. The authenticity is what makes it special.

Jeff Schwartz: They're educated in the marketplace. They know that for certain things, they can probably purchase it at a lower price.

CHAPTER 1: START WITH THE PROBLEM

You can have an incredible team, years of experience, and be really good at what you do. But here's the problem. Just because you understand the value of your work doesn't mean that your customers do.

And that's especially true when your business does something that's highly technical, very specialized, or it's just plain difficult to explain. So how do you help people understand why they should choose you?

Across our conversations with business owners, we've heard that it starts long before the sales pitch. And sometimes the best way to explain what you do is to just stop talking about your services and start with the problem. For Mason Hale, founder of SwimTopia, that problem was something he experienced firsthand. And Denny Woolley has learned that even customers asking for the same type of work can have very different needs.

TBM #19 | How a Volunteer Became a Global Business Owner with Mason Hale

CM: So you didn't start with SwimTopia?

Mason Hale: No, no. So I started with the problem. I was working at a consulting company at the time, traveling about 50% of the time, most of it international. And while I was gone on a business trip, I got home and my wife said, hey, honey, I've got good news and bad news. Good news, the kids are signing up for the swim team. Bad news, I volunteered you to run the computers for the team. And I was like, what does that mean? And so then she gave me the number of the current computer person on the team, and I went to her house, and she could not hand me this old, dilapidated team laptop fast enough.

So, you know, the way that swim teams run is surprisingly archaic. So that software predated Windows. Started as a DOS program.

CM: Oh, my gosh.

MH: Almost every swim team runs on or used to run on, and it just wasn't going to work with my travel schedule and things like that. So I quickly put up a site where the parents could tell me if they're going to be at the meet and what events their kids wanted to swim. And by the way, our team had 250 kids. So it was a lot to keep track of.

CM: Oh, my, that's a lot. No wonder she wanted to chuck this thing at you as fast as humanly possible. That's always a sign, you notice, like when you get volunteered for something and you're doing the handoff, whether it's like a board or volunteer organization or whatnot. You can always tell. You're like, oh, what did I get myself into here?

MH: And the cost of making a mistake was really high because, you know, there's only so many lanes in a swimming pool.

CM: Right.

MH: And so if I forgot to enter someone in the event, there might not be a lane for them. And so, you know, you have a little girl that shows up and wants to swim the breaststroke. And if she's not in, you've got a crying kid and angry parents, and nobody wants that.

CM: Nobody wants that.

TBM #22 | Where Experience Meets Innovation with Denny Woolley

Denny Woolley: But then you have that process that you're checking to make sure what? That it's what you promise the customer and what the customer expects to purchase from you. So another aspect of Genesis' breakout, I believe, is the ability for our people to sit and listen to the customers because everyone's story is different. No matter what you're doing, you try and pigeonhole them into similar type categories. There's always something that's nuanced and different.

CM: Yes.

DW: And we need to understand from those people. And when we can be silent and listen, truly listen to what they need, then I think that in of itself becomes the breakout moment, because what we have happen quite often is that our customers keep coming back to us. Or recently, for instance, we have a new opportunity with a new client because the key individual there came from another company that we'd already worked for, and he got the feeling that we had listened to him there. So he asked us to come join him at this new role that he has in this new company. So it becomes an aspect of being able to listen to the customer. What is it that they want? Let's not try and make it overly perfect, but let's make it perfect for the client, right?

CM: Right.

CHAPTER 2: MAKE YOUR VALUE VISIBLE

But even when you know exactly what problem you're solving, communicating that value can be difficult.

Stacey Holsinger and I talked about how businesses in industries like manufacturing and construction can sometimes struggle to show what makes their work interesting.

For Lacey Snyder, the challenge was a little different. Her company had grown beyond what her customers originally knew it for.

TBM #3 | How B2B Companies Should Approach Social Media in 2026

CM: But like, if you're a manufacturer, like we both have a tendency to work for what I call the “boring businesses” that don't get any love. Like none of what we do is sexy. It just isn't. And it just doesn't make for it. There's only so many different ways to try to make that content interesting. And so if you already have that impediment working against you, it's just going to make it harder.

Stacey Holsinger: I truly believe that it's just them. They need to take the leap and try more creative things.

There's so much talent there. I've got to tour so many manufacturing facilities and I'm like so impressed and blown away. From guitar making to sheet metal. You do the same thing day in and day out. But there's so many creative ideas that I can help spin this.

TBM #8 | The Power of Adjacent Markets with Lacey Snyder

CM: So, you know, like, when you move into that next adjacent space, how do you educate customers? Because a lot of times we run into this, too, I think, where we get known for one thing.

And then they don't realize that we do all these other things. For us, our journey was we started out as a marketing firm, and then we moved into being a revenue operations. And everybody's like, first off, what the heck is that? Right? So there's that education issue, but then also just getting them to understand, like, no, we do technical CRM implementations. We do bridge the gap between sales, service, and marketing, et cetera.

So, you know, that education leap sometimes is like, because they think marketing, they think Don Draper, and I just want to bang my head into a wall, basically. With a smile, of course.

So how do you, I mean, you kind of have the same thing. They think lending is very cut and dry.

Lacey Snyder: Very.

CM: How do you kind of bridge that gap that they're like, “Oh, she's into lending.” You're like, “Yeah, I'm your steel girl.”

LS: So the first thing I do is I shoot away from residential as quick as possible. So I always start with, you know, we do commercial lending where they need buildings, we do fleet lending. If you need a bulldozer or you need a TV van, or you need an air conditioning van, whatever you need, we can provide that also. So I never lead with residential when I tell people about that. And then I say, and then by happenstance, we started a structural steel arm.

LS: We are going into the metal roofing business. And so now we have started adding that to our portfolio.

CM: Portfolio of work.

LS: And so I think the marketing that we do, like our drip campaigns, they're very categorized. So if you're a commercial client, it always has it kind of like at the bottom, you know, the other things that we have. And our website. So if you lead people to your website, which we had to do a rebrand, we now are 4Bridges Enterprises because we have so many verticals underneath of it that we umbrella'd it. So when you go to our website, you're like, “Wait, what?”

CM: “You do all that?”

LS: You don't realize how many things.

CHAPTER 3: GIVE THEM SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN

Of course, telling people what you're capable of is one thing. Giving them a reason to believe in you is another.

Sometimes that means being willing to show more of the people behind the work. Stacey and I talked about why businesses hesitate to do that, and for Jeff Schwartz, building a reputation has opened the door to a different kind of client relationship.

TBM #3 | How B2B Companies Should Approach Social Media in 2026

CM: I think companies are a little hesitant to show authenticity because it might come off as unprofessional.

SH: Or they're afraid to brag, or they're afraid that their secret sauce is going to get exposed, but there's not a lot of secrets, like from business to business. I'm like, you're doing the same thing. It's the people that are different.

CM: It's the people that make the difference. It's the way we put unique ideas together. The authenticity is what makes it special.

SH: Definitely.

CM: They're not going to get your secret sauce.

SH: Definitely show up on Facebook and Instagram, like they're still the top platforms, but it's a pay-to-play.

TBM #11 | Building Culture and Creating Community with Jeff Schwartz

Jeff Schwartz: I think through the people of the company, through the reputation we built, the growth is different now, and it's far more on reputation. It's far more on our relationships with our clients that have now grown to know, like, and trust us. I think we have constant examples where clients are coming to us so that we can help them navigate these complex jobs, whether it's on the environmental side to a full turnkey commercial project.

I always tell my team we don't get the simple, straightforward projects. As we've grown in this area, people come to know and trust us with a more complex project. Certain areas, like senior living around memory care areas, we've become a trade partner there that they know they can trust us on an intensive and sensitive kind of commercial landscape like that.

CHAPTER 4: THE RIGHT CUSTOMER SEES THE DIFFERENCE

Here's something else worth thinking about. Not everyone is your customer. Finding the right-fit customer is exactly what leads to success.

Jeff Schwartz talks about working with buyers who know the market and understand what they're paying for, and Mason Hale faced a different version of finding the right customer when he had to decide which market his business should really serve.

TBM #11 | Building Culture and Creating Community with Jeff Schwartz

CM: Transparency is one of those key, key values for us, to make sure that we're there for each other. It's a partnership. It's not just transactional. We're not selling widgets here. You're not just selling trees. You're sensitive to what their goals are as well as your own.

JS: I think part of that is your natural growth and growth trajectory from your earlier days in any business. Then once you've sort of earned that next level, your clients are hiring you for different reasons, and then you do navigate and figure out who are the quality trade partners, who are the clients that know and appreciate what you bring to the table. What we say, you know, they know they're smart buyers. They're educated in the marketplace. They know that for certain things, they can probably purchase it at a lower price.

There's always somebody out there. But once you've sort of crossed over and have a proven track record with your clients, and to your point, we're not bashful about sharing our fundamentals, and we expect them to not only hold us accountable to them, but it's how we expect them to behave towards us also. Through the years, coming up 25 years, there are clients that just don't align.

CM: And that's okay.

JS: You have to make these hard decisions. But if there's not an alignment in that most basic thing, then things probably aren't going to go well, and certainly not for a long-term relationship.

TBM #19 | How a Volunteer Became a Global Business Owner with Mason Hale

MH: But I think longer term, after pitching lots of VCs, I learned that the swim market is just considered too small. And so it pushed us prematurely, I think, to try to expand to other sports. And so it took a long time, more than a decade, to really realize, like, that's not the right path for us. And to get off that, that train. And it was, that felt like the more uncommon way to do things or the more unorthodox way to do things. But, yeah, it took a while to figure that out.

SHOW THEM WHY IT MATTERS

Here's something I want you to try. Look at how you explain what your business does. Maybe it's on your website, in a proposal, how you introduce yourself to anyone. And now I want you to think about it from the customer's perspective. Sometimes the way we see ourselves is not how the world hears us. Try rewriting that explanation around the way your customer hears you, because being good at what you do is really important. But helping the right people understand your value in a language that they understand gives them a reason to choose you.