What Do You Say When Somebody Asks How Business Is?

Somebody asks how business is going. A neighbour, another agent, a relative at a family gathering. You have a sentence ready, and it comes out before you have thought about it.

Most of us have used the same sentence for years without ever looking at it, which is unusual for something we say so often.

Find out what yours actually is

Before deciding whether it is a good sentence, you have to know what it is. It is worth catching yourself saying it once this week and writing it down word for word afterwards, because the version you would produce if asked to invent one is never quite the version that comes out.

They tend to fall into a few familiar shapes. Busy. Quiet at the moment. Steady. A joke about the market. A number, usually your best one. Each of those is a choice, even if it has never felt like one.

Who the sentence is for

Ask who the sentence is protecting. Some of them are built to hold off a longer conversation you do not want to have. Some are built to manage expectations downwards so that nobody asks for a favour. Some are built to impress a particular person, often somebody who is not even in the room.

None of that is dishonest. It is ordinary social behaviour, and everybody does a version of it. The question is simply whether the sentence you reach for is still the one you would choose now, or whether it was chosen by a version of you from a market that has since changed.

Would your numbers agree with it?

This is the part worth testing. If you say busy, is your diary busy, or is your inbox busy? Those are not the same thing, and only one of them is business. If you say quiet, is it quiet, or did you have a slow fortnight and a decent quarter behind it? If you give a number, is it a recent number or the one you have been giving since the year it happened?

Looking at your own figures beside your own sentence is a short exercise, and it occasionally reveals that you have been describing a business you no longer run, in either direction.

What repetition does

A sentence repeated often enough stops being a report and starts being a belief. Say that it is quiet for long enough and you begin to behave as though it is, including in the hour you were going to spend prospecting. Say that you are flat out for long enough and you may stop noticing that the pipeline behind the busyness has thinned.

This is not about thinking positively, which changes nothing on its own. It is about noticing that the words you use most often about your own work are doing something, and that you have never checked what.

How it sounds to somebody who might refer you

There is one more audience worth considering. Quite often the person asking is deciding, somewhere below the surface, whether to mention you to a friend who is thinking of moving. An answer that sounds overwhelmed tells them you have no room. An answer that sounds like a complaint tells them something else again.

You do not need to perform. An honest, specific sentence about what you are working on at the moment usually does more than either of the two defaults, and it costs nothing.

A question to sit with this week

Catch your own sentence once this week and write it down exactly as you said it. Then ask the harder question. If a person who was considering referring you heard only that sentence, what would they conclude, and is that what you wanted them to conclude?

If you want to look at this properly

If you would like to put your own numbers beside the story you have been telling about your business, you can book a discovery call.