A Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Ask, and Was Right Not To

Twenty past eleven on a Sunday night, in a bedroom with one lamp still on, a woman is holding her phone close to her face so the light stays off the wall behind her.

She has been putting this off since March, and tonight she finally typed psychologist and the name of her town into the search box.

Three names come back on a map. Two of them have a rating sitting underneath, and the third has a blank space where the stars should be.

She doesn’t decide against the third one, exactly. She just doesn’t tap it, and by Monday morning she couldn’t tell you it had ever been on her screen.

The third one belongs to a client of mine I’ll call Dana.

What she rang me about

Dana called me in the spring because she thought her website looked tired. Six years old, built by a friend of her brother’s, and she had started apologizing for it to people who hadn’t seen it.

I opened the thing while she was still talking, the way I always do, and it was perfectly fine. Quick, easy to read on a phone, and the sentence across the top said what she does and who she does it for.

Then I opened her listing on Google, and I stopped hearing anything else she was saying to me.

No bad review. No former client with a grudge and a keyboard. Nothing whatsoever, on a practice that had been open for nine years.

Nine years of people leaving that room in better shape than they arrived in, and not one line about it anywhere a stranger could find. How does that happen to a business that good?

I ranked all 47 trades on reviews that same week, best down to worst, and psychologists came to rest at 46 of 47 with 70.4% holding at least one review. Dana was in the group that doesn’t.

Another psychologist asked me outright whether his website was why the phone had gone quiet. Two numbers answered him, and only one of them was anything to do with him.

The board on the wall outside

The stars are not on your website and they never were, which is the first thing I have to explain to almost everyone.

That page belongs to Google, and it behaves like the notice board bolted to the wall outside a building. You can tidy it, you can pin your opening hours to it, and you cannot stop the street pinning things to it while you’re inside working.

88% of the businesses I audit have at least one thing pinned to theirs, which is why an empty board doesn’t read as modesty to a stranger. It reads as closed, or as brand new, or as a place where something went badly wrong last year.

When did you last look at yours properly, rather than glancing at it on the way to somewhere else?

Dana understood all of that before I opened my mouth. She had thought about it a great deal more carefully than I had, which I only worked out later in the conversation.

The thing she wouldn’t do

I said the obvious thing anyway, because I always do. Ask.

She said no, and it wasn’t an embarrassed no. It was flat, it arrived with a reason I couldn’t argue with, and she had obviously given the same answer to someone before me.

The room is the work. A person sitting in that room, in the hour she pays for, doesn’t owe Dana a favor, and being asked for one quietly changes what the room is.

I’ve heard a version of that from most of the psychologists I’ve worked with, and I gave up trying to talk anybody out of it years ago.

Were you already writing me an email about it? You can relax. I agree with her.

But no is only an answer to the question I asked her. It isn’t an answer to the woman with the lamp on.

What we changed

Three things over about four months, and only one of them touched the website itself.

1. The board outside. She claimed the listing, corrected the hours, added the two things it had never carried, and got her own name spelled the way she spells it.

2. One line at the end of the letter she already sends whenever a person finishes with her. She wrote it herself and it took four attempts, because the first three read like a favor and she threw them out.

3. A form on the homepage, which she had never had. 23.5% of these homepages carry one, and a form is a letter slot cut into the door for the people who will never knock.

The middle one is the one worth sitting with for a minute. Nothing is handed to anybody in the room, there is no reminder afterwards, and there is never a second ask.

It reaches a person who has already finished, at the point where she is a former client rather than a current one, and she can ignore it completely without ever having to say so to Dana’s face.

Would you have written one, a year after you finished with someone who helped you?

Most trades have this far easier than Dana does, and for them the wording I’d use and the moment I’d use it is about a sentence long.

I’d checked enough trades by then to know Dana was ordinary rather than unlucky, and none of it is locked away where you can’t see it: the explorer on my report will print every check for a single trade, each with the number of sites behind it, so long as you pick one trade and leave the city box alone.

What happened after

Slowly, is the honest answer, and Dana will tell you herself that she nearly gave the whole thing up in July.

Six weeks went by before the first one arrived, from a man who had finished the previous fall and wrote four sentences, two of which were about how easy it was to park.

What would you have done in July, six weeks into a change like that, with nothing whatsoever to show for it?

Then two more inside a couple of weeks, both from people who had left months earlier. Nobody wrote anything that would let a stranger work out what they had been through, and nobody came anywhere close to trying.

She has a handful now. Not a wall of them, and a wall would look strange underneath her name anyway.

Owners always want a target number out of me, though the count turns out to be the wrong end of that question in every trade I’ve checked it against.

The ones in this trade who do get written about average 4.5 stars, which is the part nobody in your position ever expects to hear. When people go to the trouble of writing about you, they are generous about it.

Her new inquiries picked up in the fall. I can’t prove which of the three changes did that, and I wouldn’t trust anyone who told you they could, but the shape of her first phone calls changed and she noticed it before I did.

People stopped asking whether she had any space. They started asking when she could start.

What I’d do in your building

Look at your own board tonight, on a phone that isn’t yours, the way the woman with the lamp on looked at Dana’s. What does the blank space under your name say to a person who has never met you?

Then work out who is actually allowed to write on it. Not a person who was in the room this week, and I’d argue that corner with you myself.

Someone who finished last year. The colleague who sends people your way. The workplace that has had you in twice to talk to their staff.

You already know their names, don’t you? Nobody can do that part for you, and it’s the reason the psychologist sites I build are usually the second job I recommend rather than the first.

Assisted living homes get the same order out of me, the star rating ahead of the rebuild, and for the same reason.

Tell me I’m wrong

Some trades really are different, and yours is the closest case I have found anywhere.

So if you believe an empty board is simply the price of doing your job properly, write to me and make the argument. I’ll pull up what I found on your trade while you’re talking, and if you change my mind about it I’ll say so here in public.

And if you would rather I looked at the website first, tell me where it lives. I’ll do it gladly, though I’ll spend the opening ten minutes on a page that isn’t yours.