Why 85% of our new work comes from referrals
The most honest metric a services firm can share isn't a survey score. It's whether clients stake their own reputation on you. Ours do, 85% of the time.
Services firms love a satisfaction score. NPS this, CSAT that, numbers a client can give you in a survey and forget by lunch. There’s a harder, more honest signal: will a client put their own reputation on the line to introduce you to someone they respect? For 85% of our new business, the answer has been yes.
Referrals are trust you can’t fake
A referral is a costly signal. The person making it is spending social capital, and people don’t spend that on vendors who merely didn’t mess up. They spend it on partners who made them look good, who shipped, communicated, and stuck around when things got hard. You can’t buy that with a marketing budget. You earn it one engagement at a time.
What earns the introduction
Looking across the relationships that referred us, the pattern is consistent:
- We felt like their team, not a vendor. Same schedule, same tools, shared code ownership, not an outsourced black box.
- We were transparent when it counted. Honest reporting, including the bad news, and fast issue resolution.
- We stayed. The best work compounds over years. Long-term relationships around real product work, including the spiky periods, beat transactional projects every time.
Why we optimize for it
Chasing referrals instead of ad clicks changes how you behave. It makes you allergic to short-term wins that cost long-term trust. It aligns the whole company around the only outcome that generates them: clients who’d happily work with you again, and want their friends to, as well.
It’s also why we’re comfortable with 30-day-cancellable contracts. If we ever stop earning the relationship, you shouldn’t be locked into it. So far, clients keep choosing to stay, and to tell others.