How to Earn Trust When you Don’t Fit In

Would you trust someone styled this way with your personal tasks?

So you want to be a personal concierge and know you have the skills to do great work. Unfortunately, you cannot get people to hire you. There are many reasons this may occur, but a primary reason is trust. If a client doesn’t trust that you’ll take care of them and do good work, they aren’t going to consider hiring you.

Some reasons why potential clients will not trust you: you don’t have any background in the industry, no one can vouch for you and your work, you seem too young/old, your attire/style is inappropriate, you’re poorly spoken, or you’re poor at communicating..these are just a few.

Remember that these people are hiring you to come into their homes and help them with personal tasks. Whether it is organizing a birthday party or getting their favorite jewelry repaired, you’re often dealing with things that are sentimental to your clients. Even if you are just picking up groceries, you learn a lot about individuals this way and people aren’t willing to open up their idiosyncrasies to just anybody.

How to improve chances that clients will trust you:

• Network, network, network! – If I haven’t said this enough already, you need to get connected in your community. A nice website might help you, but it is unlikely anyone will go to your website to consider you if they haven’t already been introduced to you or told about your services by someone they trust. The absolute best way to gain immediate trust is to be recommended by someone your potential client already trusts.
• Work for friends - Try to get jobs with friends, particularly wealthy family friends. Give them steep discounts if you need to. This will help you get some background and can win you some people who will vouch for you to potential clients. A warning: be very picky about who you do this for and only do it if you really need the experience as working for free is not what starting a personal concierge business is about.
• Work in related fields or use related background details - You probably want to be a personal concierge because you already have experience with some of the services you will be providing and know you’re good at them. If you’ve been in operations at a business, managed events, or worked in any other job that has relevant work, be sure to point out this work experience in your bio when you are just starting out.
• Improve your first impression - Use your youth/age to your advantage (claim speediness or experience), do research to learn what attire is appropriate, and improve your communication skills. If you aren’t a great communicator, this is going to be a very difficult business for you to succeed in.

These are just a few ideas, but should be enough to get you started. The overall goal is to give off an initial impression of experience, competency, and integrity. If you have experience, are competent, and have high integrity, you’ll be giving the right impression in no time. If you lack one of these, you’ll need to work on that first.