A couple weeks ago I wrote about selling evil eye (nazar boncuğu) bracelets. When you’re selling a $20 bracelet, trust enters into the picture, but not that much.

These days I’m in another world though, one in which my projects might be for 2,000 times that, and on the line is financing for a multi-million dollar machine at a factory in, say, Algeria.

When you do that kind of work, you are a big part of the product. So building trust over time is a key component of the work.

Do you know who some of my favorite clients are? They are the ones who I’ve known for years. They email me on Friday, we close the deal on Saturday, they wire me the money on Sunday, and we start work on Monday. Boom, simple as pie. And you don’t get to do that unless you are very careful about maintaining the trust you’ve built with each other over the years.

One of the best ways I’ve found to build trust is consistency, which for me isn’t that big an issue, because there are two moments, one in Chicago when I was 20 years old and one in Hong Kong when I was 29, and those two moments have pretty much defined the last 20 or 30 years of my life.

Consistency comes in many forms, though, and one of them is commitment, especially showing commitment when there is a problem. Yalın Yüregil talks about this in this short from our podcast, The White Rabbit.

In other words, don’t look at a problem as 100% bad, see it as an opportunity to show how you act when things go south: