About a decade ago I hired a couple of editors for this magazine and in the process learned that you can indeed tell a book by its cover. First impressions are very reliable.
Maybe I’m an overly sensitive guy (even though my better half would be quick to disagree, my late lamented retriever would have yelped enthusiastically in the affirmative) but I believe you can learn a great deal about people-and companies-in the first moments of contact. Maybe all you’ll ever need to know.

That hiring job was horrendously time-consuming. An ad in The Globe and Mail produced so many responses, I stopped counting at about 450. Some of the cover letters and resumes were gems; most were dreary. But I eventually detected a surprising and useful pattern that had little to do with the contents of the package or the opening words of the cover letter. It was on the envelope. Sometimes it was just the physical envelope itself.

I’m not sure I can explain what it was about the mere package that sparked my interest or deflected it, but it had something to do with strength and clarity, with purposefulness, with enthusiasm, sometimes with flair and flourish. I tested my theory repeatedly, including return trips to applications I’d set aside for a closer look. And my theory held up at least 95 per cent of the time.

No kidding. I could look at an envelope and know whether its contents were worth reading. And thus it became a snap to go through the last 300 or so applications-I probably opened only 25 of those envelopes.

So what’s the point? Well, I’m not talking about hiring folks to get behind the wheels of your trucks or sit dispatch; I’m talking about the impression you give to the world by the most fundamental details of business life.

I’ve just wrapped up the 16th annual Top 100 For-Hire Carriers Survey, my favourite task of the entire year. It’s been an intense month-plus of e-mails and faxes and phone calls, and of course many trips to many web sites. I’ve been exposed, in a very concentrated way, to the “envelope” in which your business lives are contained for presentation. To the seemingly incidental details of your message to the world.

And there are patterns in all these first impressions.

I’d like to nominate the lack of a human voice as one of the worst ways to leave an impression, but electronic phone answering is so pervasive that I’d be condemning just about everyone if I were critical.

Automated answering and voicemail systems are awful, though some are worse than others. The worst are those that leave you no option if you don’t know “your party’s extension,” but make you key in the first few letters of the person you’re trying to reach. (What if you don’t know how to spell it?)

It’s a gigantic pain at best but infinitely worse if you can’t hit “zero” and reach a human. This seems to say that the call-maybe a would-be customer’s call-isn’t important enough to be received. The message is loud and clear: “We’d rather save the 30 grand than greet you properly.”
The few companies where an actual human answers the phone stand out by a country mile. (Call this magazine’s head office, by the way, and you’ll hear a live person.)

Then there’s the person who is perpetually busy, who simply never answers the phone and forces the caller into dreaded voicemail every time. Come on, nobody’s that busy. That’s also the person who never calls you back, of course.

I could go on and talk about web sites that were last updated in 2001 or 2002, and I found lots of those. Others that have been under construction since I tried them this time last year. Still more just don’t do anything-like a single page holding no more than the company name and a phone number.

If you’re going to have a web site, make it work. It doesn’t have to be expensive.

Look at Muskoka Transport’s site, for example, created in-house for something like $10,000. See for yourself: go to www.muskoka-transport.com. A model of simplicity, yet packed with good information.

Rest assured, customers and clients will be judging your book by its outer wrapping. Make sure your cover’s a good one.