This is how reputation gets built
In a hundred small non-asked deliverables.
Hi, it’s Melissa, and welcome (back) to “your founder next door”, a weekly publication with stories and tidbits of my human journey bootstrapping eWebinar to $5m ARR. No BS, just straight-up truth bombs on what it’s like to build a company without an abundance of resources or friends in high places.
A friend told me years ago that when he checks references for a new hire, all he cares about are what he calls “non-asked deliverables.”
What did this person do that no one asked them to?
Not “were they good at their job?” What he wanted to know was whether this person showed up beyond what was expected because that’s the thing you can’t teach. That’s just who that person is.
It stuck with me, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently.
With the rise of AI, it’s never been easier for one person to do someone else’s job that’s outside of their expertise. Every company is asking themselves where they can cut costs to reallocate budget into AI credits, and which tasks and roles can be replaced. The bar for being “good at your job” went up overnight, because doing what’s asked of you is something AI can now do too.
The question has become, what makes you irreplaceable? It’s not the work you were assigned. It’s the work you took on without being asked and the outcome you achieved without being overseen.
When I joined SAP at 27, I was the only person on my team without a background in tech so knew I had a lot to prove. For the first few months, I read everything I could get my hands on, seven days a week; brochures, papers, case studies. I built a giant call script matrix for every role in every industry so I could run better discovery calls and catch up with people who had years of experience on me. I heard that matrix lived on for years after my departure.
Nobody asked me to do that. I wanted to do a great job and I wanted my boss to look good for taking a chance on me.
My CTO/Cofounder, David, landed his dream job at Microsoft after university, and slept at the office so he could code as much as possible. No one told him to, he wanted to. He’s had a colorful career since, not because of where he slept when he was 21, but because of how he approached everything he was involved with.
How you do anything is how you do everything.
I came across a story recently about a factory CEO in Japan who had two teams (it was on Instagram, and I can’t find it again to verify it, but it made a good story). One team always delivered on time. The other was consistently late. Contrary to what he was supposed to do, he let the first group go and kept the second. When he dug deeper, he saw that the people who always hit their deadlines never questioned anything. They just checked the box. The ones who were always late were catching problems, rebuilding things, and caring deeply about the quality of what they made. It wasn’t asked of them and it cost them their deadlines. It also made them irreplaceable.
Here’s the thing most people don’t realize about reputation: People don’t see your intentions. They see your actions.
Good intentions are invisible. Nobody can see that you care or that you mean well. What they can see is whether you showed up, followed through, and did what you said you would. What they can see is the extra mile you went when someone else thought it was too much effort and “probably wouldn’t make a big difference anyway.”
When you don’t back up your intentions with actions, a perception forms and it doesn’t matter if you think it’s not accurate. Once it’s there, it colors everything that comes after.
This is how building reputation works. It’s not one big defining moment. It’s every small moment, compounding quietly, for better or worse. How you do anything is how you do everything.
Over time, your reputation stops being just how people experience you. It becomes your character. It’s how people describe you to others, the words they reach for when your name comes up in a conversation you’ll never be part of.
And guess what? Your reputation will introduce you to people before you ever meet them. Someone, somewhere, is forming a first impression of you right now based on what someone else said. You don’t get to be in that room. Their experience with you is.
When you are someone people can rely on, something shifts. Cofounders want to build with you. Customers trust you. Friends refer you without hesitation. You become the person people feel good putting their name behind, because when you do something, it doesn’t just get done. It gets done with flying colors. When you make everyone around you look good, you become the person everyone wants to be associated with.
That’s how opportunities find you. Not (just) through luck or hustling for them, but through years of quietly being someone people can count on. Your rock solid reputation.
A reputation for reliability is one of the most compounding assets you’ll ever have. You won’t always notice it’s happening, but one day, the right doors will open because you are who you are.
Anything less than that, and you’re fighting over the same opportunities with someone who delivers more than you for the exact same task. You won’t be considered. You won’t even be on the roster. Because somewhere out there, someone is doing the thing that wasn’t asked of them.
People think reputation gets built by showing up when you’re supposed to.
In reality, it gets built by showing up when you’re needed, even when you weren’t asked to.
Till next time,
— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️
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loved this piece @melissa !!!