Do the work before you delegate it

That's me standing in a trailer, with a hard hat and safety vest, about to enter the University of Georgia football complex in 2021.

Thirty cameras need to go on the racks. Wires need to be routed and hidden. Sixty devices need to connect to wifi. Every camera positioned at the exact right angle. Every cable tucked so it won't show now, and won't creep out six months from now.

We cleaned the racks before mounting anything so the adhesive would hold for years. We selected cable colors to blend into the background. We took the harder routes to run wire so nothing would show. We hid every cable we could, because when recruits walked into that weight room, it needed to look exactly the way it was designed to look.

None of this is glamorous. It takes hours. And there are a hundred small moments where you could cut a corner and no one would ever know.

That's the point.

An install at Perch was the handoff between a sale and everything that came after. A customer placed trust in us. The install was the first moment they found out whether that trust was warranted. Every small decision made in that weight room, most of which the customer would never see, was what the Perch brand actually was.

I did dozens of these. Not because I had to. Because I believed you cannot ask people to care about the invisible work if they have never watched you care about it.

You can tell your team to be perfectionists. But the people around you are watching what you do in the moments that don't matter to anyone but you. Those are the moments they take as the real standard.

Perch built a brand people trusted. Customers knew we would go above and beyond, sweat the details, work our asses off for them. That reputation wasn't built in a pitch deck or a marketing campaign. It came from hundreds of invisible decisions made by our employees in weight rooms, on sales calls, and on job sites when no one was watching.

We looked for these qualities when we hired. But our leaders also made a point to lead by example, to do the hard things, the tedious things, the things no one would ever see. You can't ask people to operate that way if you aren't doing it yourself.

What a leader does when no one is watching is what creates the culture, team, and brand that lasts.