What It Means When a Client Asks to Look Over Your Shoulder
Part of how we work is being willing to show how we work. When a prospective client wants to see what goes into one of our abstracts or runsheets before they commit to ordering, we say yes.
That answer is easy for us to give because the operation behind it was built to hold up to that kind of attention. The product comes together the same way every time, the people building it work in the same lanes from one project to the next, and the deliverable lands in the buyer's hands ready to use. None of that depends on a buyer being in the room. The willingness to invite one in is a function of those things being true.
What's Underneath the Deliverable Is Worth Showing
Every abstract and every runsheet we produce gets built in chronological order, start to finish, without anyone going back later to rearrange the file. We assemble it once, in sequence, and we leave it alone.
The team works the same way. One person owns one portion of the process. The next portion belongs to someone else. Those responsibilities don't shift project to project, which means the product comes together through the same hands doing the same work in the same order every time we run an order through.
For the buyer, that consistency shows up as a deliverable that doesn't surprise them.
For the buyer, that consistency shows up as a deliverable that doesn't surprise them. The next abstract looks like the last one. Information sits where they expect to find it. Nobody on their team has to relearn how to read our work because the work doesn't drift.
A prospective client looking over our shoulder is looking at exactly that. They're watching a process that was set up to be watched, because we set it up to produce the same thing for the buyer every time.
We Built It for Landmen, Which Is Why It Holds Up to a Landman's Inspection
When a buyer wants to see how the product gets made, they’re usually trying to look through the eyes of the person who'll actually use it. That's the person we built the product for in the first place.
We know what landmen do with an abstract or a runsheet, and we know what makes a deliverable land ready to use the day it arrives.
There's no step where the buyer hands the package to someone else to reformat it before the team can start working.
That shows up in concrete ways. The deliverable arrives as an indexed and bookmarked PDF with a spreadsheet index alongside it. The bookmarks correspond to the identifiers on the index, so the user can pull the index up on one screen, the documents up on another, and move through the file easily. There's no step where the buyer hands the package to someone else to reformat it before the team can start working.
A landman watching us build that file recognizes immediately what they're looking at, because the file is built around how they actually work.
Transparency Is a Buyer's Tool, Not Just a Vendor's Promise
Our reputation is on the line with every project we deliver. That's true whether or not anybody is watching. Inviting a buyer to see the work makes that fact a little more concrete for everyone involved, including us.
For a buyer, the look itself is useful. Sizing up an abstracting partner is hard from the outside. A buyer can read a sample, ask for references, look at certifications, and still be guessing about what shows up at delivery. Watching the work get done removes some of that guessing.
We didn't open the door to that kind of look on hope. We opened it because the operation was ready for it. The chronological build, the fixed responsibilities, the deliverable format that lands ready to use, the team and database behind all of it. Those are the things a buyer would see if they came in and watched. Showing them is straightforward when the work itself is in order.
Same Process, Same People, Same Result
The reason a buyer can predict what they'll get on the next project from watching one project is that the next project is built by the same team, in the same lanes, against the same product structure.
Each person on our team handles the same portion of the workflow on every order.
Each person on our team handles the same portion of the workflow on every order.
When demand picks up, we add people into the process to meet a reasonable timeline rather than asking the existing team to take on portions they don't normally handle. The lanes hold. The product structure holds. Throughput goes up. The way any single project gets built stays the same.
That's what we mean when we say a buyer can predict the second order from the first. The second order is the same shape as the first because our process was built so it can't be anything else.
Our Approach
Two things make this kind of transparency work for us.
- The deliverable is the same product every time we ship one.
- The team works in fixed lanes, so the methodology behind one project is the methodology behind the next.
The willingness to walk a prospective client through how the work happens follows from those two things being true.
If you're sizing up an abstracting partner for your next project and want to see the work before you commit, reach out. We built the operation to hold up under exactly that look.