First off, what is time integrity? This is creating and keeping integrity with your customers by respecting their time and being transparent with communication if the timing/schedule will differ from what was originally stated.

This is something I am seeing over and over again, businesses losing trust because they are abusing the time customers or prospects are giving them.

Story time to convey this point (I promise this isn’t just a rant, my husband got the pleasure of being on the receiving end of that):

In October I registered for a 3-day virtual conference with a billion dollar premier membership-based networking company. The original confirmation email said the event would be from 11:30am-5:45pm each day.

Great, I blocked out the three days on my calendar for that time slot and went about my life.

Leading up to the event I kept getting sales emails trying to sell me on signing up for the event I was already registered for. Wasting my time as I would open and read them thinking they might have important information about the event.

In fact, on the same day I received a postcard saying “yay you’re in, your surprise box of goodies should arrive in the next week” then got an email saying “I didn’t see your address on one of these goodie boxes.” 😐

Such mixed messaging was incredibly frustrating. I had no clue what was going on. I just assumed I was registered and didn’t care that much because it had been included in something else I bought. If I had paid outright, I’m sure the rage level would have been drastically higher.

The morning of the first day, I did the early-check in to make sure tech was all good to go and I’d have everything ready when it started. Luckily I did this long enough before the start of the event because I found out they had completely changed the times for the event. It now started 30 minutes earlier and was going 1-2 hours later each night than the original confirmation said...

(To get my facts straight for this blog, I dug back through all of the emails sent on this event, apparently this was communicated in an email in mid-December, but silly me for assuming that the times would have matched the original confirmation email. It didn’t matter in the end because they changed it again the week of. See chart at the bottom of this post.)

To top everything off they were constantly behind schedule during the event. I 100% understand that things happen and am all for giving grace. But it became clear that this was their modus operandi for the event. They told us all to show up 15 min early because “on time is late” and then they’d start 5-10 minutes late, so we were sitting for ~25 minutes. Then they’d keep running over in each section until they were 30+ minutes behind by mid-day.

The first day set one of the worst tones as they gave us a 30 minute lunch, only to have us sit there for another 15 minutes waiting for them to show up.

Frustrating, right?

I was more than a little peeved. And to make matters worse their event landing page had these etiquette notes:

“It is better to not post values for a company, then to have them and constantly break them” - I really wish I could remember who I heard this from.

They had the audacity to tell me to be early and if I wasn’t, I was late. And that I should make a commitment to attend and block my calendar, which I couldn’t actually do because they changed the schedule multiple times.

The point?

Are you building integrity with your customer base by keeping to your schedule and being communicative when things change, which builds trust that you’ll do what you are saying you’re going to do?

Or are you losing customer trust and sales because they don’t believe that you’ll stick to the timeline, which translates to them not trusting that you will do what you’re saying you’ll do?

Time is the commodity we can’t get back. If someone is giving you their time, then you best treat it like the most precious thing to you because if you don’t they’ll take it back and their money.

Bonuses

Other ways I have seen this show up:

Offering freebie webinars and run over time from spending too much time selling
Promising a 5 minute daily video challenge and then making the videos 12-20 minutes
Long rambling videos on social media
Your target market is busy, overworked people and then having a challenge where you ask them to watch rambling live streams for an hour a day for 8 days.

How to recover: If you have a schedule/timing issue that comes up, because life happens, then communication is what saves your integrity here. For example with this event, Simply putting up a note saying “hey we’re going to be another 10 minutes.” so that people aren’t just sitting there getting annoyed.

Resources:

Do you struggle with constantly being late, but can’t make new habits of being timely stick? Then hypnotherapy can actually do wonders for this. Instilling new habits that become easy and second nature is one of the things we do best here. Schedule a discovery call to find out more.

I used to struggle with timing for events and how to use them as an authentic way to attract clients and grow my business. After discovering Mari I instilled key habits into my everyday life that gave me executive presence. Now I show up for my clients and prospects in a whole new way. If you want to exponentially increase your executive presence then I can’t recommend Mari Gesair enough. (this isn’t the first time she’s made an appearance on my blog because of how much I love her and her work).

Schedule a discovery call to find out more!

Check her out here in her Upcoming Masterclass March 2023 https://www.more-impact-less-stress.com/presence-master-class

If it’s after March 2023 and the above link is now bad use this one https://www.more-impact-less-stress.com/

The end of the story for those who care to know: Going into this event I was already considering getting refunds for some items I pre-purchased with them for later this year due to other issues with their integrity I have.This just sealed the deal and now I’m looking to back out from the corporate level events.

I also originally drafted this blog post at the end of day 2 of 3, I’m discovering today on day 3 that 50% of this conference is going to be about hard selling me on their 40k program.

Something the lead speaker and head of the company specifically said she doesn’t do in presentations. I’m getting whiplash trying to follow what they’re saying and what they are actually doing.

And honestly I’m in a dilemma right now because I like the local people in my group, but I’m not sure I can be at all associated with this group on any level and stay in my integrity. Now I have a decision to make.

Extra bonus I put together a spreadsheet of all the different timing communications on this event and not a single one of them match.

Real Talk: Does your Business have Time Integrity?

The point?

Bonuses

Resources:

Have you hit your "or else" Moment?

Why Past Life Regression is A Mystery?