Roses

Two weeks ago, we received an email from a Sugar Hill Creamery customer about a not-so-great experience she had at one of our stores. In what felt like a 10-paragraph essay, she shared that she had never had a negative experience at any of our stores, but on this particular day, she and her friend waited 45 minutes for their milkshakes. She wanted to bring it to my attention—not to get anyone in trouble, but so I would know.

I could not have been more grateful.

Image: Me at JFK T4 last week during the ribbon cutting of Villa Russo, a Queens-based family-owned concept that I have invested in as part of my airport food and beverage business

She was right. The team member working with her that evening was new to the team, and while they were great with customers, this experience revealed that they needed more training on how to manage both in-store customers and online orders.

She did not have to send me that email. She didn’t need to spend her time writing an expository essay about this less-than-great experience. She could have had the experience and decided not to come back. But she decided to send me detailed feedback about what went wrong during this scooper-customer interaction.

As an owner, I took her feedback not as solely a reflection on the person working, though some may have blamed them or the person who trained them entirely in this situation. This was feedback for me that we needed to do a better job training new team members on how to juggle online and in-store orders.

I thanked her and sent her a gift card as a sign of appreciation for taking the time to share this experience.

Image: SHC Scooping Team pic at this year’s holiday party, which we had in January because we’re all focused on serving our customers during the actual holiday.

Feedback is a gift, though sometimes it feels more like a punishment.

An immediate response to someone giving us feedback can often be defensiveness. We might feel attacked, which can result in us either providing excuses or rejecting the feedback altogether because what does that person know anyway?

I remember when I was in my early 20s, I organized an exhibition of my godmother’s paintings. I was still learning how to put an exhibition together, so the road to getting everything hung and ready for the opening was a little bumpy. I knew there were moments through the process that made her unhappy. After we crossed the finish line, I asked her for her honest feedback about how everything had gone, which caught her off guard. It’s possible she had already written me off as an inexperienced child who would have to learn the hard way how to seamlessly organize an exhibition. But when I asked and told her not to hesitate, she was surprised and refreshed. It was a signal to her that I was serious about wanting to learn and that I was ready to hear the truth to get better.

Think about performance review time at work–if you’re receiving the feedback, have you always agreed with the person’s perspective? Maybe they don’t understand all of the circumstances that have contributed to your less-than-perfect performance, and you use the circumstances as a crutch for why you are not performing at your best.

But here’s the thing about feedback: if you really deeply care about what you’re doing, you must look for the truth in the words that are being expressed. Finding the truth is sometimes like a long-stemmed rose from a garden–a thorny gift that, when embraced, may prick you, but, when brought closer, may be the breath of fresh air that you didn’t realize you needed.

Image: Allison Dunn, owner of Hibiscus Brew and one of my partners in the airport business, and I walking from the Villa Russo ribbon cutting to the ribbon cutting of Brooklyn Tea in T4. We were passing the stall that will be Field Trip, which is also in our portfolio of investments.

If you’re like me, you can be a little stubborn or feel like you know everything about yourself, good and bad. But when someone speaks their truth about me or something that I have contributed to, I have learned through my journey of being a small business owner, that there’s likely some truth to it.

When I get feedback, I try to understand what’s being said from the perspective of the person giving it, receive what is being said, show appreciation for their candor, and, if their feedback is on a topic that is important to me, I try to integrate their reflections into my life to improve future outcomes.

Honest feedback isn’t always easy to receive, but when someone takes the time to respectfully share their opinion about you or your work, look for the truth and double click on the parts of your life or work that could be improved. The time they took to share their feedback is a gift—even if it stings a little.