The Long Game Nobody Is Playing (But You Should Be)

This one is for you, the one who is chasing this month's numbers, refreshing your pipeline, and wondering why the work feels so transactional even when the results are solid.

You are not doing anything wrong. But I want to introduce you to a different frame, one that Jay Jacobson has been living for over 45 years, and I think it is going to shift something for you.

I sat down with Jay in the full episode, and within the first few minutes I realized I was talking to someone who thinks about business in a completely different unit of time than most of us do.

The 20-year customer

Jay spent four and a half decades in funeral service. And the thing about that industry is that the repeat customer cycle is not monthly or even annual. It is generational. The next time a family needs you could be 20 years away.

So Jay built everything around one question: will they remember us in 20 years and tell their kids to call us?

He put it this way in our conversation: "When you can start having that vision out that far, it changes the way you operate today. It changes that relationship with the customer."

That is the long game. And most of us are not playing it.

We are optimizing for the close when we should be optimizing for the story the client tells about us at dinner three years from now.

The cookie was never just a cookie

Out of his funeral consulting work, Jay built Jay's Cookies, a business-to-business gourmet cookie company that now ships hundreds of dozens of cookies a week to clients all over the country. And it started from one simple observation.

Funeral homes were great at serving families through the hardest week of their lives. And then two weeks later, when everyone else had moved on and the casseroles were gone and the house was quiet again, those families heard nothing from anyone.

Jay told his funeral home clients to send cookies. Not a card. Not a coffee mug. Cookies. Something you share. Something that creates a moment.

And here is the reframe I really want you to sit with: he was not selling cookies. He was selling the experience of being remembered when nobody else remembered.

When COVID hit and his business tray orders dried up overnight, he did not panic. He woke up at two in the morning, worked through the logic, and asked the same question he always asks: why does this actually work? The answer was community. So he rebuilt the model around delivering individual boxes to remote employees, all on the same day, so that scattered teams could share one moment together even from their living rooms.

The product did not change. The understanding of what it really solved did.

What you are actually selling

This is the thing I want you to think about for your own business. Most capable service providers I talk to are five to ten years in, working hard, and stalled. And when I dig in, the stall is almost never about effort. It is about operating at the surface level of what they do instead of the deeper level of what they solve.

Jay's cookies solve loneliness. They solve the gap that opens up after a big transaction when the client wonders if you ever think about them. They solve the question every employee asks when they are working remotely at their kitchen table: does my company actually see me?

What does your service solve at that deeper level?

If you can get honest with yourself about that answer, your positioning, your outreach, your retention, all of it starts to sharpen up.

The three-minute window

Jay also brought up something that I think applies to every single person reading this, no matter what industry you are in.

You have about three minutes when you first sit down with someone to build real trust. Three minutes. And the fastest way to burn them is to jump straight to your own needs before you understand theirs.

He spent decades sitting across from families at the worst moments of their lives, and the lesson he took from that is this: ask open-ended questions, listen for what they actually need, and demonstrate that their needs come before yours. When you do that, he said, your own needs get met anyway, because you become the kind of person they trust and refer and come back to.

That is not a sales tactic. That is a long-game orientation showing up in a three-minute window.

Staying centered on the mission

One more thing Jay said that I have been carrying around since we talked. When I asked him about walking the line between being brutally honest and being kind, he said the only way to do it without losing yourself is to stay grounded in your personal values and your personal mission.

"Life is gonna throw all kinds of things at you. But if you stay centered on what your mission and your values are personally, you can adjust, you can make decisions yet not lose yourself."

That is Resilience. That is Intentionality. That is what keeps you from spinning out when things shift.

Your next step

So here is what I want to ask you. Are you playing the long game or the short one? Are you closing transactions or building the kind of relationships that people retell to their kids?

If you are not sure where you are getting stuck, the best place to start is with an honest look at which of the six principles in the Prime Performance Process is most out of alignment for you right now. Take the free assessment at /assess and see where your gaps actually are. Because paying attention to what works for you, that is where the momentum starts.