> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.juanriverasaab.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # My first boss wouldn't let me talk to a customer for six months. - URL: https://www.juanriverasaab.com/my-first-boss-wouldnt-let-me-talk-to-a-customer-for-six-months/ - Published: 2026-10-18T14:47:33.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-18T14:54:06.000Z - Author: Juan Before I sold a single elevator, I spent six months as an installer's helper. It taught me the most important thing I know about this business. In 2009 I was hired to sell elevators in Bogotá. I had a degree, a tie, and a lot of confidence. What I didn't have was any idea what an elevator actually was. My first boss in the industry had a rule: nobody talks to a customer until they've worked the job site. Not visited. Worked. So on my first day as a salesman, I didn't get a desk. I got a hard hat, a pair of boots, and a spot next to an installer on a hotel going up in the middle of the city. ## Six months on the inside. For six months I was a helper. I carried parts. I held things in place while someone who knew what they were doing fixed them there. Not only that, but I learned where you cut the openings in a building that was designed without them, how the frames go in, and how the rails get mounted straight enough that a car can ride them for twenty years. I learned that a machine room on top of a tall building and a compact machine tucked inside an overhead are entirely different things in the same building. It was physical work, and it was thinking work. Weights, geometry, and tolerances. Every number on a drawing turned into something someone had to lift. At the time, I'll be honest, it felt like a step backward. I had studied. I wanted an office. ## What the office couldn't teach me. Here's what I saw from inside the hoistway that I never would have seen from a desk: **the sales mistakes show up on site.** The wrong part. The late delivery. The dimension that nobody confirmed. Somebody in an office made a promise, and a mechanic paid for it at 7 a.m., in front of the customer, with no way to make it right. I also got to know the installers. Not as “the field.” As people. What made their day hard, what made it go well, and what they thought of the salespeople who never showed up. Most of what I believe about leading people started in those months. ## Then I got my chance and still got it wrong. When the six months ended, I became a trainee sales rep. I learned to take measurements on site with architects and builders, the pit, the overhead, and the shaft, and turn them into an order a factory could build. Then I went out to find my own customers. It took months to close my first sale: two elevators for a building in Rosales, a high-end neighborhood in the north of the city. I was intensely proud. And I made rookie mistakes on it anyway. I miscalculated the installation hours. I specified fixtures that had to be replaced. The company covered the cost, and my boss took part of it out of my commission. He was right to. It's the lesson I remember most precisely. ## What I still carry. After that, I never again thought of the field as “after the sale.” The field *is* the product. Every promise a salesperson makes is kept, or broken, by someone holding a wrench. That's still how I run a team, years, and a few continents and multiple countries later: - **Before I trust a number, I go see the work that produced it.** - **Before I make a promise to a customer, I ask the person who has to keep it.** - **When something goes wrong on site, I look for the promise upstream that made it go wrong.** None of that came from a book. It came from six months of holding things in place while someone better than me fixed them there. ## Your turn. **If you lead people who do the physical work:** when did you last spend a full day doing it *with* them? Not visiting. Not a photo for the newsletter. Working. Put one on the calendar this month, and then write down what surprised you. **If you're just starting out** and someone offers you the bottom rung, ask how much it pays, of course. And then ask what you'll learn there. Sometimes the second answer is worth more. I'd like to hear what you find. Reply and tell me.