A few months back I won a gorgeous vintage brass table at auction. It has three moving pieces and each of these pieces has a glass top. The gentleman running the auction kindly offered to put it in my car for me. He did not realize that the glass was not attached and turned it sideways. The middle piece of glass slid out and shattered everywhere. I still took the piece, it was a steal, but then I was left with having to replace that piece of glass.

I had a shop in mind to get the replacement glass, but then saw that they were out of business. I then took it to the Facebook “experts” and asked for recommendations there. I got places that were super far for me, places that ended up not doing smaller jobs and places that had also closed. I wasn’t really sure where to go from there. 

I am figuring things out as I go with selling larger pieces locally. I also know that there are a lot of nearby shops that sell similar pieces and I just figured they had to have a good source for glass replacement. So I asked. Immediately I got a recommendation for a shop that was right across the street from this particular dealer. Last week I took my little table in and they were super nice and professional and very reasonable. I have definitely found my glass person!

So the take away from all of this is some thing that my insightful friend (and motivational speaker, author, and kick ass business woman in general) Traci Bild* has long advised. If you see something that has worked for someone else, you can achieve results doing the same thing. How it applies in this situation is that there’s all these people in my industry that have already made the connections and know good local sources for stuff. They enjoy recommending and sending people to quality vendors who have done good work for them. I am definitely going to be taking advantage of that again, and as I add to my knowledge base, I hope people will come to me and I can pay forward the information. I really feel like good local businesses deserve great referrals.

*Traci’s books are available on Amazon! Her latest, The Short Cut, has really great, practical tips for people in sales.