What’s Behind Your Storefront Window?

Have you ever met someone who puts up a great front, but back behind the grandiose curtain, there’s a lot of empty space?

My friend calls this “putting it all in the storefront window.”

This friend—I’ll call him Dan—works at a private equity firm that invests in start-up companies aiming to go public. Back when Dan was young and green, he was impressed at face value. He started work during the dot-com boom, and for hours on end, he watched presentations from new businesses courting his firm for seed money.

As a rookie, Dan’s instinct was to allocate funds to the most polished entrepreneur, the dynamo in a power suit. “We’ve GOT to invest in this guy!” he’d declare, wowed by a killer sales pitch or charming demeanor. As for the soft-spoken old man with a ho-hum presentation, his gut reaction was typically, “No way.”

What Dan didn’t realize, of course, was that bells and whistles don’t necessarily equate to substance.

“Did you know,” the founding partners of his equity firm would then inform him, “that quiet old man is worth tens of millions of dollars? In the past five years, he’s started and sold two companies.” The dynamo, on the other hand, often had a sketchier track record, businesses gone bust and no assets to boot. Once you dug into his business model, the holes appeared.

I’ve long been fascinated by the insight and perspective Dan has gleaned through his job. He’s learned to look beyond the surface in judging a business, to separate presentation from performance. And of all the themes he’s noticed among truly remarkable businessmen, one thing stands out: humility.

I think about Dan’s experience when I look around at our image-driven society, a worldwide bazaar where everyone is selling something. Even I, as a writer, am selling words, my unique filter on this world. It’s a competitive marketplace, and with so much stuff competing for our attention, we skim storefront windows to narrow down points of interest.

A catchy display….clever words….captivating colors…these things draw us closer, suggest that someone is worth our precious time. We approach the most beautiful store with heart palpitations, eager to see what lies inside. By all appearances, it must be good.

We open the door, cross the threshold, and….and what? What next?

Well, sometimes the interior is even better than we imagined. It’s so gorgeous, in fact, we forget about the shell that caught our eye to begin with. Other times, we enter the store with a sinking disappointment. The room is cold, barren, and neglected. The best merchandise is in the storefront window, and the stylish storeowner—freshening up her display for today’s passersby—ignores our presence. We pass her as we exit, saddened by her misdirection. If only she exerted that energy inward, maybe we’d stay.

Meanwhile, there’s another store nearby—one we’ve never noticed before. The window display is bland, but as we glance through the glass and lock eyes with the owner, we’re taken by her friendly face. We stumble in curiously…and are blown away by the inventory. The layers! The richness! The depth! It’s a soulful atmosphere we never expected, and as the coziness envelops us, we breathe in fresh air. This, we decide, feels like home.

Only one thing stumps us: There’s not much traffic. Do people not realize what they’re missing out on?

Consciously or not, we all put up a storefront display. We can make it bold and glamorous or humble and understated. It can cry out for attention or wait to be discovered. We can obsess over it daily, ignoring needs in our backroom, or strike a healthy balance.

The choice is ours.

One other choice we have relates to how we window shop. We can do it like we always have—mindlessly forming fast impressions—or look beyond visual cues. After all, rarely does a person’s exterior reflect their true interior.

My daughter Ella recently grasped this point in her profound, seven-year-old way. Breaking away from my computer, I explained that mommy was writing a column about not judging a person based on their “storefront appearance.” As I rambled on, Ella started to nod. She knew exactly what I was talking about.

“Yeah,” she said, her eyes wide and sparkly, “it’s just like the bank. Looking at it from the outside, you’d never know they have lollipops inside!”

Lollipops and banks, I thought. Why didn’t I think of that?

Sometimes it takes a child’s X-ray vision to glimpse the colorful candy inside a boring brick façade. Other times, it takes a peek behind the curtain to realize all that glitters is not gold. Either way, a person’s storefront window is merely a starting point in discovering who they are. It’s the area out of eyeshot that really counts in this world.