How does a newcomer get taken seriously in business in the Texas Hill Country?

Scott Cundill · 2026-09-24 · Boerne

Slowly, and then all at once, and the thing that flips it is almost never your marketing. It is one established person saying your name to another established person without being asked to.

This is for anybody running a business out of Boerne, Kerrville, Fredericksburg, Comfort, Bandera or the roads in between, who can see that plenty is going on and cannot find the door into it.

Am I imagining it, or is this place harder to break into than it looks?

You are not imagining it, and it is not unfriendly either. Those two things get confused constantly.

Hill Country towns are welcoming in a way that is completely sincere and tells you nothing about whether anyone will send you work. People will wave, chat in line at the feed store, invite you to things. That is hospitality. It is not the same transaction as a referral, and a lot of newcomers spend a frustrating year assuming it is.

A referral is different because it costs the person giving it. Around here somebody's name is a real asset, built over a long time, in a town small enough that a bad recommendation follows them to church. When they put that name behind yours, they are lending you something they cannot easily get back. Of course they take their time.

So how long does it actually take?

Longer than you want, and much shorter if somebody vouches for you early.

Left alone, the usual path is two or three years of showing up. Chamber events, a booth at Dickens on Main, a lot of coffee. It works, eventually, because people slowly gather evidence about you.

What a warm introduction does is skip you past the evidence gathering, because somebody has already done it on your behalf. That is the whole mechanism. It is not a shortcut around trust, it is borrowed trust, and it only works if the person lending it actually knows you well enough to mean it.

What are people quietly checking?

Four things, more or less, and none of them are on your website.

Whether you are staying. The Hill Country has watched a great many people arrive full of plans and leave inside two years. Until you have been through a summer, a drought and a property tax bill, you are a maybe.

Whether you do what you said. Not whether you are good, whether you are reliable. The bar is a returned phone call and an arrival time you meant.

Whether you are useful to anyone but yourself. People notice fast who only ever shows up when they want something.

And whether you understand where you are. Boerne is not San Antonio, Kerrville is not Boerne, and Fredericksburg is its own entire economy built on people visiting it. Talking as though the Hill Country is one market is an immediate tell.

What should I stop doing?

Introducing yourself with your job title.

"I am in insurance" gives the other person nothing to work with and nothing to remember. Everyone in the room is in something.

Try the shape of a story instead, because that is what actually gets repeated later when you are not there. What was the last problem you fixed, whose was it, and what happened. People cannot pass on a category. They can pass on the fellow who got the roof sorted before the appraiser came back.

Then make it easy. Say out loud, in a plain sentence, who you would like to meet. Most people genuinely want to help and simply have no idea what you need, so they do nothing, and you read the nothing as indifference.

What does a good ask sound like?

Small, specific, and easy to say yes to.

Not this. "Let me know if you hear of anything."

This. "I am looking for the office manager at one of the medical practices in Kerrville, because we handle document shredding and compliance, we are already doing two clinics in Boerne, and I would like a name rather than a front desk."

That second sentence can be forwarded word for word. The first one requires the other person to do your thinking for you, in their own time, for free.

And say what you will do in return, plainly. An introduction moves much faster when the person in the middle can see it is not all running one direction.

What has a Sunday house got to do with it?

More than you would think, and the answer is sitting on side streets in Fredericksburg and Comfort right now.

The German families who settled this country farmed a long way out. Too far to get to town and back in a day, which meant church, market, the doctor and anybody else they needed were all effectively out of reach. So they built themselves a second house in town, tiny, one room with a loft over it reached by a stairway on the outside wall, and they used it on Saturday nights.

The farm was where the work happened. The Sunday house was where the work got connected to everything else. Nobody thought that was a luxury, they thought it was infrastructure, and they built it out of limestone by hand.

That problem never went away out here, the distances are the same distances. What went away was the habit of building something deliberate to solve it.

How does My Most Trusted fit in?

It is the part that makes sure the person in the middle is real.

Connections on the platform get added one at a time, by a member confirming they genuinely know the other person. There is no import, no syncing your phone, no button that turns eight hundred email addresses into a network. That sounds like a missing feature until you consider that it is the only reason any of the introductions mean anything.

When you want to reach a particular company, the platform shows you by name who the two of you already have in common, and says so plainly when the answer is nobody. If it is nobody, you can still ask a member who does know them, with your reason typed out and every word in front of you before it goes anywhere.

Nothing sends by itself. The platform will write a draft, a person presses send or does not. Out here that distinction is not a nicety. An automated message with your name at the bottom of it will cost you more than staying quiet would have.

The Trust-O-Meter is the part people find uncomfortable and it is the part that works. It reflects what each member has given out, introductions and recommendations, not how long they have been signed up or how much they paid. If you only ever take, it shows.

Who is behind this locally?

Jane Lehman hosts it, from Boerne.

She works with LegalShield, getting legal cover in place for families and small business owners before anything goes wrong, and before that she spent years as a court mediator, watching how far most people sit from knowing what they are entitled to. She is not a lawyer. Her job is making sure you can reach one without first doing arithmetic about it.

She is listed under her own name with her profiles on platforms we do not own, so you can look her over before you spend an hour with her.

What do I do this week?

Write one sentence. Who you want to meet, where, what size of outfit, and what for. If you cannot get it into one sentence, nobody can forward it.

Then talk to Jane. And if you have been here twenty years and you are reading this thinking of three people who would be good for each other, you are already doing the job, and you should probably be doing it here.