Honesty is your big thing (if you can be honest - if you can't, your competition can). I see too many places say they own their own data center - they don't. Same with equipment.
I lost a sale today via phone after someone called to find out how we operated and I explained that we had servers at datacenters in which we rented the hardware and we provided all software & service etc. The person wanted to only deal with the datacenter directly - which is fine. They said their old host was the best, but they're going out of business. They gave me the name, and when I checked them out (these wonderful people stated that they owned everything - building, routers, explained supression systems for fire etc) - with a simple traceroute to the customers domain I showed him they were hosting at Liquid Web and their host was there too.
The customer ended up going direct to the datacenter for support and service, but thanked me anyway for being candor. We MAY see a future sale because we were up front - we may not - but at least the customer has the REAL facts now, and can make decisions as needed.
Too many people with small hosting companies say "we" when it should be "I" and pretend to be larger than they are. There's actually a benefit to being the small guy - personal service.