Small Office, Home Office Information

Yuck … I have a nasty head cold and I feel like crap and when I’m like that bears with sore heads are much better company than I am so fortunately Toni was able to deal with  what happened yesterday and handle it much more diplomatically than I might done.

A couple of weeks ago the people behind a typical online Mom and Pop business that they run from their home here in town approached us and asked us to redevelop their site. Sales were very poor and they had built the original site themselves.

Throughout the redevelopment we had kept in touch with them and, as we do with all our customers, at the midway point we showed them what the new site looked like. Apart from a couple of very minor changes they seemed quite happy with the new look.

Yesterday, with the redeveloped site just two days away from going live, one of them rang the office and spoke to Toni. They weren’t happy, they thought we had missed the point when it came to marketing what they were selling and they suggested that we didn’t have any experience in selling anything online. They even pointed to a site we had built for another customer and suggested that it was way “too cold” to sell anything.

I suppose we could have suggested that they call the owner of that website and find out just how successful the site has been. We could have pointed to our car and told them how it had been paid for by the online sales we have made and continue to make via affiliate marketing and our own online shops. But in the end if a client suddenly loses faith in your ability to produce what they’re paying for then there’s only thing you can do … and that’s what we did.

The client was invited to come into the office today and pick up a full refund.

You win some and you lose some but as long as you learn from your loses things haven’t been a total waste of time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 9:10 am and is filed under Home Business, Small Business Lessons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.