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Small Business and Moral Dilemmas

One of the problems that small businesses have to face is unwanted customers. That may sound a little strange coming from someone who promotes the theory that if you want your business to grow you should never turn work away but sometimes you will come across people that you would rather not do business with.

Perhaps you face a moral dilemma when you deal with them. Or perhaps they may take up too much of your time and distract you from your business.

A friend of ours is facing the latter problem right now. He has a client who has spent a lot of money in our friend's services over the last few years and yet the client is fast becoming a pest.

He likes to come into our friend's shop and just sit. Sometimes he will talk and sometimes he will just sit and watch our friend work at his computer repair business. When he does talk he is a serious distraction, when he just sits and watches it becomes a little un-nerving for our friend and his small staff.

Perhaps even more difficult to deal with are those were there is a moral dilemma involved. For example you may need some work done by a skilled copywriter or graphic artist and you are ready to go ahead and place an order and then you find that they are heavily involved in the adult industry.

What do you do in either of those situations? That's not a question that I can answer for you because your decision either way could have an impact on your business.

But there is one thing that you should never do. Whether you're faced with a customer who is a total pain or a situation that involves a moral dilemma the one thing you should not do is avoid the issue.

Confront it, deal with it and have the courage to tell the person who is causing that problem the reason why you do not wish to deal with them.

Too often when confronted with situations like that it seems far easier to push the person away without telling them why and doing that only shows everyone how much courage you don't have.

Most people will accept the situation if they know the reasons and they may even have respect for you. And sometimes that respect can be very important further down the track.

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