Small Office, Home Office Information |
| What Do You Do When Your Small Business Screws Up? There is a certain image that tends to attach itself to authors of a blog like this. It probably flows from the concept that is embedded in our genes that anyone who commits something to the printed word (or words on a screen) has some authority. We feel that they must know what they are talking about and that means that they are experts, gurus, full of wisdom and knowledge and they are perfect beings who never … ever … stuff up. Oh how I wish that were true and if you have somehow absorbed that view of us then I hate to disillusion you but we are just plain ordinary people. Toni and I are not gurus, we are not experts and we are certainly not full of wisdom and knowledge. We are just ordinary couple like you who are trying to make a go of a small business and we do make mistakes. And today we found that we had made a biggie. We have lots of clients; some spend thousands of dollars in an order, others spend hundreds of dollars with each order and quite a few have orders that are less than $100. But we pride ourselves on treating each client equally and meeting the deadlines that the client and we agree on. This morning we woke up to an irate email from one client that pointed out that we had missed his deadline and he was cancelling his order. So what do we do? Do we make excuses? Do we shrug it off? Do we run around in ever decreasing circles trying to work out a solution or do we start blaming each other for not noticing that the deadline had come and gone and the work order was still sitting in a folder on my desk? The truth is that at 4am this morning Toni took a long shower and I took a long walk. And now we are in the process of setting things right. We’re not going to make excuses because those are only reasons why people shouldn’t do business with us. And we are not going to run around in circles, nor are we going to blame each other (instead we are blaming ourselves and Toni is busy telling me that it was all her fault while I’m telling her that I am basically inept and incompetent). Instead we have already come with some possible solutions to make sure that work doesn’t fall through the cracks anymore and we have already contacted the client and told him that the work will be done in the next 24 hours … for free. The client certainly isn’t one of the big order people but we don’t want to lose one single client so we want to make things right for him. At the same time we will be explaining why the order was missed but we won’t be making excuses. Will all that make the client happy and coming back for more work in the future? We don’t know and that isn’t really our motivation. We undertook to do some work for him, we stuffed up, and we owe it to him to set things right. So what do you do when your small business screws up?
14 Sep 2005 |
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