Josh Patrick, Founding Principal of Stage 2 Planning Partners has spent his adult life running and building businesses. For the first twenty years of his business career, he was President and operated Patrick’s Food Service. From a company with one employee Josh built the company to four branch operations with 90 employees. | You Need To Think About A Customer Before You Say Yes |
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| Wednesday, February 22, 2012 17:57 | ||
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I think most business owners I meet have a scarcity mentality. They haven’t learned to say no, especially to a customer who they suspect are going to cause problems. The problem with taking on a bad customer is they take up space in our company. Most companies have a limited amount of capacity for customers. The amount of capacity varies. But, we all have a finite amount of capacity. The problem with taking on a bad customer is that we fill that capacity with customers that are difficult or don’t make us any money, or even worse, both. I find that bad customers not only take up capacity, but they tend to take much more capacity than good customers do. It’s time for you to learn to say no. That potential customer who you suspect is going to cause you problems needs to hear the word no thanks. It doesn’t matter how you get to no, but you need to say no. One of the questions I ask business owners often is how often they say no? If it’s not at least several times a year, I suspect that they have a group of customers they wish they didn’t have. And, once we have a customer we’re usually not willing to let them to go away. It’s much better to say no before you have a problem. If you say no, you build capacity in your business for yes. When you learn to say no you build capacity in your business for when to say yes. You never want to be close to 100% capacity. When that happens you can’t say yes to that great customer. Or, if you do say yes and your capacity is close to 100% you’re likely to do a less than stellar job with them. Now you’ve taken a great opportunity and made it into one where you have to convince this great customer that you’re really better than your track record indicates. Know what you’re looking for. The best way to keep from taking on a bad customer is to have a clear picture of what a great customer is like. Having a profile of who your best customer is allows you evaluate potential customers for your business. I find this is the best way to keep from making that bad customer mistake that we’ve all made. What about you, how do you keep from making the bad customer mistake? If you're a private wealth advisor, please join Advisors4Advisors (A4A) to get its full benefits. Register now, and we will donate $20 of our $60 membership fee to Bubbles The Clown’s financial literacy program, and you can post an icon on your website saying you support Bubbles' 501(c)3 charitable organization. Plus, get other membership benefits, including:
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We’ve all done it, we’ve taken a customer on who we know we shouldn’t have taken.
