Running a small business you can easily spend a lot of time helping people without being paid. Sometimes its legitimate and ‘all in the service’ you do.
Often when people contact me about my live shows, I’ll spend 10, 15 or even 20 minutes with them brainstorming their event, helping them work out where my services will make a difference and add value to what they are doing. Often I’ll spend time thinking about their enquiry after the conversation as well. Of course at this juncture, there is no guarantee of a booking; it’s what I need to do to secure the work. However, quite often the people calling up aren’t the ones who will be paying the bill. So somewhere between enquiry and booking with a deposit, there can be long delays, to-ing and fro-ing while the person negotiates with the people who sign the cheques. Often the enquirers are volunteers, or part time staff which means the efficiency with which they handle the booking confirmation can be quite slow. It requires patience but I understand that the person on the end of the line isn’t always in control of which way the decision will go, nor are they necessarily ‘full time’ on this.
Can you pencil that date in?
Some people ask for a booking to be ‘penciled in’ but I never do this without a deposit. Why? People are unreliable. People forget, people change their minds and dither. People like to keep their options open. Sometimes people don’t even have the courtesy to get back to me and say they aren’t able to proceed at this time.
Some might call such people ‘time wasters’.
Recently I had a terrible experience trying to hire the services of a marketing expert. We arranged a time for an international phone consultation but within an hour of sending me the invoice the guy backed out and accused me of wasting his time. He even made sport of me by making his next blog post all about how to manage so called ‘time wasters’!
I understand people’s time is precious, so I’m very careful to be prompt with all correspondence; this experience really hurt because it was just untrue. I can understand how this ‘super marketer’ might get a lot of people ‘dithering’, but I take issue with him blaming me. Rather than blaming one’s clients, shouldn’t one take responsibility?
Window of opportunity
His solution, was to give potential clients a ‘window of opportunity’, that is a time frame in which to complete their ‘transaction’. When they failed to do this, he considered the matter closed. (Which is rather odd thing to do in my case since he’d already created the invoice and sent it for payment!). However he ignored one critical facet of this strategy, namely, to communicate with his clients his expectations and what exactly this ‘window of opportunity’ entailed. I only learnt of it in the blog that he blasted the same day he fired me!
Don’t blame others - take responsibility
While it’s easy to blame the customer it’s harder to take responsibility and ask questions about your own business. Shouldn’t the small business owner be asking: ‘is there some way I can improve my service so that my customers have a better experience and my time is less likely to be wasted?’
I was mildly surprised to find that my ‘super marketer’ didn’t have a pro forma to collect all the information he needed for a consultation session. I expected he might have an online form to indicate my contact details, Skype account, websites, bio and my preferred meeting times. Surely this would make setting up consultations easier and reduce the administration and email table tennis for such a busy celebrity. But no, he doesn’t, so we go back and forth like real pros, trying to find a common time slot with a 9 hour time difference between us. Instead of taking responsibility and seeing that his processes could be improved, he blamed his customer.
Who are you blaming?
Now how often do we do that? Be it in our small business, ministry or even relationships isn’t it much easier to blame others than take responsibility and look for ways to improve what we do?
Taking responsibility
I think with the customers that enquire for my shows, I need to set a time frame with them so that they understand why it matters for them to get back to me. I thought about having an enquiry proforma when I first launched Anton's Antics website, but until the volume of enquiries is overwhelming me, things are ok for the time-being (please let me know if you have ideas otherwise!). I think it would also help us be clear that we are helping each other and to set targets is a helpful thing for making sure ministry isn’t wasted.
