Warning: Somewhat of a
rant coming down the pike)
Sometimes, in the course of doing business, you have those days
(or customers) that make you want to grab you keys, lock the door, get in the car
and drive til the gas runs out without looking back. Of course you don’t but it
isn’t because the fantasy doesn’t occur to you.
Our business is creative and technical and wonderful and
hectic. In this new year, I’ve made a
few business resolutions that are intended to preserve my sanity while dealing
with customers, deadlines and being pulled in different directions.
I have a tendency to skip over my own rules and procedures
that I have in place sometimes causing issues that are the reason I created
them in the first place. You know…. When you trust a customer (or employee) and they disappoint. This makes me my own worst enemy.
I also sometimes allow people to talk me into (or out of)
things I know better than to do… either a heavily discounted price for a sob
story or including multiple versions of a design without charging an editing
fee for my time. I can be a bit “lax”
about invoice collections, late fees or allowing customers to go past their
terms. All this does is teach customers that your time is not valuable and,
believe me, they rarely appreciate it and expect it from then on.
Lastly, I sometimes
let customers dictate things I KNOW won’t work in the name of service to
appease them and prove it. Customer asking for lettering that’s too small for
the application or fabric type or trying to cram WAY too much text into a tiny
area of the design will demand that I try it any way and then say, “Oh yea,
that’s too small” or ‘That doesn’t work”.
*eye roll* Of course they expect
me to redo it at no charge that way it should have been from the beginning.
You know, I’ve been digitizing commercially for over 22
years and I can tell by looking at a design what will work and what will
not. I know better than to let customers
run me, but we all want to please our customers so we deal with it and call it
service.
This year, my resolution is to follow my own rules and stand
firm on the procedures I’ve set in place.
Work smarter, stick with my pricing schedule and stop being a pushover
with my time. If I have to “fire” a few customers, then so be it. After
all, It’s not personal, It’s business.
Rant over! Off the
soapbox now! Onward and Upward!
Any of these issues sound familiar? Do you need to organize better? Stick to your prices? Stand by your procedures or create some?
What are your business resolutions for 2016? Do share!
