Business Owner, Entrepreneur, Dreamer, Wastrel!
How often have you wished that you could come up with a great sounding title for what you do instead of what you actually do?
“I’m a business owner!”(Said sotto voice)
‘Yeah, sure! Where’s your shop?”
“I work out of my home!”
“How’s the weather?”
Seriously though, don’t you wish people would take you seriously when you say you are a business owner?
I do and one of the things I do that makes a difference to me, at least, is that I (am working on this) consistently do some small step to get closer to my goal of generating a serious income so that I don’t have to justify anything. What you or I do has nothing to do with anyone else other than as a customer or vendor. If you are a customer and are interested in my products or services, you should be concerned primarily on the quality of what I provide and on the reliability of my business. You want to know that I’m going to provide an above average product that will provide you long term satisfaction and that I will be around when you decide you need either more of what I provide and or need support for what I provide.
As a vendor, on the other hand, you should be looking at my ability to pay for what I order from you and that I will be a long term customer.
That should be all that matters.
So, how do we as business owners go about satisfying those goals?
First off, make sure that you are able to deliver and if at all possible, over-deliver, before you even think about opening your doors. Also, make sure that you have made yourself very visible to your customers. you don’t want them to guess where they think you live. Customers or buyers will be very reluctant to part with their money if they don’t know it is going to be returned in some form either product or the service your promised in exchange for the money. So, if you have a website, make sure there is contact information there.
Second, when you enter into a contract with a buyer make sure everyone knows exactly what is going to happen at every stage of the game. You don’t want to deliver a door to a customer who was expecting a half-door. Sometimes, the extra time you take to go over the order will pay dividends when the time to deliver is at hand. Under promise and over deliver.
Third, when you are starting out it is easy to promise the moon, the stars, and everything else in between. That is not a good idea. Your work is your very unique contribution to society and should be valued highly. Each minute you devote to complete a job for a customer is a minute that you won’t have for your family or for something else you would rather be doing. Treat it as a great treasure that you are making available to someone else to enjoy, so don’t give it away.
Overextending your reach!
Next, When you are starting out, you will be overjoyed to receive many orders, and have customers wanting to do business with you. The problem is when you start getting into delivery conflicts where you aren’t able to meet your deadlines and then your ability to stay in business gets impacted. This could be from lack of resources – not enough cash to pay for inventories, not enough cash to meet payroll, and so on, or it could be simply from burnout from working such long hard hours to meet those deadlines while working at a full time job and taking care of a family. Having lots of orders is great but not having a contingency plan can lead to disaster.
Another area that is a problem is dealing with vendors that are also working on building their reputation. When you started working with them you were an unknown and they treated you carefully, then as things improved on your end they started overextending their promises hoping to keep you coming back. Then, the realities of the business start impacting their bottom line and the vendor starts pushing back on promises made earlier on. At this point you could be placed on a hard place where you have no choice but to use the vendor in spite of the broken promises. So, diversify and even work with more than one vendor for the same product. It’s not lack of loyalty but business reality. Your customers expect you to meet the commitments you made to them, every thing else is an excuse.
Working for yourself is a challenge for sure, but you can make it a fun time too.
I’ll revisit this next time with my take on helping you reach out and touch someone to make working for yourself even more interesting.
Until the next time,
Good luck with your business venture.
Tags: small business challenge, small business management, small business venture