Carl Sewell makes this point in Customers For Life when he talks about how he handles refunds in his car dealerships and the dangers of arguing with your customers over a few bucks.

Here's how it's done right:

I use 1800flowers to send flowers to my lovely wife at work.  One time they arrived 2 days late…and dead from being left out in the cold.

I called to explain the problem; they immediately and sincerely apologized, refunded my money, and sent me a coupon for $20 off.  They didn't argue.  They didn't blame anyone.  They didn't hesitate.  They just made it right. 

You can't imagine how quickly that drained my annoyance. 

But what if it wasn't their fault?  Didn't matter.  I bought from them and expected the flowers to get to my wife.  They looked at my history and knew I'd keep buying from them. 

The same applies to you and your customers:

Imagine someone calls with a complaint.  Now, what's your goal?  To save a few bucks and "not let them rip you off" or impress that customer, who will most likely not only continue to buy from you, but will probably tell everyone they know?

This is tied to saying "you are right, we were wrong".  You have to convey "we value you" and "you matter."  And of course, mean it!

You obviously have to use judgment, but most of these situations will be about small amounts of money.  Don't lose track of this in the heat of the moment – think long term customer value.

You aren't really in business until you've sold a product to a real customer.

Has someone written you a check?

Not a loan, not an investment, but an actual payment from a real customer. Not your mother or rich uncle, but someone who would rather have your product or service than their money. If not, you don't (yet) have a business!

Find the shortest path to your first check

I remember reading about an angel investor saying that he'd rather see a short business plan with a customer check stapled to it than a huge one with all the projections in the world.

I meet people (heck, I've been one) who are technically “in business”, but in fact, are not.  They may have filed incorporation papers, may have a business card or a web site, but have never actually sold anything. That means to me that they aren’t really “in business” – at least not yet.

There isn't anything wrong with that for a while – it is OK if you are just getting started. But dang it, don't waste another minute on any overhead crap. Spend less time "getting ready" and more time figuring out the shortest path to getting a single customer to write you a check. Then you will be in business!

Overhead crap will suck you into the abyss

By “overhead crap” I mean tweaking your web site, redesigning your business cards, cleaning off your desk, rethinking your brochure, upgrading your office furniture, all that kind of stuff.

Here's a great article that will give you a similar view: How DropBox Started As A Minimal Viable Product

Get in front of prospects

If you are running a new, small business, you need to be in front of prospects! Talk to them, email them, meet them.  Convince them to try your service.  Until you have some of them actually using your product, everything else is a relative waste of your time.

So figure out your strategy for getting in front of these people, and then spend all of your time doing it.  It may be cold calls, or emails to people you’ve met at conferences, or passing out samples at some gathering.  But it isn’t sitting in the office hiding from your prospects, reworking your logo, hoping against hope they’ll knock your door down and demand to buy something!

No, you need a check.

When I was a PC person thinking about moving to a Mac, I got some good advice: "Don't try to do things the Windows way.  Learn the Mac way."

Easier said than done, but that was right on the mark.  And it holds regardless of how long you've been in the PC world (I'd used a PC from Windows 3.1 all the way to XP).

You have to shift your thinking, and you'll feel a backwards pull for a while, especially when you don't see how to do something.  But once you get there, you won't ever look back, and surprisingly you can then go back and forth, working on both platforms with little problem.

My biggest hang-up was installing and uninstalling apps – it was so much simpler on the Mac that I kept thinking it couldn't really be doing everything.  You may or may not experience something similar, and if you do, it will pass.

I believe you can get a handle on the basics in just an hour with these links.  I've put them in the order that I think will be most useful to you.  Watch the videos first for a good overview then use the documents for practice.

Video

• (5:45) - Mac OS X: PC to Mac – The Basics

• (1:55) – Mac OS X: Finder Basics

Text

• Switch 101: Migrate to Mac
• Switch 101: On Windows, I used to… (Side by Side Comparison)
• Mac 101: Get Started with the Mac
• Why you’ll love a Mac: Frequently Asked Questions
• Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts
• Hack Attack: A Guide to Switching to a Mac (Slightly dated, but good stuff)

I know this because we measure it. We ask each new customer “Where did you go for our number today?” and our system emails a weekly report of how many we added:

10 new customers added last week (2 commercial, 8 residential):

=====================
Commercial customers:
=====================
ABC Company (18371)     Created: 03/15/11 12:32 PM
   Source: phone book
XYZ Company (18361)     Created: 03/14/11 01:48 PM
   Source: (one of our customers)       

======================
Residential customers:
======================
Last, First (18421)     Created: 03/18/11 11:58 AM
   Source: (one of our employees)
Last, First  (18411)    Created: 03/18/11 10:19 AM
   Source: Yellow pages
Last, First  (18401)    Created: 03/16/11 04:44 PM
   Source: Yellow Pages
Last, First  (18391)    Created: 03/16/11 10:38 AM
   Source: Yellow Pages
Last, First  (18381)    Created: 03/15/11 03:22 PM
   Source: phone book
Last, First  (18351)    Created: 03/14/11 01:24 PM
   Source: Angies List
Last, First (18341)     Created: 03/14/11 12:44 PM
   Source: Yellow Pages
Last, First (18331)     Created: 03/14/11 11:01 AM
   Source: yellow pages

For those of you who are wondering, 70% isn't typical. The 4 weeks before it was 2 out of 16, 7 out of 17, 1 out of 10, and 4 out of 12. But overall these are more than I thought they’d be.

We can’t measure this perfectly; sometimes one of these new customers calls us because of a combination of things – our trucks, billboards, referrals, direct mail, etc. Even if they remember us and only use the phone book to look us up, they might not keep looking if we weren’t there. If they say they saw us there, and we can track enough calls to our dedicated numbers, we know we're getting a return for our ad dollars.

Even though I consider myself a pretty high-tech guy, these and other measurements have caused me to not give up on “old school” advertising until I’ve got the data to justify it.

“Successful entrepreneurs are those who have a passion for their business and the money to survive their mistakes. I’ve occasionally seen success happen without sufficient funding, but I’ve never once seen it happen without passion.” – Roy H. Williams, Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads

When I first read this I thought "Right on Roy!  Passion, yeah baby!"

But you know, it isn't enough.  The successful businesses I’ve started were the ones that I not only had a passion for, but fit my personality.

I used to believe that the business didn’t matter to me.  I felt I would be happy running any business because it was the process I loved; making things work, the down and dirty details.  I suspect I felt that way because I really do enjoy those things. But while you do have to like the business, maybe even love it, it has to "be you" – it has to fit your personality.

You may be a restaurateur, a baker, a consultant, or a writer.  Or maybe part of all of them.  But I doubt you are really great at more than one of them.  You may be smart and hard working, and maybe passionate about all of them but is your personality such that you can successfully build a business out of more than one of them?

Ryan and I started this business at the end of some serious soul searching about what we really wanted to do with the rest of our lives. It became clear to me when I thought about the some recent experiences giving talks to potential small business owners.  And talking with them afterward about their ideas and plans and giving them the benefit of my experience.

I've found that I love writing this blog.  I love sitting across the table from someone and showing them how they can do this and be more effective or that and save some money.  I walk out of most of those meetings nearly floating.  It is incredible!

I think I feel that way because I've found the one thing I'm really good at; better at by far than anything else I do.  Because it "fits".  People tell me "yeah, I can see how you'd be good at that."  They never said that about most of the businesses I've had in the past.

He's right that it was mostly "basic stuff", but he's still not doing it. It's "basic stuff" for a reason: while it seems really simple and obvious, he still needs to do it to be successful.

I was reminded of the Biblical story of Naaman the leper. When told what he needed to do to cure his awful disease, at first he refused because it sounded too simple for a great man like himself. (It's a great story, btw).

Look, success is rarely easy. But sometimes we make it harder than it needs to be by overlooking the "obvious" things. Sometimes we're trying to install a complicated triangle offense in a pickup basketball game with 2nd-graders. They don't know how to dribble the ball, much less run the triple post.

You have to start with the basics, and keep working on just those things until you've got them down. Then worry about the complicated stuff. Details, details, details.

The great thing is that most people seem to make this same mistake. They try to fly before they can crawl. So if you get the fundamentals down, you'll easily beat out other people — some of whom may even be more qualified than you — who are running around trying to launch some grand, complicated plan without "wasting time" on that piddly basic stuff. Without a foundation, they have very little chance of succeeding, no matter how talented they are.

Don't get ahead of yourself. Don't worry about what the other guy claims he's going to do. Don't worry about how good the competition could be if they just did the "basic stuff".

You just make sure you're doing all the basics right, and worry about the rest when there are no more "basic" things to master.

It's so easy to create the same old ad that says "sigh, we're here, yawn, snore."

Have a purpose

And sometimes, maybe that's just what you need.  But not usually.  Whether you are doing a TV ad, something for a magazine, a direct mail piece, whatever – have a purpose.

This is something I just hadn't thought much about until Laura showed me an ad map.  All you have to do is ask yourself 4 simple questions:

1. What are my prospects currently doing?
2. What do I want them to do?
3. What do my prospects currently believe?
4. What do I want them to believe?

Try this yourself

This is one of the easier things you can do to improve your advertising, so why wait?  Dive in right now!

1. Create this simple box in a document or spreadsheet (OK, here, we've done it for you).
2. Examine each of your current ads, ask yourself those 4 questions, and fill in the boxes.  Then fix them!
3. Whenever you are creating new ads, always use this first.  If you outsource your ad creation, make sure your people have one of these and are clear what the ad is supposed to do.

Not just ads

Think about this for everything your customer sees.  Are you asking those questions for how you answer the phone, your logo, letterhead, marketing materials, vehicles, business cards? Each of those should have been created while asking questions 1 & 3 and should be designed to reinforce your desired answers to questions 2 & 4.

We'd love to see some of yours! Please post a comment and tell us how it went (or even post your answers if you feel like sharing).

——-

If this article was helpful to you, please forward it to a friend!  And don't forget to subscribe to receive future posts via email or RSS.

I ran across a recent issue of Business Week which noted a study by the Nottingham School of Economics on apologies versus cash incentives.  In the study, researchers contacted customers who'd filed online complaints about a German wholesaler.  They offered a cash incentive to half the unhappy customers if they would remove their complaint.  To the other half, they offered a short apology and requested they remove their complaints.  Amazingly, 45% of the customers receiving an apology removed their complaints, compared to only 21% of the customers offered cash.

I thought this was a great point and took a minute to comment on it for our staff at Conditioned Air Solutions, partly because it reinforced our philosophy on saying we're sorry when we mess up.

Do I think we have a problem with regard to this?  No, I really don't.  Do I think if I don't reinforce the critical parts of our culture whenever I see an opportunity, we'll eventually lose track of why things like this are important, and won't naturally handle each situation the right way?  You bet I do.

I attached a scan of the article to the email to our staff and pointed out how true I thought it was and included a couple of examples of experiences I'd recently had personally.

This example was about how we have to make a judgment call on how to handle each of our mistakes.  Unless you run a fairly small company, you can't make each decision for each customer interaction.  But as the founder or owner, you want those decisions to be in line with your intentions.  The way to make that happen is to train your people in the way you want it done and then look for opportunities to reinforce that training.

Handwritten notes are uncommon these days, so people notice and remember it favorably when you send one. This is particularly true if you are in sales, consulting, or any personal service business. But really, almost any business is ultimately a "personal service business", so pay attention!

You should already have a set of postcards for mailing personal notes to customers and friends. Treat note cards as another weapon in your personal touch arsenal. Here's one of mine:

Attach a note to a something you want to send to a client or colleague:

If I find a local newspaper article on one of my customers, I'll cut it out, scribble a quick note of congratulations on my note card, and drop it in the mail to them.

It's more "efficient" to scan and email it, but it's not nearly as personal. Used judiciously, it's different enough to get noticed. It says, "I took the time to send this to you," much more effectively than anything that arrives on your computer (though scanning and emailing may actually take you longer).

Lisa, our bookkeeper at Conditioned Air Solutions, often adds note cards to account statements and overdue invoices during her regular collections process. It adds a personal touch and often gets some attention when other things are tossed.

We also have some blank cards (similar to mine but with no name or email address) that we use around the office for people who need one occasionally, but not often enough to justify printing personalized ones. It's much better to write on a blank one than have to take someone else's and scribble out their name and put your own. Note cards are cheap, though, so if you think this is worthwhile, don't be penny-wise and pound-foolish. Make sure anyone who could profitably use them has some available.

If you want some of your own, any printer to whom you show this article should be able to make yours easily.   You can also go to any of a gazillion web sites such as 123PRINT.  You have my permission to use mine as a template.

So I decided to do that. That was the easy part. But how would I start? Right about there is where I usually grind to a halt. Maybe you have this problem, too: we have a great idea, but no clue where to start, so we just sigh and move on.

You know the phrase "the best is the enemy of the good"? In this context, it means if I don't see how to do the best possible fax cover sheet ad, I won't do it at all. Ryan and I have been masters at this excuse.

But let's face it: it's pretty hard to mess up a fax cover sheet. Just try something. As long as you don't do something offensive (use a little judgment, right?), you'll be OK. If you use coupons, slap one on there. If your customers need to come see you, post your hours. If you are a restaurant, post a description of your best dish. If you are anyone, just post a bunch of customer testimonials (you do have some, right?).

So how did I do it? Well, I was fast out of the gate, and my graphic designer gave me exactly what I asked for:

While it was exactly what I asked, it had looked better in my head than it did on the screen. So far, no big deal.

But then I made the Big Mistake: since I didn't know what to do next, I did nothing. What I should have done was start using this right away and move on to something else. It was far better marketing than the standard cover sheet we had always used. But I didn't. I failed to remember that this is only a fax cover sheet – I can change it next week and every week forever if I want. I'm not paying for a huge stack of brochures that have to be as good as possible the first time. It isn't an earth-shattering deal that will make or break my company. It's simply another little thing I can do to push us ahead.

Even though I knew better, I let the best be the enemy of the good. After spending far too much time on it, I wound up with testimonials:

Is this perfect? Not by a long shot. Is it good enough? Probably. Is it better than a vanilla cover sheet? Definitely.

So here's what I'm doing: I'm declaring this done and asking the office staff to use it. If they need more space to write, we'll fix it. We'll tweak it as we need to, and if one day someone has a brainstorm about something better to put on here, we'll change it.

You can do this easily. Don't take weeks on yours like I did on mine. If you want to promote your company in this way, pick something and do it! Understand the risk of it not being perfect (very low) and adjust your time/money/energy investment accordingly.