Pride and professionalism

Even a caveman would be more likely to thrive and survive if they make their spears straighter, stronger, and sharper. A professional can stand back and look at their work and see where there is any room for improvement. Make no mistake about it, the quality of work counts a lot. You can only expand a business by offering a decent service. By sorting all complaints along the way, addressing the issues to avoid the same problems reoccurring, you can be sure that profits follow. There will be exceptions, those that do hit and run sales or flog dead horses, but few manage to make a large business that stands the test of time by ripping people off. Besides there is no better feeling than doing something well. You are not always trying to avoid irate people seeking recourse. As a customer, it is better to pay after the job is done, never beforehand. As a service provider, a good bit of incentive is lost once you have the payment.

More orders coming your way is great. More people wanting to use your service is great. What is not so great is that there will be a greater number of problems to sort out. Customers are not always right, but problems will need to be dealt with if you want to avoid them stacking up and causing stress. For each issue that pops up, just deal with it. Either refund, replace or sort an alternative un-emotively. I say again, just deal with it there and then. The minute you get wound up by trying to see who is right and who is wrong the joy of trading dwindles. Some customers are outright thieves and expect you to take a loss, however most are not. Most businesses find that on balance the over whelming majority of customers give you more help than hindrance, but the odd painful ones stick out because of the way our mind works. To the customer it is 20, to you it is 3 profit, so you need to sell another 7 items to get back in the black from one issue. Going on a 2 percent standard failure/return rate which is typical for a wide range of businesses you will always lose 40 in each 2000 of turnover and losing 40 in 294 of profit is acceptable. If you get a 10 percent failure rate your profit is down to 70 which is unlikely to cover overheads.

You can do a jigsaw puzzle in many ways. You might locate the corners first then do all the edges. Some might see a bunch of one colour and quickly put together an island of pieces. Some things will need forward planning and must not be overlooked to avoid creating delays further down the line. Too many find a stumbling block and put the whole project on hold when it could have been resolved eventually one way or another. It would be ideal to start selling when your product is perfect, and you have the full range on offer. The problem is that it is not until you begin selling that you find out what the issues are that lay ahead. One may want to be careful about over marketing a new un-established item, as you don’t want to have widespread knowledge of a product with problems. In most cases, it is better to just get going and start shifting the stock you have and make incremental improvements along the way.


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