Magazine for the professional nail industry.
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BUSINESS} Do You Put Clients Last? Author and businessman Joseph Callaway points out 10 ways well-meaning business owners may be selling their customers short — and shares the deceptively simple solution to erasing these habits once and for all. Any entrepreneur willing to endure the proverbial "blood, sweat, and tears" it takes to start a business knows how important clients are. They write the checks that pay the bills. So keeping them satisfied is rarely just lip service. In fact, most business owners believe they are putting their clients first. But according to Joseph Callaway — who, along with his wife, JoAnn, is the author of Clients First: The Two Word Miracle — what they don't You believe your number-one business goal is to make money. A too-acute focus on improving the bottom line takes your attention off of the people who are going to enable you to raise it: your customers. Your clients can always tell when they're not your first priority. "The difference between paying attention to service so that your clients will give you more business and doing so because serving the customer is your first priority may feel slight, but it's significant," says Callaway. "Taking your focus off the bottom line may feel uncomfortable at first. But you'll soon find when you focus on how best to serve clients, tough decisions make themselves. If it serves the client, you do it. If it doesn't, you don't — even if you make less money. This neutralizes moral dilemmas and really simplifies your life." If it's not "broke," you don't fix it. Many business owners subscribe to the theory that if something's not broken, they don't need to fix it. If the check-in routine your receptionist uses has been in place for years and you're not getting many complaints, why tinker with it? If your knowledge is sufficient to handle most of your clients' problems, why spend valuable time learning more? According to Callaway, the answer is simple: If you don't consistently strive to improve, you're not putting your clients first. He says, "You should make it a priority to stay familiar with the way your industry is growing and changing. You should also do everything possible to offer your customers the quality and value they deserve. Always question the status quo, and ask yourself how you can make it better." 128 | NAILS MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER 2013 realize is they've developed an array of bad habits that accomplish just the opposite. "Most owners would be shocked to hear they're putting clients last," says Callaway. "But in reality they're putting so many other things first — their own bank accounts, comfort, convenience, even their own pride — that the customer really does come last…or close to it, anyway." Callaway shares 10 ways in which you may be inadvertently failing your customers. You let the little things slide. As a business owner, there are a lot of "big" things you'd never neglect. However, you might not be such a stickler for what you believe are "smaller things." Rushing through paperwork so you can get home early, failing to spellcheck an e-mail or two, and running late probably won't matter that much six months from now, you think. But that's not necessarily the case, says Callaway. "So often in life, it's the small details that differentiate good from great," he says. "And make no mistake: If it impacts a customer's happiness, best interests, comfort level, or anything else even the slightest bit, it's not a 'little' thing." You downplay your mistakes. Nobody likes the mishmash of negative feelings that accompanies making a mistake. That's why many business owners (and their employees) resolve matters with clients as quickly as possible when a ball is dropped, and then try to never speak of the matter again. After all, there's no sense wallowing in your slip-up — you need to move forward! Right? "Wrong," says Callaway. "When your company makes a mistake, no matter how big or small, it's your responsibility to stare that mistake in the face and get to the very bottom of what went wrong. That's not just so you can fix one particular error; it's so you can figure out why it happened and make sure it doesn't occur again." >>>