Over the last couple of weeks I seem to have had a succession of meetings with prospective customers who’s only question is ‘how much is that going to cost me’. I give a ball park figure and the sharp intake of breath and the roll of the eyes is now getting me to the point of asking them back ‘would you like me to work for free’?
Don’t worry, I am not going to go off on a rant again, its just that I am getting so disheartened with people thinking that we should be cheaper for the work we carry out… actually that’s unfair, the majority of people are aware that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys, or in our case if you pay proper fees then you get professional service.
In our ever evolving company, we often discuss well into the night the direction we want to take our business and many moons ago we made the decision not to ‘sell our soul to the devil’ or to be more precise – sell ourselves short. No more would we try and fit in with a customer who says things like ‘what could you do for £20 a month’… the answer now is ‘nothing’!
So why the blog post? Well as ever I just wanted to share with you the thought process behind our small business, and to hopefully give down to earth honest advice to other start up and small businesses. If you know you are worth the money and you work hard for that money (cue Donna Summer!) then don’t undervalue yourself or your product. By all means negotiate and even barter if it is appropriate, but in our experience the customers that paid the smallest amount usually demanded the highest quantity of our time and therefore we ultimately lost money.
As ever, your thoughts, suggestions or just comments are always welcome.
They said what about me?
Well this is our dilemma right now. For the first time ever (as far as we know) someone has said something completely untrue about our business practices which is not only hurtful but is unfair as we don’t know this person and so it kind of follows they don’t know us.
So, why would someone deliberately set out to harm your business reputation? Of course the obvious answer is jealousy – a competitor perhaps? Possibly, or is it a personal vendetta? Possibly again, but you know ultimately does it matter? There is little you can do unless it is so far ‘out there’ in the public domain that you could take a legal view of the situation. So what we have decided to do is let it go by us, pick ourselves up from these hateful comments and hope that the person who has said them will one day be professional enough to come and talk to us directly – who knows it could be the start of a great B2B friendship!
Is it appropriate that I blog about this… I’m not sure, some people may be of the opinion that we should just keep quiet, but my view is that in such a small Highland community this kind of talk can damage peoples livelihoods and is therefore very unnecessary. We pride ourselves on best practice, we work hard and we actively contribute to the business community in a ‘free’ capacity so why would we want to damage our own reputation with less than ethical practices… the answer of course is we wouldn’t!
Interested to hear about your experiences and how you dealt with them so do get in touch.
Tags: business, business reputation, negative comments, online presence
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