Posts Tagged ‘small business’

Moral dilema | business decision – when do you say no?

Business News, Everything Else | Posted by Katie
Aug 02 2011

You know that saying ‘you learn from your mistakes’?  Well, sometimes you do learn but it doesn’t mean the decision making is any easier.

So, the dilemma is:  what do you do when your customers don’t pay on time even though you have had discussions, you have agreed a way of working out the payments and then all of a sudden they stop taking your calls or not responding to emails?

Well, in the past this was the situation we were in and we naively thought that the customer in question would clear his debt and all would be well again.  How silly were we?  He ended up leaving us, still owing us a considerable amount of money, was verbally threatening on email and telephone and was so horrid that we ended up giving him the information he required to set up his website with someone else just to get rid of him.  That was a year ago and to this day we have still not received the money even after spending more money asking a debt collection company to get involved.

So, you can imagine how awkward we now feel when we find ourselves in a similar situation with two more customers.  Long standing customers, one of them is relatively local, and we are in the position where if we take the websites down we are effectively cutting off one of the major streams of income to their businesses.  Whilst this pains us and makes us feel uncomfortable, from a business point of view we are in the position of if we take their website offline then we are almost guaranteeing that the relationship is now beyond repair and we are probably going to lose their business.

Well, we had to toughen up, one website went offline yesterday – and amazingly enough the customer has got in touch – the other website is due to go offline tomorrow – we will see what happens then.  In the grand scheme of things, it is not cost effective having to spend time chasing payments so what do you do as a small business owner who doesn’t like to upset people?

I don’t know the answer!  As always, keen to find out how you deal with this situation because I am sure we are not the only ones.

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How flexible can a small business be?

Business News, Client News | Posted by Katie
Jul 08 2011

In our case there are only 2 of us ‘in the office’  although as you know we work with many other companies, but in the grand scheme of things we can discuss an idea and pretty much put it into practice the next day – complete flexibility!

 

As Barry mentioned in his comment, us Brits are known for being a bit ‘tight’ sometimes especially when it comes to paying for something that we can’t touch i.e. SEO or Internet marketing.  So we decided to change the way we work.  The upshot of this is we are keeping our customers longer, they are actually spending more money with us, they are definitely recommending our services more and they are enjoying the freedom of complete flexibility.   So what do we now offer:

  • different types of packages for smaller businesses
  • no annual contract unless specifically asked for
  • flexibility to ‘dip in and out of our services’ whenever the customer wishes
  • a transparent pricing policy – ongoing work is ‘by the hour’ rather than a contract figure per month

Obviously there are limitations to our flexibility and quite often there has to be a compromise e.g. if we recommend a project requires 16 hours per month for 3 months to achieve the customer’s requirements and they only want to spend 8 hours for 2 months the reality is this will have a direct impact on our ability to produce the desired results – as long as the customer is aware of these consequences then there is no problem.  The absolute key to our business is absolute transparancey and ultimately an amount of flexibility that will ensure the customer is happy with the level of service for the price they are paying.

And, when Barry asked if we ‘stick to our guns’ regarding not lowering our price just to get a sale – then answer is absolutely yes.  There is no point in making a sale if it is going to harm the profitability of your business.  Who wants to work for free unless you are a dedicated volunteer?

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