LessThanHumble.com

We’ve all heard it, but not enough can be said for this mantra. In reality, it means focusing on the quality of your deliverables, rather than the quantity (or price) of said services.

What does it mean?
Take the web hosting “industry” for example, there’s been a huge price war going on in past years. This is apparent by the fact that Web Hosting Companies, for example, pop up and dissolve on a near daily basis due to a juvenile price war. That companies that stick around for the long term, are generally cost-competitive, yet striving for quality, not a constant attempt to undercut their competitors. Price really goes hand in hand with quantity; because a customer striving for quantity is striving to get the most for their money doubly a person striving for striving for price is striving to get X amount for the lowest price.

The principle really means that consumers, and producers for that fact, value quality over quantity (or price in this case) in the long run. Sure there are customers who float around constantly looking for the best deal, but most of the time these people are smart enough to figure out how things work after getting burned a few times.

But if I don’t keep my prices the lowest around I’ll lose customers?
That may be the case, but generally you’ll lose the bottom dwelling customers. The customers who are too cheap to pay for better services, yet are trying to get the most out of you. I notice something about Web Hosting customers, the cheapest customers are generally the biggest pains for support, billing, and usage. In my experience, most customers paying a fair amount will use adequate amounts of expendables, but never do it in an attempt to cost the service provider (you) money - they pay fairly for what they receive.

In the end, the Internet is really a global market, someone is always going to be able to undercut your prices, but it takes a decent company to undercut you in quality (support, service, product quality, etc) and this is where any company, in my opinion, can pull ahead of their competitors.

For many of us, including myself, who are in business relationships with “previous friends” (meaning you were more than an associate of the person previous to the business) and business relationships with family, there is a great need for seperation between the personal side and the business side of things.

This could not be more evident for myself considering the fact that I am in the middle of a business relationship that has the potential to go bust in the very near future because of the fact the other party does not share the same value for our business as I do and he previously did. In this day and age you need to stay mobile and always give yourself an out as I do. Not that I do not trust people, but people change and most of the time you cannot force someone into changing into how you would like them be. Instead if the relationship is to the point where it is no longer productive to the business or to one or both of the parties there comes a point to which you need to figure out if it is worth it anymore. On the same note, a partnership split can sometimes be a great opprotunity to rebound and take your business to the next level.

Conflicting Goals

A genuine, true busienss relationship should have different goals than a personal relationship. Not that the two will not work well togethor but more so that they should be held seperately from eachotheras not to harm the business relationship.

For myself, I value the effort and enthusiasm a person has for something, in most cases, above their personal knowledge. Because afterall, it does not matter how much you know, it really matters what attitude you have towards getting something done.

To The Point…

This is really where you have to remember that in a business relationship, whether it include personal implications also, business should be business - for the good of the business. You cannot let a person drag yourself down to the breaking point, and just like my previous article, you need to know what that breaking point is.

So I leave you with this tid-bit of advice, remember to always seperate your personal relations from your business relations from someone as they both have very conflicting goals.

Cutting our losses, it is probably one of the more difficult things we have to do in life. In the eBusiness world this is probably an ever more occurring activity as ventures constantly rise and fall. And for those of you like me who run networks of websites and are involved in many different markets this occurs at even greater intervals.

Knowing when to cut your losses is an instrumental life skill. Just like a game of poker, it is key to know when you have a good hand, and when you have a bad hand. In reality it is all about acting decisively do not procrastinate it out, take action when it is appropriate and learn to rebound from failure.

With new start ups for example, I think it is a great idea as part of your initial business planning process to set a reasonable debt-figure to which, if you hit it, you know it is time to call it quits. This can help attribute to the prevention of going down into a continual black hole of failure. Likewise, you need to figure out how long you are willing to commit to an operation that will barely support itself as most businesses do not succeed in the first three years.

Sometimes, things just do not go the way they are supposed to go, were planned to go, or expected to go. Periodically, a task, a entity, or even a person will drag you so deep that you have to cut it off to avoid total failure. There are times though when you may be cutting your losses too soon. Though again, it is timing, look at GoDaddy.com for example, a huge company now, but according to Bob Parson (founder), when he initially started the business, there was a point in its growth that he had put over $10 million into the company, it still was not profitable, and he almost allowed a friend to buy in at pennies on the dollar to prevent himself from going bust. The friend ended up backing out, and today the company is extremely profitable, doing great, and maintains a huge presence on the Internet, and probably one of the largest market shares in domain registrations.

Unfortunately in life nothing is totally predictable, and generating “what ifs” is always substantially easier than creating resolutions for them. So once you are ready to let something go, you need to make sure you have satisfied other viable options (or at least the top X of those). And remember, with eVentures though, it never hurts to give yourself an out (or an “inâ€? in this case), so that say in 6 months you can go back, pick up where you left off and try things all over again with a new, regained focus.

Well I know I started this off, saying I was going to post at least every-other day, but obviously that has not been the case. I have been horribly sick for the past four days, barely able to even work or enjoy the 4th of July. Why was a I sick? Not sure exactly, but probably because I have not taken a break from work in general in about six months.

Why Breaks Are Important
Breaks give you a chance to “re-cycle” your mind and relax and enjoy life. Breaks also help to improve efficiency, especially when you are in the midst of struggling with something that is killing your productivity.

What Breaks Do For You
This obviously varies depending upon the person, but for me, breaks give me a chance to empty my work-related thoughts from my mind and gives me a chance to enjoy life for a bit (not that I do not enjoy working). Breaks give you a chance to drain your stress level, and lessens the strain on your body - because stress strains your body.

When I get stuck on a task, something extremly difficult, or even a task that is super easy, and I find my self spending too much time on it, I take a five minute break, or even a several hour break to let things go, relax a bit, and do something I enjoy at the time, such as cooking.

Working Too Much Destroys Ingenuity, Creativity, and Lessens Efficiency
Everyone who works too much can attest to this. When you over-work yourself, your mind naturally becomes weaker when developing solutions for whatever problem you are trying to tackle, be it a problem at all. I have found that when I get stuck on something, if I walk away and do something relaxing for just fifteen minutes (like running to the store to pick up food) and I come back, I have got a substantially higher chance figuring it out or finding a way of getting around it.

How To Take A Break
I know it is a simple task, but for the longest time I did not know how to take a break. If you are like me and your schedule varies so much during the week (as to what you are doing and where you are at) this can be difficult, but for starters I highly recommend picking a day (such as Thursday for me generally) to where you avoid doing any work, avoid calling any clients, avoid even thinking about your business to get your mind off of things and help facilitate new ideas. Likewise, it is a good idea to set time segments out of your work days to step away from things to reduce the stress buildup that most people incure by the end of the day.

That is it for now…

I love having angry customers. That’s not to say that I love making my customers angry, but I love having the opportunity to please an angry customer. For easy reference, difficult customers are referred to as angry customers.

Anyone who runs a website, that sells some sort of product, service, or other goods, or doesn’t even sell anything tangible or monetized, at one time or another have run into or will eventually run into a angry customer. Unfortunately you can’t please everyone, and it’s hard to even know when a customer is not pleased (far worse than angry, in my opinion). The great thing about this is though, angry customers are gold mines-literal jackpots of potential overflowing satisfaction. 

With the state of today’s “Internet”, you’re customers are physically disconnected from you. They can’t see the faces of your sales team, let alone hear their tone, or even see their facial expressions. This makes it hard to show a customer that a) you value their business (words can only do so much) and b) and respond with feedback that pleases them. Therefore, any opportunity that you have to deal with a customer should not only be a time to up sell (up sell up sell up sell – a great motto to run your business by) but it should also be the time to receive appropriate feedback. Here’s where you’ll start to uncover the angry customers, unless the particular person is already irate and obnoxious. In either case, you’re set..

What do I do with an angry customer? 
It’s simple, please them. This doesn’t mean that you have to give into their desires if it is less beneficial for you. It means showing them why something is the way it is, giving proper explanations, and sincerely apologizing when something has been done wrong on your part (or even if the customer perceives a wrong doing). Anyone could write on and on about how to please a customer exactly, but basically show them that you care about them, their business, and what they think. Now turn them 360 degrees around, continue to listen and work their frustrations out of them. This could take 30 seconds or 30 minutes, but give it time. Once the frustration is worked out, continue to work the customer to make sure that they got all of their problems sorted out, through whatever means. Once the customer has released their frustrations, make sure they “smile” (and you “smile”) whatever way you can. Obviously if this is on the Internet (through text-based communications), the only way to do it is to word things properly as to make them extremely friendly, but in person just smile (and mean it), and over the phone lighten the conversation so that they leave on a good note. Now you’re ready for the next step, how to turn your happy-customer-converts into evangelists for your business.

How do I get my angry customers who’ve turned happy to tell other people? 
You’ve basically already done it, because it’s is all about making sure that the customer is happy beyond their expectations and making them aware of their happiness (though don’t bring it to their direct attention). People generally love to brag, so this isn’t really all that complicated, once a customer is happy beyond their initial expectations, most are going to go off and tell their friends “so and so did X for me, you should really take a look at their business.”
Now I realize that not all customers can be pleased, and not all customers can be turned into evangelists, but if played properly 9/10 can become jackpots of overflowing satisfaction. It’s an art that takes time to learn, and years to perfect, but the key point in all of this is knowing what the customer wants, and being able to understand and analyze their non-verbal (or even verbal) responses.

On a side note, there’s a great book I read a while ago that follows this subject: Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force