James Schramko here. If you are a service business and you are relying on customers to respond to you, to get work done, then I’m sure you’ve had some difficulties at certain points getting that response which can be incredibly frustrating as a business owner. The good news is there are some things you can do to help your customers.
Number one, you can actually frame your offer better on the sales offer. So you can put forward the terms and conditions as to how your service works. In other words, educate and filter. So get the right customers in and make sure they’re very clear on how it actually works. You can even do a “How It Works” demonstration for these people.
Next, if they are dragging the chain then see if you can put in place steps like auto-approval. So instead of having to wait for them to come back to you with approvals, just put them on auto-approvals so the work is auto approved, and then you can have a revision time frame. It’s not an open-ended forever revision, you should definitely put a clear time limit on it and build that into your service agreement which they must agree before they go ahead.
If they keep dragging the chain after that, if they’re very slow to respond and you’ve educated them, then it might be time to unsubscribe them and move on to a better customer. Your life is worth more than forever chasing the bottom-of-the-barrel customer. So get the best customers, let them know how it works, educate them, build your system to be as smooth as possible, and you’ll find that your service business is a little more joyful.
And if all of that fails, then do what I did and sell your service business because it’s worth something out there in the marketplace. You can sell it for multiples of your profit and move on to a business model that frustrates you a little bit less.
I’m James Schramko. This is jamesschramko.com.
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