Business Mistakes
Oops
The number one common business mistake is to make it difficult for a customer to buy goods or services. Oops! You don’t want your customers to have to work to spend their money on your products and services!
On a daily basis, I find myself frustrated at how much work I have to do in order to buy from or hire a business. The obvious result of this is that businesses that are easy to work with get repeat purchases from me, while many other businesses lose out on a sale because I get disgusted with how much work it is before I can actually buy anything.
This starts with making your business easy to discover.
This of course means advertising in one form or another. Word of mouth can only go so far! It’s shocking how many companies don’t have a website, don’t have an email address and/or completely fail to reply to email.
Why don’t other people have this issue? I’m sure they do, but many will just go with the flow, grumble under their breath, and usually pay more, or buy lower quality, because it’s easier to just continue on, even at a higher cost, than it is to do the work to try and find a better company to work with.
(Not a good way to do business)
Another mistake is not making doing business enjoyable. If the business has a physical location, there should be ample parking, the building should be attractive and clean, and the staff should be friendly and welcoming.
Interactions should be positive: fun and polite. Not negative and confrontational.
Quality, or rather lack of quality. Selling low quality products (or doing poor quality work) does not encourage repeat business.
These same concepts apply to employment. As an employee, your number one job is to make your manager’s life easier. As a manager, you should appreciate employees that make your life easier. An employee should not have to work to figure out what is desired from them. A manager’s job is to make it easy for an employee to get their work done. The first step of course is to clearly communicate what work they should be doing!