Jun

7

A Problem Shared With The Landscaper

June 7, 2008 |

This morning I woke up early to do pending work for one of my favourite customers.  A few hours into it the roar from industrial landscaping equipment disrupted my concentration.  My Landscaper and I have the same problem:  The week doesn’t have enough days and the day doesn’t have enough hours.  The amount of work available to be performed is greater than the amount of time that we can realistically allocate for working.  I am sure he is also in the same situation I am: rejecting new customers.

The problem he had earlier this year was telling me he could not help me.  I sometimes have the same problem with existing customers.  Once you have a good relationship with a customer, you do not want to let them down.  You want to continue it.  You want to keep cultivating it.  And you want to keep it there, since you never know when the business will not be as good as it is: and then you want to know there are people that trust you.

We are both working on a Saturday for a customer that we value and keep.  Yet we are both working more than we should.  Not because working a Saturday on itself is bad, but because if the business was managed right we should have dropped some customers (old or new) in favor of more lucrative business.  Dropping a customer, however, is not something you want to do in a casual way.  You do not want to abruptly break the business relationship.  You want to keep helping that customer from time to time, maybe in more complex / better paying endeavors.

What things I should learn to do (and my landcaper should):

  • Find consultants that need work, help them grow their business.  Train them, and hook them up with your existing clients before you are overworked.
  • Increase prices.  Start by increasing prices for new customers - as to only get new ones that will be more lucrative than existing ones.  But if necessary, start increasing prices to old customers — and offer them cheaper alternatives with the junior partners discussed above.
  •  Find ways of saying: I can’t, more often.  Maybe finding alternate schedules, but ultimately just saying I can’t is better than risking doing a less than perfect job.

All of this is easier said than done.  How do people achieve the perfect balance?


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