How Easy It Is to Do Business with You?

Would you buy from yourself? I mean, honestly would you give yourself an order and most importantly one after that and one after that?

It’s easy to talk about lousy service and lousy business practices when it is someone else’s company. It’s easy to criticize businesses you come across or nod your head when a prospect tells a story how badly your competitor managed the last order.

But have you ever wondered what your clients think of working with you?

I am often asked by freelancers how to grow a business from working on your own to a small company with much steadier client base. My answer is simple, you can do it only with a help of your clients who can send you enough work and referrals to make it happen. There is no other way.

How to make sure that your business will grow and your clients will send you referrals?

It’s actually quite simple. All you need is make sure that you do 3 things:

1. Deliver the project on time.
2. Deliver it within budget.
3. Provide extraordinary support during and after the projects completion.

And that’s it.

You don’t have to underpromise and overdeliver. You don’t have to throw in any freebies, additional services or anything else that you might think will pamper the client. The secret is actually in doing your job right and being there when your clients need you.

But the problem usually starts with that last element.

To most companies sending out the invoice means the end of the project. If you really want to make it in business you should start considering it only the beginning. Now your client will start having questions about your product or the service you provided. No matter how many times you explained the outcome to them they will now be asking about it, maybe they will want another meeting to clear things up. They will take a lot of your time for which you will not be paid. And the more you hide from them the greater your chance that you will never hear from that client again.

If, however, you stay contactable and provide great support, no client will consider you difficult to work with. And that can mean one thing only, a repeat order.

But before you tell yourself how well you do it, answer these 4 questions to find out is it really easy to do business with you:

1. How easy it is to get in touch with you? Can your clients ring you any time during the day? Or do you spend most of the time between meetings and working and thus your phone is switched off most of the time?
2. How friendly are you? How do you react when the phone rings? Are you excited about client calling you or do you curse under your breath before taking the call?
3. Do you do your best to save your clients time, money and fix their problems at the same time?
4. Do you know why your clients actually work with you?

Here is a well known but often forgotten truth about building a business: it is clients who fill in your bank account, not your company. And the only people who can help you grow are those clients who pay you for helping them.

Too many businesses rest on their laurels once they reach a certain level in their growth and forget about clients that elevated them there. Suddenly they become harder to reach and difficult to do business with. I know that for a fact, I made the same mistake. And I know the reasons why you would too. It takes so much strength to climb up that once you get there you simply feel that you need a break. Unfortunately, if you are serious about business, at that point this is the last thing you can afford.