You’ve already learned first two of the 5 biggest mistakes you can make in dealing with your top clients. Today we’ll cover the third and fourth ones:
Taking on More Than You Can Handle.
When you take on too much, your business can’t keep up and therefore you can easily lose control of everything and find yourself barely functioning. You want your business to be successful, no doubt, but you need to have a plan for how you will handle the growth. Your clients expect great customer service and highly quality products/services, they don’t know or care about your behind the scenes operations to get those things done. Look for these signs that you are taking on more than you can handle:
- Clients’ needs aren’t being met.
- Employee morale is low, clients are upset and you’re in a panic.
- You have to react in emergency mode to save accounts.
- Your current clients are suffering from trying to keep up with new business.
- Profits are going down.
- You are just trying to pick up the pieces of your business.
- Your clients/customers leave.
- Resources are being reallocated.
When you find your business in this situation, implement this 4 Question approach to get back on track.
All Your Eggs in One Basket
You cannot allow your company to become dependent on any one client. It is business suicide. Eventually that one client is going to slow down or no longer need your services. In order to stay in the game, and in business, you need to diversify.
If you ever mishandled a client situation, you could drive away potential prospects! In order to keep balance and prepare for a strong future, there are a few things you can do:
- Stay in the loop and try to know what’s going on inside your fish company.
- Constantly reinvent yourself and stay at the top of your industry.
- Stay exclusive.
- Try to secure multi-year commitments and contracts.
- Spread your contracts out.
- Price your products/services correctly.
- Watch this short video to help grow and diversify your income and profits!
Next time we’ll talk about the last of the killer mistakes and how to combat it from hitting your business hard.