How many mistakes do you make in a work day?

I think some of those are absolutely "part of the process" for that kind of work, KB. You can't possibly bat 1.000 on that stuff. No one can.

 

I would have a sit down with him and tell him to get off your back, and if he doesn't, you have two options: put up with it or tell him to **** off and dissolve the partnership.

But I wouldn't take any grief from an equal partner when he refuses to put the same type of scrutiny on his own mistakes.

 

I prefer to count my mistakes by the hour. When I count them by the day, it starts to get into numbers that boggle the mind.

 

I'm an hour from the office and a bid is due by 10 am.

Whoops. I'll be bidding that one off the phone

 

Ya, I'm looking to dissolve this thing when the current contracts are fulfilled.

 

We print lots of business cards. This one company gets several, all the same card except for the personal info. Of course, we send proofs. And since they print 10 on the page, I fixed the first one on the page, cropped it and emailed them a proof. It was good, so I printed, cut and delivered 500 of them. Since I only changed the first card, fifty were correct, 450 had the previous Email address on them.

And I claim to this day that I did change all of them to the correct email. I guess I simply forgot to save the changes. Yeah, that's what happened.


And since I own the place, I got to pay for it.

Live and learn, try to remember better and move on.

 

happens more than it doesn't in small companies. It's why building a successful company is so hard.

 

I deal with teenagers by the boatload every damn day. Um, yes, I make mistakes.

 

We knew from the start there wasn't enough of a market for this to be a full time thing. We've also learned why the customer service sucks so bad at other similar outfits: the margins are small, and time is one of the biggest reasons why. We're redoing something for a client who felt their pollen was "burnt" because it had black material around it. That doesn't make any damn sense, it's clearly mineral such as manganese or pyrite. Burnt pollen just thins and degrades into fragments. It doesn't burn like cellulose. But we're doing the "give them what they want" thing, which means just taking a loss on this one. Now that we've documented each step of the chemical process and can demonstrate that the black stuff was there all along and just concentrates as the pollen concentrates, all we've really done is waste money to avoid pissing someone off. And educate them, I guess.

And it's my fault, I am the one who suggested we just show them they're wrong, rather than redoing it without comment (would be the same result) or telling them no. A happy customer is cool, but the volume of business is so low that them being happy or not makes no practical difference in terms of contracts. Just the right thing to do, which is expensive.

 

Making customers happy is a hard thing to do.

 

Especially when it comes to aspects that are beyond our control. We can't process what isn't actually there. We aren't alchemists. Some folks don't get that. We process samples for microfossils, we don't and can't produce microfossils if they aren't there.

 

Under promise and over deliver. It's hard but that's how you do it.

 

redoing it makes it look like your fault and incompetence. i'd say "we will redo it to make you happy, but we believe it to be correct because of x y and z." clients know they don't know everything. that's why they hired you.

 

something that took me a long time to get was that it's ok to admit to a client you either can't do something or need to find out the answer because you don't know it and get back to them. people respect honesty

 

That's what we're doing. And along the way we're documenting/proving what we said was the issue.

 

yeah, but I would have explained it before spending the money to redo it.

 

I had a $20k bid due 2 days ago and I forgot it. Facility maintenance man called me today and said "I thought you were bidding on that job for this year?" Luckily it was just a easy form of theirs that I had to fill in my prices on and turn in. So I got it ready and ran it up to them and they hadn't turned in bids to corporate yet.

 

They should know, but some like to argue.

 

Now that I'm on the hook for every screw up (because it's my company) I do things a lot more this way. When I was in sales for Sunbelt Rentals the regional sales manager told us to never turn down a deal. So if a customer called us and said they need a backhoe tomorrow, and we didn't have one we still took the deal and figured it out later. That's a ton of pressure to be under for someone who isn't the boss. But it makes you think on your feet. Learned a lot from that guy about business.

 

One thing that's got me by the balls is everyone in construction around Nashville is working 6 or 7 days a week right now. I put jobs off for 6 weeks and I'm still getting "that sucks, but we'll wait".