Treat Your Business Like Your Best Customer Or You May Not Be In Business Much Longer

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Let’s start with a simple question: How do you treat your best customer?

When that customer has a need, do you take care of it immediately or put it off until later? Do you make sure they’re satisfied with your product or service? Of course you do! If you didn’t, you wouldn’t stay in business long.

Here’s another question: Do you know who your best customer is?

In case you are still trying to sort this out, let me make it easy for you. If you are an owner or a CEO running a business, your best customer is your company!

According the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 30% of businesses survive 10 years. That means 7 out of 10 new business ventures fail in less than a decade! There are many reasons for this, including lack of startup capital, and products and services that do not keep up with changing needs and tastes of the market. However, the main reason businesses fail is the lack of time an owner or CEO takes in planning and managing the business properly.

Hard to believe? It shouldn’t be. Wondering if your business is soon to become a thing of the past? Let’s take a simple test.

Where Are You Headed? Questions For Consideration:

Where do you stand with your annual budget so far this year?

Or perhaps a more appropriate question: do you even have a budget? When was the last time you thoroughly reviewed the cash flow of your company? No, I don’t mean seeing if there is enough in the checking account to pay the bills this week or month. I mean dissecting, line by line, the expenses you faced last month to find opportunities to decrease them. This is found money. And it will keep you in business.

When was the last time you looked at your accounts receivable?

Is it increasing? Why? Are there ways to collect this money faster? Can you change payment terms or give incentives to collect sooner? How about no accounts receivable at all? Consider having customers pay upfront, before you deliver a service or product.

When was the last time you looked at your accounts payable?

Accounts payable is another area that can soak up or release cash flow. Are you taking advantage of any discounts by paying earlier than necessary? Have you asked your vendors for better purchasing terms? Maybe you can refinance that loan for better terms.

A good habit to adopt is to always ask for an additional 10% off proposals, even if the vendor has said you are getting their best price. The worst that could happen is they say no. Many times this will work to your advantage.

When are you going to replace ‘John,’ who is always screwing up?

According to the G.H. Smart’s book Who, a poor employee can cost you revenue of up to three times their salary. Get rid of John, and save those customers and that revenue.

I know, I know. You are busy! You hardly have time for lunch, let alone pouring over numbers. You believe the customer is always priority number one. But if you don’t take the time to take care of your best customer—your business—you’ll have plenty of time when it is no longer around.