If you want your business to work then return people’s phone calls, emails and enquiries promptly – immediately even.
Since moving house we have had to contact some tradies to get quotes on different work and getting a return phone call is like gettting blood out of a stone. By the time the call does come (if it comes) I have already moved on to ring someone else who sounds like a) they know what they are talking about b) will turn up.
Its a pretty low bar to jump just to be in business – return calls, know something about what you are doing, turn up. After that if you’re good at your job then the rest should take care of itself.
We hear lots of news about the economic downturn and people struggling to make money and so on. I can only assume that all the tradies I call are so laden down with work that they don’t have time to call back.
I began my own business partly out of frustration at the ineptdness of so many tradies I had dealt with. I figured you didn’t have to be any kind of genius to make a business work. That was 4 years ago and it seems not much has changed.
It never ceases to amaze me at how tradies, service providers and retailers scream “go away, stop bothering us, we don’t have time for your business”…Do they not get that a happy customer is a loyal one. Make us feel valued and we’ll not only give you our exclusive business but we’ll also tell all our friends to do the same and save you tonnes in advertising fee’s…..or cross us and we’ll take you down because the best stories, the ones we humans really love to tell, are the ones where we have been wronged.