As a business owner, you have undoubtedly come across customers or potential customers who speak so badly of you that you wonder where they get all the venom from. What do you do with these people?

I am of the school of thought that a business should choose its customers i.e. do not go against your convictions, beliefs, morality and better judgement just because someone is paying you money. However, I also believe that all businesses exist solely to serve their customers. As a business, you should strive to delight everyone that you deal with.

From my experience, your worst critics can be turned into assets – into evangelists who will spread the good news about your business far and wide. You know why? Because if someone is very critical of you as a business, it automatically means they care enough to form opinions about you and communicate them to you. I see this as an opportunity to turn your worst critics into people who speak exceedingly well about you.

Now, as it turns out, many of your critics criticize you from points of little information. All it takes to show them that you are not as bad as they think is to be patient, to listen to them and to address their queries step by step in a clear and respectful manner.

For example, the guys over at DukaPress once received a very harsh email from a potential customer. They could have responded with equal venom or just ignored the critic. However, they chose to engage him in a conversation and address his concerns. Less than five emails later, the critic had made his first purchase at the DukaPress shop! Since then, he has made more purchases and even referred people to DukaPress. Imagine that…

So the next time you get a call or an email from a venomous critic, seize the opportunity to acquire an evangelist!

If you take time out to seriously consider all that is involved in running a business, you will find that the most prominent tasks and traits are multi-tasking and organization. These are the same qualities that define most Project Management jobs. You have to know what is going on in each aspect of your business from projected revenue to hiring staff to advertising and beyond. The best way to prepare yourself for this multifaceted undertaking is to take notes from Project Managers.
Like most jobs that are challenging, Project Managing is not glorious. In fact, it is seen in the corporate world as a position that consists mostly of creating busy work. Yet, in these positions you need to know the ins and outs of all aspects of the corporation that you are working for. You need more than just a peripheral knowledge of your current advertising campaign; you need to be fully entrenched in its ideology and delivery in order to manage how it is run by delegating responsibility to those best suited, and so forth.

This is the same situation when you own your own business. The exception is that you need to know more than just one aspect of your corporation; you need to have intimate knowledge of each corner of your business in order to manage its daily affairs including task delegation, future planning, and idea generation. As the owner of a business you are the head of Accounting, Marketing, Human Resources, among other sectors. You will have staff that will look after the details, but it is up to you to hire the right people who share your vision for your organization and can deliver what you expect in a timely and organized manner.

That is why it is so essential to have the right staff to follow through on the tasks that you set before them. If not, you could wind up in a situation whereby you are micromanaging all the aspects of your business down to the most finite detail. This is exactly the situation that you want to avoid; drowning in the details and micromanaging your way into disaster.

This is where the skills of Project Management come into play. Being a Project Manager is about knowing a little bit about each aspect of your business and not being a specialist in any. You find competent people to do the required tasks, whether it be controlling, marketing, or hiring staff, but you oversee the entire process and make sure that your final stamp of approval goes on each major decision that comes to your desk. You make sure that things get done as planned and make sure that none of the details are missed and fall through the cracks.

After all, this is your business, and you will want these little details to reflect your vision for your endeavours. The key is to hire staff that you can feel confident know your vision and manage them in a way that reflects open communication of the daily goings on in their respective fields.

Have you just started your own small business? Or are you doing some freelance work? How do you get new and more customers?

We’ve found that the following works for us. Maybe you too.

1. Partners
It is very helpful to team up with people who provide other related services and arrange to refer business to each other. For example, if you are a web designer you can partner with graphic designers to refer businesses to each other.

2. Profile
Building your business profile is a constant and unending task. This means a well structured and designed website, writing for/being written about in trade publications, attending business networking events, speaking at conferences, entering/winning/judging awards, and that’s before you’ve started with all the usual social networking avenues like starting a blog, commenting on other blogs, tweeting, facebook, linkedin – I think you get the idea now. An important consideration with this is to ensure you’re getting a profile that will be seen by potential clients, and not just chasing fame within your industry.

3. Happy clients (word of mouth)
Unfortunately, the most effective new business method is also the most difficult — happy clients are repeat customers, meaning more work and thus more billings. But more importantly, clients also talk, whether they have a good or bad experience. Marketing people know other marketers, business owners know other business owners — and they ask each other for recommendations, and value those recommendations highly. The better you service your clients, and the happier they are, the more likely they are to recommend you to their colleagues, friends and family.

Finally, don’t expect things to work instantly, building up a reputation takes years so your biggest asset and selling point is the standard of your work and the way you approach clients. Showing your work in the best light and having a diverse portfolio will give you the confidence to approach people for work.

When we first got into business, we were dreamy about what exactly we wanted to do. See, we’re able to do many things that are internet-related. So when we started, we thought we could do everything and offer all of the following to customers: web design, SEO, social media marketing, strategy, reputation management, etc etc. Nice eh? Soon we would be swimming in clients!

Wrong. We quickly realized that this was a very bad approach to business. Indeed we did get a range of clients who wanted a range of things done for them. This earned us much needed revenue but it also stretched us thin. We were trying to do too much with too few resources. We were extremely lucky that nothing disastrous happened (for example, if one of us had fallen sick – weeks worth of work would go undone!)

Over time, we realized that we needed to reduce the range of what we offered or we would burn out. And so we did just that. Currently we offer only or two from the range that we had initially started with and are looking to niche this down even further.

It is not immediately apparent, but it is true that a small business almost always makes more money and has a better chance of success if it chooses to attack a very specific niche. We almost failed because we were trying to be too general. Do not let this happen to you. if you are thinking of starting your own business, make sure that you have defined what it is that you do down to extreme specifics!

Good luck.