Parenting Your Clients

As a small business owner, one of the most difficult problems for me is time management. As a fellow business owner likes to say, "The best part of owning a business is getting to decide which 20 hours you want to work." I couldn't sum it up any better.

 

I recently met with a business associate who is a business coach, Helen Kosinski of Better Than Ever Coaching (www.betterthanevercoaching.com), to talk about time management. Or more accurately, my lack of it.

 

Somehow we got on the subject of a parenting class my wife and I are attending. After six kids between us my wife and I have come to realize we know very little about raising kids. So, we might as well learn another theory. This class is all about letting your kids own their problems and to be responsible for resolving them. Basically, when presented with a problem from your child you go through several responses:

 

The first is "Oh No!", for example when Suzie says "I forgot my jacket on the bus!!!!"

 

The second response is "That's a problem!", when Suzie further explains that she forgot to tell you she "brought the Tud the Turtle in for Show and Tell without asking, <sniff sniff> and Tud's in her jacket pocket <sniff sniff> on the bus!!!!"

 

For the third response we're told to say "So what are you going to do about it?" and let them take ownership of the problem and let them come up with a solution that either doesn't involve you or involves you on your terms, not theirs.

 

I jokingly told Helen that this might work on some of my customers who drag me into problems that I am not there to resolve. She simply replied, "Why not try it". Hmmmm. After thinking about it, sometimes my time management issues are related to taking ownership of a customer's problem that I wasn't initially brought in to fix.

 

Sure enough, I got to try it out the next day. I was called in to set up a network for a medium size office. While I was setting up the network, the client kept mentioning the company had additional connectivity problems that hadn't been done correctly when the office was first built.

 

Then she said, "Our fax line wasn't wired properly!" I responded with, "Oh no!"

 

She continued, "We need our fax line, we're missing a lot of important faxes!!!!" Keeping to the script, I replied "That's a problem."

 

"But the boss wants to have the fax situation resolved today and told me to get it done!!!" Okay, this was too easy. "So what are you going to do about it?" I asked.

 

There are countless times where I would offer to help and suddenly the problem was mine. The former owner of the problem would disappear. Sometime the problem would grow and take much more time than expected affecting both my schedule and profitability.

 

Once you take ownership of a problem on the client's terms, it's very difficult to get any concessions on those terms later. In other words it's your problem until the problem is resolved for little or no financial reward.

 

In my fax problem case when I asked what she was going to do about it she told me a few of the options she had and asked if I could see if I could fix it. We negotiated the terms and conditions before the work was done. Using my parenting class technique, I took ownership of the problem on my terms - and both parties were happy.

 

Now if only it would work so well on my daughter ….

Comments

[Bliss Sawyer]

And I'm assuming the reason you had time to write this great post is because of your new-found time management skills :) Great concept for our businesses!

[Sam Lewis]

Great advice Wayne. I need to use this myself.
It's so easy to get sucked into "ownership" without being compensated, and we all know how that works out.
Thanks
Sam