Mike Andes explains why service businesses need hard boundaries on what they offer and how many customers they can handle. A customer who pushes you past capacity is a bad customer, even if they pay well, because they'll break your operations.
Not all customers are good customers. We want to eliminate the chance of bad customers sinking our business. And how are we going to do that? We're going to define what services, what service area we are going to serve, and we're going to define how many customers can we actually serve. Because any customer that's going to push me above my capacity limits, in other words, I'm overworking my crew or my trucks are overworking themselves. It's starting to become unsustainable. If any customer gets me above that limit, they're a bad customer, because that customer could potentially lead you over the edge. They're not bad people. The service that they offer, the property, they're not bad. Ultimately, though, for your business, it could be the worst customer ever because it pushes you over the limit.
