MBA965 Q&A Wednesday: I am not in love with my customers. Am I in the wrong business?

Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. When you need more than just interviews and inspiration, you need practical strategies to improve your business. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes I answer a question from you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar00mba.net I would love to answer your question. Today's question comes from Shannon and Shannon asks, I'm not in love with my customers. Am I in the wrong business? Such a great question Shannon. Thanks for asking it. And if any entrepreneur with any experience is going to be honest, they're going to say yes. I definitely have experienced this before. Having customers, you're just not in love with customers that just, you know, maybe make you upset or get under your skin or you simply just wouldn't want to see them in person or have a meal with them or meet up with them at a conference. Does this mean that you're in the wrong business? This is what we're going to get into in today's episode. Do you have to love all your customers in order for you to feel like your business is congruent with you? Or is that fairytale talk and we gotta get real and a business is a business and you're not gonna love everybody? And even if you don't love all your customers, does that mean your business is a failure? We answer all those questions and get into all the details in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode is supported by AC Looking for a laptop that delivers on both performance and price. The Acer Swift 5 offers a powerful Intel Core processor, super slim design and more. Discover new possibilities with the Acer Swift 5. Go to acer.com, click on store and enter coupon code 100 MBA at checkout to receive 10% off plus free ground shipping on a Swift series laptop, including already discounted models. Offer valid through April 30, 2018 and limit to one per qualified order. Windows hello. The password is you. Windows 10. So Shannon writes in and asks, I'm not in love with my customers. Am I in the wrong business? So let's just assume that Shannon is talking about the majority of customers. They're not in love with the majority of their customers. And I'll get into what if it's just a few customers or a small minority of customers later on. But it sounds like most of the customers that Shannon has are not really people. They really enjoy speaking to Shannon and everybody else who's listening. Let me let you in on a little secret. Over the last decade, I've gotten to know a lot of great entrepreneurs with big businesses. 7, 8, 9 figure businesses. Some of these people are close friends of mine and they shared with me the same concern. They said, you know, I'm not really into my customers, but their business is booming and they're doing well. But it kind of stings them a little bit that they don't like their customers. Now when I say don't like, they obviously don't hate them, but maybe they just don't enjoy speaking to them or engaging in conversation. Now the first thing I want to establish is that we all have to take responsibility. When we build a business. We attract certain types of people to our products or services. So the customers we have are the customers that we attracted. So if you don't like them, that's probably mostly your fault. It doesn't mean that your business is a disaster. It just means that they've come to you because they love your service. And you allowed those types of people that you don't like to be a customer. Not anybody can be a customer of every single product. We talked about this in an earlier episode. Low priced products versus high priced products actually was last Friday's episode, if you're wondering. But having said that, is it the end of the world? No. The people that I speak to that kind of express this feeling, they hire people that take care of their customers on their behalf, whether that's a customer service manager, whether that's a president of the company, somebody who really loves people, loves dealing with people, loves turning people around. And for the most part, as the leader of the company, they don't really talk to the customers too often. They might do that at a conference or public speech or some sort of physical meetup. But there's nothing wrong with assigning somebody to be the people person to be somebody who's going to take care of your customers. At the end of the day, that person represents your company and your brand. And hey, you can't be great at everything. So you could definitely find somebody that can jump in and take care of your customers needs and you can step back and deal with the other Things in your business, management, innovation, product development, sales, all that kind of stuff. So just because you don't enjoy the company of your customers, it doesn't mean you're in the wrong business. You could love the product itself or the problem you're solving. And you could just simply not be a people person or somebody who's really a social person, I should say, that really loves speaking to people. I mean, when I look at the people that work at our customer service department at Webinar Ninja, they love people. They love speaking to people, solving their problems, even when they're angry for some reason. And every business will have angry customers. There's nothing wrong with that. That's just par for the course. Many people are just angry because they're having a bad day, but they love turning them around and helping people. Not everybody's like that. So if you can get the right people in place in your business to take care of your customers, that's just as good. You're taking care of them by getting somebody to take care of them. If your business is profitable, if it's growing and you're enjoying the process, you're enjoying the different aspects that you contribute to the business, then I would keep going. That sounds like a great business to me. Now I want to ask Shannon or anybody else who's having the same problem as Shannon, who's listening to Ask themselves the question, is there something else bothering you? Is there something else going wrong in the business? Why are you having these feelings where you don't like your customers? Are the customers complaining about some valid issues that you can fix? One of the things we like to do in our business is every six months or so is ask our customer service reps to list our top 10 requests or complaints or things that customers are struggling with. And I take on those 10 and see if we can change our product or service to solve these problems. If I can eliminate these problems completely, that can help them out and make their lives easier and make customers happier. So maybe you could do that as well, and maybe your customers won't seem that bad. Now, if you are a small company and you're a solopreneur, or maybe you have three or four teammates and you really can't expand to the point where you can get somebody to completely take over customer relations, that's totally fine. It's good to be close to your customers at the start because you got to make sure you can refine your product on the fly via customer feedback. If all your customers are just completely hating on you, Maybe you need to take a look at your product or service. But if some of them are complaining, let's say 20% or less, I wouldn't be so concerned about that. You're gonna get that in every business, see if you can reduce that percentage. But that's good feedback. You can really use that. And some of it is just hate and you can just kind of ignore it. But as an entrepreneur, one of the things I learned that is so important is that you gotta grow thick skin. You gotta be objective, you gotta take feedback and not get defensive. You know, even after years and years of reminding myself this, I have to keep reminding myself to listen to feedback from customers, from colleagues, from our own teammates and say maybe they have a point. I gotta step back as not the founder of this company, not the person that's been working on this day in and day out for the last how many years and just be objective about it. Maybe they have a point. Maybe I can consider and improve. Whenever I've done that in my business, I've really made some leaps of improvement in our products or service. So yes, there's going to be the chance that you're not going to love all your customers and maybe even most of your customers. And that's going to happen as you grow, because the more you grow, the more you're going to get a variety of customer. And yes, that means you're also going to get people that are very loud with their opinion. And what I found with our business webinar Ninja. As we grew, I had to start delegating the role of customer service to our team, our customer service manager, because I was spending too much time in the weeds and I couldn't really focus on innovation. I needed curated feedback from our customer service manager to know exactly what to improve on rather than just being, you know, nose deep into customer tickets and feedback day in and day out. That can really wear on you. At some point. I personally, as the leader of the company, as a CEO of Webinar Ninja, made that decision. I need to step back a little bit, get somebody else to really deal with customer service, handle our customer in the best way possible, but at the same time give me what I need to hear to fix or improve the product. Because like they say, the loud minority can often drown out the silent majority. And it might give you this impression where like, I hate my customers. Don't let that happen to you guys. I got more on today's topic on today's Q and A Wednesday. But before that, I gotta give love to Today's sponsor. When was the last time you checked your paystub or picked benefits at work? Chances are it wasn't easy. HR software has been clunky and hard to use since, well, HR was a thing. One technology company takes a different approach. Namely. Namely is the only all in one HR payroll and benefits software employees love to use. Ready to clock in? No problem. Need to write a performance review? You can do that. Want to schedule some vacation time? 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I don't want to deal with them, I don't want to talk to them. You gotta handle that. And these people can really help you improve your product. Shannon. I hope that helps you. Hope that answers your question. Today on Q and A Wednesday episode. If you're listening and you have a question in your head right now, email me@omar mba.net I'd love to answer it. Here on the show we only use first names. We keep it anonymous to make it super simple. So no worries. Alright, that's it for me today guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. I always say this as a leader of your company. You can't expect to be able to do everything very well. You have to start hiring experts. People that are in love with what they do and are really good at it. People that are self motivated. You have so much on your plate. There's so much you have to do. There's so much you have to oversee. You have to start thinking strategically about where are the key areas of my business that I need covered. What are the most important things in my business that need experts. And when it comes to customer service, that should be on the top of your list. People need to have a great experience. All right, thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode where we discuss how to choose the perfect launch partners. If you're launching a new product, service, a new update, whatever it is, how do you choose the right people that can help you make that launch a success? We get into that in tomorrow's episode, so make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Until then, take care. Of.