Editorial Team

Customers are the lifeblood of your business. Being customer-focused will generate positive word of mouth, engagement, and brand loyalty, but how far should you take it? There is a difference between being friendly and being friends with your customers. Here are seven ways to keep a happy balance between the two.

Remember the basics

The old saying, “the customer is always right” applies to every business. We can all agree that a customer focus is essential for success. After all, a positive experience will keep a customer coming back. It’s important to always keep this mindset because it lays the foundation for a strong relationship. Customers want to feel welcomed—not ignored. It’s really as simple as that.

Establish trust

The key to any successful relationship is trust. You don’t need to become best friends with your customer to build a trusted relationship, but you need to deliver what was promised. And if you’re friendly in the process, your customer will be satisfied and happy. Conversely, if you mislead or are dishonest with a customer, most likely he won’t return…no matter how charming or welcoming you seem.   

Set boundaries

Relationships are important in building businesses. Nurture those relationships without letting them undermine your bottom line. For example, if you become too close with your customers, they might expect discounts or free services that don’t make good business sense. It’s one thing to reward customer loyalty, but another to give away the shop.

Understand your customer

Your business model will dictate how close you get with customers. If you own a hair salon, for example, you might be friendly enough with your customer to know his hobbies, plans for summer vacation, and the names of his children. After all, in the hair business, you can spend up to a few hours with each customer, so a deeper, more personal relationship is natural. 

On the other hand, if you own a smoothie shop, your interaction with customers should be short and sweet. Most likely, your customers just want to grab and go. Gauge these variables because each scenario is different. 

Respect boundaries

Being overly friendly could be a turnoff to some customers. A busy customer may not care for small talk, but will appreciate that you handle his job with a sense of urgency. You can still be friendly, but stick to the business at hand. And most importantly, don’t push yourself on your customer. Keep it simple so customers remember a pleasant experience. 

Don’t play favorites

Just like you shouldn’t play favorites with your employees or your children, you shouldn’t play favorites with your customers, either—even if you happen to be friends. Be careful. Customers talk to each other—both in person and on social media. The last thing a customer wants to hear is that someone else got a better deal from you on a product or service.   

Be consistent

The way you and your employees treat customers should be consistent. You can avoid creating the wrong impression (whether it’s one that’s too friendly or not friendly enough) by using the right phrases and words. Your words create the first impression, so make them count. Create a standard “script” for your customer-facing employees.   

When all is said and done, any business relationship exists because of the buyer’s need and the seller’s obligation to fulfill that need. Your customer doesn’t expect to be your BFF, but he does expect a friendly and fair exchange. Delivering your product or service in a professional and courteous manner is always the best course for customer satisfaction.

Every component of a small business is crucial, from its core strategy all the way down to its stationary supplier. There’s no room for inefficiency, idleness, or wasted potential, not when the competition is so fierce, and the risk of failure is so high. As a result of this, small business employees should be able to stand as a pillar of the business’ structure, bringing something distinct and valuable to the team dynamic.

If you’re looking to build a team for your small business, it’s essential to know what kind of employees you should be on the lookout for.

1) The Up-and-Comer

Employing someone fresh out of school or college might sound like a recipe for disaster. Why, after all, would you want someone on your team who has no experience in the real world? That’s the thing, though, fresh-faced small business employees are also free from lousy working habits and corner-cutting tendencies. Taught correctly, they can become perfect models of an employee, able to train subsequent hires and be relied upon to uphold your business’ practices to the letter.

2) The Old Hand

Contrasting The Up-and-Comer, “The Old Hand” represents an employee who has had years of experience elsewhere in your chosen industry. They might be a little stubborn and set in their ways, but their value lies in how much experience they bring to the table. If your business encounters an issue, odds are The Old Hand has lived through something remarkably similar; they can help steer your team in the right direction and away from disaster. As they say, “those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it”.

3) The People Person

A team without a sense of camaraderie isn’t a team at all: it’s just a group of people working in close proximity. Hiring a People Person, then, should be high on your list of priorities. By enabling conversation and fostering a team-centric atmosphere within the workplace, The People Person can transform a group of small business employees into a fully-fledged small business team.

4) The Ideas Machine

In business, problems are inevitable; their solutions often require a touch of ingenuity in small businesses. That’s why you need an Ideas Machine on your team, someone who can think about problems from a unique perspective and arrive at solutions that won’t break the bank for your business and its limited means. Also, Ideas Machines are superb for arriving at innovations with regards to your product or service offering. Put simply; small business employees don’t come much more valuable than The Ideas Machine. You should make sure you’ve got one on your side.

5) The Old Reliable

Do you need something done? Does it need to be done well? You need The Old Reliable. Diligent, dependable, and responsible, this employee will keep your business ticking over smoothly with their work’s unwavering quality. Big ideas and sweeping innovations are great, but they’re useless without someone willing to get their head down and get the job done right.

As you can see, an employee can bring so much more to a team than what their job description might state. Small business employees need to be able to let their talents and specializations shine through. Give them the room to do that, and your business will only benefit as a result.

We don’t often associate our daily job as being something fun or enjoyable. Work can often be stressful and challenging. This can be made worse when a boss doesn’t understand how to make his/her workforce happy and reduce those stresses. A boss needs to learn how to create a place of happiness in the workplace to offset all the other stresses that people endure daily outside the workplace.

Studies have shown that one of the most critical lessons leading companies have learned in recent years is that creating an enjoyable work environment that inspires employees to take ownership and joy in their work can result in enormous benefits. Happy employees can do amazing things.

Happiness has a Multiplying Effect

It is commonly known that happiness is a contagious emotion. If everyone around you is happy, then you’re more likely to be satisfied. Conversely, if everyone around you is talking about how much they hate their job, you’re more likely to feel disdain towards your career too!

Reducing Stress Increases Workflow & Productivity

Stressed and unhappy employees are easily distracted and less likely to go above and beyond. This can have a massive impact on overall company productivity (and remember…unhappiness can be contagious!) Working to eliminate stress and worry in the workplace can lead to an instant adrenaline rush to the productivity level within your company.

Happy Employees Can Make Mistakes

This sounds counter-intuitive, right? But happy employees feel supported enough to learn from their mistakes rather than fear them. Employees who fear making mistakes are more likely to make them science shows, and more importantly, likely to try and hide them. Making mistakes, when shown in the right like, can be powerful towards learning and unforeseen success in the workplace. Workers who fear mistakes will miss the learning opportunities.

People Like Happy People

Staff retention and turnover can be a massive problem at companies where happiness and morale are low. Finding joy in your work and improving relationships between work colleagues and your employer creates a united bond. Happy workers are more willing to develop strength together, as well as build company loyalty. This will also help in terms of retaining staff in the long term, as well as hiring new staff when needed as they will hear about the positive company culture.

Positivity in the Workplace Promotes Risk-Taking

There is nothing safe and stable about running your own business. Very few people got to the top without taking risks. Based on that logic, wouldn’t you like your employees to also take risks to get great rewards?

Unhappy employees are more likely to remain in their lane and just get the job done. However, promoting a positive attitude towards risk-taking and ‘thinking outside the box’ within their role can promote some fantastic results. Happy employees are statistically more likely to implement calculated risks in order to get big rewards in their roles.

Creating a workplace which is enjoyable to be in and permeates happiness throughout the workforce is not an easy task. However, once achieved, it will return the effort tenfold. Sometimes you need to look inwards to achieve this and think ‘Happy Entrepreneur = Happy Employees’.

Here I’m talking about a boostraped company, starting small with the owners work, looking to expand. And the question is can you keep the productivity up by hiring new people?

This is the part where you, the reader should identify yourself with the article: you started small, probably working from home, got some nice customers, income is going steady, but you feel you can’t expand and grow profits unless you get some help (this is one of these moments when you are working 12 hours a day, and over weekends to get stuff done but it’s still not enough). If you are in this situation, the only valid thought is that you need to hire somebody so you could have more customers and cash more in. And now the question again: if you hire a new person, your profit will go up or down? I mean if you have a profit of 3000 euro per working man (yourself) now, does this mean that if you are going to hire 2 more you will get 9000 euro profit at the end of the month?

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Of course I’ve already said this on my blog in a way or another, but it seems is never enough. Probably the latest time I’ve said it was in “There is something wrong with entrepreneur’s minds” – “Having more free time is an absolute non-sense, at least in the beginning. If you start small and probably without any significant outside investment, then, here we go, you will have long working hours, working weekends, and no holidays!”.

Well, right now, I’m able to make a little differentiation: we have a big difference between work long and work hard. And, unfortunately for the entrepreneurs they have to do some sort of work hard for long if you get what I’m saying.

But why is this so hard? (I’m not complaining I’m just putting warning labels all over the place). Well, Socrates said: “The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know”. And if you are just starting up, well, you actually don’t know anything yet, no matter what or how good you were in your 9 to 5 job so far. And even if you are a serial entrepreneur, you still don’t know anything. Because each time is different.

OK. I hear voices saying that I need to bring more on the table if I want people to believe me. And here I am saying that: Entrepreneurship is hard because there is nobody telling you that you are going the wrong direction until its too late. When you work for the MAN, well, the MAN usually plays safe enough that a mistake it’s filtered out several times. I mean is quite hard to make a monumental mistake without getting anybody else to notice. Hell, they even track down when I’m getting in or out the office. But if you are an entrepreneur, entrepreneurs are lonely persons. Even if they have partners, the total number of filters in their thinking and actions is always smaller than the filters put in place by a hierarchical structure.

And being an entrepreneur is hard again because the number of ideas you can output during your lifetime is limited. No matter how hard you try, the ideas should come from a closed circuit – your mind – as opposes of the “open societies” – more people and more ideas working for the MAN.

Entrepreneurship gets even harder when you don’t know if or when you are going to make it. Being employed, chances are that you are going to succeed to the end of the month when you are going to “make it and get your paycheck”. But you never know that when you are an entrepreneur.

It’s hard because you are fighting all other entrepreneurs. Well, not exactly all, but if you evaluate on a theoretical level, the entrepreneur that started a restaurant on my street could very easily change his business and open a PR company. Because his own entrepreneurship thinking should give him the same opportunities as it gives me. And it does.

I don’t like this article. Still I’m going to push the “Publish” button, maybe it will help somebody sometimes somewhere.