This is an unfortunate but true business story:
We have a good friend that we have been coaching and educating for years on starting a business. For instance, businesses and people that you need to speak with before you open a brick and mortar office as to avoid the many possible pitfalls and costly mistakes. We had been working with our friend in So Cal, designing their Internet requirements along with their toll free vanity number to auto attendant with a few special features for months in anticipation of their special opening day.
We had done our due diligence of communicating with them every few weeks to see if they had any changes, needed to add another employee, change an extension, set up voice mail, anything to ensure that their office network was wired per their needs, Internet would be operational and tested before they opened,
Then it happened, we received the call that we expected for months, time to turn up their office. What we got was. “We had to pull the trigger over night because (fill in the blank), Now can you help us because the new provider did not understand our specifications as to what we need to properly operate our business, the VoIP was not configured properly, and we want to open a day early.” This 11th hour ad-hock change for whatever reason was emotional poor planning that has cost them dearly.
What we learned:
No matter how much you try to educate people about starting a business, there are many illogical reasons why they do something unexpected.
No matter how well you believe that you educate people on your services, 75% of the time they forget or do not truly understand what you do and provide.
New business owners are so excited to be opening their doors, sometimes they lose their common sense.
Even after months of education on our company and our services, educating them on opening a business, coaching on the variables or possibilities, they went in a different and costly direction.
