GROWING YOUR BUSINESS: You’re never too busy for your customers

by Dan Beaulieu
Business consultant

Well it’s happening again. Contractors are getting busy. Despite the pandemic, contractors who come to your house, plumbers, electricians, landscapers, carpenters, painters, you name them, they are all very busy right now. People have been taking advantage of the warm weather to get work around their homes done while they can.

As the pandemic continues some customers are having things done to the outside of their houses and properties since they are uncomfortable with having strangers in their houses.

This has a led to a shortage of good professional contractors. Right now, it is even difficult to get some of them to answer their phones or return your phone calls. Some of them are not even using their phones but rather insisting that you leave them an email! (which with Maine having the oldest per capita population in the country, cuts them out completely as few of them even have email).

To you busy contractors, here’s a bit of advice.

So, I get it contractors, you’re busy. You’re having a hard time keeping up. I know it’s hard in this feast or famine business world you live in. But always remember just that…it is a feast or famine world for you guys, so you need to be careful how you treat all of your customers and potential customers when you’re feasting. Keep in mind that you have to treat all your customers as if their business is valuable to you no matter how much business you already have.

This means business courtesy as usual. Answer the phone, return phone calls, try to fit customers in no matter what. Most of the time customers are calling you because they have a problem, and they feel you have the solution to that problem. So, give them that solution no matter what.

Treat all customers with respect and try to solve their problem no matter how busy your are. Always keep in mind how much of a privilege it is when a customer calls you with business.

Don’t brush them off. Don’t just say something like, “Sorry, I’m too busy right now,” and hang up. Or worse yet, not even bother to get back to them. Instead, either find a way to take their business, or provide them with an alternate solution.

No matter what, your job is to find a way to help your customers. The great business writer Peter Drucker once said that, “the purpose of a business is to accumulate customers.”

With that in mind no matter how busy you are you always have to find a way to keep and grow the customers you already have; as well as accumulating new customers. That in the end is the only way you are going to keep growing your business.