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Do Not Bring Me Problems Bring Me Solutions

Guest post by: Zeeman Haus

Article Overview: "Do not bring me problems bring me solutions!" That's a phrase I have used several times with just about everyone in my life at one time or another. I never really thought about what it meant. It took me awhile to realize that the one common factor in all of the issues that I have come across in my business and my life had one common denominator: me. That's right; I had to take stock in how I was operating and what I could do to take the burden of running every little thing off my shoulders. What I discovered was a slow process, but the end result shocked me.

Do Not Bring Me Problems Bring Me Solutions

"Do not bring me problems bring me solutions!" That's a phrase I have used several times with just about everyone in my life at one time or another. I never really thought about what it meant. It took me awhile to realize that the one common factor in all of the issues that I have come across in my business and my life had one common denominator: me. That's right; I had to take stock in how I was operating and what I could do to take the burden of running every little thing off my shoulders. What I discovered was a slow process, but the end result shocked me.

A lot of what I discovered was that I was not empowering my own people. I had no trust that they would handle the crisis according to my own wishes. I had no written customer service plan in place and no standards of operation. Basically I was quarterbacking a football team that had no plays. As a result when there was a lot going on, things would become chaotic and there was a lot of ball dropping .

My first step was to draw up a playbook. My playbook didn't have an X's and O's though. Instead we had a clearly defined strategy of customer service and my customer service reps rejoiced and client satisfaction increased. Now when my customers called with concerns , my CSR's were able to respond in a timely fashion. This increased our value perception to our customers and left me answering a lot fewer questions. It also kept me off the phone with customers more and I could direct my time towards other things.

The next thing I did was organize my offense; my sales force. I took direct quotes from my marketing plan and left it readily available to my sales people. With a little coaching- using the marketing plan as a reference, I was able to prepare them to do business the way I would do business if I were to push them out of the way.

Which brings me to the third thing I did; an attitude check. While I am certainly not a gruff sort of person to work with, I am- like most entrepreneurs, an alpha personality. I'm a take charge, very gregarious type of person. It has served me well to a point, but it had put my staff into a strange position as well. Without a plan and some coaching, my staff had become reliant on me to handle everything. I found myself trying to take over tasks instead of leaving it to the person I was paying to do them. It took some practice but I learned to back off a bit and just let them do their best. On long term projects I would check in and "see if they needed" anything. Short term I asked them to give me a completion estimate and if I felt it was reasonable I would leave them alone until the date the project was supposed to be done. By doing this I enabled them to work more independently and achieve some goals, building their confidence in themselves and my confidence in them as well.

Just these three steps; providing a clear expectation, coaching and allowing them the space to achieve their goals cut my "hot button" issues substantially and saved me a lot of extra worry. There were some growing pains for my team, but like any other relationship, growing meant a more productive relationship.

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Article Tags: business plan, business practices, customer service, employee empowerment, problems
Referred by: http://7inchlcdtv.com/



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Congratulations, Evan! - Hope you have a wonderful honeymoon! Bring back some of that sunshine for us!
Re: Quote of the Day - "Don't be embarrassed about asking "stupi - 100% agree with this. It's also a great lesson towards getting people to stop worrying about what others think of them. I've also found that on forums the "sorry this may be a stupid question but..." type of questions often produce a lot of useful responses, which is good for the person asking the question, good for the forum users, and good for the forum owners. Bring on the "stupid questions"!
Re: Website Name Help - Its good that you have come up with the idea of setting up a website for your business. Now As it is into Business Solutions, I would recommend that you also include this into the name of the website. This will help you getting better results as far as SEO is concerned. You can start building a brand with this name. As you have already got the name booked, you can try changing it to something on the lines of Business Solutions as in azimabusiness or azimabusinesssolutions. Its a long name but still is good from the SEO point.
Help me name my moms business - I think Infinity Cleaning Services sounds better than Elite Cleaning Solutions... Why the Solutions? What is there to be solved? You simply get a rag with some Windex on it and wipe away.... plug the vacuum and Vac Away, get a mop and mop away. Stick to Infinity Cleaning Services... ICS sounds cool...
Should I Outsource My Sales Function? - Last month my website passed 200,000 monthly visitors and, as a result, we have started receiving an increasing amount of interest from advertisers wanting to reach the target audience on my site. We’ve landed a deal with Bell Canada, one of Canada’s largest companies, and are in discussions with two major online companies. Bell Canada came to us as a referral and the other two companies both came to us, presumably after doing a search and finding my site. To date a lot of the revenue from our site has been from programs such as Google AdSense but we’ve increasingly looked at private sponsorship. Bell Canada was our first corporate sale and we’ve also sold smaller ad spots to some of the experts we profile on our website. We have also recently been approached by a website representation company. They basically do the work of finding advertisers for you and are your outsourced sales team. The company I’m in touch with is a reputable firm as a few of the other websites in my industry are also using them. Should I work with them? The upside is I could attract more brand name advertisers to my site and it could free up my time to be able to focus on building even more website traffic which, in turn, would drive more revenue. There is also no up front cost to working with this company. The downside is they take 40% of everything they bring in and want to work towards an exclusive relationship. They are also charging the same rates that I am already charging and quoting for the different sections of my site. As my site continues to grow I’m sure we’ll get even more attention from advertisers as well. My current problem is should I: 1. Continue as is and wait for more advertisers to come to me as I grow. 2. Bring someone on to be responsible for selling my ad spots. 3. Go with the website representation company and let them sell my site. What would you do in my situation?


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