Imagine for a moment these scenarios:
- You’re browsing through your local Costco and decide to swipe your arm across an entire shelf of products, knocking them all to the ground.
- You’re banging at the door of a restaurant at 9am, demanding to be let in because you want a salad right now.
- You barge into your doctor’s waiting room, ignore those waiting their turn, and push your way into the exam rooms because you want to be seen now, without an appointment, without signing in.
Great Companies Deal With Rule Breakers 
How far do you think you’ll get in each of those scenarios? While imagining them may sound super fun while we shelter at home, in reality, we know we’d get into a heap of trouble.
Why? Because each successful company has its operating rules, and typically there is zero tolerance for rule breakers.
That restaurant will not seat you at 9am because you demand a salad outside of their normal hours. And Costco will forcibly escort you to the security office after sweeping all those products to the ground. No sir, they don’t let you have your way no matter how much you think you deserve it.
The Customer Is NOT Always Right
Entrepreneurs, focused on making money by making customers happy, often forget to address operating rules. They think their business exists to do whatever a customer wants. The customer, regardless of what you were taught, in NOT always right. Sometimes they are rude and thoughtless. And you don’t have to tolerate that.
So what happens when clients, behaving perfectly nicely, ask you
- for services you don’t provide
- for payment extensions you don’t offer
- for extra sessions you can’t give for free
How do you respond? What are your operating rules?
Establish A New Mindset Around Protecting Your Operations
If you don’t have any, or they are all in your head, I’m going to ask you to do yourself a favor and embrace this new mindset. You are a professional company, an entity. Every company has rules, processes, systems and guidelines for acceptable behavior from company employees as well as from customers. You may want to be the nicest person in the world, and become known for great customer service, but NOT to the detriment of the success of your company.
Your Company Depends On You For Survival
Your company is an entity that cannot survive unless you take good care of it. When you let bad customers dictate the rules, you are allowing your company to be abused.
Harsh words? But it’s the truth. Your company needs to be cared for and protected as well as nourished.
- If you have operating rules, take them out, review them and update them TODAY.
- If you do not yet have operating rules, sit down and write them out TODAY.
Share with your team. Have a meeting about it. And most importantly, have it visible and upfront on your wall and in your mind when customers try and get around them.
Respectfully but firmly let them know, “We don’t offer that. This is not the way we operate, etc.”
Take Active Care and Nourish Your Company
If it helps to compare your company to a plant that needs air and light and good soil and water, then go with it. Buy a plant and set it down
on your desk where you can look at it every day. If this is your company, you will not let it go without watering. You’ll check all the leaves and make sure they’re healthy. You’ll spot little weeds and rip them out. You get it. Tend to your company the same way.
If customers try to convince you to do something “special” for them, and if you know that one special thing will lead to more bad actions, pull that weed out now.
Take care of the health of your company so that you can serve all of your top clients, which was your mission and which is part of your operating rules.
Need Help? Just Ask
If you need help with toxic customers or establishing rules and boundaries, it’s time to get to work – with my help. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get this done. Book your Strategy Session At an affordable price, we can knock out some challenges and push your goals forward.
Start here: https://calendly.com/susana-f/strategy-session