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Interview Patty

How to Prevent the Fires that Burn Clients

There’s an Old Saying: “We’re Only as Valuable as Our Last Mistake.”

 

It’s normally used when referring to client relationships; one mistake can ruin years of hard-earned loyalty.

 

If we don’t want to micromanage our people, what’s to keep them from eventually making a mistake that costs us the key account — or worse — the possibility of future business with similar clients?

 

Surprisingly, we do have control over this issue, although few business leaders understand it. There is, in fact, a way to prevent the type of account-costing mistakes leaders are concerned with and raise performance while we’re doing it.

 

To discover how organizations were able to prevent the mistakes that cost them client relationships, I went looking for the teams that worked in environments where errors were so costly, folks were motivated to fix potential problems long before they turned into mistakes. One team I found doing this extraordinarily well were wild-land firefighters.

 

These men and women are tasked with inserting themselves behind active forest fires that sometimes stretch thousands of acres, containing them and getting out safely. A mistake in that environment wouldn’t just cause damage — it would cost lives.

 

Here’s how they ensured mistakes wouldn’t ruin their results:

 

1. Never sidestep a problem

Many believe solving a problem is a win — and in the short term, they’re right. However, each challenge a team faces pulls them away from their objective while they take time to solve it. If someone else comes across the problem next time, they have to take time to solve it all over again.

 

What wildland firefighters have learned to do is not only solve problems as they encounter them, but to take the time and change how they accomplish their jobs so they never face that exact challenge again. They’ve learned that inside an active forest fire is not the time to relearn how to solve problems.

 

2. Catalogue mistakes

As part of the training course every wild-land firefighting recruit goes through, each person is tested not just on the right thing to do, but on what to avoid doing. Candidates watch hours of documentary footage on mistakes their predecessors made that caused injury and loss of life.

Every person on your team brings years of experience and hard lessons learned. They can be one of your most valuable resources in learning how to avoid major mistakes and how to fix them before your client is affected.

 

3. Regularly share lessons

Every forest fire is a learning environment for people tasked with controlling them. While instructors bring decades of experience to the table, everyone understands that any solution that works is worth investigating because it might save someone’s life.

 

It’s vital to regularly sit your team down and go over what challenges they’ve recently encountered and how they solved them. As a leader, decide whether it’s worth sharing across your organization so innovation becomes routine.

 

Mistakes won’t burn client relationships if we contain them while they’re small.

 

Source: Business Journal

 

 

 

Patty Block, President and Founder of The Block Group, established her company to advocate for women-owned businesses, helping them position their companies for strategic growth. From improving cash flow…. ​to increasing staff productivity…. ​to scaling for growth, these periods of transition — and so many more — provide both challenges and opportunities. Managed effectively, change can become a productive force for growth. The Block Group harnesses that potential​, turning roadblocks into building blocks for women-owned businesses​.

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