The Masters of Disaster: Promotion is Not Enough
In order to build a successful freelance business, you must do three things, and do them well. If you don’t, no amount of promotion will save your business from oblivion. Here are the Three Elements of Business Success:
1. Doing Business.
Provide the goods and services that people pay you for. Part of this process is providing customer service so good that people will want to do business with you again, and send referrals.
2. Getting Business.
This is where your marketing and selling activities fit in.
3. Running the Business.
Tasks that don’t directly make you money but must be done fall into this category. We’re talking about things like administrative tasks such as long-term planning, accounting and bookkeeping, handling legal matters, and office and business management. Employee hiring, training, and supervision are included in office and business management.
The following story illustrates what can happen when there’s an excessive focus on getting business at the expense of doing it and running it.
The Mortgage Debacle
Five years ago, I applied for a home loan with a well-known local company. I first heard about them through an advertisement in a free real estate publication. The ad promoted their series of free seminars on home buying and home building.
The company owner presented all the seminars I attended, and they drew quite a crowd. I was relieved to find that they weren’t sales pitches masquerading as seminars. Quite the opposite. They were billed as educational, and indeed they were. I learned a lot.
As for the owner, he was anything but a high-pressure salesman. I was so impressed with his low-key approach that I decided to use his company as my mortgage originator.
During the initial interview with this company, I was asked for my mailing address, which is a post office box. I told the interviewer, who would be handling my mortgage paperwork, to send any correspondence to the post office box, rather than to my street address.
The reason I gave was this: The street address mail went into my landlady’s mailbox. I didn’t want her to know, much less suspect, that I was looking for another place to live until I’d found one.
A few days after that interview, the loan approval letter arrived at the street address. And it was handed to me by the landlady.
Right after I got that letter, I called the company and repeated my original request that all correspondence be sent to my mailing address, rather than the street address.
Shortly thereafter, a Fedex delivery arrived at the street address. It was a tin of cookies from the man who had done that initial interview. And it had a “Thank you doing business with us!” note.
Nice gesture. Or so it seemed at the time.
When the cookies came, I was still about three weeks away from closing on my house. During that those three weeks, everything went to blazes. Most notably, I waited and waited and waited for the paperwork that would tell me what my closing costs and monthly house payment would be.
Finally, three days before the closing, I asked my real estate agent for this information. He was having his own problems getting answers from the mortgage company, and he told me that I’d have to contact them. (By this time, my agent was so exasperated that he couldn’t call the mortgage company without getting into a shouting match.)
So, I called the man who had interviewed me and was supposed to be handling the paperwork. He told me that he’d e-mailed the closing cost and house payment information the week before. I told him that I didn’t receive it, and would he please send it again?
He did, and it went straight into my spam e-mail file. This missive had a cryptic subject line, several paragraphs that referred to the software used to send the e-mail, and an attachment with a long, convoluted filename. No wonder my e-mail software flagged it as suspicious.
Well, as the late night infomercial people like to say, “That’s not all!” The mortgage company also had the real estate agent and the title company put verbiage into the house contract that delayed my closing by three days. It was only through the kindness of the sellers that I was able to move in when I did.
In just one month, I became convinced that this company’s name should have been the Masters of Disaster. To put it mildly, the concepts of timely and careful communication with customers eluded them. Doing business with them was a mistake I won’t soon repeat.
Since my dealings with the Masters of Disaster, I’ve learned that they have quite the reputation around town. And it isn’t good.
Deconstructing the Debacle
This is a classic case of well-executed marketing giving the impression of a well-run company when this was clearly not the case. Their excellence in seminar promotion and presentation did not translate into good customer service.
If some of the energy involved in promoting the seminars had been put into providing better service, I think my experience would have been positive.
Unfortunately, they chose to use marketing to bring in new customers to replace the ones they’d antagonized. In the long run that strategy will only hurt them.
Don’t be like the Masters of Disaster. Strive to excel in how you:
- Do Business
- Get Business
- Run your Business
Tip: Good presentation is crucial, but doesn’t prove that a company is efficient and customer service oriented. Don’t be overly impressed. Do your homework on any company you’re thinking of using.
To me this article seemed like more of a rant about a mortgage company and it’s shortfalls, then about good business practices for a Freelancer. I didn’t walk away with any specific useful information that I can apply to my business.
Alavri, the short version is that many businesspeople put more effort into their marketing than they do into their work and the carrying out of the functions they advertise, which is a mistake. Do the best marketing you can, for sure, but don’t neglect the service you provide.
Yeah, I think it’s a good point to make, especially with all the articles done on self-promotion hereabouts. You don’t want to be all surface: gilded but empty. Balance in everything. Middle path. Be well-rounded. All that good stuff
Good example. I think the story is important for me as the reader, to understand the scenario correctly. What i got out of it was, even the small things matter much more than we think. If they had used fed-ex to send the papers instead of sending the cookies you would have had the papers in time.
This reminds me that all the time i use to service my customers without pay – do pay off in the end thought its hard to know that you are doing so much for your customers for free.
My main takeaway from your post is the importance of long-term (and short-term and mediium-term) planning. These are crucial not only for business but for all aspects of life.
Regarding the mortgage fiasco, I’ve only done four real estate deals so far, but three of them had major problems and required me to be on my toes, proactive, and riding herd on everybody involved in the process.
I’ve lost count of the number of companies that I’ve dealt with over the years that put all their effort into appearing professional, rather than actually being professional. Heck, I’ve even worked for a couple of them.
I sympathise with the issues you’ve had, there’s just no way of really knowing until it’s too late.
It amazes me how many companies put all their time and money in building their marketing arm but neglect their production or services. Companies should realize that word of mouth can do more for them in the long run. Had your experience been positive I’m sure you would have written the exact opposite as well as told friends and family how wonderful it was.
When a customer is happy, they’ll tell a few. When they’ve been wronged, they’ll tell it to as many people they can get their hands on. Church of the Customer Blog had a post of how a Domino’s owner used social media to apologize for a bad customer experience, http://www.churchofcustomer.com/2009/04/how-to-apologize.html
I think “Working for myself” really captures it: this company was so focused on *appearing* professional to prospects that they either weren’t capable of or didn’t care about *being* professional to their actual clients. It’s a good example, and I would have loved to hear more of Martha’s thoughts about applying this lesson to our businesses.
Great article & suggestions.
It is really hard to know the truth behind the company until we do our homework about it…
Great read..
Freelancers generally have little to fear about the possibility of over-promoting themselves beyond their level of competency.
It is far likelier that a freelancer is competent to do many jobs but has retained the “employee modesty” of being trained to not toot their own horn, because bosses tend to smack down anyone who talks themselves up, and it’s regarded as “unseemly” to self–promote in most workplaces. When you’re out on your own you have to unlearn the modesty crap that employees are indoctrinated with.
A creative or a technical freelancer generally isn’t a born marketer – most *real* experts pay more attention to the work itself than to trying to influence people to write checks to them. The *real* born marketers tend to be the types who sell snake oil and who destructively over-hype their flawed characters and abilities. You tend to find BS artists more in “money” occupations like finance and in pure sales and involved in multi-level marketing schemes. Why: there’s no real technical, business or artistic skill or knowledge required – you just have to be able to “talk.”
So, this article is warning about a practice that few freelancers need to concern themselves with, as service providers. Quite the opposite, in fact – in order to survive, you need to promote yourself more than it seems like you should.
While using this forum (great stuff!) to step by step going freelance myself, I just had my own little experience with a company that does a great job with marketing and sales, but kind of let me down delivering.
In this case web hosting. I *thought* I did my homework. From 24/7 support to email, the works.
Once things was set up (late Friday afternoon) and I ran into trouble I had to wait for Monday morning before getting any response to my emails.
I can go on and complain, but that’s not the point.
Thanks to this post and my own little experience I will make sure that what I *say* I will deliver, I already have in place. This way of talking like you already do, but you actually still just plan to do it, does nobody any good and definitely ruin your reputation.
That is a good point. There is no use of promotion without concentrating on basic resources like service/product quality, responsibility, customer care etc.
Freelancers and SOHO should be care with this.
@Glinkus, I was just abducted by a new client. He held me hostage until I completed all the graphics and charts needed for his grant application.
Now that I’m free, I can get back to those other two clients, whom I’ve been neglecting.
So, in short, I don’t just write for this site. Tell ya the truth, I’d be bored if I did nothing but write. There’d be no client abductions to write about.
Glinkus — what makes you think FreelanceSwitch is not actually a real client?