Keep it simple

The start of a new year offers a fine opportunity to revitalize your business for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. Here are seven easy steps you can take now to simplify your life, lower expenses and pump up your net income in 2014 and all the years to come.

1. Adopt a marketing mentality. If customer satisfaction is the mashed potatoes, marketing is the gravy.

But marketing involves far more than passing out your business cards. Marketing is a complex challenge, all the more so in a business operating in a specialized niche such as yours. If you are to achieve optimum success in marketing your nursery, you must be willing to spend time studying, reading and analyzing your market and your competition.

Keeping your business healthy and profitable requires an ongoing marketing program. There is no other way. Competitive prices alone won’t do it; dependability alone won’t do it.

Marketing embraces all facets of your operation. To be an effective marketer, you must nurture and promote your business image, sell yourself as well as your business, and concentrate on making your nursery the best choice for discriminating customers.

2. Inoculate your business against telephone sickness. Your telephone can be a powerful business builder or a destructive business killer. Every time a customer or prospect dials your number, it’s a request for information, help, or even the possible placing of an order by a new customer. Any failure to deliver on these needs indicates the unerring presence of telephone sickness.

Inoculate your business against telephone sickness by training everyone in your organization to understand the importance of one of your most powerful business tools — the telephone — and the urgent need for treating every caller with courtesy and respect.

In particular, make sure that your telephone is always answered promptly. Never allow it to ring more than three or four times, and make sure that everyone identifies himself or herself by name in a cheery voice. Never leave a caller on hold for more than a few moments. Leaving a customer on hold for more than a minute or two is one of the surest signs of telephone sickness. And always call the customer back when you have promised to do so.

3. Eliminate the tardy invoice. If you do any of your own billing, never forget that neglected accounts receivables can be devastating to your profitability. Eliminate tardy invoice damage by setting up a fool-proof system for promptly sending out the invoice for every order, and by following through relentlessly on every late payment. This is as important to your financial success as the quality of the products turned out by your nursery. If your customers learn that you are cavalier about money owed to you, you can be certain they will stretch your patience (and your cash flow) to the limit.

4. Beware the invisible low-performer. Even one slacker in your operation is an internal virus that will eat away at productivity, profits, and employee morale.

Dealing with an under-performing employee is a challenging task for most nursery owners, but failing to face up to the problem will make a bad situation even worse. It can result in added stress on other employees who may have to take up the slack — and resentment among those who can’t understand why the offender is allowed to continue on.

The cure? Show your top performing employees how much you value their work and that you won’t tolerate a slacker.

5. Beware the invisible employee. In the course of your demanding schedule, it’s all too easy to fall into a pattern of superficial contacts with employees. Consider this actual exchange overheard between a business owner and an employee passing in a hallway:

Employee: “Good morning, Mr. Smith, looks like we’re going to have a nice day.”

Boss: “Fine, thank you. How are you?”

That sort of disconnect between an employee and a busy manager is all too common today; it preys on the susceptibility of workers who are starving for individual recognition and the essential dignity that goes along with it. Failing to supply it provides a perfect setting for the loss of initiative, lowered work ethic and destructive depression on the part of the offended employees.

Eliminating the invisible employee virus is easy even for the busiest nursery owner. One of the simplest and most effective ways to develop and demonstrate sincere interest in your employees is to take the time to find out something about each one including the names of their spouse and children, or their hobbies or special interests, and then following through with questions that show you are genuinely interested.

6. Eliminate the foggy instruction. Do you think that the instructions you give to employees are always crystal clear? If you think so, there’s a good chance you’re wrong. The ability to communicate with precision doesn’t come naturally to most of us regardless of the extent of our education and business know-how.

Industrial psychologists studying the effectiveness of communications among humans uncovered an astonishing weakness in this vital area of our lives. Much of the problem, they say, is the result of a limited vocabulary and the way many of us choose our words.

If you’ve ever been frustrated by the failure of an employee to follow your instructions or carry out a project the way you intended, it’s quite possible that the fault was your own — that you failed to make your instructions unmistakably clear. Too often, we assume that everyone will, or should, understand everything we say or write; this situation provides a happy breeding ground for the foggy instruction virus.

Trying to pinpoint the blame for specific incidents of miscommunication probably isn’t worth the effort. Still, there is little room for doubt that the heaviest share of responsibility for effective and profitable business communication rests with the person assigning the task, not the person receiving it.

Some years ago, a detailed study on business owners and managers revealed that a broad vocabulary was the most often seen characteristic in successful executives. That’s not surprising when you consider that words are the only tools we have for communicating our thoughts to others. Because a nursery owner must get things done largely through the efforts of others, the ability to express thoughts with clarity and precision is an obvious necessity.

Wilfred Funk in his classic book, Words of Power, said, “Success and vocabulary go hand-in-hand.” This sentiment, echoed by countless experts, leads to an inescapable conclusion: Since words are necessary in the formation of our thoughts, an expanded vocabulary will improve the quality of our thinking. The most appropriate word will seldom be the longest or most obscure one. The possessor of an unnecessarily large vocabulary runs the constant risk of being misunderstood.

Effective communications can be an elusive target. But managers who make a sincere effort to improve their skill in expressing themselves and their ability to understand others will gain an advantage by inoculating themselves against the foggy instruction virus.

7. Go the extra mile. Never forget that a complaint from a customer can easily be turned into a valuable asset. Some years ago, a major retail marketing study revealed that customers whose complaints were satisfactorily resolved became better customers of the company than they were before the incident.

Some of the most successful companies in the world have been built on a foundation that revolves around the principle that customer complaints provide a valuable opportunity to build the business. When L.L. Bean was starting out, he suffered what could have been a disastrous setback. Shortly after he began shipping his first waterproof, hand-made boots, customers complained the boots leaked. Determined to fulfill his promise of customer satisfaction, Bean returned the full purchase price to every customer. Then, he set out to correct the flaw in the boot’s design. That was the beginning of the customer loyalty that helped to make L.L. Bean what it is today.

Sometimes, satisfying a customer complaint calls for measures that you may feel unreasonable. When that happens, think of the cost in time and money as an investment in your future. Once you’ve sold yourself and your employees on why your nursery is the best choice for customers who require the utmost in quality and dependability, it’s essential to focus your marketing efforts on ways to promote this image to both customers and prospects. In short, make customer satisfaction the hallmark of your nursery.

William J. Lynott is a freelance writer in Pennsylvania specializing in business management, as well as personal and business finance; lynott@verizon.net.