Authors: Bryce Whitty
One of the most powerful mindsets to have as your own boss is to always blame yourself for anything that goes wrong. That’s right, anything. Everything is your fault.
Why on earth would you want to blame yourself for everything? Because it allows you to build up an incredibly rugged business. It allows you to change how external problems affect you.
Ill jump right into an example of what I am talking about. Let’s say you have spent hours on a single clients computer. You do the work, invoice the client, a few weeks pass and you give them a call. They tell you that they are not going to pay you. Not because they have a complaint or that you have done anything wrong, they are just not going to pay you.
I am sure you will be thinking all sorts of expletives towards your customer and how this external source hurt your business. However, at the end of the day you let this happen.
You probably should have had a system in place to prevent this happening, but hindsight is always 20/20.
You need to take it on board and put a new system in place. Take a deposit up front, do a credit check before you take on big projects, get a contract signed, create payment milestones, whatever you need to do.
Suddenly, you’ve taken control of the situation to prevent or at least minimize the chances of it happening again. It was your fault that you didn’t have a system in place to begin with, you took it on board and now you do. Your business just got stronger.
Another example is a common scam that is attempted against business. In fact, one of my business clients fell for this one. It is a scam where scammers "invoice" businesses for something very general. The secretary or whoever is in charge of paying the bills often doesn’t know what is happening out in the field and therefore doesn’t know what their co-workers purchased. This is especially true in larger business. It’s the secretary’s job to pay the bills and so they do what they are hired to do.
This scam works very well on businesses that don’t have a defense against it. Now, as I mentioned before, one of my business clients got stung by this one so they set up a system where the boss (who has a better idea of the businesses purchases), gives all the invoices a quick "once over" to make sure that they did actually purchase what they are being invoiced for. Again, the scammer was an external source but they took it on and controlled it.
You might have lost one of your clients details in the craziness of your day to day work. Don’t let that happen again by setting up a CRM like CommitCRM, mHelpdesk or ShopManager.
Forgot to invoice? Make your onsite Computer Technicians invoice from their Smartphone as soon as they return to their car. Tech CRMs like CommitCRM, mHelpdesk and Shopmanager can all be made web accessible so onsite Technicians can do this.
Not Blaming Yourself
I knew someone who has been blaming others for his problems for his entire life, no matter what it was.
This person eventually purchased a business with a shop front.
The business is failing? "The person who I bought it off cooked the books".
"My customers take advantage of the business, they are all bastards".
All of these issues remained something that he couldn’t control because he never took ownership of them. Eventually, the business went bust. He still maintains that it wasn’t his fault.
By always taking the blame on board, you are being pro-active at preventing it from happening again, making your business incredibly robust.
So next time something happens, think "I shouldn’t have let that happen, and I am not going to let it happen again".
© Technibble – A Resource for Computer Technicians to start or improve their Computer Business
To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit. Blame Yourself
