Recently I’ve run into several situations where people were unhappy with the performance of someone else. When I dug into what was going on, in reality it wasn’t that the other person wasn’t performing, it was that the person I was talking to DIDN’T KNOW. In three cases the person actually said, “if I just knew where things stood, I’d feel better”. Â That one seems pretty easy to fix, right? So for the sake of research (and needing a blog entry), I contacted the people. Â I mentioned that there was a gap in knowledge and could they fill it? Â Here are completely reasonable reasons that this happened: Person 1 said they weren’t ready to tell because all the pieces weren’t in place. Â They were on schedule according to the plan they laid out at the beginning, so they didn’t think it was necessary to tell […] Continue reading
Business Loyalty
Lately I’ve run into some interesting situations regarding business loyalty. I totally get that there is little loyalty between employees and employers or between consumers and product companies. But one place there is loyalty is in small business. And it is a wonderful thing! For instance, it was a no-brainer recently when a client needed a service. We looked through their customer base, found the people that could provide it and done. Everyone was a winner and not only did they get the service they needed, they got a meeting with someone they hadn’t been able to meet in the past because now they had multiple relationships. On the flip side, a non-profit I work with didn’t look through their membership database and ask for bids on a project and have now lost several members because of it. The challenge is, if you don’t know […] Continue reading
Emailing Project Updates
I recently spoke to a group of college students embarking on their first consulting projects. We discussed the email updating portion of the projects and there were tips that I hadn’t really put into words before but have always practiced. So I thought it would be fun to share them here! Subjects on these emails should be “Update on (project) – First Update” or “Update on (project) – Midpoint” or something like that. Consider these will get filed and if they need to be accessed later, it is helpful to have subjects that make that easy. If you are doing an update email for a client, start with a thank you for the project or their time or something. If you are struggling with a project, you are nervous or concerned or generally freaked out. Typically because that is your focus, it is more difficult […] Continue reading