Feedback

This is a guest post by Clayton Blackham, partner at Snapp Conner PR. I first met Clay while I was at Sharp Analytics. He crafted a PR strategy that helped us gain great momentum in the market - momentum that I believe helped us sell our business to iCrossing.

Your company might be small or fledgling. There’s a good chance that you wear a lot of hats, that time is of the essence and you often move at a break-neck speed and expect your employees to do the same. I work in an public relations. Probably not unlike the industry you work in, it is not uncommon for me to be required to make decisions at a moment’s notice and get results. And of course, I am judged by those results.

Over the course of the last few months we’ve felt an increase in the pressure to “move the needle” for our clients. They are paying the same as or less than they were paying before the downturn, but they are demanding twice as much work. We’re OK with that because we all need to get through this recession.

With that preface out of the way I can focus on the real reason for the post: feedback.

Despite having to run a million miles per hour, what I’ve seen with friends’ companies, clients and even our own company is that there seems to be ample time for meetings that really don’t change the bottom line. But when it comes to giving feedback and teaching people how to do the job right, no one wants to touch it. Typically, the person asking us to do the work looks at it, makes a couple of changes and tells us it looks good. They approve the work and move on.

The problem with this approach is that nothing is learned and the same mistakes or the same quality of work will be produced over and over again. By not providing feedback, you are doing your employees or vendors a real disservice. It’s true that talking to people about what’s wrong with their work isn’t fun and it isn’t always well received, but it’s critical.

I can think of dozens of cases where I was given feedback on how to do something right after not doing it the way they expected. I hate to think of the hours lost in productivity – not to mention the frustration on the boss’ part – because two people had to do the job one person could do was significant until feedback was given. It usually only takes one time telling someone how to do it and that’s the end of the story.

Next time someone gives you something instead of saying, “It looks good, but made a change or two.” explain the change and why you made it. It’ll make your life easier next time around and strengthen your company.

Turning Customers into Advocates

There are a lot of good companies, maybe even great companies with crappy customer service. But good customer service can help make a crappy company a good one. Years ago, I heard stories about Nordstroms wonderful customer service, how supposedly they had let a customer return a tire to the store. One of my friends tested the return policy by taking back a pair of used shoes. The sales associate refunded the purchase price of the shoes (but made it clear to my friend that he was taking advantage of the system). I don’t think good customer service requires that you let people take advantage of you, but it’s probably smart to give customers the benefit of the doubt.

My wife’s an avid reader and subscribes to BookSwim which is like NetFlix for bookworms. She sent her books back a couple weeks ago and hadn’t received her next set of books so she sent a frustrated email to BookSwim and planned to cancel. She received this email back the same day:

Hi Kacy,

Gosh, it’s been a long time since those books were sent; it sounds as if the postal service had a fit of kleptomania. It’s certainly not normal at all! I’m very sorry you experienced this delay. I’ve marked these books as lost and we’ll send you a replacement package from your rental pool tomorrow morning. In the meantime, we’ll keep an eye out for the prodigal books.

The USPS guarantees us 4-14 days shipping time on all media mail, but in the future, if a shipment takes an inordinately long time, let us know right away so we can send you a replacement package - there’s no reason to keep you waiting while the postal service holds your books hostage.

By mid-May we’ll hopefully have return package tracking so these things don’t happen in the future.

I hope this has answered your question. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to e-mail back or call 877-BOOK-SWIM.

Thanks for your patience!
Chip

Chip’s email is a bit folksy, but it did the trick. There’s no way Kacy would cancel her subscription now.

My wife’s experience reminded me of something that happened at CrimeReports.com. We had recently launched and we were getting some good press. We ended up with a link from the front page of CNN.com and that generated a ton of traffic. Everything was going great until Google’s servers decided that our Google Maps use seemed extraordinary and they shut us down (even though we were a paying customer). Since CrimeReports.com is a Google Maps mashup, the site is pretty useless when you shut down the map. We were down for almost an hour, but we had a friendly message up explaining that we would return soon. Nevertheless, we received quite a few nasty emails in that hour, many of them with expletives telling us how much we sucked.

We made a point of responding to every email — even the emails that told us where to shove our site. We apologized for the inconvenience and asked them to return now that we had resolved our technical problems. I don’t know that we won a lot of customers back, but I do know we received at least one apology.

The moral of the story is this: Don’t forget that your customer service is more important than your corporate twitter account when it comes to defining your brand. The customer may not always be right, but you probably need them to be your customer.

Building Your Team

One of the best examples of great advice in “Good to Great” that is almost impossible to follow in a “Crappy to Good” business is the advice to get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus. Don’t get me wrong, this is great advice but a startup entrepreneur is dealing with an intractable problem.

The nice thing about a startup is that it is attractive to a certain type of person. I’m not talking about VC backed startups with enough cash to hire former Yahoo! executives, I’m talking about the rest of us. The person who is attracted to your typical cash-starved startup is someone with a lot of energy and a low cost of living. These are people who care more about the company’s vision than they care about a fat paycheck. I love these people.

The problem is that what they have in heart, they often lack in experience and very few startup entrepreneurs have the time to coach employees. Since you probably can’t attract the talent that you need, you need to get the most out of the talent that you have. Here are 5 tips:

1. Hire slow, fire fast. Alan Hall gave me this advice when I was at Sharp Analytics and it’s good advice. Don’t hire someone until you absolutely have to and once you know that someone isn’t going to work out, fire quickly. It’s in everyone’s best interest.
2. Never underestimate the importance of cultural fit. If your gut tells you that the candidate isn’t going to fit, don’t convince yourself to hire them anyway. A good way to avoid this is to make sure your team meets and interviews every candidate. You’d be surprised at what you will learn from other members of the team. I once had an office manager whose gut was never wrong. I made sure she met every candidate and I would turn down qualified people based on her
3. Ask people to do things they are good at. This sounds ridiculously obvious, but I don’t think it is practiced regularly. I remember an employee who wasn’t good at project management but I kept assigning him project management responsibilities. There wasn’t a shortage of work, so it was easy enough to shift some responsibilities so that this employee didn’t have to do project management and could focus on what he was good at.
4. Build a rapport with your team. I believe that people who respect each other perform better. I can’t prove it but I’d love to see you prove me wrong. Building a rapport with your team means that you have to work at least as hard as everybody else and you need to be accessible. As important as those lunch meetings are, I highly recommend eating with your team on a regular basis.
5. Be brutally honest. You can’t afford to do this if you decided to skip the rapport building but if you can’t be brutally honest then you won’t get the most out of your team. And don’t confuse being brutally honest with being mean. Being mean will not get you loyalty. Being kind and honest will. I highly recommend reading “Crucial Conversations” if you have any problems in this department.

There’s no question that team building in a startup is critical to the success of your business. You’ll pay a high price for team building mistakes and you’ll get a great return on the right team.