Last time, we talked about not showing up to prearranged appointments and how that is terrible waste of your marketing. I discussed it from that perspective and from your customer’s perspective. But it doesn’t just happen with potential jobs, you know, “Can you come and quote…?”
It also happens for other types of meeting.
It happens with meetings with me, for example, particularly, when someone is considering business coaching but hasn’t yet committed. (It happens a lot less when people are paying to talk to me — funny that!).
I’m a business coach for tradies. People pay me so that me and my program can help them change their businesses up — turn it to a better one.
This is what is going on for people when they don’t show up for stuff (not just my stuff).
For a potential client, a meeting with me, which might be very beneficial but also might not be (we might not get on) – it has a certain level of importance in their mind.
Now, they either forget because they don’t have great systems for managing their time.
Or, when it came to it, they prioritised something else instead — usually, something customer- related.
Now, prioritising is fine. You should be prioritising. But I don’t see people prioritising well. They’re not making positive and considered choices about where to spend their time and instead, they’re reacting and responding without consideration, out of fear or muddled and urgent thinking.
Things you should be spending time on to grow and scale your business
This is what I want to warn you against.
A meeting with me falls into the same category as many of those other things you can and should be doing to grow and scale your business:
- Setting bookkeeping up properly
- Understanding margins
- Building systems
- Calling potential customers
- Following up quotes
The list is long.
I use myself as an example but what these have in common, including investigating business coaching, is that they are easily displaced by the urgent day-to-day stuff and you can keep deferring them without any immediate or apparent consequence.
Calling to follow up quotes
I know that following them up gets you more business. But all you know is that you don’t follow them up and you’ve got this much business.
If you never follow them up you don’t know how much better it can be so you don’t know or feel how much it is costing you not to don’t.
The costs are hidden. They are less growth or money you don’t get that you could’ve.
So, you’re prioritising by accident or default is costing you but you can easily ignore how much it is costing you and most of us do — it’s human nature.
My job, of course, when I’m your coach, is to point out their costs so you can’t ignore them and help you put the systems in place so you make active choices.
If you’re disorganised, I can help you build systems that make being organised easier. I can help you hire people to run the systems for you so it’s easier still.
You will have to do something – implement the systems, hire the people and use the systems – this is not a free ride. But I will make it easier.
If you’re not prioritising well, I’ll teach you how to manage yourself better so you make your decisions before you’re under pressure – then you can make the right one not the urgent one.
They’re your decisions, you make them. Don’t let them make themselves.
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