Recently I had one of those moments that was so bad, it made me physically ill. In fact, it was such a problem that I couldn’t even write about it for a week!
Our company helps entrepreneurs start & run new companies. This has the tremendous upside of working with very passionate people on really fun projects. These people are totally invested in their vision, their project, and the better future they envision for their customers, employees, and themselves.
The dreamWe were going to help this company launch the alpha version of their website to a handful of prospective customers a couple weeks ago, incorporate their feedback into some changes for their beta launch in early November, and then they were going to go raise some money with this momentum behind them to increase their valuation before the holiday season. This is important because most VC’s and their customers tend to take these two months off and nothing gets done.
A classic case of building value quickly & preserving equity in an effort to win a spot in the marketplace & keep a greater share of their company to boot! This is something we encourage more founders should do more often.
The nightmareHave you figured out what happened yet?
We missed the alpha ship date.
To give you some idea of the stakes here, missing that one date was a decent indicator that we were going to miss the beta launch. Thus they probably weren’t going to be able to raise money until February of next year! Missing the launch date by two weeks on a three month project happens all the time, but in this case it was potentially going to cost the initial investors & current employees (who are working for peanuts) two months of time, cash burn, and their personal reputations that they’d put at risk in lining up potential partners, investors, and future employees to evaluate their site before the end of the year!
The responseThe worst part was their response. I wish that they would have yelled at me. I had hoped that they’d threatened me. Hell, I would have felt much better if they’d physically punched me. You know what they did instead? They explained to me exactly what they had riding on this, and how they were really disappointed in us.
I couldn’t agree more, and I told them so.
The fact of the matter is we screwed up. Regardless of what unforeseen events happened during the project, we were on the hook for communicating those possible risks & having them make decisions about cutting features or adding more people to the project sooner in order to hit the date. We didn’t do that, and we let them down, big time!
The phone call ended with the following statement from me:
“I want to express to you that we take full responsibility for this, we know it’s really important to you, and we’re going to do everything we can to recover and not slip the ultimate Beta ship date. I can’t expect you to believe me given recent events, but all I can do is tell you that we’re going to do our best for you. Lastly, I would like to say that, I’m sorry.”
I was truly lost. We were going to do everything we could to help them get through this, but how could I earn back their respect?
The lesson
A good friend of mine had the misfortune of calling me after this conference call and asked me, “How are you?” I laughed and said, “Pretty terrible as a matter of fact! We just did the worst thing we could possibly do to a client who had a lot riding on us, we really let them down.” He gave me some very sage advice that I would like to pass along to you.
“Some of our most avid customers here were customers that we totally screwed at some point. We went to them and told them we knew that we screwed up, told them we were going to fix it, and told them that whatever it cost them we’d make it right as best we could. We did that, and now they respect us more for it. That’s the way you earn trust is by how you handle yourself when the situation goes against you.”
He was 100% right. (He always is.)
If you tell them it’s their problem and you’ll send them a bill for the headache you’ve caused them, you’ll be out of business in a month. If you instead own up to it and tell them you’re in it with them, your customers will be willing to trust you more because they know you won’t abandon them when they really need you.
The conclusion
After doubling the size of the team involved, giving them daily updates, and shipping a solid alpha we look poised to recover nicely before the holidays.
The client is once again confident that we’re doing all that we can to help them through this – and that we were sincere when we apologized.
If you find yourself losing sleep over a situation with a customer please take this advice with you: You cannot avoid disasters from happening on every project – but when they do, take advantage of the opportunity to go to the mat for your customers!
They’ll respect you for it later, your staff moral will recover stronger than ever, and you’ll earn your firm a great reputation!
About Chris Harris
For 13 years Chris Harris has been successfully developing technology solutions and creating winning business strategies for both start-up and brand-name companies. Chris co-founded Inventure Global, a San Diego headquartered IT consulting firm with offices and programmers in India offering sophisticated IT and technology planning, design, and implementation services for new and growing businesses looking for experienced talent and intelligent support. Inventure Global also maintains the New Venture Outsourcing Blog.