James Schramko here. And what do you do as you’re growing your business to manage your client expectations and your own time? I’m going to give you a couple of resources that will make this a bit easier.
A really cool thing you can do to help manage your customers and yourself is to create a help desk. Even if you’re a small operation, having a professional help desk (we use HelpScout in our business) allows you to separate out the customer-facing activities from your inbox.
It also allows you to hire people to start managing that customer relationship. And then you can just internally discuss this with your team. So when we’re using a tool like Slack, my team can update customers from our help desk. And I’m protected from that. Now, I can see the tickets in Slack. And I can discuss the tickets with my team, who can then go and post an update. And I started the support as one of the first things I outsourced over a decade ago. And it’s freed up my time and my ability to manage customers.
Other things you can do when you bring on a customer, have good client selection so that you’re only dealing with people who aren’t going to soak up all your bandwidth. You should never ever let people who are the wrong fit customer buy your service or your product. Because they will take a lot of resources compared to a right fit customer who’s going to be easier to deal with.
So we’ve talked about help desk, we’ve talked about right fit customers. Other things you can do is, to partition days of your week where you’re doing the bulk of the actual work. And you can set clear expectations when you’re actually bidding on work or when you’re promising a product so that your customers have a clear understanding of the boundaries of when you’re available and how you’re available. So you’ve actually got time and space to think and create and produce.
So there’s a bunch of things that might help you as you grow your business to manage that client activity and to provide some time for yourself. This is exactly the sort of topic I talk about inside JamesSchramko Membership. Hope to see you inside there soon.
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