Wise Startup Blog

As a small business, your job is to grow as quickly as possible, and with growth comes great leaps, and (hopefully not great) failures. If you don’t continue to push the envelope, there’s no chance you can ever make it to the next level. Unfortunately, however, so many small businesses and startups keep making this mistake.

Afraid to Fail

Small businesses are so afraid to fail. The biggest example I keep seeing is a failure of companies to communicate with their customers.

When doing consulting for eCommerce companies, I was working with one company who had been in business for 10 years, and over that time had accumulated more than 150,000 customers. And 150,000 customer emails.

I asked them if they had ever emailed their customers, and they said “we are doing okay now, plus I don’t want to bother our customers and have them get pissed at us.”

This is insanity.

If you think about your own personal experience. I have a favorite restaurant in Gainesville, and I eat there probably 4 times a month. On one occasion last week, the service was really slow, and we had to wait 30 minutes for our appetizer to arrive.

This was irritating, and definitely did not make me happy.

BUT, the restaurant was very crowded that night, and they were understaffed (Finals at UF are going on now), so I understood.

I am still going to go back to this restaurant…

Your Customers Will Forgive You

This same mentality should be applied to YOUR business. If you are going to send emails to your clients, some of the emails may piss some people off, and sometimes you may have typos or delivery errors in those emails.

This comes with the territory.

But after a couple months of doing this on a regular basis, you work out the hiccups, and if you have any major failures, your customers will forgive you. And if you do make a major mistake, make sure to apologize.

So stop worrying about what might happen or how you might appear, and start growing your damn business!