“Brains Over Bucks.”

Business Blunders

By Jeff Slutsky and Marc Slutsky

Successful business people learn from their mistakes. Making mistakes from taking risks is part of the educational process for any successful businessperson. The more mistakes you make, the more you can potentially learn, provided you don't keep making the same mistakes over again. For now, let's learn from other people's mistakes:

Ovary Oops!
When the client returns to the Vet to pick up his AKC registered Champion show dog, he notices that his bill seems awfully high for a bath and spray. So he mentioned that he felt it seemed pretty pricey to the tune of $100, just to get his dog clean and flea free. That's when he discovered that he was being billed for a bath and spayed. The lawsuit that followed basically rendered the Vet financially neutered. We don't know if they every got rid of the fleas.
Lesson: Give your customers what they want.

Sweet Surprise
We were recently told of a new kosher style deli that was having problems with their young servers because they just weren't familiar with the product line. It seems they couldn't tell the difference between corned beef and a corn dog. One customer orders a Reuben sandwich on challah. Challah is traditional Jewish, braided bread. When his ordered arrived he was surprised to see that they put his sandwich on halavah, which is a very sweet, candy-like desert. Lesson: Before you let your employees serve your customers or clients, make sure they understand the products and services you offer.

Chicken Feed
Making mistakes in business is part of doing business. The key is to learn from those experiences. We've had our share of Biz Blunders over the years. Marc was the volunteer chairperson for an ad-hoc committee of a non-profit organization. The problem was that he couldn't get his committee members to attend the meetings and this was causing his time involvement to be much greater than he anticipated. He had only one scheduled meeting left. He wanted to insure that a quorum would be present so they could vote on their final recommendation and then he'd be free of this task once and for all. To motivate his committee members to attend, he mailed out a flier that promised them a free chicken dinner at the end of the meeting. Everyone showed up. After the vote he treated them to their free chicken dinner: little packets of dried corn!
Lesson: Don't do this.

Insensitive Situation
Then there was the fast food franchise owner who was so proud of his new Braille menu, that he had it laminated.
Lesson: Use a little common sense.

Do you have a marketing or sales question or have you done or heard of a great biz blunder you want to share? Send it to us at Street Fighter c/o of this paper.

Street Fighter Action Plan

1. Make a list of between five and 10 of the biggest mistakes you've made in your business or career.
2. For each one, write down the most important lessons you learned as a result of this mistake.
3. Lastly write out what changes you've made (or will make) as a result of that experience.
4. If you have less than three mistakes, consider taking a little more risk.

 

 

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