“I’m sorry the delivery is late, but….”

“I know this didn’t turn out the way you ordered it, but….”

As entrepreneurs, we have all been in situations when we have been unable to meet our customers’ expectations.  

You may have been counting on suppliers who did not deliver to you on time or with the products you ordered.  Maybe your workers did not show up on time or quit in the middle of a job.  Or maybe you may have had a sudden influx of business or an unusually big job that you just did not expect and you and your employees just can’t keep up.  

However, it is important to remember that you are the one who picked those suppliers.  You hired and trained those workers.  You accepted all of that extra work.  

Explaining why you did not meet the expectations of your customers with excuses does not build trust and confidence with customers.  While there may be reasons behind your failure to meet their expectations, customers generally do not want to hear about your problems.  What they want is for you to do what you have said you would do, and do it when you said you would.  If you can’t, they expect you to make it right.

Think of it from the customer’s perspective.  Blaming bad customer service on your supplier or your employees communicates to your customers that you are less than competent.  It is your business, so whatever goes on within it ultimately reflects on you.

Even worse, telling a customer that the reason you could not deliver as promised is due to taking care of another customer, communicates that their business is less important to you.

The importance of taking full responsibility and acting with integrity with your customers is important any time, but it has become critical during the ongoing Great Recession.  

Recent surveys conducted by the National Federation of Independent Business suggest that weak sales are is the single biggest challenge facing small business owners during the recession.  Since the forecasts of most economists call for a continuing sluggish economy for some time to come, taking steps to attract and keep will continue to be a significant challenge for entrepreneurs.  Not meeting customers’ expectations or telling them that their business is less important certainly is not wise when operating in an economy where customers and the revenues they create are increasingly hard to come by.

Taking full responsibility with customers builds confidence in you and your business.  Making each customer feel like their business is always the most important builds loyalty.  Building confidence and loyalty in customers is essential for surviving the continuing recession and thriving when the economy finally does recover.

When things go wrong with a customer offer no “but’s” and no excuses.  Be honest, take full responsibility, and tell what you intend to do to make it right.

Guerrilla marketing for entrepreneurial bootstrappers is nothing new.  Entrepreneurs have been finding creative ways to promote their businesses when they have little or no marketing budgets for generations.

In an article at Business on Main, Jeff Wuorio shows how social media is taking guerrilla marketing to a whole new level.

Wuorio offers strategies on the effective use of social media and discusses how it can be used to scale a business. 

But like any marketing efforts, social media requires deliberate planning and careful monitoring.

“Despite its powerful potential, guerrilla marketing isn’t an
effortless slam dunk. For one thing, strategies like blogs, Twitter and Facebook
mandate creating a schedule and sticking with it,” said Wuorio. “Also, be sure to track the reach of your programs by
monitoring their affects on such indicators as sales or inquiries. If something
seems to be working, keep riding it. On the other hand, if you try something
that just doesn’t seem to be panning out over three to six months, don’t be
afraid to scrap it and try something new.”

My favorite time of year.  The beginning of a new academic year. (By the way, my office is the first bay window on the top floor up on the top right in the picture above — stop by and visit sometime!)

When I left academics years ago to go into the private sector as a healthcare entrepreneur, I was shocked how much I missed the rhythm of the school year my first couple of years away from teaching. 

This year’s freshman class has moved into their dorms and are ready for their new beginning.

The Beloit College Mind-Set List has labeled the class of 2015 the “Internet Class”.  The authors of this annual list tell us that this year’s freshmen have grown up in an age “when everything from parents analyzing childhood maladies to their
breaking up with boyfriends and girlfriends, sometimes quite publicly,
have been accomplished on the Internet.”

We continue to see the entrepreneurial mind-set deeply rooted in this group.

Typically, we start with about seven or eight students entering Belmont intending to major in entrepreneurship.  They are often are hard core group who are ready to hit the ground learning about all things entrepreneurship.

Over the four (or so) years until they graduate, their numbers usually grow to about 25-30 as more students from their class realize that where they want to go in their careers is a path defined by entrepreneurship.

This year’s freshman class is starting out at about 20 students!

So now the forecasting fun begins.  Will the class of 2015 grow by the typical 20 students?  Or is the growth a multiple, and will they grow to 60-80 by their senior year? 

Like any entrepreneur, I see this growth in our program as a good problem.  But as an grizzled, road tested entrepreneur I know what fast growth can do if you are not careful!!

This year’s freshman will find many improvements in our program.

We have fully implemented the shift in our curriculum to the business modeling approach.  While business plans are still part of what they learn, they are positioned simply as a tool to communicate the business model to investors.

They will also benefit from a major shift in where and when we teach. While the classroom is an important learning environment, we are putting more and more emphasis on learning outside the classroom. 

We have created lots of co-curricular innovations over the past eight years, but they have grown into a difficult array of programs to navigate.  We offer hatcheries to start businesses, various and sundry mentor programs, legal and accounting clinics, seed funding, early stage funding, peer roundtable groups, and so forth.  We realized that many students seemed a bit overwhelmed by what we offered and were not sure what they really needed.

So this year we are focusing our efforts on putting some structure into the co-curricular learning environment.  I have two new team members to help with this effort.  Lisa Davis has joined us as Program Coordinator of the co-curricular programs.  We will be assisted in this initiative this year by veteran tech entrepreneur John Wark, who is serving as our entrepreneur in residence working with our practicing student entrepreneurs.

We also have two new campus-based businesses to join our array of retail and service businesses already in place.  We have two students starting a music store — a natural for Nashville — and are starting an app development company through the collaboration with our alumni who started the app firm Aloompa.

We will be trying to engage the class of 2015 early.  We cannot wait until they arrive in our classes their sophomore or junior years.  They are arriving ready to connect and ready to learn, so we will get them integrated into our co-curricular learning opportunities.

So this year I have a heightened excitement to the beginning of classes.  More budding entrepreneurs creating more challenges and more opportunities.  What more could an entrepreneur in academia ask for?  

When I was first starting up our healthcare business back in the late 1980s the only “technology” I took with me was an AT&T phone card for making calls from the road.  I would punch in a bunch of numbers and then punch in more numbers to make the call.  It was actually pretty cool for the time because before that I used to have to call my wife collect from the road.

Soon I added a couple of amazing new technologies.  One was a car phone.  Only problem was that it was hard wired to my car (with the antenna permanently attached to the roof), so unless I was traveling in my little red Mazda 323 it was of no use.  Also got a pager.  That allowed me to know when people wanted me to take out my AT&T calling card, punch in a bunch of numbers, then punch in their phone number.  Hopefully they were there to answer….

Fast forward a few years and the pager and car phone morphed into a flip phone.  Also got a laptop, although still not in the wireless era so it was kind of a dumb device.  But I felt liberated.  Although carrying the rather bulky laptop everywhere threw my back out a few times….

Today’s tools and toys makes traveling even easier.  My Android phone, iPad and MiFi unit are about all I really need.  Light, easy to use.  Plus, they actually make traveling easier.  I still need my laptop on some trips, but it is no longer essential.  And thank goodness those have gotten a lot lighter — gotta save my old back for golf.

Business on Main offers a short video by Paul Hochman that has a few specific tips on products and devices that make business travel easier and less stressful.  You can check it out here.

(My blog is a part of an online influencer network for Business on Main. I receive incentives to share my views on a monthly basis).

I have been exploring the app for Entrepreneur magazine.  It is a free iPad app that brings the magazine and other content through a single source.

I really like the search function in the “Library”.  That is what I always tended to use at their website, so this is an app that truly eliminates the need for me to go to that website.  At this point it seems that it can only go back to content from 2010 and 2011.  There is some really good content from Entrepreneur that dates back a few years.  Hopefully they will build up the archives available through the app so I won’t have to also search at the website.

Navigation in the app is a bit clunky and slow.  For example, with articles presented in the “Feeds” section it provides links to the web article.  “OK”, I thought. “I will get some more meaty content there.”  But often it is the same article I just read in the app version.  Time wasted.  It is also hard to get out of a specific article once you use the search feature. 

Within an issue it would be great to be able to click on an article and go to it from the contents.  Instead you have to “page through” to get to it.  Quicker to read the hard copy magazine in this case.

I also think it would help to streamline their Feeds.  There are three buttons to choose from that seem to be more convenience for them than easy for the user.  I really don’t care about difference between what is a “Daily Dose” versus a “New Article”.  So why make me click between them.

Navigation is a bit awkward, especially since I go to this app right after I have been using some really slick content apps like USA Today and Fox News apps that are easy and intuitive. 

All in all a good start.  A useful tool that should get easier to use over time.  In spite of it being less the user friendly, it gives some great content.