Yesterday, I attended the monthly breakfast meeting of the local technology council, and left with a couple of really good takes on “rules for doing business”.
The title of this post is my favorite.
I really love being a businessperson, and through the years, I’ve read hundreds of articles and dozens of books about entrepreneurism.
But the simple idea that a problem is an opportunity to “own” that customer – for life – is one of the best phrasings of a business philosophy I’ve ever heard.
These kind of opportunities come up all the time, and this past week was no exception.
Yesterday, I got an email from the Controller of one of my oldest clients. We are in our fifth year of running a piece of custom software which I wrote for them, and yesterday, part of this app stopped working.
I’ve been debugging it, off and on, since mid-day yesterday, and finally found the problem a little before 8 am today.
I’ve been keeping their IT director up to speed, and he wrote back this morning that, as we suspected, there was a software upgrade on their production server. We don’t know for sure that this is the source of the problem, but it’s a strong suspect.
In reflecting on this, I’ve come to the conclusion that problems will inevitably arise in software development: those of our own making; our customer’s making; and in some cases, the vendor’s making.
So, we can never avoid problems altogether, but we CAN control how we deal with them.
This contrasts with something that’s been on my mind about a business transaction involving some very close friends of mine, and a semi-friend/acquaintance.
Without going into details, except to say that I introduced all the parties, my friends have been very unhappy with the acquaintance’s performance involving some major lifestyle changes they want to make.
My friends have been made to feel that their needs – which are reasonable – are of a low priority. They’ve been given misinformation. There have been issues with diligence and commitment.
In short, they fell they have not been treated with the degree of professionalism which anyone who spends good money deserves.
On the other hand, the acquaintance probably thinks she’s been working hard for them, and in a way, she’d be right: she’s probably done 90% of a difficult job.
Unfortunately, it’s the last 10% that’s been lacking, and that’s what often makes the difference between a lousy deal and a really good one.