EP222 Own It | Ken Courtright’s Today’s Growth | Growing Business Today

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Own It

This is a topic that is not about growing business today. It’s about growing business at any time. This principle would have worked phenomenal 500 years ago. It’s going to work phenomenally in a thousand years. This episode is called Own It. What I mean by that is, you know when you’ve made a mistake. You know it. You also know that in many cases you can easily not mention it. You could hide it, you could overlook it, you could sidestep it, or you can physically own it. Take ownership of it, apologize for it sincerely, and make up for it. I want to walk you through a few situations where you might want to consider owning it and how this will grow your business dramatically.

Let’s first look at customers. If you’re listening to this podcast, either you want more customers, you want to keep the ones you have, and in some cases, you do want to fire some customers and you should. The reality is I don’t know if you’re going to be able to go through your business life and not make mistakes with your customers.

You’re either going to deliver late, you might underserve. You might promise one thing, then realize what it costs to deliver it and deliver another thing, hoping they don’t notice. These are all mistakes I’ve made in my life. In most cases, if not every case when I’ve realized I made a big blunder, I’ve owned it. I’m not going to say I enjoy it, but since I’ve owned it and apologized for it so many times because I’ve made so many mistakes, the reciprocal is the customer is blown away that you’ve even admitted it. Half the time, they didn’t even know you made a mistake. Half the time, they don’t care, but because you owned it, they basically lean forward and say, “This is a person of credibility. This is a person of integrity. I can’t wait to do business with them again.”

Let’s move on to your spouse, your family, or your significant other. If you’re going to kick ass in business, you’re going to need their support. When you miss a kid’s event, when you miss an anniversary, when you miss whatever, when you forget something, when you screw up, please try owning it. Especially the men listening to this podcast. For some reason, the machoism inside us wants us to move on, maybe a little silent treatment. Definitely try ignoring it, it will go away. Time heals all wounds. Why don’t you own it? Try owning your next three mistakes, which will probably be now and see how they react.

See how they melt, see how they open up and say, “No, it was probably my fault.” How about vendors that you might be a little bit late in paying? You’re not dramatically late. If they give you a net 30 and you paid net 40, they’re never going to call you. Not in today’s day and age, not from 2008 to 2014 when people were paying 90 days and six months late. How about owning it and say, “I’m not going to be on time, but I’m not going to be past fifteen days late.” How about owning that? How about with your employees? How many times do you know you’re messing something up with an employee? You don’t think you have the energy to do the calls, the emails, fly out to see him, to apologize for it and own it.

Yet you know if you did it, it would make such a big change in their life, in your relationship, and the production. It’s amazing. How about joint and affiliate partners? These aren’t your partners like a partner agreement contract where you have to run your business. These are affiliate partners. Maybe you co-authored books. You speak on their stage, they do advertising for you. You use them every time. You never would consider using someone else. There could even be a pay to play partnership, like an Amazon affiliate where if you promote your products on Amazon, you get your 4% to 12% or whatever it is. How about when you screw up there and you’re messing up their platform? That’s such an easy one to ignore. You’re not going to go back to them for six months or a year. You won’t see them again until the next event.

So much time is going to pass, so much water will be under the bridge. They’ll probably forget it. They won’t. In business, all business partnerships, which includes employees, which includes vendors, which includes bankers, which includes every type of transaction, have the memory of elephants. They don’t forget a thing. Nobody forgets when someone slights them. Nobody forgets when someone doesn’t deliver promptly. Nobody forgets when someone doesn’t pay on time. What is amazing is nobody ever forgets when somebody owns it, makes up for it, apologizes sincerely for it and makes the proper corrections. Nobody ever forgets that and that word of mouth in their circles that you made good on something spreads better than good customer service. I hope this helps.