Partner Article

Do people like doing business with you?

Over bank holiday I cycled the Sustrans Coast & Castles route from Newcastle to Edinburgh. It’s a fabulous journey of contrasts, but not just the contrasts of coast and country. Many memories come from the type of welcome we found each time we stopped.

In a world full of coffee shops and tea rooms we experienced an amazing range of quality. Clean premises, an appetising display of fresh looking food and smiling staff who seemed pleased to see customers seems fairly straightforward to me, yet was only found at half our stops. The others were grubby, sticky and surly with an atmosphere suggesting they didn’t want visitors. A catchy name doesn’t make a good business!

Hotel accommodation seemed better in terms of service but handicapped by lack of investment in premises - poor quality fixtures and fittings now needing replacement and a distinct feel of the 1970s exacerbated by the apple juice fermenting in its dispenser!

An interesting correlation lay between the general feel of a town and the businesses within the town. Lovely setting and architecture but an air of depression tended to mean a dour welcome and gave little incentive to us to stop, whereas less attractive towns and villages which had pleasant businesses and a warm welcome encouraged us to stop. Chicken and egg? Catch 22? Maybe, but the difference starts at the micro level of individual businesses, not the macro level of the town, city or region.

Look at your own business; is it a pleasure to do business with you? Do you irritate potential customers with a myriad of pointless rules (the equivalent of ‘fruit juice or cereal’ but not both!) or overt cost cutting (the hotel with no shower gel or postage stamp size bath towel). If it is true to say people do business with people it must be worth being a pleasure to do business with.

One benefit of being a member of a peer group of non-competing businesses is that you can find out first-hand from other business leaders how businesses in other sectors address this fairly basic requirement for success and adapt those methods for your own business.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Denis Kaye .