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Tinking Turtle Raverly

Maternity and Parental Leave III: Informing your Customers

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As I mentioned in the last post in what has now become far more of a series than I had imagined, having a well crafted and working plan internally for your business is only half the challenge.  In order to maintain the trust and loyalty of your customers, preparing them for any changes in your business operations is key to ensuring this joyous time is as stress-free as possible for both the new parents and the business owner.

Balloon LogoDepending on your business model, this notification, and how you change your own operations, can vary significantly.  For a retail shop, it could very well be that the day-to-day operations for the casual customers are unaffected.  Perhaps it’s only those specialty orders or specific classes that will take a bit longer to fill or offer.  Alternatively, for a single-performer organization like Tinking Turtle, there are significant changes we needed to let our client base know about.  Specifically, for Classes & Instruction, Jennifer would be unavailable for either contract teaching or private lessons for a period of several months, and for our Finishing and Repair Services, we have already closed project intake and started a waiting list.

In order to ensure sufficient lead time for notification, we believed in  spreading the message about our new schedule and/or services early.  We’ve found that our customers- especially those who are repeat visitors and with whom we have an established relationship – are extremely willing to work with you to adapt to your “new normal”.  Having a child is an exciting time in almost everyone’s life, and framing the communication to reflect this can breed a great amount of good will among everyone your business interacts with.

Because our stakeholder base is fairly varied, we utilized a multi-tiered approach to ensure everyone was informed.  You can never (or almost never) reach every possible individual with whom you interact, so identifying the individuals you need to contact into “buckets” and then tailoring a communication out to each bucket would be a good first step.  For us that consisted of the following:

  • A pair of Blog Posts and an email notification out to our mailing list to notify individuals of the exciting news and potential changes.
  • Updating on our website service pages as early as possible to socialize the new schedule of offerings with individuals
  • Direct Outreach via email or phone call to our key vendor partners including publishers, LYS’s, and Fair, Festival, and Retreat contacts informing them of the changes

Additionally, we’ve tried to be as transparent as possible both through subsequent blog posts (like this series) and in our followup conversations responding to inquiries to keep everyone appraised of our future plans.

This brings everything full circle to where we are today; at this point plans are in place, customers are informed, and now it’s a matter of routine upkeep of the plan until the happy day arrives!

Have any questions about aspects of maternity or parental leave that I haven’t touched on?  Want to see anything more in-depth?  Leave me a note in the comments and maybe it can be the focus of a future installment in this series!

~ Mr. Turtle

 

 

From the Business Desk: Stakeholder Engagement

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From the Business Desk is back.  From the Business Desk is a semi-regular series that looks at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber Arts Business.  This feature revolves around managing the many important parties your business works with on a daily basis.


Due to the specialized nature of a fibre arts small business, you most likely are interfacing with a large number of external parties in your day to day business operations.  From suppliers and vendors to accountants and banks to individual customers, the web of interactions you weave is a significant challenge to manage for any business owner.

Complex web of your network.  Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Managing these types of interactions with all of these various individuals is key to a business’s well being, as often times a business is judged by the market not by it’s actual results, but by how it operates and delivers results against its’ expectations.  You see this a lot of times with Fortune 500 companies where although they could show spectacularly profitable results, if these do not meet the expectations of the organization, things like it’s image, reputation, clientele, or stock price can suffer. 

There are many in-depth training classes you can take from high-paid consultants on how you can accomplish this; what I’m going to do is share some high-level tips for how we at Tinking Turtle keep track of things here to best manage the expectations of all of the interrelated individuals we commonly interact with.

Constant External Communication.  Communication is absolutely tops in managing any sort of relationship that you have, be it with a vendor for ordering supplies, or a customer expecting a deliverable on a particular project.  Often times, when you know things are not going according to plan and you cannot meet a deadline, the earlier you can communicate this, the better.  That way things don’t come as a shock to those impacted, and if you can both communicate the issue and what you are doing to resolve it, you can ensure your relationships are positively maintained.  Studies show that customer loyalty can actually be increased if your business takes ownership and provides an exceptional level of service in the event of a customer service issue.

Internal Communication.  If your business has more than one employee, it is vital that all of the staff are on the same page and have access to information regarding the various stakeholders that they interact with.  Nothing is more off-putting than to have an external vendor be told “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about” in relation to an issue.  This could be something as simple as having a weekly staff meeting, or a common room whiteboard with a high level FYI list of things to be aware of for all of the associates to have access to.  There are also technology solutions to allow these relationships to be documented, having a CRM application is one avenue that Tinking Turtle uses, as to us, everyone we interact with from vendors to contractors to customers is tracked in our system.

Understanding Expectations.  The last item I want to stress here is the importance of actually understanding the expectations of everyone you interact with.  A classic example of this can be found in the Project Management Tire Swing analogy, which has been around for quite some time and is demonstrated in many introduction to Stakeholder Engagement classes.

The importance of understanding expectations.

By making assumptions about what is really necessary in a relationship, the chance for misscommunication is high, which then leads to situations where one party’s expectations are vastly different than the other.  A good way to think about this in any interaction is to ensure that both you and the other party have clearly understood conditions of satisfaction that need to be met as part of this relationship.  In ensuring that you have established these up front, it is much easier to then set expectations, and then identify areas that can be changed as the nature of the relationship changes.

These are only a few of the ways that small businesses can work to ensure that the relationships with the many individuals and organizations with which they interact remain strong.  It is the strength of these relationship, and how engaged you are keeping all parties involve that can really be a stragic benefit to the long-term success of any fiber arts business.

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