Stop Communication Procrastination

I have shared highlights and interactions from the Smart Cleaning Tribe that I facilitate every Monday. This past week's call was wide-ranging in topics, but one issue spoke to many in the Tribe. Communication. When you run a solo business under $100k, it's fairly easy to maintain all communication of email, texts, and online messages with your customers. For the most part, solos have under 30 customers and they don't have many emails to address. It does get much harder to be responsive and accountable to ALL communication as your revenue grows. In this episode, this issue comes up big time in 2021 to bite Mark's business. He doesn't ignore his emails. Mark runs a very successful janitorial company over $1 million in revenue and gets up to 50 emails per day from customers, employees, and vendors. This is not a task that Mark could or should do on his own. He has tried and it cost him 2 customers in 2021. Here's the irony. Mark (like others in the Tribe including me) are guilty of procrastinating on their communication. They respond quickly to the email, but not fully. This buys us time to come back to the email when we have time. The problem as you may have guessed it. We don't have the time to come back to it. Therefore, we drop the ball and the communication procrastination hurts our reputations and bank accounts. 

Lizzy identified an interesting reason for her communication procrastination. She is a perfectionist and waits until she has all of the answers perfect before she replies. This may not happen because of time crunching. Her irony is that she has GETMO quotes all over the wall. Go back to my episode called "Perfection is the Enemy" to hear more on this. Michelle shares her insecurities and failure in this area as well.

When I get to Bryan, we were all surprised to hear him say. "I am strong in this area." He has dropped the ball in the past and has implemented a delegation strategy. He hired a VA to do various office-related tasks for his company. One of those tasks is to monitor all inbound communication and hold Bryan accountable to his full response to every message. Bryan is the one responding. However, he delegated the accountability to a VA and now he is never unresponsive. Mark's solution is similar but also very different. He is hiring a full-time office person to take over all communication. It will their job to never let what happened to Mark ever happen again. Mark will check in with his employee to hold them accountable. He is keeping the accountability piece and delegating the communication. In both solutions, delegation with accountability is the answer.
Would you like to learn more about the Smart Cleaning Tribe? Check out our testimonial videos and free content on the Tribe page!