Build People-First Relationships to Watch Your Business Grow
When building a business, it’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of navigating legal hurdles, securing suppliers, and then focusing on what your business delivers while forgetting one of the most essential pieces of any business–your unique selling proposition. A unique selling proposition is what your brand or business offers that no other business or brand can supply. When contemplating yours, one of the most important factors to consider can’t be measured like dollars or donuts. It’s how you treat your clients and business partners.
Building a people-first business isn’t difficult, but it does require a mindset shift that can be difficult. So, here are three tips for shifting your business or brand into a people-first business.
Cultivate a Can-Do Company
Getting on record as the company that gets things done puts your company in the driver’s seat when it comes to new business. Remember, you don’t just work with other brands and companies, you work with people at those companies. Being the group that solves problems for those people makes you incredibly valuable and–when people naturally move on to other roles–they remember you. So, how do you cultivate a can-do company to back your people-first business?
For starters, it’s about mindset and company culture. If you’re in any leadership role, lead from the front. Make sure your people see you doing the work you ask everyone to do. Then, inspire confidence. Let your staff know you trust them to find solutions and to come to you for help when they need it.
Being “Can-Do” doesn’t mean never saying no to a client request, it just means finding solutions wherever they are available. Taking on too many tasks can risk burning out key members of your team, so make sure to keep track of their status and needs with regular check-ins.
If you do find yourself facing tasks your team can’t immediately handle in-house, consider reaching out to a company that offers virtual assistants to shift responsibilities or get additional help. That way, you become the connection that gets things done for your partner brands and businesses.
Engage Beyond Work
Clients, employees, business partners, and everyone you work with in your professional life is a person first. They have lives, families, and interests far outside the professional realm that most people know nothing about. If you’re going to be a people-first business or brand, however, you do need to engage beyond the purely professional realm.
It’s easy to see why. Names and numbers in a phone don’t mean much. Attaching meaning to them, even simple meaning, can improve relationships considerably.
Let’s say you know “Tim” is really into golf. If you inquire about Tim’s golf game or if he saw the latest round of the PGA, Tim knows you are listening to his interests. Tim starts to think of you less as a business associate and more as a friend. This puts you at the top of the list for future business interactions.
Now, before you start thinking this is manipulation, remember this is the way all friendships are built everywhere. And, in the long run, building a strong partnership is beneficial for you, “Tim,” and all the other individuals served by your people-first business.
Open Up Flex Time In Your Schedule
The biggest concern with developing a people-first business is the same as the single largest concern with every other facet of a new enterprise: time. Rebuilding a company culture and creating stronger relationships with clients both take time that professionals are far too often short on.
Implementing these changes requires you to be able to open up flex time in your schedule. There are lots of ways to do this: eliminating or delegating low-importance tasks, cross-training staff so that work can be shared more evenly, or hiring on additional staff. Or–shameless plug–you can retain the services of a virtual assistant via Strategic Management and Logistics.
Whatever option you choose for opening up flexible time in your schedule, be sure to build in enough time to communicate to your larger team the goals and steps of your plan as you cultivate your can-do company attitude, engage beyond work with clients, and open up time in your schedule to implement your people-first business plan.
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