Small Biz Survival

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Mistakes when selling to friends, family or people you know

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This is a critical topic for rural small businesses: avoiding mistakes when selling to friends, family, or people you know.

Cristian Dorobantescu is a young entrepreneur in Romania, learning and sharing some lessons that apply to all small businesses. Right now, he’s dealing with this very topic. His list of mistakes includes:

  • You don’t make a clear contract for the job and this leaves space to interpretations and excessive demands from the customer (and this is where everything starts actually.)
  • You do things you wouldn’t normally do for a regular customer, like keeping a very low price or even worse, not updating the price when the costs are higher
  • You’ll take every mistake or failure personally
  • Bad situations don’t affect only your business but also affect your personal relationship or friendship to people
  • You will spend a lot of extra hours trying to make things better, and this will prevent you from doing a better business to people you have never met
  • You will not be able to tell your friend customer that he did mistakes (like for example keep changing the work specs) and that why things are not as they should be

Read the whole post for more of Dorobantescu’s perspective.

About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.

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