15You're Fired!
The Common (and Fatal) Mistakes That Businesses Make
I cowrote a blog called The Five Friends with my friends Larry Winget, Mark Sanborn, Randy Pennington, and Scott McKain. In the blog, we talk about subjects ranging from the greatest challenges that businesses face and best practices for employers to how selling has changed and the relative importance of hiring vs. training. We cover a lot of ground, and occasionally we use the blog to just let off some steam about things that are bothering us. Recently, our blog dealt with the common (and fatal) mistakes that businesses make and, specifically, businesses that each of us have fired as a result.
It can take years to build your magnetism with customers, and it can be lost in an instant. Often we lose a customer because of simple and completely avoidable mistakes. The great danger is that we might lose our vigilance against making such mistakes and lose customers because we simply weren't paying attention.
What follows are our stories of companies we have fired and the reasons we did.
I'll begin with my own contribution to the “You're Fired!” blog with my story about six infuriating months I spent in a quagmire of off-the-charts terrible customer service at the hands of the phone company.
Joe Calloway Fired a Phone Company
A couple of years ago I fired a company that had become irrelevant to me, and the ensuing madness and incompetence was almost beyond description. I will never do business with them again. ...
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