No matter what business you’re in, achieving success depends on your relationship with your customers. Even if you have a monopoly, unhappy customers will go elsewhere as soon as there’s somewhere to go. So, what are the most important points in taking care of customers?

A recent article in Entrepreneur.com more or less lays out the five most important elements:

-    Be proactive
-    Communicate
-    Have a positive attitude
-    Understand the client’s business
-    Follow-up.

You can read the article for more details.

However, there is one more thing I would add, something I’ve found to be a real issue in many companies – letting management and product development people know about the feedback front line people get from customers.

Years ago a study was done regarding the support desk industry – the people you call when you have a problem with a product or service you’ve purchased. These individuals make a big contribution to a company achieving success. However, it was found that often the support desk people heard about the same problems over and over again – but they didn’t let anyone else know about it. The information never got to management or product development so nothing was ever done to make the necessary changes in the product or service.

Everyone likes to feel like they’re being listened to. It’s a vital part of achieving success in any activity, and a vital entrepreneurial skill.

Some people consider buying a franchise when they want to start their own business. The advantage is, obviously, that the franchisee has a formula that works. Theoretically, if you follow the formula, you shouldn’t have a problem achieving success.

However, even though there’s a good chance of achieving success with a franchise, some franchises do fail. Fortunately, why they fail is no mystery and there are lessons that can be learned from this. Check out Five Reasons Franchises Fail for some answers.

The article lists the obvious:

-   The business model isn’t easily duplicated
-   Location is bad
-   Poor marketing or advertising – including not being able to sell.
-   Competition
-   Unrealistic expectations

But there are two other important factors that, although touched on in the article, are not given the weight they deserve. These are:

-   Liking people and having the ability to work with different personalities
-   The ability to manage employees

It’s the ‘liking people’ issue I feel is pivotal, and it’s really an understatement. You have to be downright gregarious to achieve success in many franchises. You have to welcome every person that comes your way, and be sincere about it – you really have to want people there.

In fact, when it comes to achieving success with an independent business or a franchise, if it involves servicing people, any inkling of, “Not another customer, I just don’t feel like it right now’ will make achieving success next to impossible.

People instinctively know when you don’t really want them there. If that describes you, go home and let someone else run the place. Otherwise, you will be the biggest barrier to achieving success. Knowing when to stand down and let someone else cover the front lines is also a vital entrepreneurial skill.

“Do not look where you fell but where you slipped.” That’s an old African proverb – no one really knows who said it, but it’s a good one. In fact, looking at where you slipped is a key entrepreneurial skill. But what does it mean, and how do you apply it?

Basically, it’s pretty simple. By the time you’ve actually landed (the fall), it’s really too late to do anything about it – staring at the ground where you landed won’t teach you a thing.

However, if you can locate the point at which you started to slip, you can actually prevent future falls.

Let’s look at statistics, for example. The numbers could be going up consistently for weeks or months on end. You look at them every week, and note their climb. Maybe you get the occasional down week but it’s nothing major, easily understandable (a hurricane hit and there was no electrical power, a snow storm kept everyone trapped in their home, and so on), and things go back up the next week.

Then you hit a week that goes down, and you don’t have a clue what’s behind it. That’s the beginning of the slip. Then the numbers go down further the next week and you still don’t have an explanation.

You are headed for a fall.

What is the entrepreneurial skill to be learned here? First, if the numbers start slipping, find out why; now. Second, if you are trying to recover from a fall that happened quite a while ago, look for the point at which things started slipping. There will be your answer.

Achieving success depends on anticipating the future – which you do with entrepreneurial management skills like finding out why things slipped instead of waiting for the fall.