Why loyalty is bad for business and how to value your time
How many jobs did you promise to do, and of those, how mane have you actually managed to do so far?
If your to-do list has as many promised jobs as ‘real’ jobs, then you’re suffering from a sense of loyalty.
Let me explain what I mean, and what I did about this, when it happened to me.
I don’t like letting people down. Generally nobody does. Moreover, a pending task is a form of stress, so it’s a bad idea to let all those to-dos pile up and run around like wild horses in the back of your mind.
I’m forever tweaking my systems – the way I work and live – to make things easier, better and more enjoyable.
It’s no easy task.
Needless to say, there’s always a situation you can plan for, an unknown variable that you have to deal with ‘as you go’.
I came face-to-face with one of these unknown variables this week.
It all started with Windows (as in the operating system). A client rang me because he’s having trouble using an application on his PC. The problem is that the Windows installer broke the mid-update. The application it’s affecting is something he needs to use on a daily basis: it’s an essential tool in his business.
The thing is, I don’t do I.T. these days. But I have history with this client: until I left, I was the IT director in his former company.
Our relationship has changed a lot since then: he’s now a client of mine.
The service has changed too: it’s not I.T. any more; it’s online marketing.
But still there is that history between us, binding us together however loosely. And it seems that – unless you do something to change the dynamic of the relationship, whatever it was that you did before defines you now.
In other words, the man who drives the bus becomes the bus driver, instead of the man with hopes, dreams, aspirations, friends, interests, likes and dislikes… who happens to drive bus for a living.
So to my client and ex-boss, evidently I am the IT guy.
Unless – and until – I do something to change that notion.
Loyalty is a strange thing
So I said I would pop in to his office and sort the problem out.
It was around the Christmas period and I had a bit of time on my hands.
But more than anything it was that sense of loyalty at play.
That was over a week ago. The day I made the appointment was the day that the country was hit by one of the biggest snowstorms in many years. Schools shut down, public transport ground to a halt…
…and I cancelled my appointment.
I told my client – who I imagine is growing more and more desperate by the day – that I simply couldn’t reach him and I’d have to wait until the weather cleared, not knowing of course that it was going to drag on for this long.
As I write this, my car is still completely covered by a thick blanket of snow and ice.
And so I have had this pending task running around in the back of my mind all week.
And here’s the funny thing…
Time is ticking and in a couple of days from now I will be leaving the country for a few days.
This leaves me and my client with the pending task in the air, between us.
Of course, in reality there is nothing up in the air or ‘between’ us: the fact that my client rang me with his issue doesn’t magically transfer the responsibility of the issue onto me. The issue is still my client’s issue, and therefore his responsibility.
But people often see things through their own perspective.
Add to this a sense of loyalty and you have the potential for trouble.
The trouble of course is when the client feels you’ve let them down, because you ‘promised’ something.
How putting a value on your time solves this
How many running threads do you have? How many pending tasks? How many clients waiting on what they perceived was a promise from you?
It helps to sit down and come up with a plan in order to avoid this kind of situation. Running stresses are distractions: they keep your focus away from your business and almost always end up costing you money.
By this I mean that often times pending tasks that are the result of promises based on a sense of loyalty are things that are going to earn you little, or at least less, than if you were doing the job for somebody with whom you didn’t have a bond of any sort.
Or a sense of loyalty.
The important thing in business is to always put a price on your own time, and then decide whether the job is worth doing.
Of course, what’s important in business isn’t always the case outside of the business, especially with relationships.
I often stop work for a couple of hours to pick up groceries for my mother; I stop and chat with a friend; I take time out to tend to things, to be with my other half, to do nothing.
These things are all part of life and necessary: even doing nothing ticks a box.
But you have to draw the line somewhere, especially if you’re running your own business and you’re trying to stay efficient.
Your client is not your mother.
Where you draw the line is completely subjective: it’s a fine balance and only you can decide how to play this. The thing to keep in mind this that any business time you invest on anything other than making money or building a healthy relationship with your client – and by this I mean creating win-win situations – is going to cost you money.
In my case, going out to see my client – especially in the current driving conditions – is going to cost me over an hour of my time each way. That’s two hours in total spent on the road. I’ll need half an hour to prepare beforehand and another half an hour to settle back into work once I return.
That’s three hours downtime.
Plus 1 hour at my client’s office.
That’s a total of four hours: that’s effectively half a day’s work.
The worst part of it is that I can’t charge a callout fee for various reasons;
- I’m not in the I.T. game any more, so I don’t do callouts per se.
- Also there is my relationship with my client to take into account.
- Finally there’s that sense of loyalty which in turn creates a sense of expectation from the other party.
On top of all this, my client has a special rate (because of that sense of loyalty).
In all, I stand to make very little, if I were to go, in exchange for four hours of my time.
Not a good deal, and definitely not a win-win situation.
What I did… and what I took away
In the end I had to contact the client and turn down the job. All things aside, there is no time in my schedule now to fit that visit in, even if I wanted to.
I did however spend some time searching for solutions online, which I provided along with a colleague’s phone number whom they can contact with I.T. related issues.
The thing to take away from this is – as I mentioned earlier – that unless you change the dynamic of the relationship, once a bus driver always a bus driver.
Changing that dynamic can be as simple as choosing the wording in your dealings with your clients.
Build a sense of loyalty for the right reasons – always keeping those win-win deals in mind.
Otherwise, stop promising or creating expectations in your clients’ minds. And if those expectations already exist (because you have ‘history’, or for any other reason) then work to change those expectations if they are not creating win-win deals for both you and your clients.
You’ll have to take the relationship aspect between you and your clients into account, of course, and perhaps there needs to be some give and take. But the point is that your decisions should not be based only on the relationship aspect: they should also take the business aspect into consideration, because this affect your bottom line.
But without loyalty what is there?
Loyalty is something banks strive to build with you. But is your bank loyal to you in return? Try going into debt if you need an answer to this…
But without loyalty you may wonder what there is, or what kind of business you will be running.
The answer is integrity.
Integrity makes good business, loyalty doesn’t.
If you have integrity and you carry this across your business then no harm will befall you and your clients will respect you.
By definition, integrity keeps you on the right track and makes you strive to achieve win-win deals.
And nobody can complain when this is the case.
Business tip: when it comes to making business decisions always put a value on your time and act accordingly. If something is not worth your time, find a way to create a win-win deal.
Feel free to buy me a coffee if I helped you in any way ;)
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