HBI #12: I suck, and other confessions of a business owner

One of the worst parts of running a business is unhappy customers.

In my opinion, a business exists primarily to solve problems for its customers and generate a profit.

So when a customer feels like using your product/service either didn’t solve their problem…or worse, caused them more problems…that’s tough to hear as an owner.

I’ve had over 180 happy customers at Crypto Tax Made Easy in the last seven months. I have nothing but 5 star reviews on our products & services. And the business is built almost entirely on referrals.

But it was inevitable that, eventually, I would have an unhappy customer.

And that day was Monday.

Two negatively perceived things that haven’t happened yet, happened with this same client.

And now it’s time to learn from it.

Sucky McSuck #1

The first negative experience for this client was that they thought I didn’t communicate our call location adequately with them.

My done-for-you crypto tax service doesn’t include a call with me.

I don’t even sell the service on a call. It’s really simple.

If you don’t know how to do your crypto tax, I do it for you. If you’re willing to pay my non-negotiable rate, then we work together.

I don’t want to work with people who have to be convinced to use the service, and this is probably why I have so many raving fans of the business.

It’s usually the people who seek out a service that solves a problem they know they have, at a price they deem fair who are the happiest clients.

Clients who have to be convinced through sales tactics & objection handling can be good clients. But on average, there is a higher probability they are dissatisfied with the service.

And I don’t get on calls with paying clients unless they ask, at which point it is usually billed hourly.

99.9% of the time there is no reason to need a call with me as a client. I am not an accountant, and therefore cannot give tax advice.

However, occasionally clients do want me to explain to them how I do the work and how the calculations work in case they need to explain it to their accountant.

In these cases, I often make an exception in the name of client experience and do it free.

In this specific client case, I did make such an exception.

However, for some reason this client ended up on Google Meet when our meeting was on Zoom.

They waited and waited. I waited and waited. Our lines were crossed.

Then I ended the conference and politely acknowledged that perhaps something came up for them and sent over a loom video covering what we would have discussed on the call.

They were understandably frustrated that they waited on Google Meet, and that I ended the Zoom conference instead of waiting the entire period of the scheduled call.

They felt their time had been wasted, and that I neither did a good job of communicating and also was wrong in leaving the conference when they didn’t show up.

Suck-lution #1

I reflected on this to determine: what could I have done better in order to avoid this situation?

Should I just refuse to get on calls with clients altogether?

No, that’s just an emotional all-or-nothing response. This is something that clients have appreciated in the past. And they all found the Zoom link without issue.

Could I have communicated more clearly?

Yes.

Although I added the Zoom link to the calendar invite, and sent the Zoom invitation to the client both before the call and when they didn’t show up right away - they may not have been monitoring their email.

I think what happened is I created the calendar event, which automatically creates a Google Meeting room.

The original invitation email would have contained the Google meeting link, not the zoom link. So maybe this client joined the meeting by searching for that original email in their inbox?

My solution is that if I am going to schedule a Zoom conference, I will set up the meeting natively in Zoom.

This means the Zoom invitation should be in the Google Calendar emails from the beginning, and no confusing Google Meet links will ever be sent.

And regarding me ending the conference when they didn’t show up after 8-minutes - should I have stayed on?

I’ve concluded, no.

It’s the week before tax deadline and my workload is massive. The task-switching required to monitor Zoom in case they show up late while also trying to complete other work is a productivity drain.

I still feel solid in my personal policy that if someone is 5-minutes late to a call without prior warning, I will end the conference, reschedule if appropriate, and move on with my day.

Sucky McSuck #2

And that leads to the second point of frustration for this client.

They expected me to pay for their reports from the crypto tax software company, and they called me deceitful for not doing so.

This was a tough bit of feedback to stomach. I believe I am quite forthright in the way I describe my services.

And to be accused of intentionally deceiving them when I have absolutely no upside from doing so felt extreme.

I had 60+ clients utilize the same exact service they used, and every single one of them understood that they had to pay for the software, and my job was to fix the errors in the software. This is how the service is described.

However, what I learned from this situation is that some people will make assumptions about a service/offering, so I need to make sure things that seem obvious to me are crystal clear/

The point of contention they raised is around what “done-for-you” means.

They believed my done-for-you service included not only me doing the work for them. But me paying for their software and delivering a digital and/or physical copy of their crypto tax report.

I never explicitly say that I will pay for their software.

And in past businesses where I’ve hired “done-for-you” agencies…I’ve always paid for the software as a client and understood this implicitly.

I paid for the ads done-for-you ad agencies ran on my behalf.

I paid for the email marketing software that done-for-you copywriters used to send the emails they wrote on my behalf.

But this client thought that since they don’t have to pay for their accountant’s software subscriptions, that they shouldn’t have to pay for the crypto tax software.

The difference is obvious to me, but I can see why it wouldn’t be to them.

An accountant pays one licensing fee to be able to use the software in their business. And then they use it for all of their clients. So the marginal cost is near nothing per client.

But the crypto tax software I use does not charge me one licensing fee for unlimited client usage. It is a retail software that charges $99+ for each tax report.

That would be a high marginal cost relative to the price of my service, which is why I don’t include it in my pricing. Rather, I have negotiated a discounted rate for my clients with the software company.

The analogy here would be:

You went to your doctor, and they gave you a prescription. When you get to the pharmacy, and the pharmacist asked you to pay for your pills you called the doctor back and said they deceived you and that they should pay for your pills.

That’s how I see it.

The doctor didn’t charge you for the software they used to input your prescription in their system. The marginal cost is near 0 across their patients. It’s a cost of doing business.

But if they had to pay for your prescription, that could kill their practice. So they’d either have to charge you more - and you pay the cost of the pills anyway. Or they eat the cost and have their margins obliterated.

Suck-lution #2

So in this case I have taken a lesson from it, and it’s simple.

Most people will understand that it is not my responsibility to pay for their software.

But based on current numbers, 1.6% of clients will not understand this.

Therefore, in order to avoid this situation again I will just put an explicit disclaimer that I do not pay for their crypto tax software. Problem solved.

I’ll be frank - I wasted more time and energy on this situation than is healthy.

The fact that I was being accused of deception definitely elicited an emotional response when, from my perspective, I had gone out of my way to try to give this client a great experience!

But instead of a raving fan, I had the opposite.

So what should I have done?

From “Suckit” To “Profit”

Should I have done the typical customer service thing where you profusely apologize and do something extreme to try to make them happy?

Well, from a pure business perspective…probably not.

My friend Jay Goncalves wrote a book “Customer Success Manifesto”.

And in it, he references how most business owners focus too much energy trying to take people having a bad experience to having an average experience.

But every client having a stellar experience with your business is 9x as profitable as a client having an average experience.

Why?

Because they spend more with you, and tend to refer business at a much higher rate.

So your energy is generally better spent helping clients have an average experience move to having a stellar experience.

In this case, I tried to create the stellar experience out of the gate.

But things moved into bad experience territory quickly.

If I just reallocated that time and energy I spent trying to deal with the unhappy client, I may have been able to create one or more raving fan clients.

But I didn’t. So taking the feedback, and improving my services (even marginally, and for rare client situations) is me making lemonade with lemons.

Big love, even if you think I suck.

-Matty Dubs