I've written a book.

Here's what one reviewer said about it:

"Kirsten has written a book every business owner secretly wishes they had years ago. It’s a practical, step-by-step toolkit that shows you how to stop being the bottleneck in your own business. No jargon, no lofty theory, just straightforward advice and examples that make it easy to apply straight away. If you’ve ever felt guilty for taking time off, or anxious that the whole show would collapse without you, Kirsten gives you the confidence and the structure to step away. Read this and you’ll finally see how your business can run without you, not because you don’t matter, but because you’ve built it to last."

😊 😊 😊

Of course you'll recognise it. I wrote it all here first.

I'd love some more reviews. Reply to this email you'd like to review it before I publish it later this month.

Not everything that goes wrong is your fault. Here's how to deal with it.

Hey there,

Another thing that keeps business owners from taking a break, or relaxing properly when they’re supposed to be on a break, is the thought that their team might have to deal with (as one reader put it) “a major client cock up that we couldn’t have anticipated” - a big mistake that has become urgent.

Or more particularly the fear that their team might simply freeze in the face of such a cock up and so fail to take timely and appropriate action, leading ultimately to a major client complaint when ‘the Boss’ gets back.

So in this newsletter I’m going to work though how to:

anticipate the kinds of client mistakes that might happen, and plan how to deal with them
craft a universal process for dealing with client mistakes you can apply to your own business
give your team the confidence to deal with big client mistakes while you’re away

anticipate the kinds of client mistakes that might happen, and plan how to deal with them

The scariest element behind this worry is the unknown-ness of what might happen.

But in actual fact, there are going to be a limited number of things that can go wrong from your client’s side, just as a limited number of things can go wrong from yours.

So just as with complaints, the place to start building confidence in your team to deal with client errors is to identify what those things could be.

In other words, just as we created Per-Product Complaint Scenarios, you can create Client Cock-up Scenarios, ahead of when you might need them.

Here’s how:

Start by choosing one Product or Service. You could choose by net-profit margin, frequency of sale, probability of client mistakes, or even by the impact of a mistake.

However you choose the first product you work on, once you’ve gone through this process for a single product or service, you’ll be able to:

a) use it immediately for that product or service, and

b) create a Client Cock-up Scenario for everything else you sell.

The best way to identify the kinds of mistakes clients can make is by getting your team together. Some of them may even have experienced them already in another firm. Inany case more heads are always better than one.

By all means use AI, but remember that it only knows what’s been shared on the internet, and it’s so eager to please that it makes things up.

Use your own and your team’s actual and probably extensive know-how and experience both to identify likely problems and possible solutions and to sense-check results.

Now you've got your team together, and thinking about your industry as a whole, plus the product or service you’ve selected:

Ask yourselves:

What sort of mistakes do clients make?
For each mistake you identfy:
- How does it usually happen?
- What’s the impact on the client?
  - What’s the worst that could happen for them as a result?
  - What’s the best that could happen?
  - What are the knock-on effects?
  - What would that cost the client?
- What options are there?
  - for preventing the worst?
  - for fixing the mistake?
  - for mitigating any effects of the results?

The key here is to draw on your combined experience and know-how to come up with practical solutions that can be implemented quickly if necessary. You might even distinguish between ‘Quick Options’ and ‘Slower Options’. You know your own business best.

Once you’ve identified possible options, add in:

What you need from them to be able to implement the solution
What each option would cost you to do.
Would you might charge the client. If you decide to charge the client.

Finally, since prevention is better than cure, answer this question:

How could you stop a client from making this mistake again?

What could you change in your own processes to minimise the likelihood of a client making this mistake?

‘I bet Kirsten’s created a template for us to put all these scenarios in’

Of course I have.

Here it is: Client Cock-up Scenarios (TEMPLATE).

Make a copy, download and fill it in for your own business.

build these into a universal process for dealing with client mistakes you can apply to your own business

Once you have your likely scenarios, you can use them as a Prop in a process for dealing with client errors.

In some ways this is going to be quite similar to the process for handling complaints.

A client that has just made, or found out about a big mistake is going to be emotional - worried, maybe even terrified, of what might happen, perhaps angry with themselves for making the mistake, panicking and wanting an immediate answer.

So as with a complaint, the first step is to acknowledge the client’s feelings, empathise with them and help them get to a state where they can think rationally about what to do next.

This means the first Activity in your ‘Handle Client Mistake’ process is going to be similar to ‘Create Rapport’.

Similar, but not the same, so let’s give it a different name. Let’s call it...

‘Create Calm’:

Remember, even if this is a scenario you’ve seen many times before, for the client this is probably the first time it’s happened.

So put yourself in your client’s shoes, and show the kind of sympathy that enables them to recover enough equanimity to move on. Your sympathy won’t change facts, but it does help to put your client in the right state to be able to consider those facts sensibly.

Don’t spend too much time here, but do make sure they manage to calm down. You can use phrases like "You must be tearing your hair out, but I’m sure we’ll find some way to make this situation better than it is now."

As soon as the client has recovered their equanimity, and only then,

Ask for the facts of what’s happened. Make a note of what’s happened:

What went wrong?
When did it happen?

If you recognise the Cock-up Scenario, you can reassure them: “We’ve dealt with this kind of thing before. There will be an impact, but it may not be as bad as you think.”

Then move on to the next Activity:

‘Explore Consequences’

In this Activity, you calmly and patiently go through the possible consequences of the mistake with the client. Ask them:

What’s the worst than can happen?
What’s the best that could happen?
What are the knock-on effects?
What are the costs for you?

The reason for doing this is that by helping the client to identify and bottom out any possible consequences, you also help them to start dealing with them as something concrete. And bounded. Something that can be tackled practically, rather than feared as a great big unknown.

In this way, you start to move them towards thinking about possible solutions, which you do in:

‘Explore Options’

In this Activity, you use your knowledge and experience, together with the Client Cock-up Scenarios, to work through all the options you and the client can think of to:

fix the mistake,
prevent as many of the consequences as possible,
or at least mitigate the effects of those consequences for the client.

Remember, this is a collaborative exercise between you and the client.

Once you’ve covered all the possibilities you can move on to:

‘Agree Plan of Action’

In this Activity you decide which of the options you are going to take, and in what order.

Remember to assign responsibility to a specific person, whether that is in your organisation or the client’s. The result should be a list of actions, with a description of what to do, who is going to do it and by when.

Remember also to agree how you are going to communicate progress on the Plan. That will depend on the nature of the mistake and the urgency of the actions.

Whatever you agree, write it down as part of the Plan.

‘Execute Plan’

Finally, execute the Plan, to the best of the combined abilities of you and your client. Communicating as you go, and being prepared to adjust the plan in the face of what actually happens.

So what you might end up with is a process that looks something like this:

give your team the confidence to deal with big client mistakes while you’re away

The way to help you team get confident enough to handle big mistakes that might happen while you’re away, is to have them practice handling small mistakes all the time.

Create Client Cock-up Scenarios for all the mistakes your clients are likely to make that you need to help them with, not just the big ones.

Train your team to run your new ‘Handle Client Mistake’ process. In training, give them the ‘easy’ ones to deal with first. Then let them run through some of the more impactful mistakes.

Let them practice running the process before you take your next break. That way you and they will be both be more confident that they can do it.

Finally, make sure everyone is totally familiar with your ‘Fedex Sentence’, so that even if the scenario is one you haven't encountered before, they've got some solid principles to work to.

Nobody wants a client to make a mistake.

But sometimes you can't prevent it - even if you know they're going to make it.

So the next best thing is to be able to calmly and practically be able to help them out of it. Nad help them learn from it.

That’s it for this newsletter.

Here’s what I hope you learned today:

The world is a complex place. It’s not possible to anticipate everything that might happen. But you run a business in a specific industry, in a speciific niche, for a known set of clients. Your business universe is not as unknowable as you might think. You may not be able to anticipate every single thing that might go wrong - that’s just not possible - but you can probably anticipate most of the things that are likely to go wrong. So do what you can.
Remember, if the mistake the client makes is something you genuinely couldn’t anticipate, the combination of a universal ‘Handle Client Mistake’ process and your ‘Fedex Sentence’, will almost certainly guide your team to a good solution. Maybe not the optimum, maybe not what you might have done in their place, but certainly good enough to make the client appreciate the help. Even if you aren’t able to completely fix the problem your intent will show, and you’ll strengthen the relationship between you. And that’s what matters.
Customer mistakes, like customer complaints are feedback. Use them to improve what you do for your customers, and they’ll make your business stronger.

Well, almost it.

Here's a bonus idea for you:

One reason ‘major client cock ups’ happen, is because an original mistake isn’t caught when it would be relatively easy to fix, and the consquences small.

This usually happens because of batching.

When you’re dealing with many clients going through the same process it’s tempting to group the work together and deal with all the clients at a particular step at the same time. Like having one person perform each separate step of making a pin on a big batch of pins at the same time, instead of letting each person work on creating a single pin from start finish.

This seems efficient, but one problem with this approach is that you might not notice a mistake that happens near the start of the process until the client has got near the end. And that is almost always going to make the mistake more difficult to fix because of all the work that’s been put on top of it. And if there’s regulation involved, it may also mean hitting up against an immovable deadline that adds additional consequences for the client.

The solution is twofold:

1) Include this process snippet wherever you need to get information from the client:

2) Let each client flow through the process without batching, in real time.

So that information is checked as it comes in, not just before it is about to be used.

If you’ve already had a go at creating your own ‘Restore Customer Faith’ process for dealing with complaints, why not use your experience of doing that to tackle this ‘Handle Client Mistake’ process?

If you haven’t, tell me, would it help if I put together a workshop where you and your team could build and practice your own ‘Restore Customer Faith’ Process’ over a few afternoons?

As always, thanks for reading!