Reach for the Sky: RTA Business on the Art of Innovation

The amazing news that Google is attempting to build an honest to goodness self-driving car, only highlights the need for creativity and ambition in business, and this week, the RTA Business blog will explore just why you need to reach for the sky if you hope to make a substantial profit on the sale of your business.

It’s not as easy as showing a potential buyer your profit margins and waiting for them to sign on the dotted line. Buyers want to know that they can use your business to build on profit margins in the long term. If you’ve developed a lucrative, innovative product that fills a gap in the market, they’ll be biting your hand off to gain access to a veritable gold mine. This is why you need to reach for the sky.

Google: A Case Study in Ambition

Google is the perfect case study to highlight the benefits of ambition. They’ve practically constructed their entre brand through sheer ambition. Time and time again, Google have attempted the improbable, or at last the inadvisable (such as introducing Gmail in a saturated market) and they have seen success that has spurred them on to new heights.

They’ve become so popular because they find gaps in the market where they can make the most money - they find the practical opening then ambitiously shoot for the stars to fill it. The numbers back it up. Since it was first created in 1998, Google, according to Forbes, has become worth a staggering $382.47 billion.

RTA Business Asks: Will the Self Driving Car Work?

So is the self-driving car a step too far. It’s certainly an ambitious project; a car that will have a start/stop button, but no controls, steering wheel, pedals etc. If it’s possible, and that’s a big if, we at RTA Business believe that it could be Google’s next highly successful project.

Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin explained why to the BBC, stating that it aims to "improve people's lives by transforming mobility". The amount of people this could benefit is sky high – disabled people, older people, people who can’t drive, blind people etc. There’s so much potential.

This is why you need to reach for the sky if you ever hope to sell your business. Find that gap in the market and truly fill it, and you have a gold mine on your hands, a gold mine buyers will flock to acquire for a tidy sum!

How Can You Effectively Handle Customer Complaints?

Customers with a grudge are like a nightmare you can’t wake up from when you’re looking to sell off your business. They’re there, always looking to discredit you, and it makes it that much harder to find a buyer. How can you effectively handle customer complaints so that the problem doesn't snowball?

The customer complaint is such a delicate balancing act. If you’re too lax with them, if you don’t address their concerns, they can get angry and angry customers tend to take to social media accounts and blogging sites to vent said anger. If a potential buyer sees that, you can forget selling them your business.

However if you’re too attentive to the customer then it can be just a harmful to your business model. The customer can be too demanding and that uses up valuable time and resources that you could use to increase your profitability in other areas. So how can you avoid either conclusion?

Customer Care: A Balancing Act

It really is a balancing act and there are some steps you can take so that customer complaints don’t hit your ability to sell your business. Start by training up your staff. Let them know what to expect from customer complaints and how you would like to handle it. Run some workshops so they can get a feel for the experience.

It’s also important that you empower your staff. It’s all a self-confidence game and you need to think of it like you would parenting. Kids don’t respect weak parents who let them get their own way – they also don’t respect parents who have to shout to claw back their authority. Complainers work in the same way. Empower your staff so that they deal with customer complaints calmly and collectedly.

The next point to make is clarity. You've always got ask customers to clarify the points they are making. Mistakes are most often made when the staff member and the customer get their wires cross, and this sets the customer off. It’s such an easy problem to address as well, just encourage your staff to ask for clarification on anything they are unsure about.

The final way to effectively handle customer complaints is to make sure that your staff know how to speak to customers. Here are some tips to pass on to your staff so that they minimise the risk of offending customers:

• Be Polite: Be polite at all times, nothing makes a customer angry like an impolite staff member; it makes it look as though you don’t care about their complaint
• Be Respectful: Your staff are representing you, they are professionals and they need to act as professionals. Using slang term, address customers by nicknames, that sort of thing, implies that your staff neither respect the customer or the company they work for. It makes you look unprofessional.
• Be Nice: It may seem insignificant, but it really isn't. Warmth attracts warmth. If your member of staff is nice to talk to, if they’re open and professionally friendly, the customer is a lot more likely to feel as though they can behave in a cooperative manner to address the problem at hand.