#115 The 3 Cs in Business
It’s sometimes the simple things that get overlooked in our businesses that end up causing us a lot of grief. However, unnecessary angst can be avoided when you set yourself up in the right way. Today I run you through the 3 Cs in business, which I believe are non-negotiable in both the context of your client relationships and running your business successfully.
I see a lot of businesses letting themselves down when there’s a gap in managing client expectations. This can cause ups and downs in client satisfaction, and may even cause a loss of clients altogether.
In this episode, I emphasise the importance of having crystal clear communication across all of your touchpoints consistently. Ensuring that clients are clear on what you stand for and how you can help them from the get go is crucial in ensuring a positive experience for everyone involved.
I talk about the different ways to implement clear communication, including the onboarding process, ongoing conversations and throughout all of your documentation. For instance, does the client know they’re paying for that phone call? Did you provide them with your terms of service or payment? You may be creating misaligned expectations if you fail to provide the necessary information, and this can cause issues that take your time and energy away from what you do best.
When it comes to running your business generally, it’s not just with clients that crystal clear communication should be prioritised. This should carry over into all of your relationships to ensure your business stays grounded in what you value and how you want things to run. Being clear with your team, including your employees, accountant, strategist or social media manager, will create a flow in your business and set you up to be able to focus on what really matters.
I encourage you to be intentional with how you communicate with those around you, rather than operating on the fly or in reactive mode. It really could be the difference between growing sustainably and feeling like you’re continually up against a brick wall.
Crystal clear communication really is a game changer, and I hope today’s episode has inspired you to think about the ways in which you could create more clarity in all areas of your business.
Full Transcript:
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[00:00:00]
Hello everyone and welcome back for another episode of the Rise Up in Business podcast. Today I wanna talk to you about something that's a non-negotiable in my business and that is the three Cs, crystal clear communication. To those that have been listening for a while. This will come as no surprise to you, and if you're new, welcome.
Clarity and communication will be something that you learn very quickly. Very important to me. In last week's episode of the podcast, I talked about how to use your legal documents to really stand out from the crowd in business. And this week I wanted to talk about the three Cs, crystal clear communication and why it [00:01:00] is so important to you both in the context of your clients and running your business more generally.
First of all, as you know, if you've been listening for a while, I have a litigation and dispute background. So the first 12 or so years of my career was spent acting for business owners involved in disputes, in court, mediation, arbitration, all the things, because they're in dispute, because something's gone wrong.
And most of what I saw back then could have been avoided. I've shared that openly. On the podcast, on my website, on my social media, I talk about it a lot. My mission in this business is to empower small business owners just like you, to set yourself up properly in a way that will help you avoid those tricky situations where you need to call a lawyer like me to you out.
Crystal clear communication forms a vital part of that. Think about it from a client perspective. When a client reaches out to you, it's because they've been referred to you or because they [00:02:00] have spent some time on your website or they've been following you on social media and they wanna talk to you about whether you can help them.
So they reach out and they have a conversation. Usually from there, you'll direct them to an offering on your website or you'll issue a proposal or a client service agreement or whatever it is that works with your offerings and your processes and systems. And so the client then has a second touch point.
Sometimes this is a third touch point, but often it's a second touch point. It is vital that your client is able to understand what it is that you are offering to do for them in a crystal clear way. So crystal clear communication consistently across all of your touchpoints is vital and in my view, are non-negotiable. So we need to make sure as business owners that right from the very first experience a client has with us, they are clear on what we do, what we stand for, and how we can help them. Then we have a conversation and we continue that clarity so that the client is really clear.
When we move to [00:03:00] documentation, it needs to be consistent. At this point, this is where a lot of businesses let themselves down because there's a big gap here in managing those client expectations because there's a lack of clarity around the communication and what you've said initially is no longer consistent or worse, you've not said anything about a particular issue, let's say payment. You've not said anything about payment, and then all of a sudden, you provide them with payment terms, which are completely inconsistent with the vibe they've been getting or the message they've been getting. So you might be losing clients without actually realising you're losing clients, or you might be losing clients, and you're wondering why.
Crystal clear communication across all of your touchpoints, including your documentation, so your proposals, quotes, client service agreement, terms and conditions, invoices, emails is absolutely critical to ensure a positive client experience for your clients from the beginning to the end of their time with your business.
If you don't have that, [00:04:00] what we tend to get is a graph and it goes up and down. Client satisfaction levels are higher, client satisfaction levels are low, and they fluctuate, and we don't want that. We'd like a steady continuation of client satisfaction levels even improving, with the more time they get to spend with us in our business.
But having clarity in our communication and making sure it is crystal clear sets us up for long-term success with our clients because they know what they're getting. They know how we operate and how they're getting it. They know what they're paying for. They know how and when they're expected to pay, they know what to do.
If something goes wrong or if there's some misaligned expectations, or if they have a question, they know where to go to find the answers or how to reach out to you or your team to answer their questions to ensure that their experience within your business is a positive one.
And we get that by ensuring crystal clear communication consistently. So there's probably [00:05:00] four Cs when you think about it, but I harness a lot of the work that I do on crystal clear communication because in my view, not only does it set the business up for success with clients, but it helps avoid those unnecessary disputes or misaligned expectations, which can take a business owner's eye off the ball and take them away, both in terms of time and energy from doing what they do best and growing their business and serving their clients and generating revenue in their business.
So this concept of crystal clear communication for my business is a non-negotiable, and for many of my clients, it's become a non-negotiable. During the time we've spent working together, because I've been able to explain why it is so vital and how it's so easily overlooked because people get caught up in the workflow platforms, the social media, the marketing, the reels, all of those things are very bright and shiny and can be distracting.
But when we take it back to basics and we look at what grounds [00:06:00] our business and what we need to harness our attention and focus to, it's that crystal clear communication, which evolves into the execution of providing services to our clients or products if we're a product based business. But it's important that clients' expectations are managed from the first touchpoint all the way to the final touch point and the offboarding, and making sure that communication is really clear at all times so that we are setting ourselves up for success and our clients' experience up for success so we can continue to grow our business, send very satisfied clients out into the world, benefit from that word of mouth so we can continue to serve and help more people.
So you can see, I get really excited by this because crystal clear communication really ought to be non-negotiable for all businesses, in my view, because it can avoid so many misaligned expectations. It can avoid so much grief and angst that just simply doesn't need to be there. If we [00:07:00] focus our time and energy on the communication and the way we are delivering that to our clients. So that's the importance of crystal clear communication and the three Cs in the context of our clients.
But also when we're running our business more generally, the crystal clear communication carries over into all of our relationships. So let's think for a moment about our team and how we wanna get the best out of our team. It's really important that it's clear what our expectations are, our feedback is clear, our praise is clear, areas for improvement are clear, what they're doing well. It's really important that our team have the benefit of our crystal clear communication too, so that they can continue to grow and evolve with our business and best serve our business, and so our business can best serve our team, and that applies to employees and contractors and it applies to our advisors. So whether it's your lawyer or bookkeeper or accountant, social media manager, strategist, whatever it might be, if we make sure that we're allowing [00:08:00] ourselves the time to think through how we wanna work with these people, how we wanna work with our team, how we wanna work with our advisors, and give ourselves the space to think and communicate clearly.
Not on the run, not on the fly, not in reactive mode. But really think about it because it can be the difference between, uh, business growing sustainably and businesses constantly feeling like they're ending up against a brick wall, dealing with issue after issue after issue. I do see that a lot with business owners who are time poor, burnt out, they don't have the right people around them. They're frustrated. It's a vicious circle and clients often come to me and ask for help to get off that hamster wheel, which I can happily do. I can happily work with clients to help identify ways that we can get off that hamster wheel and what it is we can do in terms of systems and processes to put in place to protect the business and set it up for long-term success.
But inevitably there'll be a conversation in there [00:09:00] somewhere with me where I do talk about the systems and processes and the clarity and communication and how it is that we are communicating with all the key people and supporting the moving parts in our business. And it all comes back to what most people think is really simple, which is why it's so easily overlooked, which is the three Cs, crystal clear communication. So what I would love for you to take away from this episode is that sometimes it's the simple things that can be the most powerful And often in my experience, focusing on crystal clear communication can really be a game changer in your business internally and more externally with your clients.
I hope you've enjoyed this bite sized episode. It's really important to me that I share with you what I know works in business and what I know are the pain points for so many business owners. So if you know another small business owner that you think would benefit from these little nuggets of gold, please do feel free to share this episode with them, because that's how we help this [00:10:00] podcast get into the ears of even more business owners.
Thank you so much for listening as always, and I'll catch you next time.
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