Home Business Pitfall # 7 – Falling Through On Promises (Part 7 of 7)

I left this topic for last because it is the most important point I wanted to make, the most difficult pitfall to avoid and, without question, the one that I have tumbled into the most often. Falling through on promises.

There are a number of clichés that can be used in this situation, such as, “don’t make promises you can’t keep,” or “your mouth is writing cheques your body can’t cash.” Ironically, and contrary to one of the most popular quotes about promises, they are not meant to be broken. This is true for all aspects of life, including your home-based business.

Right now, you are probably thinking that I am going to extol the virtues of the ever-popluar phrase, “under-promise and over-deliver, ” and while I am going to discuss the concept, it is not in the manner in which most people would suspect. You see, the idea of under-promising and over-delivering is not exactly a new theory—there are tons of executives and CEO’s of large corporations who abide by that rule. One in particular is Howard Shultz, CEO of Starbucks. In his book, "Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time", Harold takes you through the process of following his dream and he admits that every step of the way, he made a point to under promise and over deliver. So,if it worked for the CEO of Starbucks, it must be good for you too, right? Not necessarily so. Let me explain a little further.

The first time I ever failed to meet a deadline with one of my clients, I was subjected to the phrase, “under-promise and over-deliver.” Cringing with guilt, I made a solemn promise to myself that I would follow this to a tee. When I promised a client I would have a project completed by, say Tuesday, I tried to deliver it the Friday beforehand. When I quoted a client a particular price on a project, I tried to ensure that the costs came in lower than expected. Initially, I only did this to give myself a bit of a ‘cushion’ so that if it happened to take an extra day or two to complete a job, no one was the wiser. And, if expenses came in a little higher than anticipated, I did not have to pay for them out of my own pocket. Conversely, if I was able to deliver earlier, at a lower cost, the client was genuinely pleased.

As I became more adept at estimating time and costs, it was easier for me to judge the time and money needed to complete a project. More often than not, my estimates often included a day or two more, a dollar or two more, simply to allow me to under-promise and over-deliver on just about every occasion. But then a strange phenomenon began to occur. My clients gradually expected me to over-deliver on my promises!

Suppose I had indicated a Tuesday delivery for a project. My client would expect to have the project in hand on the preceding Friday. If the project cost did not come in lower than originally quoted, the client would suspect they were being overcharged. I had essentially created a self-conflicting dilemma – the dreaded “Catch-22.” It seemed that if I promised a particular date, I was now expected to exceed the promised deadline. And, if I failed to do so, somehow I was falling through on my promise.

Granted, if I committed to meet a certain deadline, and I did meet that deadline, technically speaking, I was not letting the client down, but merely keeping my word. However, the ultimate goal of the concept of under-promise and over-deliver is to set expectations and then exceed them in the eyes of whomever it is you are making the promise to. The problem I was faced with was that I had over-delivered on so many occasions, the client’s expectations were already set in their mind, and for me to over-deliver, in the truest sense, I now had to begin producing deliverables a day or two earlier than the original over-deliver date. Dizzying, isn’t it?

So, now that I found myself swimming in a vortex of illogical conflict, it raised the question, “how does one avoid falling through on promises?” The answer is simple. When you make a promise, choose your words carefully, and follow through on your word exactly as you gave it. If you promise someone you will call them at a specific time, call them at that time. If you promise your customer that the order will be delivered the next day, make sure it is delivered the next day. No more and no less.

Now, please do not misunderstand me -- I am not saying you should aim to underachieve in your goals. If you promised your client a return on investment of $100,000 and you are able to over-deliver an ROI of $200,000, that is certainly cause for celebration. Just be careful the next time you promise a ROI of $100,000 and you are only able to produce $50,000. Because you over-delivered the last time, theexpectation is already there on the part of your client, and he or she will likely be twice as disheartened by your failure to live up to your promise the second time around.

Having said all this, it is imperative that you do not to fall into thesub-pitfall of falling through on your promises. Making promises you simply cannot keep. By this, I mean, if you have zero control over a third-party’s involvement in a transaction, for example, a courier’s delivery time, do not make any promises on their behalf. Only commit to aspects in which you have complete control over. For instance, when a project requires that I publish to the Internet, my words are chosen carefully, and I will always promise to have the material ready to publish at a certain time. But when it comes to when it will be published, I make no such promises. I know that I have zero control over the status of servers and Internet connections, and if my ISP is experiencing delays or outages, of if the server is down for maintenance, I have set myself up for a potential broken promise.

I would like to share a personal example of a time that I actually did fall through on a promise, one which I thought I was secure in making, but as it turned out, it was one I could not possibly keep. A client of mine wanted to deliver a time sensitive email to his entire customer list. He provided the email content; all I had to do was send it to everyone on the list. This was not a spam-based project – I do not deal in spam – it was a legitimate list of his customer base. I promised I would send the email on the specific date, even if it meant working into the late evening hours.

For this particular project, I decided to use my own mail server, and because of the large quantity of emails that I had anticipated being sent, I contacted my ISP beforehand to ensure that the email would not be stopped at the server level due to the unusually high volume. The technical support rep that I spoke with assured me that the emails would not be flagged, and that I would not experience any difficulty sending them out.

That evening, I spent approximately five hours “monitoring” the progress of the email delivery. I was watching for errors, undeliverable emails, and any other glitch that might have happened. The status report that I received indicated that there were approximately 25 emails that did not get sent due to incorrect email formatting, missing information, or other expected reasons. The report also indicated that approximately 1,600 emails were delivered to the intended recipients.

You can imagine the sick feeling in my stomach when the client called me the next day asking when the email was going to be delivered.What? I was dumbfounded. I had already sent the email – to 1,600 people! But for some reason, they were never received.

Upon further investigation, I discovered that, yes, the emails were sent from my end, hence, the successful send report. However, my ISP’s server stopped delivering them after the first 250 emails. Why?Because it was flagged as spam due to the high volume. The technical support rep that I had originally spoken to was grossly misinformed, and there was simply nothing I could do about it except to put my tail between my legs and beg my client’s forgiveness. Surely my ISP was not going to call my client and apologize on my behalf. No, the onus was on me. I made the promise and I failed to deliver. What is even worse is that my client had promised HIS customers that they would receive the information at a specific time, which obviously did not happen. So, by my failure to follow through with my promise, I essentially caused another to fall through on his promise.

It took only three days before my client phoned me to let me know he had, understandably, contracted the services of an online contact management company, and that I was no longer needed to deliver email messages to his customers. It was an expensive lesson to learn given the amount of business it caused me to lose, but let me assure you, even if I receive written guarantees from a third-party, I no longer make promises on their behalf.

Now, I know I have used the word ‘promise’ a lot in this article, but only because it is such an important word. But it is not just a word. According to Webster’s Dictionary, a promise is “to assure somebody that something will certainly happen or be done.” Those are some pretty powerful words – assure, will and certainly. They leave no room for ambiguity, no allowance for maybe, and there is no tolerance for failure. A promise, is a promise, is a promise. And falling through on one can potentially be one of the most costly mistakes you can make.