Let me share with you a story about….Failure in business!
And I’m going to speak about personal experience and show you how my ex-partners and I took a multi-million dollar company and literally, drove it into the ground.
Let’s go back in time to around 2010 or so…And the birth of my company saw the meeting of 3 skilled individuals coming together to build something special. We each had our strengths and weaknesses and we complimented each other perfectly. The community of customers we built was a thriving place to be and things looked perfect…We couldn’t lose.
Or so we thought….
Then we hit hiccups. Business priorities changing. PayPal did their best to ruin not only our business but an entire industry and continue to do so in internet marketing circles….
And we stopped doing something that we did, every single day….
My partners and I stopped communicating.
We went from talking with each other every day and developing winning strategies into weeks of not hearing from each other. Communication seemed to be something we avoided rather than embracing it’s importance.
Not only that, but the worst thing we did was stop communicating with our community….
We shut them out.
We didn’t maintain relationships and a once thriving business quickly became a skeleton of what once was…
Sure, things around us weren’t great. PayPal’s slap didn’t help. And an industry that once thrived was on life support…But at the end of the day, I directly blame our lack of communication as to why we failed. If we would have talked more, engaged our community more…I’m sure we would have found solutions!
Communication!
This is something that doesn’t cost a penny. It takes some time and some effort, but communicating with your community and partners doesn’t cost anything out of pocket…
Yet most failures in my business seem to have come directly from a lack of communication…
In business we have spent the better part of a century PUSHING our message to the masses. Here’s our product or service, let’s advertise to bring awareness to it.
The revolution of social media added a new dynamic to the business world…Now savvy businesses make an effort to PULL their community to them.
This is communication in business….Push and pull! A benefit to both business owner and customer within the community…
Still, we fail miserably at basic communication. And I see it happening here in the STEEM community too…
This is my warning to anyone that takes community for granted. And a warning to anyone that takes partnerships for granted…If you stop communicating, you may as well kiss what you had good bye.
Take it from me and the extremely expensive lesson I have learned…Don’t EVER stop communicating!
Our most valuable asset these days are the relationships we build with our community…So I urge you to treat it like gold.
Let’s start pulling people in with great communication, discussions and content…And the community WILL support us!
—–
