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Blame Yourself
One of the most powerful mindsets to have as your own boss is to always blame yourself for anything that goes wrong. That’s right, anything. Everything is your fault.
Why on earth would you want to blame yourself for everything? Because it allows you to build up an incredibly rugged business. It allows you to change how external problems affect you.
Ill jump right into an example of what I am talking about. Let’s say you have spent hours on a single clients computer. You do the work, invoice the client, a few weeks pass and you give them a call. They tell you that they are not going to pay you. Not because they have a complaint or that you have done anything wrong, they are just not going to pay you.
I am sure you will be thinking all sorts of expletives towards your customer and how this external source hurt your business. However, at the end of the day you let this happen.
You probably should have had a system in place to prevent this happening, but hindsight is always 20/20. You need to take it on board and put a new system in place. Take a deposit up front, do a credit check before you take on big projects, get a contract signed, create payment milestones, whatever you need to do.
Suddenly, you’ve taken control of the situation to prevent or at least minimize the chances of it happening again. It was your fault that you didn’t have a system in place to begin with, you took it on board and now you do. Your business just got stronger.
Another example is a common scam that is attempted against business. In fact, one of my business clients fell for this one. It is a scam where scammers "invoice" businesses for something very general. The secretary or whoever is in charge of paying the bills often doesn’t know what is happening out in the field and therefore doesn’t know what their co-workers purchased. This is especially true in larger business. It’s the secretary’s job to pay the bills and so they do what they are hired to do.
This scam works very well on businesses that don’t have a defense against it. Now, as I mentioned before, one of my business clients got stung by this one so they set up a system where the boss (who has a better idea of the businesses purchases), gives all the invoices a quick "once over" to make sure that they did actually purchase what they are being invoiced for. Again, the scammer was an external source but they took it on and controlled it.
You might have lost one of your clients details in the craziness of your day to day work. Don’t let that happen again by setting up a CRM like CommitCRM. (See more of our recommended Tech CRM’s here.)
Forgot to invoice? Make your onsite Computer Technicians invoice from their Smartphone as soon as they return to their car. Tech CRMs like CommitCRM, mHelpdesk and Shopmanager can all be made web accessible so onsite Technicians can do this.
Not Blaming Yourself
I knew someone who has been blaming others for his problems for his entire life, no matter what it was.
This person eventually purchased a business with a shop front.
The business is failing? "The person who I bought it off cooked the books".
"My customers take advantage of the business, they are all bastards".
All of these issues remained something that he couldn’t control because he never took ownership of them. Eventually, the business went bust. He still maintains that it wasn’t his fault.
By always taking the blame on board, you are being pro-active at preventing it from happening again, making your business incredibly robust.
So next time something happens, think "I shouldn’t have let that happen, and I am not going to let it happen again".
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Best advice ever I’m a technician with little business savvy but have learning by blaming myself and learning from those mistakes.
As others have expressed – very good advice. I’d only add that having essential systems in place is one thing – maintaining them is another. Real discipline is required. Its always the time that you don’t cover your backside – that comes back to bite you!
I have to agree with Lisa.
I don’t blame myself for anything but if I am at Fault I do rectify it to the best of my ability.
This is so true and necessary. Very useful and informative post. Thanks and greetings from Brazil!
This is a pet peeve of mine for life in general. There are certain people that are too quick to point the finger at others. The only way to grow in life, and business, is to acknowledge your mistakes and change. Great post!
OK – points well taken, but dont forget to pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself for the good things you do, for the things that went right, and for all your successes. Positive thinking about the up side is just as important as accepting the responsibility for the learning curves and downside experiences we all go through.
“ … always blame yourself for anything that goes wrong. That’s right, anything. Everything is your fault.”
Bryce, I am disappointed in this article. You are being deceptive to yourself to blame yourself for things that you did not cause or allow to cause. If my customer calls me a complaining about losing his Internet connection a few days after removing an infection from his computer, I do not accept the blame for the faulty underground cable owned by his local ISP. Do you blame a keyboard for the failure of a display monitor? What good is that?
We have enough problems that are our own so we do NOT need to be taking on other’s. Properly assigning blame or responsibility is critical to Root Cause Analysis (RCA) in problem solving. Falsely assigning blame hinders the corrective action and frustrates those who do not truly have responsibility for the problem. This applies in all situations – relationships, processes, machines, or just circumstances.
@sys-eng is correct.
I would have kept the title, because it’s attention getting, however, early on in the article I would have changed it over to “take responsibility”, which is more accurate.
That said, when I was at a small shop we had a good customer order a small server and we installed it and did the conversion, after which, he decided not to pay. For no other reason, than that’s his business practice. He figures a point of pain for the vendor; how much are you willing to eat before you take steps to get that money due you when you consider the time and fees involved.
We were dumbfounded and could not believe he would do that. We had a good relationship and he admitted that. He just felt he’d rather have the free server.
Another client on hard times didn’t pay a bill. One of his employees told us, “each week we decide who not to pay, and this week it’s you.”
We never went back to either client. In the future one of the employees from the first client, went out on his own and we got his business soup to nuts. It was many years worth until our small shop closed.
There is no moral to this story. Someone will charge back your services or hardware, outright not pay you, etc. Recognize that you aren’t the only one and just keep going forward.
Great advice, Bryce, and applicable to life in general. Early in my business, I stopped taking certain work because of hassles when I should have had a better system in place to deal with the hassles effectively and still take on that work and make money from it. It was a stupid solution that meant I lost out on work I needed so I didn’t get burnt once or twice.
We can only control ourselves and our response to situations and taking responsibility for the messes we create is the first step to fixing them. Anyone who points fingers should look in the mirror.
I don’t say take the blame as much as “learn from my failures” which is not blaming, but learning and raising your bar of managed expectations. Telling yourself, “Man, I messed that up” is good to recognize your failure, but it’s better to say “Man, I messed that up but how do change my policies and procedures to insure it doesn’t happen again”
Good article to remind us that as owners, we need to recognize changes are needed sometimes on a daily basis.
This article seems to me to be more directed at a taking responsibility for those areas of our businesses we can control, such as proceedures and practices. I get where Bryce is coming from in this sense. Too often we put blame on anyone/everyone but ourselves. We all could benefit from taking a fresh look at how we conduct business. It certainly couldn’t hurt.
Great points, Bryce!
As others have already eluded to, there is a fine line between taking responsibility and taking blame. I think some people are getting hung up on the wording and sticking on the title rather than the message, though. We obviously can’t take blame/responsibility if an ISP’s underground cable is bad or damaged, but that doesn’t mean we can’t sympathize (or even empathize) with our clients and, in a friendly way, help them to understand that there are some things that are simply beyond our control.
I do think that there are far too many people who are quick to “pass the buck” and write something off as someone else’s fault or problem. See if you ever catch yourself using the “well… because” line of reasoning. We all try to justify our actions, thoughts or words. “Well, I only failed because so-and-so didn’t do what they were supposed to do,” or “Well, it’s not my fault because I didn’t know,” are just elaborate excuses and won’t help your reputation and certainly won’t put money in your pocket. Taking responsibility/blame kind of goes hand in hand with The Golden Rule and that old addage “two wrongs don’t make a right”.
Bryce is right. Our own pride and primal need to “be right” all of the time can really get in our way at times. Being proactive instead of reactive and learning from our own (and others’) mistakes will go a long way to making us successful.
Josh B: “I think some people are getting hung up on the wording and sticking on the title rather than the message, though.”
Josh,
According to Bryce’s own words, he must take the blame for that.
;-)
I take the blame for the less than ideal wording :)
@sys-eng, I agree with what you said. Not the best article written by Bryce.
Prevention is always better then cure. Having your paperwork ask the rights questions can prevent some headaches down the line.
I used to invoice Clients, but after stunts like this, I stopped. If I know the clients I may let some things slide a little, but if they are new clients, I keep the equipment until the invoice is paid, and then I release their computers. I even added some terms to my forms, saying that in effect if I have to keep their equipment for more than 90 days due to non-payment of their invoice, the equipment becomes property of CompuMedics PC Repair, and will likely be sold to pay the invoice. I have never had a client disagree to the terms, and it has saved me a lot of grief.
Blame, responsibility – who cares?
I think you guys are splitting hairs and missing the point. I think it is a good post and for me, timely. I just hired on a business advisor who gave me similar advice and helped me solve some really simple problems that had me stumped. This piece is free and I think the advice is as good as that of my advisor, while not focused directly at my business.
Thanks again, Bryce.
Awesome blog post and nice comments by people it seems that all have gone right
A wrote a blog entry about just this.
http://riseofthedyad.blogspot.com/2011/05/good-insight-taking-responsibilities.html
The business is failing?