Are You Prepared?

Are you prepared? Of course you’re prepared to take care of your clients’ needs. But are you prepared in the event that you have to take some time off from work? What I mean by this is, do you have a way for your current clients to get their computer needs fulfilled in the event that you are out of work for a week or two? Because of course, you want to keep them. You’ve worked long and hard to keep them as clients but it would take less than a week for them to leave you for your competition.

I recently ran into a small issue when my parents came in to town to defrost during their frigid winter temperatures of -24 degrees Fahrenheit. With them living in the exact opposite corner of the country, I wanted to spend as much time with them as I could.

I work alone so I don’t have any employees to take care of my clients and I really don’t have anybody else in the trade that I can send them to. So what did I do with my clients who needed help?

1. I hoped and prayed that they wouldn’t have any problems. This isn’t exactly the best plan.
2. I attempted to divert all of my work to certain days that my folks knew that I would have to work. This again doesn’t always work because sometimes issues are urgent.
3. I worked while my folks were here. This again won’t always work because there may be times when you (or I) are simply unable to work.

So, after much consideration, my best recommendations would be to:

1. Hire an employee to do the work and bill the clients. This serves 2 purposes. In addition to having a trusted employee to take care of clients in your absence, if you train him or her up well enough that you can send them out on their own, you suddenly have 2 sources on income instead of just 1.
2. Find somebody in your local area who knows approximately what your clients need and set up a deal with them. This way, you know that your clients will be taken care of, and you can do some revenue sharing (like a 75-25 split) for them doing the work. But you have to know that they are trustworthy and won’t steal your clients!
3. Hope and pray that you don’t end up in a car accident, jail, or even have to take a vacation. Any of these could land you completely out of work for a while.

So after this past week, I am seriously going to work on getting to the point where I can hire on another set of hands to help me out and I hope you can do the same. A little extra income never hurt anyone and having a backup in the event of an emergency is your first defense against losing your important client base.

 
Written by Tim Biden