Do your clients Trust you?

A developer I had hired to do a large e-commerce project backed out of the project three months into it. They decided they didn't understand the project as well as they thought. The client had precise details of things he wanted on his website, and we had multiple meetings explaining it all, but my developer failed to recognize the intricacies of what he was requesting and bowed out 3 months into it.

When you run into situations like this, what have you done?

Could you have also needed to back out of a project because you didn't understand it? What do you do if you make a mistake in business?

Everyone makes mistakes, but what happens afterward tells the world what kind of person you are. It shows your character. It shows you what you're made of and what you think is essential. For some people, money means absolutely everything, and something is wrong if they have to part with it. They certainly don't want to lose any, and will sometimes lie about what happened, blame it on someone or something else, make endless excuses, or try to ignore things. In significant cases, it usually ends up in court, where things drag on for years.

My father once made a mistake when he painted the Harrahs Automobile Collection sign on the side of a building with 5-foot-tall letters. When he got it all done, he realized it was 11 feet off-center. This was a gigantic sign painted directly on the brick building. It's not like you can erase it or even paint over it, so my father did the only thing he could do: He paid a sandblasting company to come and remove everything. He then repainted the sign, which was correctly positioned.

Yes, he could have ignored it and I'm pretty sure that many other businesspeople would, but that's not what my father did. He did it on his own without being discovered or called out as making a mistake. Still, Bill Harrah learned about his honesty and trustworthiness, which solidified a 30-year relationship, producing millions of dollars of signs, banners, posters, and projects for his casino.

In my case, the developer refunded all the money I paid him, causing a significant loss for his company. While I respect my developer for refunding the money, I'm not out of the woods. I now have the problem of trying to find someone else to do this project when we've been working on it for three months. The customer is very unhappy because of all the time he has spent getting things right, but he trusts me, and I'm diligently working to find the right person to do this job.

Trust, honor, and respect are hard-won and easily lost. Once you have trust with a client, minor failings can be overcome as long as that trust is restored. Never lose trust. Never tell a lie to win a sale.

You can always do right by doing the right thing, especially when making mistakes.

Please feel free to post this if you can relate. It could help someone do the right thing.