How to Gain Customer Trust for Starters

Hi,

My name is Tawheed.

If you are new here thanks for joining, and if you are a returning viewer, really appreciate the audience as usual.

I am going to dive straight into the credibility aspect of a business. I touched a little bit about this in the culminating parts of the previous episode, so if you want to take a look at that you can just check it.

Credibility, just is a way for businesses to trust one another. If I render a service or I sell a product, how do I get my prospective customers to trust that I am going to be able to deliver this service or the product? Especially when it is the kind of service or product that spans a number of months. For example, OLAYEMI & COMPANY, like I have always touched on the QuickBooks Online subscription. It is a monthly service you can pay quarterly, biannually or annually.

So if I want to get a business to trust that when you pay me for a year, I am going to deliver on that product for one year. I need to put certain structures in place in my business to give my prospective clients the confidence that I will be able to deliver. One of such examples is to have an address. Now some people tend to think that having an office address must be an office space or a building in which the office resides.

When you are starting out, it is difficult to manage cost especially when you want to get everything done at the same time. When you start out a business, you rarely would have gotten any contract or any business coming in, so you just try to put things into place to get people to know that this is the business I partake in, the services that I render or the product that I sell. So it is very important to ensure that you keep cost low, that is what sustains your business.

In the beginning, you may not have raised money like a startup or probably gotten some funds from your savings, or through family and friends—got a loan, or even from the bank. It is important that you use this money wisely and judiciously to ensure that your business is sustainable, is in it for the long run, is a going concern like is considered accounting conventions; whereby you are going into the business with the mindset that, for the foreseeable future and in perpetuity this business will continue to exist and engage in transactions with clients.

So basically all you need to do is to ensure that you keep your costs low, so you do not necessarily have to go and rent that office space in a serviced building or maybe an apartment or a building where you can design internally and externally, put your signage to show everyone that OLAYEMI & COMPANY is here. When I started OLAYEMI & COMPANY, even to this day I am yet to open an office space for it because up till now, I am still the only one involved in the business.

However, it is my plan to grow it and scale the business, and I am going to have to get an office space. But because it is just me, and that is not the only thing I am involved in, and I also want to ensure that my costs are low, I need to play at this level. If I get an office space, that is going to just more or less take out most of my profit and at the end of the day, it is just going to seem like I am working for my landlord which is not how business is meant to be dealt with.

So do not give in to the allure of glamorous things, all these aspects of life that do not really matter, you want to be able to tell your friends or people around you that you have arrived, you got an office space, come over to see where I do business meanwhile you rarely even have transactions happening in your business and before you know it, 3-6 months down the line, you start to worry about the next year's rent and no business has come in.

I have a colleague that is into a similar business, one of the businesses that I am engaged in. During one of my visitations to him, he shared a story of his which I find to be inspiring. In the early days of his business he was practically running it from home, so he had his balcony where he set up his work station, that was more or less his office. So his house was the office address basically and there was this client that he was building a rapport with, trying to close a deal with and at the end of the day a representative from that prospective client had to do a visitation of his office, and he managed that with such grace, he did not hold anything back.

He welcomed the client with open arms. The client came over to his house, rather than just take the client straight to his work station, he actually introduced this client to his family, having walked past his sitting room and met his family members, he eventually showed his client the way to where he works openly without any form of shame. And the client found that to be really welcoming as well as trustworthy because if someone was so open minded to invite anybody to their house, introduce them to their family and show them the humble beginnings of their story. I mean it is only fitting to support such an individual that is grinding and hustling to make something out of himself.

So you would think that most businesses end up renting that fancy business premises, it is not the case, I mean even Apple started out from the garage, Microsoft, in which I am also a partner to, started out from the garage. One thing I love about Microsoft business and the model is their partnership network, so it is their vision to empower every person and every organization to do more and achieve more, and that’s one business that anyone can get into as long as you learn the technologies, and then do what it takes to become a partner. I mean the sky can only be the beginning.

So whatever business you do, ensure that you keep costs low. I am going to talk about that in more detail because you see lots of businesses that just want to show off, even in your fancy office environment you buy the most expensive furniture, rather than maybe investing in renewable energy supply, you get a diesel generator and incur cost of running generator on a day to day basis, cost of maintenance.

You know that also depends on the kind of business that you are involved in, in a manufacturing business you might need to get multiple source of energy and having diesel generators, renewable energy sources. If those are the fundamentals of the business I need to set up, I understand that. However, if you run a service based business that do not really run machines in your factory, like most of the businesses that I am into, you can work from anywhere. It is important for you to not get it twisted and think that you need to get an office space.

So you need to just think about what you really want and how you want to get to the next level.

So in essence, think BIG, start small.

Thank you so much for reading.

Tawheed Olayemi is a business manager and entrepreneur. He currently serves as CFO, IBSL - Microsoft Solutions Partner in Nigeria.

Subscribe to my newsletter for more features on #businessmanagement #entrepreneurship #financialliteracy