Most young entrepreneurs have great business ideas but find it incredibly hard to find the right people to execute those ideas. This is especially frustrating because human resources are a critical success factor to all businesses.
Oftentimes, I have walked into business premises back home in Cameroon and thought, wow, this is a really good concept. Yet in the end, I walked away dissatisfied, anxious, and upset.
Common problems with service businesses.
Poor customer service.
I remember going with a white friend into an ice cream parlor many years ago. It was a new business but it looked rather empty. It wasn’t too long before I found out why. After waiting for almost two hours, we were told that our food was being severed. My friend’s food was served and mine wasn’t.
When I tried to inquire why her response was ” madam, you have been asked to wait why can’t you do so?”, in the rudest tone and body language possible. Of course, it flared me up and the rest is a story for another day. Some people seem to be in a bad mood every day all day. Perhaps it is a part of their DNA. They pretend on the day of t interview or when the boss is present, yet relax into their real face when no one is watching. These are the worse kind of persons to hire. They will chase all your customers in the twinkle of an eye.
Lack of appropriate skills.
New business owners often make the mistake of hiring good people with the wrong skills for the right job. What I mean is, in the case where the client-facing staff isn’t rude, she often does not have the skills that fit the job that she is executing. In a business like a restaurant, being a polite chef is not going to cut it, if the food on my plate is uneatable. The person you are hiring has got to be the right person for each role that is assigned to them.
Poor Time Management.
Most customer service staff fail to understand the notion of time management. Like in the example of the ice cream parlor in point one, ignoring the customer’s patience threshold can be very costly. I have been to business venues where the serving staff has wasted so much time either taking the customer’s order or serving them, and the customer simply got fed up and walked away. Some people are naturally sluggish and would make a poor fit for any type of business that requires swift pace services. Customers really value speed, and they’ll pay top dollar for any business that satisfies this need. The richest man in the world, Jeff Besos understands this quite well.
Lack of Cleanliness
A squeaky clean environment can be a game-changer for most service businesses. Sometimes you walk into a business premises that is meant to be customer-oriented and it looks so dirty and non-enticing. Whether it is a barbershop, school campus, beauty parlor, restaurant, pub, hotel to name a few, the environment has got to be clean and welcoming at all times.
I had a restaurant back home in Cameroon, and my friends who stopped by to eat complained to me that the person who served them food was bare feet. Shocking!!! How can you trust the hygiene condition in which your meal was made, if it is served to you in a “modern” bare feet? My goodness, some people have the nerve. I remember watching a video that went viral.
The parents of a popular elite boarding school went to pick up their kids for the Christmas break and happen to make their way to the dormitories. It was a horror scene with feces, mold, and all sorts of rubbish in the very spaces where their kids lived. They were enraged, and this video would dissuade others from sending their kids there. The boarding master and those in charge were not doing their job.
And as sir Disraeli rightly said, some people just do not have the instinct to be clean, and without the proper education and desire to cultivate the habit of cleanliness, your business will suffer.
The legendary Brian Tracy once said ” to have a successful business, a good leader must learn to hire slowly and fire fast. Take your time before you hire a new team member. And the moment you ask yourself if you knew what I now know about that person would I still have hired them and the answer is no, fire them immediately and cut your looses.
