For a long while I had five key business lessons that I subscribed to, which I have been pretty good to stick to - recently I realised that I needed to add a sixth one.
No more freebies!
The reason I don't like doing work for free or rendering a service at a lower cost is that it de-values the service that is provided to our other clients. The long and the short of it is that when doing something for free it takes away from clients that are investing their hard-earned money into a service.
I recently had an incident where someone needed some guidance on using social media. I am very happy to help where I can, and agreed that I would mentor them until they were comfortable to manage it on their own - but I didn't listen to my own advice. The realisation came like a bucket of ice cold water over my head that my goodwill was taken for granted and that my 'mentorship' role had changed to a personal assistant role, when mails for updates would come through with no "please" or "thank you" - just delegation and an expectation of things magically happen.
Isn't it interesting that it is generally those who don't pay for a service that then expect the most - why is that?
