Hey beautiful readers, how is your new week and new month experience going? I hope you are having a nice experience already. For me, I have been a little bit down health wise but I have also been pushing really hard to stay strong because staying in bed is not good for my pocket at the moment. Something happened yesterday and I concluded that I had to come share it with you because it is a significant business lesson that I have learnt.
I have this very good customer who comes to patronize me on a regular basis and he came to me one day with a request of needing one thousand naira urgently for transportation, I felt it was the least I could do so I gave it to him and he kept to his words and came back to give me the money the following day. Later that day, he came to me to discuss about building a personal savings account with me he told me that he regularly spends too much so he will like to keep some money with me and I felt it was a good idea since it will give me the opportunity to use his money to run my business until he needs it.
He brought in the first set of money as agreed that evening and the process of savings began and I was surprised to find out that he came back the following day to request for the money he had saved, I gave it back to him without questions but he made it an habit to save today and withdraw tomorrow and I was getting tired of it, so I called him to advise him about growing his savings instead of regularly keeping and withdrawing the funds and he promised to change.
He sent me a message last week Sunday requesting for a loan from me and I explained to him that I did not have much money at my disposal at the moment, it happened that I went out briefly yesterday and this young man who knows that I have already told my sales representative to give him funds whenever he asks went behind me to collect a huge amount of money from her, she thought his money with me was going to be a perfect substitute for the amount that he collected.
I went ahead to call him immediately I received the message, and he responded by asking me if there was a problem with the money that he collected, I was shocked to my bone by that question and I wanted to attack him back immediately but then I realized that I had no legal backing against him, so I decided to play it cool with him, persuading him gently until he brings back my money, my decision will be to cancel any savings he is trying to build with me and let him know bluntly that any transaction he will be doing with me must be verified first, there will no longer be room for any advantageous offer that he use to experience before.
This made me realize that the relationship we have with customers should never be allowed to get to another level where they feel it is a right to take from our business, I am just really hopeful that this annoying customer comes back to give me my money and after that I have promised myself that such will never repeat itself again.
Thanks for reading friends, enjoy the rest of the week.