This is a critical topic for rural small businesses: avoiding mistakes when selling to friends, family, or people you know.
Cristian Dorobantescu is a young entrepreneur in Romania, learning and sharing some lessons that apply to all small businesses. Right now, he’s dealing with this very topic. His list of mistakes includes:
- You don’t make a clear contract for the job and this leaves space to interpretations and excessive demands from the customer (and this is where everything starts actually.)
- You do things you wouldn’t normally do for a regular customer, like keeping a very low price or even worse, not updating the price when the costs are higher
- You’ll take every mistake or failure personally
- Bad situations don’t affect only your business but also affect your personal relationship or friendship to people
- You will spend a lot of extra hours trying to make things better, and this will prevent you from doing a better business to people you have never met
- You will not be able to tell your friend customer that he did mistakes (like for example keep changing the work specs) and that why things are not as they should be
Read the whole post for more of Dorobantescu’s perspective.
small biz rural entrepreneurship Romania Cristian Dorobantescu family lessons learned
- Move Your Money and Bank Local - March 22, 2023
- Using a building as a warehouse or storage in a small town? Put up a sign - March 13, 2023
- How to get customers in the door of small town and rural retail stores - February 19, 2023
- Check your small business website for outdated pandemic changes, missing info - January 31, 2023
- Rural Tourism Trend: electric vehicle chargers can drive visitors - January 15, 2023
- 2023 trends for rural and small town businesses - December 26, 2022
- Local reviews on Google Maps drive enduring value - December 17, 2022
- Extra agritourism revenue from camping, cabins and RVs with HipCamp - December 12, 2022
- Harvest Hosts attract vanlifers and RV tourists, Boondockers Welcome - December 2, 2022
- Holiday 2022 marketing: Tell your founding story - December 1, 2022