The Customer Isn't Always Right, But They're Never Wrong (#120)

In this episode, I discuss one of the biggest mindset shifts I've made as a business owner: understanding that the customer isn't always right, but they're never wrong from their perspective.

I share why reacting emotionally to complaints, criticism, and conflict can damage relationships, cloud judgment, and lead to poor decisions. Instead, I explain how taking the time to listen, gather facts, and understand both sides of a situation has helped me become a better leader and build a stronger business.

We dive into the importance of responding instead of reacting, why empathy doesn't mean agreement, and how systems and processes can help remove emotion from difficult conversations. I also share my approach to handling customer complaints, staff issues, and conflict in a way that protects the customer, the team, and the business.

If you've ever felt defensive when receiving criticism, frustrated by complaints, or struggled to separate your emotions from your business decisions, this episode is for you.

Because sometimes the difference between a good leader and a great leader is simply taking the time to understand before being understood.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

As your cleaning business grows, your ability to stay calm under pressure becomes a competitive advantage. Small business owners often make emotional decisions because they're too close to the problem. And time and time again, I see this coming up. And I was actually talking about this with our management in our cleaning business. We had a management meeting and we were just talking about some things we'd seen in a local Facebook group. There was someone who talked about a negative experience they had with the cleaning business in our area. And it's the typical, it's the same cleaning business that always comes up and we always laugh about it. And we like look at their Google reviews and we'll see they've got a one-star review, and the the owner comes in and responds so emotionally and like just turns something from bad to worse. And so you can just imagine what their potential customers are thinking. They're probably thinking, well, stuff these guys, I'm going to go over to enhanced because they're not responding like absolute crybabies in their Google reviews. Anyway, uh one of the biggest shifts I've experienced as a business owner is learning to separate emotion from decision making. You know, back when I was cleaning houses myself, every problem felt personal. A complaint felt like an attack. Uh, a staff member calling in sick felt like betrayal. A cancelled client felt like rejection, you know, like kind of feels like being broken up with. You know, it feels like being back in high school again. And I'm sure I know I can speak for myself in saying that I used to not be able to deal with things like that very well, and I would respond quite emotionally, and that obviously didn't lead to uh better outcomes. So the the same issue stands in business, and I see too many people making these mistakes. They respond too emotionally, and it's because they're simply just too emotionally invested in the business. And it's a bit of a catch-22 because as a business owner, as a founder, as an entrepreneur, you should be emotionally invested in your business. It should be like your baby. But on that same token, you need to completely divorce yourself from all the emotional attachment in your business. So I want to talk about that today. And it's not to say that you should be a completely emotionless robot or that you should become, you know, a not nice person, because I think emotions are important. You know, they they tell us something. Frustration can tell you that something matters to you. Anger can tell you that a boundary may have been crossed. Anxiety can tell you that there's uncertainty, you know, so on and so forth. But emotions should provide information, not instructions. Right? Too many business owners allow emotions to drive their decision making. They get angry and send an email and they regret it later. And they they get frustrated on the spot and they'll fire someone without any second thought. They get stressed and they drop prices or they they compromise on non-negotiables they had with clients and they start crossing their own boundaries. And the feeling is very real, but the reaction is optional. And if there's one rule I've learned and one principle that just echoes throughout my mind whenever I'm in some sort of conflict or I'm feeling frustrated or flustered or angry in business, is that you should never make a permanent decision based on a temporary emotion. Now that can be applied to all areas of life, and I'm sure you've heard that before. But it's just as important in business because when something happens, whether it be, you know, you get some negative feedback from a customer or you have a conflict with an employee or there's a damage or something like that, you should just sleep on it. Think about it, gather information, gather your thoughts. Because a lot of problems that feel urgent today are going to look completely different tomorrow. And especially a month down the track, six months down the track, years down the track. Sometimes the best business decision is to simply wait 24 hours before responding to a conflict. I can tell you so many times where I have responded hastily and it hasn't uh it hasn't been good for me. I've I've responded in the moment, I've responded on impulse because I've been emotional, uh you know, emotionally charged, whether it was I was frustrated or angry or upset, and it just never makes the situation better. And there's that saying the customer is always right. I uh rebuke that, I reject that entirely. But I think the customer is never wrong. Now, what I mean by that is there's always two perspectives and there's always two sides to everything, right? And I'm using customers as an example, but this goes for any sort of conflict where there's two or more parties involved, and there's there's two sides, which is any conflict, right? It could be customers, it could be staff, it could be vendors, it could be affiliates, whatever. It could be someone on social media, which happens a lot. Um, so I don't think the customer is always right. Customers can be mistaken, customers can misunderstand things, customers can have unrealistic expectations, sometimes they're just flat out objectively wrong. But I do believe that the customer is never wrong from their perspective. So when a customer complains, my goal isn't to prove them wrong. My goal is to understand why they feel that way, regardless of what my opinion about it or my feeling about it is. I try to divorce myself from all the emotion in these conflicts. Now, the the best thing you can do is remove yourself from that decision-making process or that conflict resolution process, which is what I've been able to do now. I've got layers of management, so I'm very far removed from all of it. But if you're in the middle of it and you're the person that's that's dealing with these conflicts, which you probably are because it's a prerequisite on the way to growing a business, you're gonna be the person wearing all the hats, you'll be cleaning, you'll be customer service, you'll be quoting, you'll be doing everything. So you're gonna be faced with these things. And so you need to remember that the customer is never wrong from their perspective. So the first step is just understanding and leveling with them. Because whether I agree with them or not, their experience is very real to them. Like maybe we genuinely missed something, maybe expectations weren't communicated properly, maybe they've had the worst week imaginable and a missed skirting board or a missed cobweb was simply the final straw for them. And any other week it would have been, you know, overlooked, it wouldn't have mattered to them because they're generally happy with like 99.9% of the other things in the service that you do. You just never know, right? You never know what's going on in someone's head, in someone's personal life. And so the person emailing you or or calling you or texting you with a complaint or feedback or you know, just saying anything that that could that could spark an emotional response from you, that could invoke some sort of negative emotion from you. They could have had an argument with their partner, they could have lost a major customer in their business if it's a commercial contract, they could have received bad health news, they could have been dealing with stress for weeks and weeks and they've just finally snapped. I've come to learn that you just never know what's going on in someone's life. And so I've always tried to remind myself that whenever I'm involved in something where things are getting tense, things are heated, and people are upset. I always just try to remind myself that. But it doesn't excuse poor behavior. Um, however, it does mean that we should seek understanding before judgment. Now it's it's even harder, especially when, as I said, you're doing all the things, you're you're wearing all the hats, and if you go out there and you spend all this time trying to get a client, you put in the work, you go to their house and you do a quote, you build rapport with them, and you know, you put in all this effort on the front end to get the customer, you do back breaking work, cleaning for them in the initial clean, and they come back with a complaint, and you know that that can feel like a very personal attack because you went out of your way and you put in all this effort and did all of this work to get them and and service them, thinking that, oh, this is gonna be great. I'm gonna have this client for years and it's gonna be a great work. And then all of a sudden you get this complaint, and you're just immediately on the back foot, and you're immediately just fired up and ready to defend yourself and tell them they're wrong and whatever it may be. And I've done this so many times, it's so much harder when you're the one that is invested in this relationship, right? I think that's probably why romantic relationships are always there's always problems there. That's that's why you know relationship counselors and and and psychologists are booked out for months and months on end because we get emotionally charged in things like this. And when there is such an investment in the relationship, whether it's a romantic relationship or a working relationship, it makes it a lot harder to just level and and ground yourself and respond with a level of objective understanding or just being able to respond diplomatically, right? It's tough. And I I've been there and I've responded to things in in a in a bad way, and I've later regretted it. And these days, now that I've built the business a lot bigger and I've got two locations and hundreds of clients and nearly a hundred staff, I look out there in the marketplace and I see all these other businesses that are that are making these mistakes that I made back when I was a bit fresher and and more green in the business. And so one of the biggest lessons in in leadership that I learned is that understanding two people can experience the same situation differently is very, very true. Right? The I'm just gonna use this example of like a customer complaining because it's probably the most common thing that we all get as cleaning business owners, right? So a customer complains, and look, the cleaner may have done a genuinely good job, and the customer may still feel disappointed. Both can be true, but the mistake is assuming that somebody has to be wrong here, that somebody has to be the villain. So instead of asking who's right, just ask what does each person see that the other doesn't? And in this case, it could be you're one of those people and the customer is the other person. So it could be a matter of what don't I see that the customer's seeing and what uh do I see that the customer isn't seeing from my perspective. And look, just a quick sidebar, I'll give you two very real examples of things I've done and and ways I've handled conflict that I've later become not so proud of, I'll I'll just say. Um both instances, one I was you know not in the wrong, and one I was technically in the wrong, but still didn't really handle it very well. So I've I've got a couple of one-star reviews. We've got like a hundred and uh probably 165-star reviews, and maybe two one-star reviews out of all of that. And one of those one-star reviews, it was in our first location in Bunbury, and we had this lovely lady go in to clean this person's house. We'd been cleaning their house every fortnight for like a year, and uh so she went and did the clean. She'd she'd done a few cleans there already, and um, out of nowhere, we just got this one-star review from this customer. And at first I thought it must have been a mistake because this customer had been super lovely and very, very accommodating to us, and we'd been very accommodating to them and very flexible with the schedule. And I just got this notification on my phone that we had a one-star review, and I go to it, and it's like the most deplorable review ever. Like, if you read it and you knew nothing nothing about the situation, you would think that we were the worst cleaning company on planet Earth. They basically made it sound like the cleaner was in there for three hours and did not touch a thing and then just left. And in in fact, like made it look worse than when she'd actually gone in there and found it. Anyway, it looked, it was a terrible review, right? It was it was very, very bad. And long story short, the cleaner did not clean some mold in the silicon in the shower, which can't even be cleaned. Um and there was also like a bit of a bit of like water staining around the underside of the toilet rim where the water comes out, like very, very small, but the way they were describing it in the review was just abhorrent. Like it was it was crazy. Anyway, I responded. I first tried to call the customer and tried to SMS them and email them and you know, just try to resolve it, and they were just not having it. They were super angry, they were demanding a refund and all this stuff. And in the end, I couldn't get through to them. I gave I gave them the refund anyway, but then I responded to the one-star review, and it was quite emotionally charged because it was this was all in the same day, and I was basically just trying to defend myself rather than just taking an objective approach and and responding a bit more, I guess, neutrally and and level-headed. And so my response to that one star review just didn't really look good in retrospect. And in my mind, I'm like, okay, this is this is a completely, you know, almost a false review. Like, it's just it's a bit, it's kind of nonsense. So I wanted to respond in a way where someone looking at that would get a clear understanding of like, oh, this is blown out of proportion. But in the end, I just made it look worse and I made myself look unprofessional in response. So I think I ended up deleting my response to that and just letting the review sit there, and I'm like, whatever, I'll learn from that. And so that's an example of, you know, we're not really in the wrong, but you know, that person, like I said, they may have been having a terrible week. They could have been having a terrible week at work or in their personal lives, and then they just saw this like mold in the silicon in their shower, which would have been there forever, and they've just like noticed this on a bad day, and it's just like sent them over the edge and they've left this one-star review and it just blew up into crazy proportions. And then I took it a step further by just responding emotionally, and it just it didn't look good for me. It it obviously made the customer more upset because, from their perspective, you know, they're not wrong. They they have a reason that they believe uh to be upset, but then I'm also upset, and it's just this negative cycle. So that there's an example of you know responding emotionally when it's objectively not really anything on you, but you can still handle it a lot better. But then there's I'll give you a story of me being in the wrong, but also not really fully accepting that I'm in the wrong and and still handling the situation poorly. And I'm gonna kind of expose myself here, but uh here goes. So, and sorry, I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here, it's gonna be a slightly long uh bridge in this episode, but anyway, a couple years ago I got a call on a Sunday afternoon from this real estate agent that I'd done quite a lot of cleaning for. We had a good working relationship, but we we did a lot of work for him and a lot of his partners, and he was like, We've just sold this house in this really nice suburb in Perth. It's like the most affluent suburb in Perth, but the people that are moving in are not happy with the current state of it. It was not cleaned, it's you know quite bad. It was sold for like three and a half million dollars, and yeah, the owners weren't happy with the state of it. And I'm like, fair enough. If it's a three and a half million dollar house they've bought, you'd expect it to be clean. Anyway, he's like, Can you come in and clean it tomorrow? Which was Monday, and it happened to be the Easter Monday public holiday. So I already had plans. This was like Sunday afternoon before the Monday public holiday, and but I was like, all right, um, you know, I want to help you out. You've you've been good to me. Um, and you know, I'll I'll cancel my plans tomorrow. It's no big deal. I'll get it done. And I I charged a good amount for it because it was a public holiday last minute. I didn't charge anything absurd, like um, we'll get to that. Uh but anyway, it was Monday. I went in there at three in the morning because this was a three-story house. I knew it was going to take me all day if I could even get it done in one day. And so I went in there at three in the morning. I ended up staying there until around uh 9 p.m. that night. The only break I took was to eat lunch. And during that time I was cleaning, I decided to set up my tripod and get some cleaning content. Because I was like, look, this is at the time I was struggling to come up with content ideas and I was like, this is going to be a good piece of content. I'm like doing this vacate clean last minute on a public holiday. It's going to take me all day and probably most of the night. So, you know, I'll set up my tripod, get some clips. I ended up with like two hours of footage, edited that down to a three-minute video. And if you've seen my videos on TikTok and Instagram, they're mostly voiceovers. So I'm trying to like fill in three minutes of voiceover, um, which is not easy because I'm like, what do I even talk about? I don't have any ideas or any inspiration. This is just me cleaning a house. I'm like, this is how I clean an oven, this is me cleaning the bench. Look how big this place is. Wow, wow, you know, whatever. Uh cleaning the walls, blah, blah, blah. And then there was like this three-second clip in the video where I just said, you know, I can't believe the previous owners left it like this when they sold it. That was it. Three seconds out of a three-minute video, I said that. And bear in mind, this is a completely empty house I'm cleaning. I do not know who lived there before. There was no mention of them. Um, even the real estate agent did not tell me who they were. I had no inkling of whoever the heck was living in that place. And um, like the house is empty, there's no like pictures or anything. Anyway, I posted that video on TikTok, and it was like literally, you know, it was like 10 p.m. when I posted that, probably later, actually, because I was, yeah, I think I posted at like midnight, and I was like, whatever, I just need to get a video out because I hadn't posted it in a while. Anyway, I woke up the next day, the video had 20,000 views, and I was like, whoa, this is kind of crazy because most of my videos like that might get a couple thousand overnight. And it was around 10 a.m. that morning when I got a phone call from the real estate agent, and I was like, oh, this can't be good. I must have missed something in the clean and I've got to go back and fix it, which I was dreading because I I had a really busy day uh on Tuesday the next day. So pick up the phone and he immediately sounds panicked. He sounds stressed, and I'm like, oh, this is not good. And basically, the TikTok I posted of me cleaning this house ended up on the for you page of the previous owners uh that lived there. And they were absolutely livid that I had posted this video of me cleaning this house. And mind you, it wasn't even that dirty, but you know, if if it's a three and a half million dollar house, you'd expect it to be clean if it's being sold, right? So, yeah, this three-second part of the video where I was like, I can't believe the house was left like this. Um, I was just trying to, I was like, you know, this this will be a good little hook in the video. Um, this will spark up a bit of conversation in the comments, which it did. And yeah, it popped up on the previous owner's um for you page. There, I looked in the comments, there like children were in the comments, like replying to people in the comments, calling them names and just being like pretty horrible. I got two direct messages from the daughter and the son of these people, and they were like saying nasty stuff to me as well. And uh the the dad who was the owner, the previous owner, he was like asking the real estate agent to like uh give uh give him my number so he could call me and just like abuse me. It was a mess, right? And I I was starting to I was freaking out a little bit, but at the same time, I was like, this is so blown out of proportion. Like, I've not named anyone, there's there's nothing that could identify them. I'm just like it should the video shows me cleaning up close in an empty house, and I just said, like, I can't believe the house was left like this when it sold. Now, I fully understand that this is on me. I shouldn't have posted that. In hindsight, it wasn't a good call, but I was so like far removed from the whole process, like I'd never interacted with the previous people that lived there in the house. Obviously, I would never talk bad on any of my clients ever, but I guess because it was an empty house and the real estate agent was technically my client and they called me in to do it. I I just wasn't really thinking straight, right? So I I posted the video, um, yeah, and it wasn't that bad, but for some reason the these people obviously think the entire world revolves around them and that everyone was gonna know that they lived in that house and whatnot. And yeah, it was it was bad. So I got two one-star reviews from the the old owner and his wife or whatever, and the reviews were really bad. Like you you can imagine, they were not happy, they were very, very angry, and the reviews reflected that. And the reviews made the situation sound a hundred times worse than what it was. They basically made it sound like I'd just gone in there and filmed the whole time and done no actual cleaning, and I charged them like a ridiculous amount of money. Mind you, I was there for like 15 hours. I charged $1,900, which yeah, sounds like a lot, but I was like working hard. And this is a three-story vacate clean on a public holiday last minute. So, whatever, sue me. Um, don't sue me. But yeah, they left these one-star reviews, and by then I'd already taken the video down. I took it down as soon as the real estate agent called me, but they they left the reviews after, and I was like, Okay, um, this kind of sucks. So I ended up, I was like talking through the real estate agent, he was like the middleman in this, talking to I guess his client who was the previous owner or whatever, and we basically said I would give a full refund if they if they could take the reviews down, and they agreed to that, and I was like, okay, cool. So I I gave them a full refund of uh $1,900. I think it was actually more than that. I gave a bigger refund than what I'd actually been paid. So at this point, I've lost like $2,000, 15 or 16 hours of my time, and you know, a mass uh pretty much my whole Tuesday as well, because this took up my whole day. And I was like, it kind of sucked. I was I was really I was I was a bit emotional about it because I was like my my whole body was aching from doing this massive vacay clean. But then the the guy he he wanted to call me and he just wanted the real estate agent told me like he wants a proper apology from you. Um, like even though you've refunded him and taken the video down, he's like he wants a proper apology from you. And I'm like, okay, fair enough. Give me his number, I'll call him and I'll apologize. Because by this point, I I kind of realized like, look, wasn't the best call for me to post that video, and even though it wasn't, you know, anything anything crazy bad, like it just it's not a great thing to do. It's not very professional on my part, and I shouldn't have I should have thought this through. And I've since learned that lesson, and I'm a lot more professional and and all this stuff in my content. But I'm telling you this to humanize myself and you know show you that I do make mistakes. I make a lot of mistakes. This is probably one of the biggest mistakes I made. But anyway, I called this guy up and um I'm just like, hey, how you going? And he is just he's just straight into it. He is going off his head at me, calling me names, swearing his head off, just being really, really nasty. And I'm trying I'm trying my best to just keep keep my composure and just respond level headedly and and and just try to trying to be neutral, but he just kept going and going. And I was like, Look, man, I'm I was just making content. I didn't I didn't even know who you were, and like he was accusing me of lying. He's like, No, you you knew who we were, and you were doing this and all this stuff. I'm like, look, man, I I really didn't, I didn't know who you were. I wasn't told anything. Um, I didn't know all. This information. I was just making content. It was a dumb thing to do. I've taken the video down. I've given you a refund, all this stuff. And then he basically just like called me a name and hung up and did not take the reviews down. And uh same thing again. I immediately just went to those reviews once I once I knew that he wasn't going to take them down. And I responded really, really emotionally. And I was I was like, you know, it was like this massive long response that I wrote, and I was like, uh, you know, noting that I refunded him, I took the video down immediately. I didn't, I was, you know, I didn't know who they were, and because they were accusing me of doing all this stuff. Anyway, I'm rambling so much right now. But long story short, I made a mistake. I I responded emotionally to someone who had responded emotionally to my mistake, and it just blew up and it became this massive, like volcanic eruption of nonsense. And looking back on it, this is like, I don't even know, two years later. Like I regret the way I handled it. And my point is, my my point for that massive long tangent that I just went on is that eventually you are not going to care at all about whatever it is you currently care about, whatever the big fire that you have to put out is, whatever the big conflict is, or whatever the big problem is, you're not going to care about it in even a few months' time. I do not think about this moment anymore. At the time, it was like the worst thing that I'd gone through because I lost I spent like 16 straight hours in this house cleaning the heck out of it. I was, I was so sore for that whole week, and then I had to keep cleaning like every other day after that, and it sucked. And then on top of that, I had to refund him like $2,000 and you know it was embarrassing for me because it it wasn't a good look for me that I'd done this. And you know, I was pretty embarrassed that I had to put the real estate agent through that and all this stuff. So it just it just sucked for me. And yeah, I didn't I didn't respond very well. And but now looking back on that, I'm like, I I don't even care now. Like I don't even I don't even remember how like visceral viscerally upset I was. It just doesn't matter, it's water under the bridge. But what I can't take back is how I responded and how I handled that situation in that moment. So just let this be a lesson to you and and use my my stupid little mistake as a reminder to yourself that nothing is ever that serious. It doesn't matter how much money you lose, how much time you lose, how much of your of your own patience or you know whatever you you you face with that you've lost, it's not you're not gonna think about it eventually. Like it's just not worth the risk of trying to defend yourself and and trying to make yourself look better and and risking making it even worse, which is what inevitably always happens. So that was a big wake-up call for me. And again, I just want to reiterate, I fully understand that I was in the wrong, even though it was a really, really simple and in my opinion, you know, very menial mistake. Um really just an oversight for me. But it was not the it was not the right thing for me to do. It was a bit unprofessional, but the response just uh it just ticked me off a bit and it set me over the edge. And I didn't handle that very well. And that was a big wake-up call for me where I realized that I needed to divorce myself from all the emotion I have in my business because it wasn't it wasn't good. And even like a week later, I was like, man, I wish I just responded a bit better in that moment. And yeah, so yeah, that was um that was a story. That's probably the the worst customer experience story I have, besides the time when I was like literally physically abused at a vacate claim once. But that's a story for another time. I was like 18 or 19 when that happened, and if you know that story, then you know. So anyway, um since then I've I've realized a lot of things and I've realized that I in in divorcing myself from the emotion in my business, I realized that you have to separate yourself and distance yourself from the emotional tie somehow. And you can do this with people, you can do this by having layers of management. Like I no longer have to deal with a lot of this stuff, and if I do deal with it, I can deal with it very objectively because the customers that are complaining, I've for the most part never even met them. I didn't have any hand in like getting the customer, signing them, talking to them in the beginning. So I can take a very objective approach, and so you can have people that can separate you from the emotion in the business, and you can also have systems and frameworks and processes. And a really good thing that you can have is a complaint resolution framework. So one of the best examples of this is just handling like a customer complaint. Um, you know, many, many business owners they immediately become defensive, like I did in both those examples that I just told you. Um, pretty extreme examples. I I I I was very I was a very passionate business owner. I mean, I still am, but I was passionate in you know, not a great way when it comes to customer service. Customer service representatives that are passionate are usually the worst, I've come to learn. So anyway, the complaint resolution framework, it should look something like this. Step one, just listen. Just allow the customer to explain. If it's on the phone, don't interrupt them, don't defend yourself, don't try to justify anything, just listen. Step two, acknowledge them. Acknowledge their experience, not because they're automatically right, but because they deserve to be heard. For example, you know, thank you for bringing this to our attention. I understand why this would be frustrat frustrating. Even if you don't understand, it's it's okay to tell a little white lie. I understand why that would be frustrating for you. Okay. Step three, gather facts. It could be uh you might want to have a look at photos of a job if someone's complained. You might want to have a look at the completed checklist, if there's any job notes that the cleaner left, um, if there was any staff feedback, if you can have a look through the service history and see if there's anything that's popped up. And if it was you doing the clean, then you know you can just kind of do a mental review. Okay, be like, take myself back. Did I forget this or did I overlook this? Or could this be a possibility of something that I've done wrong or or I've missed, or can I can I understand why the customer is feeling this way? And then step four is you identify the root cause. So what actually happened? Was it a missed task? Was it poor communication? Was it a different expectation? Was it a service failure? Was it just a simple misunderstanding? And then step five, decide fairly. You don't decide emotionally, you don't decide reactively, you just decide fairly. And sometimes that can mean a reclean, it can mean a touch-up, it can mean a credit, it can sometimes just mean a clarification or an apology. And but step six, and this is the most important part, is just improve the system because every complaint is data. It is a data point for you to improve your service. So just always ask yourself at the at the end of a a customer service resolution, what can we learn from this? Right? I've there's been so many times where what what's a good example of this in recent times? There there was a customer there she was saying that she loved her cleaning lady, but she wanted me to send through the checklist of what the cleaner is supposed to do because she thinks that there's things that are being missed. And so I I uh talked about it with her, and I found out that she used to have this cleaner that would do the whole clean and then would also, in addition to the regular clean we do, would like clean her alfresco sliding doors inside and out. And then that person stopped cleaning for her, and we put on another cleaner who was great, lovely lady, and did the clean to a T, but she wasn't doing the alfresco sliding doors because it was like an extra. And so we went through like this this um like just a mini discovery process, and we're like trying to figure out what the the real issue was, and we found out that it was that. It was just like a mismatch in expectations based on what her previous cleaner was doing, like going above and beyond and delivering this exceptional service that wasn't actually asked of her, and so we just improved the system. We just sent out a PSA to our existing team about you know not going outside of the service scope because you know, as much as we appreciate you wanting to go the step further and and go above and beyond for customers, it can confuse people and it can lead to conflicts like this. And then we built this into our onboarding process, and we have a video about how you have to stick to the standard service procedure and the standard checklist because of this, this, and that. And so that's one example of how we we didn't respond emotionally. I I could have been like, oh no, this is one of my best cleaners because she was like, This is one of my best cleaners. There's there's no way that she wasn't doing a good job. Um, but I listened, I I tried to acknowledge it, I gathered some of the facts, I looked at the the checklist she'd done, I looked at the job photos, I was like, okay, everything looks good, and then I had identified the actual root cause. Okay, and then I just decided fairly I I offered an apology, I offered an explanation. I felt like there was no need for any discount in this case, so I just offered a bit of clarification and a bit of an explanation and thanked her for uh bringing this to my attention, which is something you should also do as well. Thank the customer for just broaching it with you because a lot of people will keep it to themselves, and that's honestly worse. I would rather have someone come to me with an emotional um conflict or complaint or whatever it is than just keep silent as much as the confrontation can be difficult to deal with. But then step six is always to improve the system. How can we learn from this? What can we what can we do better next time so that this doesn't happen again? So having that sort of framework, it can be a mental framework that you go through when a customer complains, or you can have a similar framework for when there's HR complaints, or you know, people calling in sick or canceling things last minute, you can have little mental frameworks for everything. And the goal should always be to just respond objectively and diplomatically and always being able to play both sides or at least see both sides and understand uh the the perspective of the person that's that's complaining. And as you grow bigger beyond these problems and you grow a team, and now there's other people that are that are doing these things for you, then you can remove yourself from the process one step further. So now I don't have to deal with people calling in sick, I don't deal with customer complaints, I don't deal with damages. Um, and so when I hear about things, it doesn't affect me emotionally anymore. Like I I'm not I'm not as involved and I'm not as invested in it as I was before. And that's become somewhat of a competitive advantage for me as a business owner. And I've you know, I now look at other businesses out there and uh particularly smaller business owners that respond so negatively to negative criticism and feedback and and conflicts. And I just look at that and I'm like, you know, I see it now, I see how it doesn't look good, even though I can tell, like, yeah, you're probably not in the wrong, but the way that you're responding to this conflict is wrong, and you shouldn't be doing it like this. So laser management are great. Obviously, you you don't have that early on. Um, but as a leader, this is something you're gonna have to understand is that your team watches how you respond. And this is something I had to come to terms with as well. And if every issue becomes a crisis, your team learns to panic. If every complaint becomes an argument, your team learns to become defensive. If every mistake results in anger, your team learns to hide mistakes. Calm leaders create calm organizations. Professional leaders create professional organizations, right? Your job isn't to absorb pressure and pass it on. Your job is to absorb that pressure and create clarity, not only for yourself, not only for your customers, but for your team as well. Because it's going to perpetuate and transcend throughout the whole company. Because that energy is potent. That energy is contagious. And lastly, the probably the best piece of advice I can give based on my own personal experience, and this is like the most simple and mundane kind of way to tie this all together, is just take a bit of time before responding to any sort of conflict. Like a customer might send an email that feels completely unfair and unreasonable. A staff member might say something that frustrates you, and in that moment, it's easy to jump to a conclusion and just straight away react defensively. But after a few hours, or sometimes even the next day, you might just sleep on it. And you often realize that the situation isn't as black and white as it first appeared. So, one question I always try to ask myself is what's the outcome I'm trying to achieve? Because in business, being right is often less important than being effective. Right? A rushed response might feel good for a few minutes and you might feel like you might get this like serotonin hit as soon as you respond, and you like get that weight off your chest, and like all these negative emotions just kind of wash over you and then they're gone as soon as you respond. But then later on you regret it, right? Like I just talked about. Um, but a measured response can preserve a client relationship, it can retain a team member, or it can prevent a small issue from becoming a major problem, and it can look better to other people on the outside that are looking in, that are looking at the reviews, whether it be like six months down the track, a year down the track, and they can see your professionalism when responding to something, especially in a public setting. This is really important. Obviously, it's different if it's like you're just talking directly to the client privately, but then obviously that can make its way around. People talk, especially in a small town, uh, which is where one of my businesses is located. People talk, word spreads around, and so that's something I've had to be conscious of. And that's why it's even more important to just understand people's perspective because they might think that uh they're not in the wrong and they may think that you've done something. But if you respond defensively and emotionally, you're just going to reinforce their their negative emotions and it's gonna make them feel worse, and they're they're really it's gonna go from having a bad experience to you to having uh with you to having the worst experience with you, and they're gonna tell people about that, and that's even worse. That's an even worse outcome. So, one question is what's the outcome I'm trying to achieve? All right, that's why I'm a big believer in this principle. Um, to respond quickly when things are positive and respond carefully when things are negative. So as soon as you get a five-star review, respond quickly, thank them, um, give kudos to a cleaner, whatever it is. When there's a negative piece of feedback or something comes up that's that's not great and it might make me feel a bit defensive or emotional, that's when I take time to just let it sit. Uh I'll sleep on it, I'll I'll think about it, and then usually as time goes on, the situation becomes a bit more or a bit less black and white and and a bit less um emotionally charged. And that's that's when it's easier to give a more diplomatic response and it leads to better outcomes because the businesses that scale and do well aren't necessarily run by the smartest people, um, they're often run by people who can stay calm long enough to make good decisions when everyone else is emotional because this is it's a big mental game, as I keep saying, like especially at scale, like business is very simple. You just get customers, you get staff, staff do the cleans, you rinse and repeat. Like the actual mechanism for growing the business is very, very simple. But the the other half of it, and the main thing that really matters that people don't talk about is the mental side of it. And a big part of this stuff is just how you respond, how how you can respond logically and and and diplomatically in emotional situations, because it can take years to build a reputation and seconds to absolutely ruin it. And I've seen this happen with other cleaning businesses and just other businesses in general, where people have absolutely gone over the rail uh off the edge, over the rails because they've responded to a conflict really negatively and word has made its way around, or there's like been like a TikTok video that's been posted, and it just looks really, really poorly on them. And I know that they come to regret that later. Like I've regretted how I've responded to one-star reviews later on, and in the end, like it just it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. Like, I'm it's been like two or three years since my first one star review. Do I still think about it? No. I the the only time I've thought about it in in recent times is be is right now because I'm making this podcast episode and I'm like trying to give you examples of times I've been a bit of an idiot, a bit of a doofus, and responded not so good. Because look, at the end of the day, like a lot of you probably think that I'm this really, really savvy, smart, um, super successful business owner. And um, thank you, you're correct. No, I'm kidding. Um, but I'm still at the end of the day, just this reptilian-brained human being that responds emotionally, that does dumb things sometimes. And especially a few years ago, when I was like 19, 20, 21, I'm still just like I was a 21-year-old. I was doing 21-year-old things. I was, I was um, I was very new to the world at that point. I f I feel like I felt like I was born when I was 18. And so I made a lot of mistakes, and I had to quickly learn from these things. And um honestly, I don't think the age really matters. I I think we all make the same sort of mistakes in business, and I think it's easy to justify it for me to say, like, oh, you know, I was younger, but the the emotions are still there, like the the behaviors and the attitudes and the mindset is still there, but I've just put up guardrails and I've put I've put principles in place and like processes in place for me to be able to distance myself from making bad decisions and and turning bad situations into worse situations, right? And actually, one of the things I did earlier on when or before I had like a proper team in place to just to help me respond more objectively to conflicts, because I would ask myself, like, what outcome am I trying to achieve here? And pretty much the answer was I just I want to keep the customer and I want to keep them happy, and I don't want to, you know, make this blow up into uh in stupid proportions, right? And so uh one little thing I did back before I had a team was I created a fake customer service representative, and uh her name was Sarah. So I just created a a subdomain in my email folder. It was Sarah at enhancedcleaning.com.au or like it was admin or reception at enhanced cleaning, but the name was Sarah, and I would respond to customer feedback with that email, with that Sarah email signature. So they they feel like they're talking to someone different, and then I can I can now be just like this objective uh this objective complaint handler because if the customer's complaining about something I did in a clean, which happened from time to time, um I might respond personally like, oh no, I did that, I remember doing that. But Sarah, my customer service representative, can respond a lot more objectively and she can act as the middleman or the middle woman. And it was actually really good for me. And I was I was able to uh work through a lot of things and it meant I was able to probably retain and hold onto a lot of customers that I otherwise wouldn't have if I responded myself, you know, with my like emotionally emotional self. Um and yeah, I I can't even like think of examples of this because what this is going back like five or six years now. But that was something that I did because I I recognized early on, like I I really have an issue with just being too emotionally invested in this business and I really suck at customer service. And so how can I become better at customer service? Well, if I just create like a customer service avatar that I can respond through that I can kind of use as a proxy for my emotions, um, then that would probably lead to better outcomes. And it did. So I don't know, that's I don't know if that's considered like shady or like unethical at all, but that was something that really helped me work through conflicts with customers a lot better. Obviously, now I have like real human beings that respond for me, so even better. But honestly, the the same same outcome is achieved either way. So I don't know, just um that's just a little tidbit from my experience. So if you want to do that, feel free. I know a few people that have done that and they've they've said that it's like one of the best things they've done. And it's like such a simple thing. You just set up an email subdomain and you can respond to all conflicts with that. And it's it's great to have. You can even use AI with it if you don't want to, you know, feel like you're lying or being fake. Just get an AI um customer service representative to respond to all your you know, customer service conflicts and feedback and and whatnot. And same thing with HR, and you can train them on how you want them to be, like you can feed that um customer resolution framework to the AI bot. You can have like a custom GPT that can respond to these things, and so anyway, I'm I'm getting off on another tangent, but bottom line is you want to have some sort of framework that you can work through conflicts with, one where it allows you to let the other person speak and feel heard and feel understood, and allows you to see the other perspective that you're probably not seeing, right? Like ask yourself what is what is something they're seeing that I'm not, and vice versa. And what what's what's a framework or a lens that I can look through that that allows me to approach this situation in a better way, in a more structured and um in a way that's gonna lead to a better outcome. And also just take time to respond to conflicts. Anything that's anything positive, respond immediately. Anything negative that could potentially blow up or or catastrophize, just take a bit of time to respond. Let the emotions cool off, take a day or two, sleep on it, and then come up with a response. A good exercise to do is like draft an email, if if this is an email, draft an email to whatever it is, or if it's something that's in your head, just write it down, write down your hypothetical response to it, and then the next day, once you've slept on it, revisit that draft, revisit that thing you wrote down, look at it again, and then see how you feel about it. A lot of the like 99% of the time, you'll want to change every word in your response because it's gonna seem too emotionally charged and it doesn't seem like the right thing to do. So that's a good exercise to do. Just take time on it, sleep on it. And that's that's really it. Like, I just wanted to talk about that because I was talking about this on the management meeting I had with my team yesterday, and we were just like laughing about this this cleaning company in our area that's just like responds so poorly to to poor reviews, and it just makes it look so much worse. And we're like, oh, how can't you how can you not see this? Like, customers are going to be more turned off by your response as the owner than the actual band review itself. You can actually turn band reviews into a positive if you just choose to respond professionally, and that's like that's like one of many things that we could talk about. And so I don't really have like a solid, concrete answer for for this problem that we all go through. Um, it's we are emotional beings, we're human beings, and this is how we're wired, but it's definitely a competitive advantage if you can just learn to divorce yourself from the emotion in your business. So, yeah, that was the episode for today. Um, yeah, funny, funny story that time I posted that TikTok. I don't know if anyone, anyone listening to this might remember that. It was kind of gone in a flash, but uh definitely left a permanent stain on my um hypothetical record. It's uh not something I look back on fondly, but I just turned it into a learning experience. I'm like, look, I should probably uh have a better duty of care when I'm inside a property filming, regardless of if it's like a completely empty vacant property. And yeah, that was that was a big uh big lesson for me. I lost 2,000 bucks, 16 hours of my time, um, probably a few years of my life because I was using like the the most toxic chemicals to clean like the oven and stuff, and I didn't have a mask. So, you know, you live and you learn, but definitely one of the biggest problems I've faced in my business, and one of the biggest challenges that I've had to deal with and overcome was just my own emotions. Because majority of the time in your business, you are the biggest bottleneck. And for me, that was a big one. I know for a lot of people that'll ring true as well. So, with that being said, your emotional tie to your business, it can be a superpower, like your passion can be the biggest driver of your success, but it can also be the bane of your existence when you're dealing with conflicts. And as soon as you have a bad day or a bad week, if you're too emotional about it, it can really rattle you. So just finding that good balance and recognizing how your emotions can not only be a strength, but also a very big weakness in times like this, that's the key here. And just building frameworks and processes and these like these these mental lenses that you can look through to to better weather the storm when you when you're in situations like this, that is going to be one of the most important things you ever do in this business. So thank you so much for listening to another episode of Self Made. We'll talk again soon.