Emotionally Manage Negative Reviews

2019-03-242019-03-05 by Steph

What’s up ? This is THE stephane ANDRE !!! I watched an Olivier Roland’s video and I learned some good stuff.

When we have company, we read customer reviews to improve the products/services. But we have a way of thinking that can hinder the company’s evolution. Here is an example, for a product the are 10 positive reviews and 1 negative review. The problem is that the entrepreneurs will think 1000 times more about the negative review rather than 10 reviews positive.

Bad comment

To change this way of thinkging, it’s necessary to understand that this is part of human nature. We have been educated by evolution to focus more on negative things than positive things. And yes, our ancestors lived in an unstable environment during the vast majority of the existence of the human being. Here are some examples :

Our ancestors were very attentive to the elements that were partially negative. They could be very happy, have a great day but they had to pay attention to the powerful animals that could, by surprise, kill them.
Our ancestors had to pay attention to the disputes that had in the village because these disputes could deteriorate the village’s stability. This can result in creating friction that undermines trust in terms of collaboration for survival.
Our ancestors were never satisfied with their situation and this motivated them to improve their lifestyle through science.

Solution

emotionally, manage, negative reviews, positive

As you’ve seen, this is a way of thinking that we have in human nature and there are some tips to avoid being obsessed with these negative reviews. I propose 3 solutions :

Ignore them. The more negative reviews you see, the more you’ll be desensitized to that. It’s not very complicated because if your company is working well, you have few negative reviews.
Delegate the management of reviews to a member in your company. This allows you to avoid being on the front line in the emotional impact to be less affected. It’s true, this solution have a problem. It creates distance between the entrepreneur and the customers feedbacks. It’s for this reason that it’s recommended to set up a procedure for the member who handles the reviews saying : « From now on, it’s you who manages the reviews. The thing I would like you to do is that you only transfer negative constructive reviews to me ». Negative constructive reviews are the criticisms where you see the urge to help.
Create an email address only for positive reviews. For example, you can name this email : « positivereviews@yourCompanyName.com » and tell to the person who manages the reviews that each time he/she receive a positive reviews, he/she send it to this email. You can also tell to this person to make a screenshot of a positive review from social media and send it to this email.

With this email address, you create the email of happiness. This will be useful for moments of demotivation and doubt. If, for example, there is an negative reviews that makes you feel bad and you think about it several hours later, you can log on this email, read positive reviews and realize that you’re doing a good job. It’s really a special feeling to know that you’re changing the lives of many people. It’s really fantastic and it allows you to relativize.

It’s possible to make a combination of the 3 solutions. It means, you force yourself to read the negative reviews to desensitize you ; you delelgate part of the process to manage the reviews ; you create a magical email as a psychological support.

These solutions allow you to put things in their place so that you don’t get overwhelmed by negative emotions.

It’s possible that you know of other methods to handle negative reviews, if it’s true, share your method with us in the comments section.

Subscribe to my newsletter and share this article if you think it can help someone you know. Thank you.

-Steph

P.S. If you’re in Miami and you like Caribbean food, go to my cousin’s bistro to eat Haitian food, click here.

Start A Smart Company

2018-08-23 by Steph

What’s up !!! This is THE stephane ANDRE. I watch an Olivier Roland’s video and I learned some good stuff.

To create a company, most people advise to leave school or job to be 100% focused on creating the company. I advise you to start your business part-time and continue your school or job. An excellent method for this is « Lean Startup » . The principle of Lean Startup is to put on the market as fast as possible your product/service at minimum viable.

2 different methods

Classic

Let’s take a closer look at what most people do. A person has an idea to start a company, so this person does a market research to minimize the risks. Then this person will seek financing with bank loans after calculating the needs of the business. These business needs based on a 3-years business plan that is extremely theoretical and hypothetical. You should know that in 99% of cases, as soon as the company is open and prospects are in contact with the products/services, these business plans have no connection with the reality of the field.

The problem with this method is that this person works for 1 year to create a product/service and when it’s available, this person realize that everyone doesn’t care. When the product/service isn’t selling, the stress rises enormously and you have to find a way to pay back people who lend money to your company.

Lean startup

With the Lean Startup’s method, when a person has a product/service idea, the principle is to find the minimum basic function of that which would interest the audience and the prospects who would be willing to buy. Then you have to do a test as soon as possible on the market. There is something very important that Michael Masterson said : « Before your business make its first sale, it’s nothing more than a set of unproven ideas that you are spending money on ».

That is why it’s necessary to set up a field test in the most real conditions possible with the most minimal version of your product/service.

Here is an example with someone who wants to buy a parking lot to rent it :

With the classic method, this person bought a random parking lot hoping to have many prospects interested in renting it.

With the Lean Startup method, this person will find an interesting parking lot to buy. Then this person will post an ad in an ads posting site and on social media and will wait to see if there are peope interested in renting it. If people call this person to say : « I’m interested in having your parking lot, I’d like to rent it », in this case this person will buy the parking lot. If nobody is interested in the parking lot, this person will not buy it.

Test quicky

There are several other methods like this to test. In my case, it’s my blog to build my brand and until today, I’m doing it part-time. Here is a 3-part article in the power of a blog ( here ).

Create my blog allowed me to :

To know if I could find and keep my rhythm to write articles
To know if I could share interesting things to create an audience
To know if I could possibly monitize this blog with this audience

Once you have the idea, you need to test it as soon as possible to see what is happening on the field to collect feedback from the first customers and to know if you have an interesting business model or not. This test is excellent for eliminating a lot of uncertainty.

The cool thing about the Lean Startup method is that you’ll really start investing a lot of time, money and energy when you have your first customers who will help you improve your product/service.

Let things be clear, Lean Startup isn’t a magic formula, it’s necessary to act and start the process again, until you have a product/service that interest people.

Subscribe to my newsletter and share this article if you think it can help someone you know.

-Steph

The Important Things To Delegate In Your Company

2017-12-01 by Steph

I watched an Olivier Roland’s video and I learned good stuff.

Here are the most important things to delegate in your company

Accountability

I often meet entrepreneurs who do their own accounting and they say it’s a nightmare. Here are the 2 reasons why I advise them to stop :

Accounting requires a lot of time.
It’s extremely easy to make a mistake. Even certified public accountants make mistakes. The problem when there is an error in your accounting is that all the numbers are wrong. And when all the numbers are wrong, you tax return is false and when your tax return is false, you are in a long-term nightmare.

It’s possible to find a good accountant for around $1 200 a year when you start a company. It’s always better to pay that than to be in a financial nightmare for 5 years because of a mistake in your tax return.

Technique

What’s cool is that with WordPress and its free plugins and themes, it’s easy to install and manage a blog / website. There are also other platforms that allow you to do the same thing.

On the other hand, when there is a major problem that exceeds your skills, it can be negative for your company. For example,your blog / website no longer responds. If you don’t know how to do, you can spend 2-3 days trying to understand the problem and it’s been 2-3 days since your audience no longer has access to your blog / website.

At that moment, you need an IT provider. This is not a person you will hire as an employee but it’s a person to whom you can entrust all the technical tasks that you don’t knew how to do.

Yes, it will cost money but ask yourself this question : « Is it better to spend 2-3 says repairing your blog / website is down or pay a IT provider who repairs it in 1 hour ? ».

I advise you to find a IT provider quickly when you start making money with your company before having a major problem. Maybe someone around you knows a good IT provider or maybe you need to find one on Upwork. Test this IT provider with a small task to find out if her is competent or not.

Customer support

It’s something to delegate but not as fast as the technique. At the beginning, it’s important to do customer support yourself to be in direct contact with the audience to see the problems in services or products, etc. But that doesn’t mean that customer support is the best added value task that the company’s founder can do.

With customer support, you will quickly see that there are often the same questions that are asked. To eliminate much of the customer support is to make a FAQ. A FAQ is the list of questions most frequently asked with a reply.

For other questions that are a little more complex that are are common, you can do a procedure to explain to the people who take care of your customer service how to solve the problem. And you can ask them to inform you when a question is frequently asked to have a permanent feedback. This allow you to stay in touch with reality.

Maybe someone around you knows a good customer support provider or maybe you need to find one on Upwork. Test this customer service provider with a small task to find out if her is competent or not.

Social media

Since you have a blog or a website, you have an audience. This audience sends you messages when you create content. This is the same principle as for customer support, it’s important at the beginning that you answer the messages yourself to discover your audience. You will know the fears and the hopes of your audience. It’s important that you learn how to communicate with your audience.

To find out what things to delegate, you need to be aware of seeing where you bring the most added value to your company as a founder, it’s about innovation, strategy and setting up processes. This allows you to work on your company and not work in your company.

It’s important to know the difference between working on your company and working in your company (being a slave to your company).

Solution

I told you there was a way to find IT provider, customer service provider and social media provider on internet. The best known platform for finding freelancers or outsourcing is Upwork . You will find providers from several different countries. Always test a provider with a small task that doesn’t have a huge impact on your company to make the selection.

Share this article if you think it can help someone you know. Thank you.

-Steph

Sacrifices To Be An Entrepreneur

2016-11-11 by Steph

I watched an Olivier Roland’s video and there is good stuff.

Olivier Roland spoke with a girl who had left her job for 18 months to create her company. This girls had left her job with a negociation to have a social assistance for 2 years. The problem is that her company doesn’t work well, she doesn’t earn enougn money and her soacial assistance will finish in 4 months. They talked together to analyse the problem.

It’s not Disney’s World

This girls didn’t work effectively and quickely for several reasons. She was lazy because she thought was going to succeed. It’s a good mindset but nobody succeed at the first shot. She thought she was in Disney’s World. Create a company is just the first step. It’s like having a stick for a hike. You have this stick to start to climb the mountain but it will be another stick at the top of the mountain. And the mountain is very hard to climb. When you have a company, it is not Disney’s World, but it’s instead « it’s the war and I want to survive ! »

This girls spend to much time to have a perfect design for her blog, a perfect design for her newsletter. It was not the most important thing to do. The most important thing to do is to grow your audience. If your content is good, your design’s blog doesn’t matter. Don’t do intelligent procrastination like her.

Entrepreneur

When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re not an employee. You face reality in a way that doesn’t forgive. That means that as your company doesn’t make money, it’s just an untested hypothesis.

Have faith and be optimistic is great but you need to test your product in the market as soon as possible. And you need to have this mindset « it’s war and I want to survive ! » like a warrior, like a samourai. Be an entrepreneur doesn’t means you will be the next Facebook, Amazon or Google because you’re an entrepreneur. Results will not come naturally because you’re an entrepreneur. You must give everything you have everydays like an ahlete.

Fight for

You must be ready to sacrifice your time (miss parties, birthday party, marriage, etc) and your energy to have all the chance on your side. You must do have huge motivation, by this way when you see an obstacle, you’re excited. And if you’re not excited, this obstacle will not stop you. Everydays act, act, act, act, track your act and adjust.

Have a strategy with key actions to have first sales as soon as possible. If your product don’t work, it’s not a problem. Refund customers, use audience feedback about your product and change characteristics. Try, try, try, try and must be ready to word 10 hours per day for your company.

Spend your time to act and learn. Track your actions and adjust to improve results. Devote all your time to grow your company.

Do you propose a prototype of your product/service to your audience ?

-Steph

Increase Sales

2016-10-31 by Steph

I watched an Olivier Roland’s video and I want to share this with you ?

A trick to multiply your sales by 2, 3 or 4 without much effort.

It’s very simple but you must really do it. First, what is the best seller of your products/services ? Is it sellers ? Your website ? Your Youtube channel ? Or you ? The truth, none of all these. The best seller of your products/services are your satisfied customers. You can say all what you want to your prospects, they will always think : « This product/service is good but he forces me to buy ! ».

Satisfied Customer

A truly satisfied customer of your product/service is much more convincing because he has no personal interest, it’s just someone who is happy. You gonna tell me you already know that. Yes and there is something else you can do with your satisfied customers. You must know that your prospects have more confidence to your sarisfied customers than you. And this is normal, this is why you can use the internet’s power to be able to have a leverage effect to ensure that your satisfied customers can convince a maximum of people.

How to do

When you do good work, often, clients will say, « Thank you, your product/service really helps me ». The next time a customer telling you this, ask to the client to repeat the same thing on video. A short video of 30 seconds. In most cases, your customer will accept because he just thank you for your product/service. You can make the video with your smartphone, it’s perfect. Then, you publish this video on your YouTube channel or on your blog and you put it on all your social networks.

Now when you have to convince a prospect, you can show testimonial videos of your satisfied customers from your smartphone or your tablet. Written testimony is good but video testimonial video has more impact. If you have 5, 10, 20, 40 testimonial videos of satisfied customers, you really make the difference.

Don’t hesitate to ask to your current customers to make you a positive feedback because there are some that will not spontaneously thank you, it’s your silent customer. Your silent customer is so concentrate on his work that he didn’t think to thank you. You can contact your silent customers simply send an email with their request to do a testimonial video or you can make a contest to explain how your product/service has helped.

The principle is to do regular testimonial videos of satisfied customers to increase and improve your credibility.

Have you already have testimonials of satisfied customers ?

-Steph