If you’ve had a long history of working directly with clients and customers as a business owner, then you know that it can sometimes be a grueling experience. While many customers are kind and your whole interaction passes without anything of note, some customers can be very pushy and needy when it comes to your services.
The same can also be said of some coworkers; while some are diligent and rarely ask you to do things, others will try to push their work on to you and rely on you too much. One of the most frequent issues you’ll run into with clients and customers is time.
If you run a business that deals in custom made creations, whether it be physical art, logos, or even data, customers can be very impatient. You might have a lot of work to do, and not everyone is cognizant of that, leading to them pushing you over and over again to stop what you’re doing and do their work for them.
This is a bit of a two way street, of course. You shouldn’t promise them to have something done in two weeks only to deliver it to them in two months. However, if they’re requesting it weeks ahead of when you said you’d get it to them, then it’s time to put a boundary in place and not let them push you around.
If you have other customers that were promised deliverables sooner, that’s what you should focus on. One customer shouldn’t dictate your whole work schedule. A very similar problem is faced with coworkers.
It can start out innocently, with you helping them out a little bit when you have very little work and they’re swamped. This is a nice gesture, but they might get a little bit too used to it.
In time, your coworker might start to toss extra work that they don’t want to do your way, weighing you down in the process. At some point, you should put your foot down and tell them that you have your own work to focus on.
This problem is even more prevalent with the advent of technology. Whereas people used to have to go through to process of either going to see you personally or sending you a letter, they can now just sent you an instant message or email, or even call you up through Skype or Zoom.
This makes this type of behavior much more common, so you need to watch out for it before it weighs you down.
