Today, as part of an interview for SmartCompany, I was asked an interesting question: “Tell us about a near death or challenging experience that your company has been through. How did you solve the problem?”. My response…
"Growing too fast before we were ready almost killed The Physio Co. In the early days, one of our biggest clients dumped us. Why? Because we weren’t paying them enough attention and listening when they spoke.
At the time, I was 26 years old & in my third year of running The Physio Co. I was inexperienced and personally stretched far too thin. I was trying to be the technician (physio), manager & entrepreneur on a scale much greater than was possible. I didn’t have the right people to support me and a client made a decision that almost killed us.
And it was a big client. Over night, almost half of our revenue evaporated and I was left scrambling to save The Physio Co.
I responded by reassessing my role, hiring an Operations Manager to help lead our team and implementing a quality control program that brought us much closer to our customers.
In hindsight, being dumped by a client early on was one of the best things that could’ve happened. The Physio Co is much stronger and we learnt to listen more than ever."
NB: At the time, it didn’t feel like a lesson well-learnt. It felt horrible!