There has been a slight lapse in my blogging due to a few things, its currently holiday season and we have had a few weeks off over the break, however if I’m truly honest with you the lack of posts is due to the difficulty of tackling the next topic in our story.
Before commencing this blog a rough timeline was put together marking out the key events both positive and negative that have occurred in the process of getting this business off the ground. This marks the first real negative hurdle the business has faced and I’m not sure how to even tackle writing about it. I suspect that by the time this gets published on the blog it would have been edited several times.
Upon start up and up to this point in the story I had taken advice and the support from many owners of small businesses who were part of my friends and family network. One of which was the father of my soon to be wife. In the early days the unconditional support of family was something we took for granted and we benefited greatly from it.
Over a period of time a series of issues and small conflicts arose with my in-laws, in my personal relationships with them and more so with my father-in-law. In an attempt to remain professional and as unbiased as possible let’s just say that I rapidly became their least favourite person and so one of GDL’s biggest and most loyal clients at the time dropped from our regular clientele.
Whilst this was no real shock to us as we assumed the conflict in my personal life would carry over to our business relationship, it did cause a few issues in the life of the business. (it still causes massive issues to this day in my personal life).
At the time GDL was dependent on the few clients we did have and especially on the families that owned multiple vehicles and so we had overnight lost one of our key clients. In hindsight and years down the track looking back it matters very little to the business, but at the time this was detrimental and rose fears within myself of seeing my small budding business fail. It was a very stressful time, but was probably beneficial for us to experience so early in the life of the business.
The other key factor this whole nasty business bought to light was the concept I had in my head of “I can keep every customer 100% satisfied”. For a while I truly believed this and this was the first of a few lessons I had that helped me realise that some people are beyond reason and are never 100% satisfied.
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