Self Employed Success

Dealing with difficult clients?

I hear horrific stories all the time from my colleagues and clients about their own customers who constantly step outside the boundaries of what’s considered good social behavior.

Sure, we all make mistakes from time-to-time, but these folks make a nasty habit of it.

Your overall health and your quality of business life matters. Identifying and dealing with crazymakers will give you a helping hand in creating the business you want.

Are your clients making you crazy? Your health and the health of your business matters. Tweet This!

I’m sure you’ll recognize some of these types of customers:

1. The Non-payer: They promise to pay, they may even have a contract, but over and over again the check doesn’t arrive. They pretend they didn’t get your invoice, or your emails, or your phone calls.
2. The Verbal Twister: They “remember” everything you say, and will tell you that you said (and meant) something completely different than your actual words. They take all your words and interpret them in their own way, especially when it’s not possible for you to remember everything you’ve ever said.
3. The Complainer: Everything in their life sucks, and they tell you about it ad nauseam, every chance they get; also known as The Squeaky Wheel because they feel if they make enough noise, they’ll get more attention. Also akin to The Energy Vampire — every time you come in contact with them, you walk away feeling drained, exhausted and debilitated.
4. I Love You, But: This crazymaker starts off praising you. They say things like, “I love your work,” or “You really understand me.” In the next sentence they rip you apart, accusing you of double-dealing, sub-standard work, or unethical behavior on your part, completely out of the blue. This “give then take” approach keeps you off balance, which is the whole point.
5. The Rusher: Always in a hurry to get something done and doesn’t care if you’re busy with other projects or other customers. They say things like, “I want it yesterday,” or “I know you said you have no open appointments, but can you sneak me in first thing tomorrow morning?”

That’s just a starter list; there are many more crazymaker types out there. I know you’ve run into customers whose repeated bad behavior has you scratching your head in bewilderment. I’d love to hear your stories…share them in the Comments below, okay? We all benefit by reading about other people’s experiences with crazymaker clients.

Remember, unless you are a psychotherapist or psychiatrist, you are not trained to identify crazymakers upon first meeting them, so don’t beat yourself up if one of these people sneaks into your business life. Even trained mental health practioners cannot always instantly spot a crazymaker.

In Part 2 of this blog post, I’ll give you some tips on how to deal with the crazymaker clients in your business life.

Here’s a great guest post by blogger Lisa Rae Preston:

Securing a team of employees who’d work for you for FREE sounds like a page right from the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes for Entrepreneurs, but it’s a real possibility.

Enter the wonderful world of virtual interns!

Virtual interns typically work for 10-15 weeks for your business and can take care of activities like social media marketing, creating viral videos, copywriting, editing, contacting the press on your behalf, driving traffic to your site, etc.   As long as you can train the intern to do the work, the sky’s the limit on how they can serve your business.

College intern coordinators love to have companies contact them regarding internships.  Their students get real-life work experience with you, which can be included on a future job resume.

Interns are often paid a small salary, but unpaid internships have taken the stage recently.  In fact, 48% of internships in 2011 have been unpaid. (National Association of Colleges and Employers)

Unpaid internships aren’t about students working for free.  The training you give them as they work on  your projects can be implemented in another job post graduation.  Students often prefer virtual internships, as they can work right from their dorm room or campus library, and hours are usually flexible.

In order to approach colleges to secure your intern or team of interns, you want to have in place:

• A detailed list of all tasks you want the intern to do for you during the semester
• The documents, videos/audios necessary to train your intern for each task
• A job description and paragraph listing your qualifications for the internship
• And of course, a professional web presence and up to date company information

Internships offer solopreneurs a chance to share their knowledge and expertise as well as receive hundreds of hours of unpaid assistance in their businesses.  You can literally have an entire team of interns working with you every semester, taking care of a multitude of tasks like SEO, product creation, traffic generation, press-release writing and PR, and social media marketing.

Internships pull a triple win, giving colleges the ability to showcase training that can help students get hired faster, offering students meaningful work experiences and a letter of reference for future employment.  You as the business owner reap the benefits of part-time employees without payroll.

Guest blogger, Lisa Rae Preston, specializes in creating intern training programs for entrepreneurs, based on their virtual business needs. If you’d like to learn more information about how to secure interns for your business or about done-for-you intern training systems, visit Lisa’s Think For Success website.

In December 2011, I conducted a Learning Survey of small business owners to determine how their learning preferences had changed since the last time I conducted the survey in 2008.

1,647 small business owners and solo entrepreneurs completed the survey. You can download the results here.

I hope you find this information helpful in understanding your students and how they like to learn. Please leave your comments and questions below…I’d love to hear your thoughts!

P.S. If you haven’t taken the Learning Survey yet, there’s still time. Take it here and get 12 great freebies from 10 great business mentors, just for taking the 3 question survey.

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It’s really important that you DO copyright your work officially through your government channels. Yes, most governments say that the moment you create something it’s copyrighted, but the fact is if someone steals your work, you have to prove you were the first one to create it.

Submitting your materials officially to your government’s copyright office saves you a lot of headaches later on.

What Work Can You Copyright?

• group and training program materials
• forms and worksheets
• book, audio and video programs
• educational exercises you’ve created
• your website/blog
• student guides
• songs/jingles
• photos/images

It’s your material, you should protect it.

If you’re in the USA, you can upload your material via the US Copyright Office website. If you upload your materials, it’s only $35 and it takes a few months for them to process your paperwork; if you mail hard-copy, the fee is $50-65 and it can take 9-12 months for them to process it. (Note: fees change, so check out the Copyright Office website for their current fees.) You’ll also find a Copyright Basics article on this site, as well as a list of Frequently Asked Questions.

Bundling Pays

You have to pay the copyright registration fee for each item you copyright. However, the USA Copyright Office allows you to “bundle” material together and call it a “program.”

For instance, when I copyrighted the Mastermind Group Facilitator Training class, my bundle included my lesson plan, my student guide, all the forms I give to students, etc. I called my submission to the Copyright Office “The Mastermind Group Facilitator Training Program” and uploaded just one PDF file with all the contents.

I also took all my articles from 2010, put them together in one PDF, and uploaded the one bundle entitled, “Karyn Greenstreet 2010 articles.”

If I had sent them as separate PDF files, it would have cost me $35 for each PDF/item I submitted; because I bundled it into one PDF file, I paid just $35 for the whole submission.

Once you get your copyright number back from the government, put it on EVERYTHING: your website (if you copyrighted it), your forms, your student/group materials, etc. Let people clearly know that you have an official date stamp of when you created your materials in case someone copies your work.

This is especially important if you have created a program or system from scratch. You put a huge amount of time and effort into creating your materials and your process. Take the 15 minutes and $35 to protect it.

What about the Poor Man’s Copyright?

There is a concept called the Poor Man’s Copyright where you send a copy of your work to yourself in a sealed envelope, so that the date of copyright is established by the postmark. This is what the US Copyright Office has to say about that:

The practice of sending a copy of your own work to yourself is sometimes called a “poor man’s copyright.” There is no provision in the copyright law regarding any such type of protection, and it is not a substitute for registration.

What About Other Countries?

Many countries have agreements to honor each other’s copyrighted materials. Some countries do not have a copyright submission process, but recognize outside for-profit and non-profits companies that accept copyright submissions. One hint that a website is the official government website for copyright information and protection is that the URL of their website may have “gov” or “govt” in the name.

• USA Copyright Office
• USA Patent and Trademark Office
• Canada Intellectual Property Office
• Australian Attorney General’s Office
• Australian IP
• United Kingdom (copyrights, patents and trademarks)
• New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development (copyrights, patents and trademarks)

Be careful that you get to your official national government site for copyright information and applications. There are a lot of sites that offer to submit copyrights for you, but it’s not the same as getting the information directly from the government agency that does the work and knows the laws.

The best place to get your questions answered about copyrighting (and patents and trademarks) is your official government website devoted to the topic.

If you find a website for your country’s government office that I’ve not included in this blog post, please leave a comment so that we can all share the resources. Thanks!

Copyright versus Trademark

Note that a copyright is not the same thing as a trademark or a patent. See your countries’ websites to learn the difference. This article from LegalZoom entitled How do I know if I need trademark or copyright protection? may help clarify things for you.

The Final Story

So…what if someone does steal your website text? Read my blog post about Are Thieves Stealing Your Website Text? It includes information about what to do if you find that someone has broken your copyright.

It is well worth the time and money to officially copyright your work and your materials. Put time in your calendar right now to focus on this important task.

I’ll get off my soapbox now. 

Did you find this helpful? I’d love to hear your comments below!

The phrase “business reinvention” might have you quaking in your boots. After all, who wants to start all over again from scratch?

Ah. I think I can help by offering up a different definition for you to ponder.

Business reinvention isn’t about tossing it all away and starting from scratch (unless you really, really want to do that). Instead, I think of business reinvention as a process of looking at your current business model and your own goals, and finding places that could use a makeover. Knowing why you’re reinventing your business is the first step in the process of transformation.

There are lots of places where you can transform your business: your marketing, your target audience, the services and products you sell, the way back-office administration happens, your technology, your scale (national versus local), your resource base, your business and personal goals. You can choose to remodel every single one of these items or pick the one that will give you the biggest bang for the buck.

Some business reinvention stories…

One of my clients is a chiropractor and has been doing it for nearly 30 years. But as she gets older, its harder and harder to lift patients off the table and the work itself causes her back and shoulder pain. In addition she feels that she would like to reach a larger audience with her message of being in conscious choice about all aspects of your life and not just following what everyone else tells you to do or think. She will take everything she’s ever learned as a chiropractor and everything she’s been studying and living for the past 30 years and create a new business where she can teach and coach.

One client of mine is taking her existing locally-based business and making into a virtual business that she can conduct from anywhere in the world. This frees her up to travel with her husband and continue to have a business she loves.

Another client of mine stayed in the same industry but changed his service offerings. In the past he had offered sign design and installation to his local customers. Now he’s offering sign management on a national scale to large organizations with multiple locations throughout the USA. He’s taken all his knowledge, experience and connections and put them to work for a new, larger, and more lucrative target audience.

In all these business reinvention stories you’ll see a common thread: as a small business owner, your goals, your values, your needs and your lifestyle can change. And you can reinvent your business to reflect these new dreams and move you towards the business and life you want.

You decide how, when and where to transform your business

Business reinvention is what you make it. But it’s not making tiny tweaks here and there; it’s shaking up the whole business and marketing models and realigning them to your goals, values and needs.