Question from a reader:”Any business tips for us this Friday?”
My answer is yep, if you are charging money for something, please take the time to do it right. One of my biggest bugaboos is that people who provide service or a product aren’t either supporting what they do or they are doing a half-assed job. Fair enough but then you shouldn’t be shocked if people aren’t going to pay you for your product. I’ve been accused of doing that at times and when I first started publishing, my first book may be light on pages but it is deep in thought and content. Since then I realized that people want to pay for the pound for their books in the real world.
Back to today’s topic. I went last weekend to a local tourist attraction and went to pose for a picture. The picture would have been for about $12 – $30 if you also got a cd or dvd with it and it was to presented in a nicely bundled package. The pose was in an airplane as you board it and the particular plane was off the ground and it was a pretty dramatic pose (or in my case, out and out silly) and if you would have looked at the scene overall you could tell, wow, you are above the ground on one of those airline walk-up stairs boarding a special airplane.
Unfortunately, when you get the printed picture, or in this case, the sample that they post on their website to intice you to buy it, with the watermark, you get a heavily photoshopped area around the picture and it looks like you could have been posting in front of a stage prop instead of on the staircase to one of the coolest planes in the world.
The particular tourist attraction I went to was great and there was a museum and an old English document on display and the overall trip as an A plus so don’t get me wrong about the good time I had.
If they wanted to get me for the additional $12-30 for the posed picture they could have done a better job with their photographer posing me and telling the kid who jumped into the shot behind me to move out of the way. His head (the kid’s) is down to the left on the photo and he looks like some apparition coming out to show up like on the fake ghosthunter tv shows.
The worse part is that you didn’t get to see me terrified for standing on a walkway, on a flight staircase about twenty-thirty feet in the air entering the jet. Anyways, if I were doing things like that and trying to charge money for a product, like a book, I would go ahead and then take the time to block the shot. To be fair to the photographer, he probably wasn’t trained on this and he was a nice enough person.
The take away from all this is to take your time and if you are charging money try to do the best possible job you can because in a tight market for money, people will want better service.
Have a great weekend people and here is the picture I was talking about.
For contrast, here is another image to show you where I was in relation to being in the air when that above picture was snapped. Here is a shot from below:
As you can tell, it would have been a lot more dramatic showing the outside of the craft and the people standing on the steps with the sense of awe and majesty that would go along with this setting. Well, maybe they will change things. Just make sure that you remember to try and watch your details as well. It will make you a better business person and that should hopefully make you more profitable.
In an unrelated event (or is it because of the service angle?) General Motors is getting ready to go into bankruptcy and at this time they are trying to renegotiate debt. One of the reasons that people had avoided American cars for the longest time was that they were perceived as being less value for money than their competitors. That wasn’t and isn’t always the case but in the business world, perception tends to be everything so hopefully the government bailout will do something to help shed the bad image that they’ve had over the last few years.
When it comes to cars, people tend to remember their cars like they remember their boy and girl friends. They were either great or they were horrible and they try very hard not to make the same mistake by dating (or buying them) again.
To tie this in with today’s entry, people might give the tourist site photo area a second shot if they felt they were getting a better value for the money.
May 29 2009
If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book, Practical Money Making, that is listed right after his paragraph in this very post. There are some great suggestions and ways to survive the Depression we are in.
Interested in any of my books? You may want to make a stop over here. Please click through to purchase my books and some other interesting items that actually ARE on sale.
Have you read my book, “Bad Tax Idea, Good Tax Idea“? Please order it today. The tips inside can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Tax planning should be done year round and not just two weeks into January or later.
Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book go to Rett Syndrome research. One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes. My daughter Arianna has Rett Syndrome and we are working to do all we can to make her life easier and find a cure in her lifetime. Boys born with the Rett gene generally die at birth.
Kim Isaac Greenblatt
If You Are Charging Money, Do A Job Right
Tags: Business
[...] Greenblatt presents If You Are Charging Money, Do A Job Right posted at profitable, saying, “When it comes to making money, it pays to do a job the right [...]