Jerry Osteryoung
Jerry Osteryoung is a consultant to businesses—he has directly assisted over 3,000 firms. He is the Jim Moran Professor of Entrepreneurship (Emeritus) and Professor of Finance (Emeritus) at Florida State University. He was the founding Executive Director of the Jim Moran Institute and served in that position from 1995 through 2008. His latest book, coauthored with Tim O’Brien, “If You Have Employees, You Really Need This Book,” is a bestseller on Amazon. Email Jerry @ jerry.osteryoung@gmail.com
Latest
Letting Staff Make Decisions in Customer Service Issues
A critical piece of every business’s customer service strategy is how you plan to handle customer concerns. When properly dealt with, complaints are an opportunity to transform angry or upset customers into extremely loyal ones.
Financing Short Term Assets
One problem I see all the time is businesses financing their short-term assets improperly, which greatly increases the risk to the firm and can potentially even cause it to fail. This is a serious issue, but it can be remedied by choosing an alternative financing method.
Policies That Work Against Great Customer Service
So many times, businesses establish policies that work for them but penalize their customers. Now go out and make sure you do not have any policies that seem like they are serving your business but are really reducing your sales and diminishing the quality of customer service you provide.
Problems with Staff Getting Along
Frequently you have to deal with staff members who do not get along. This is one of those things that is just part of human nature. However, you cannot ignore these problems because they will only get worse with time.
Last Impressions
So many businesses go out of their way to make sure their first impressions are great but forget how important last impressions are. Last impressions are how customers decide if they will continue doing business with you, so I think last impressions are more important than first impressions in many ways.
Why You Need Business Interruption Insurance
Business Interruption Insurance (BII), which is intended to compensate the company for income lost in the event physical damage renders it inoperable for a period of time, can provide so much value in so many ways.
The Power of a Good Checklist
Over the years, I have devised countless numbers of checklists to keep my staff running efficiently. What I have found is that effective checklists specify every task that must be accomplished without skipping any significant details.
Money is Not Always the Best Motivator
For so many years, I have talked about the power of incentives to motivate staff—especially monetary ones. However, more and more research is showing incentives do not work in all cases and can sometimes even produce the opposite effect.
Are You Making it Difficult for Your Customers to do Business with You?
Feedback from your customers is critical to the success of your business, but there are many things they are simply not going to tell you. Just because your customers are not saying anything about them does not mean they are not costing you business.
Kindness Does Matter in Business
Spontaneous kindness makes such an impact of customers and employees and we just cannot forget about the power of this concept. Another recent research poll showed that the the brand attribute that customers had found important (up by 391% over 3 years) was “kindness and empathy.”