Business Practices We Love to Hate

Today, I'm going to be the old man yelling at a cloud.

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Here are 9 things business do that I HATE, HATE, HATE. And because one of the things I hate that other businesses do is to take WAY too long to get to a point they don't have, there is no (hopefully) fun intro and I am just diving into it.

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1) Not Getting To The Point

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I have found in life that the quicker or more succinctly I can explain something the more impactful it is.  Someone once told me something about being my own bank, I asked them to explain it to me and they sent me to a 3 hour youtube video... NOPE. Maybe I missed out on a great opportunity, but I think I would have just personally been SVB for my own finances. Get to the point.

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2) Hidden Pricing

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If you cannot share your pricing openly and consistently... I am going somewhere else. Are you trying to screw me over and charge me more?  Do you want to see what you think I can afford? Are you using "value based pricing" (aka business speak to screwing over the buyer). Look, we used to be a bartering society and then some crazy person invented money maybe 5,000 years ago...get with the times man. To be fair, you don't need to put it ON your website, but if someone asks during a call/email/dm...can you share it RIGHT there? Or do you need some weird authorization after a 25 minute timesharing style boiler room sales pitch? Not for me.

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3) Being a Hypocrite

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If you want to sell me that you're a social media wizard (actual message I got) you should have more than 120 connections on that social media platform (actual amount they had). To be fair, LegalEase has almost zero current marketing other than the show we do every week and the clips from it - so we are guilty of being a marketing company that doesn't directly market ourselves (although we make a post or more a day for me to market ourselves).  Seriously, practice what you preach my business friends!

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4) No Customer Service

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I will be honest here...even BAD customer service is something...but how often do you get involved with a company that just has NONE.  There's no phone number to call, no one can accomplish anything, they always need a supervisor, you have to wait for someone to call you back (which they never do)…it's the worst.  If you're the cheapest option and I know I am going to risk this...fine.  But when you sell a moderately expensive product and I can NEVER talk to anyone...ouch, please just let me run the other way.

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5) No reviews that you didn't control

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If your reviews are ONLY on your website and not on google/facebook/etc - RUN THE OTHER WAY.  I promise you there is a reason for that.  No one who has a ton of great reviews doesn't give you a place to see all of them.  And to be fair, most studies actually push a 4.5/5 with MORE reviews than a 5/5 with very few. We seem to KNOW that no one is perfect, we just want a good shot at a great meal.

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6) Pushy Sales Tactics

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Let's be honest, no one wants to hear from you until they NEED to.  If I wanted to buy your amazing clickfunnels course for $9.97 if I act now in the next 5 seconds or it goes back to being $100,000,000 and there are only 3/8th of a slot left so I need to buy now...I don't need to buy now.  If you find a company that spams you and then sends the "just making sure you got my prior message" tell them to take that prior message you never asked for and shove it.  Heck even if you send me a "valuable" newsletter...why do I need to take the steps to unsubscribe if I didn't subscribe to begin with?

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7) Inconvenient Processes

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If I need to print ANYTHING to hire your company, I am going somewhere else.  E-sign, e-pay, set me up for auto-charge, seriously let me shut up and you take my money!

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8) Overpromising

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When I got my first case management system, the sales person SWORE to me that a number of features I wanted were "coming soon" or "in beta right now" and then when 6-9-12 months later NONE of them had come to fruition...do you think I was dumb enough to stay with a system that didn't do what I wanted it to?  No (well I did check with my wife first...but THEN we found another one)

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9) Forcing a list to be longer than it needs to be

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When companies just throw out WAY too many features to try and get to some "clean" number and you're left reading about shit no one cares about...just end it already!

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That being said - what did I miss?

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Next week I am getting super personal with you all.  Today is my last day of 75hard and so next week I am going to write about how I decided to do it, how it went, and what that has to do for your law firm (spoiler alert, it's the same shit I talk about everywhere else just with "firm revenue" replaced with "bmi" and lower is better)

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Until then, may you not something something about Scream 6 except they've made so little sense for so many years that I don't even know how to reference it anymore. Courtney Cox maybe?

Until Next Friday

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