Mistakes Matter!

Credit: Anthony Guice

How you manage mistakes matters. If you’ve been in sales any time at all you know that one. There is no shortage of advice on the topic either. How you manage your mistakes says lots more about you than how you manage success.

But what if a client fouls up? How do you manage that? Do you let them twist in the wind or do you dive in and help? What it the mistake is expensive?

Certainly, there are boundaries. A former employer of mine liked to say, “I’m prepared to pay for my mistakes. I can’t afford to pay for my client’s errors too. They have to own those.”

I agree with the guy that said this but not everything is black and white. Let me share a fiasco that came my way. Saying yes to helping a client turned into big money.

I was doing business with a large southern bank. I printed their statement stuffers (remember those?), retail service brochures and commercial bank collateral. I had something going on for them almost every day.

A new marketing lady at the bank decided to cut out the middle man (their agency) and buy direct. She included me in the process but it was clear she had her eye on another printer. Her plan was to save agency markup and reduce the printer’s invoice.

She was a real “expert.” She decided to provide her own paper. She could avoid another markup and, essentially, buy press and bindery time.

I declined to quote. I felt like there were too many ways things could go wrong. The risk was too great for the offered reward. I lost the business and it was noticed.

Fast Forward: A few weeks pass. The agency calls and asks, “would you be willing to store some paper for the bank?” I said, “sure. How much and how long?” My assumption was we’d put a few cartons on the shelf. The agency dude didn’t know and promised he’d get back to me with the specifics.

A few hours later he calls back. He’s chuckling and says, “This is paper left over after printing a retail service brochure. Now, I don’t want to say they fouled up their order but it’s 375,000 sheets of 26 x 40, 100-pound Wedgewood Gloss Cover.”

I was stumped. My warehouse was 18,000 square feet. I couldn’t hold this amount of stock. I would be working around it all day every day.

But I had promised. I stuck to it and the paper showed up. It was scattered all over the plant and in every corner.

Fast Forward: The bank promised to use the stock for all of their brochures. That meant I would be doing all of them until the stock was used.

Guess what. They didn’t like the paper they bought. They would fuss at press checks. We’d switch to a better sheet and they’d say “great. This is what we had in mind.”

So, this is what happened: We got the bank printing anyway. The favor we did got them out of a pinch. They paid storage and upgraded all of their work to a superior sheet of paper.

I called a soft drink company I worked with. I told them I had a warehouse full of paper begging to be used. They did weekly kits for bottlers and the bank stock was perfect for it.

Summary: The bank got their paper off the books. At the end of each month, we provided an accounting for what was used and applied a credit against invoices owed. The soft drink giant got a great deal on the stock and reduced the cost of their weekly mailings. My employer received storage fees, more business from the bank and more business from the soft drink company.

Saying yes to storage (helping the bank with their mistake) generated lots of revenue and changed the way both customers saw our company.

The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with Printing Impressions. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of Printing Impressions. Artificial Intelligence may have been used in part to create or edit this content.