Kevin Bemel ·
Dividends Entrepreneurship Will Pay You
Rarely will entrepreneurship only pay you money. You'll learn numerous lesson for improving your life.
If you start a service business you'll find the Pareto Principle applies: 80% of your headaches will come from 20% of your clients. I'll never forget one property management client who drove me crazy trying to please her. She owned an apartment building in tony Bel Air, California. Her outlandish expectations and constant harping only marginally outdid the extraordinarily demanding tenants. After handling her building for two years I asked a friend who was managing her commercial properties how things were going with her. Turns out he had dropped her account after three months.
I was astonished! Despite more than ten years in business, it never occurred to me that I could fire a client. A week later, with a huge anvil lifted off my shoulders, I started to enjoy life again. I actually had free time!
Life lesson from entrepreneurship:
[Tweet "Relationships with Clients Have to Be Mutually Beneficial Just Like with Friends"]
If over the long-term a client uses 80% of your time, he had better pay you 80% of your income.
You may have a friend constantly needing your support. But will that person be there for you in your hour of crisis? If so, you have a friend. Otherwise, you are an unpaid psychotherapist. Re-examine your feelings of self-worth if you need to have this person in your life for validation.
Another equally memorable client had a gorgeous 1930s era building in Los Angeles. One evening, happily ensconced in my apartment not too far away, I got an emergency call from one of my resident managers. A pipe had burst. She needed my help. So I threw on a jacket and jeans over my pajamas, grabbed my keys and pager, and ran out the door. I had walked about three blocks when I sensed a car following me. Not good.
Sure enough, in the next block I heard tires squeal. Within seconds a young man had leaped out of the car, put a gun in my side, and demanded money. I yanked my hands out of my jacket pockets and protested all I had was my keys and pager. He poked the gun into my ribs and insisted on money. Shouting now, I explained I was responding to an emergency at a building I managed. Trying to convince him I had not brought any money with me, I insisted he frisk me!
Evidently, my bellowing disturbed the occupant of the apartment we were next to. He shouted, “if you don’t shut up I’m going to call the police!”
With a confused look on his face, the gunman sprang back into the car and off it drove. Visibly shaking when I met my resident manager, I quietly told her what happened. But we got the problem fixed. And I didn't mention the hold up when reporting to the owner the next day.
But the resident manager had told him. So at the end of our conversation, he said he had heard what had happened. He expressed his gratitude for my perseverance. Some time later he told me to raise my fee!
Life lesson from entrepreneurship:
[Tweet "In Business and Life, Tenacity Generates Extraordinary Results"]
Are you frustrated with people who do just enough to get by? You should love them. Because of their laziness your top-quality performance, sooner or later, will stand out. It has to.
In today’s competitive economic environment even employees have to be entrepreneurial. The good news is such a milieu plays to your strength of striving for personal growth.
What lessons about personal development have you learned from your work?
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