People often refer to business friendly states, or business friendly banks, but I think it’s most important to be a business friendly business.  Business friendly essentially means customer friendly, but to businesses rather than individuals. Many if not most businesses have companies as customers that use the others products or services as an enabler for their own business.  It makes sense to treat these business customers with great service and attention, since they will not be buying just one of your products, but hundreds or thousands, and will be much more valuable than most individual customers.

I was surprised in the last two weeks by companies on opposite ends of the friendly spectrum.  Two companies were very business unfriendly.   A couple were the opposite – so business friendly they were almost Zappos-like.   Tempting as it is, I won’t name the two unfriendly companies.  I’ll take the high road and highlight one of the superstars.

First, my top 5 things you should do as a business friendly company – in reverse order:

5) Be prompt and courteous in phone and email communication. Hardly a revelation, but it was shocking to me how a couple companies – in this economy – could afford not to do this.

4) Look for ways to say “yes”. If hitting a roadblock on pricing, terms, or support – think out of the box to figure out a way to make you and your business customer happy.

3) Show respect for their time. Businesses are busy.  Not getting back when you said you would, not completing an order on time, requiring your customer to follow up on you -  not good business practices.

2) Be proactive.  Be the first one to reach out, show you care, put in that little extra effort.

1) Think of your mom. Ask yourself, what would I be doing differently if this customer was my Mom?  Would I be going out of my way a little more?  Would I be a little nicer?  Would I try within my own organization to knock down a few hurdles?  If we all treated everyone like we  treat our Mom, the world would surely be a better place.

Now for my superstar highlight. Drum roll…

FedEx Office.  Although they ditched their “Kinkos” name last year, it’s hard for me not to call them FedEx Kinkos.  If you are like me, you might expect poor service from a really large company, but I was floored by the exceptional business friendly service I received recently from FedEx Office.  They were able to produce a yard sign for me and ship it for free to a local FedEx location across the country all within 24 hours.   Other companies that specialize in yard signs had 1-2 week lead times for producing the sign, added another 1-4 days for shipping, were much more expensive, and of course charged for shipping.  24 hour turnaround was out of the question.  But for FedEx Office, it was no problem.

Not only that, they did all of those top 5 business friendly things.  Kudos to Kinkos!

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A Washington Post article Friday highlights several homeowners that are selling their home For Sale by Owner right now.  To me, the interesting highlights are the varied reasons the home sellers give for going FSBO:

• Marginal equity. Some people just don’t have enough equity in their homes in this economy to support paying a real estate agent, so they need to sell it themselves.
• Been there, done that. Some homeowners have already successfully sold their home FSBO in the past, so don’t see a reason not to now.
• No downside. Why not try?  Even if they don’t succeed, there is little perceived downside risk as they can always hire a real estate agent if they don’t get many offers or decide they aren’t the Do-it-Yourself type.

The Washington Post article coincidentally comes out the same time as one from the Seattle Times about how many more million dollar homes are being sold FSBO.   This new trend for high-end homes is being driven by folks not necessarily needing to sell but wanting to slowly check out their options while avoiding paying a large commission check:

“The Kellers haven’t made a firm decision to sell, so the FSBO route allows them to evaluate offers without committing to pay roughly $90,000 to a real-estate agent.”

The anecdotal evidence in these articles supports the general trend that the National Association of Realtors has been reporting – FSBO sales increasing over the last few years up to 16% of home sales for 2008. I think the reasons for this are a combination of factors similar to those highlighted in the articles – web-savvy consumers, squeezed equity, and a willingness to try as the trend becomes more pervasive.  (Everyone’s doing it!)

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An article yesterday is a case study for why the real estate industry needs to change it’s business model:

Here’s the net-net of the article:

• Real estate agent working 24/7, taking calls at 1:00 am and working constantly while on family vacations.
• Led to divorce (surprise)
• All for $60,000 per year before expenses

Now, the author tries to put this in a positive light saying that he changed from a “lone ranger” to a “team player” and then life magically became better, but then that team fell apart because everyone was in it for themselves, and so he concludes with some lessons on what would have worked better with good teamwork.

I don’t want to seem negative (ok, maybe I’m a little negative on this), but does anyone see something wrong with this picture?

A lot of real estate agents are working their butt off and don’t have much to show for it.  Often I hear from agents that they do a lot of work for clients and then those clients decide not to buy, or sell, or they switch agents, etc.  And then the agent doesn’t get any compensation.  To me, that means the commission structure of 3%/3% just doesn’t work in so many ways.

What if these real estate agents could instead foster a working relationship with home sellers and buyers that was based on providing real value for services rendered?  Where they could transparently build trust and earn respect with prospective customers? And those customers were the real deal – qualified home sellers and buyers?

I hope someone will launch a service soon that might address these needs…

Stay tuned.

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An article written today about Flat Fee MLS gives good context to the uncompetitive real estate home seller environment for consumers in the US.  Real estate agents that try to offer their customers choice by putting their home listing in the MLS for a low-cost “flat fee” often meet resistance and artificial hurdles from the local real estate board that controls access to the MLS.

From the article, Chris Ballard who runs  Century 21 Clickit Inc. based in Georgia said:

“It’s (the flat-fee business model) going to be a growing segment of the overall real estate industry — it makes sense to a consumer,” Ballard said.

He added that he informed Canadian bureau representatives of MLS-related legal issues he’s encountered in the U.S., such as MLS restrictions that prevent properties under certain types of listing agreements from being uploaded to Realtor.com.”

The US. Department of Justice and Canadian Competition Bureau have been investigating real estate anti-competitive claims for some time and take it seriously.  So much so they have dedicated an entire website to it.

It’s great that the US DOJ is looking out for consumers in this way.  Clearly they have done a lot of research on the issue.  Even highlighting this chart of how real estate commissions have continued to rise simply because home prices have increased, when in a true competitive market, commissions should have remained flat.   You have to ask why in the world consumers would need to spend $11,000 or more to sell their home.

http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/public/real_estate/commission.gif

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Perhaps the most important step you will take when starting your own company is to sign up beta customers.  What type of product you are selling and the type of customers you are targeting will greatly affect how you plan to reach these folks.

However, regardless of how you reach out, the most effective way of qualifying them, learning about what they want, and seeing if they are interested in participating in your beta test is to conduct a survey.  Survey Monkey is probably the most well known service for this purpose.  Tried and true, Survey Monkey is inexpensive, feature rich, and has lots of reporting capabilities for when your survey is completed.

I’m starting my own company this very way.  The company is focused on the For Sale By Owner (FSBO) market, for homeowners that either want to sell their home themselves, or sell it with limited help from a real estate agent -  providing the homeowner with just the right amount of services they require.  Since  current FSBO sites are frankly stuck in the 90′s, there are a new generation of FSBO 2.0 tools that are needed – so that a web savvy, informed home seller can take advantage and save thousands of dollars when selling their home.

If you know anyone that has either sold their home in the past themselves, or is looking to do so soon – please let them know about the survey! They could be eligible for hundreds of dollars of free services by participating in the upcoming beta test.

Click Here to take survey

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I came across a site the other day while I was trying to solve a problem.  I needed an electric dog fence, commonly called an Invisible Fence, except little did I know Invisible Fence(TM) is actually trademarked and they don’t like you calling it that.  Similar to Kleenex, Q-tips, etc.   The problem was that the Invisible Fence folks came to my house to give me a quote on installing a fence, and well, it’s expensive.  Really expensive.

So that led me to ask is it really difficult to install one of these fences?  Especially if I want to install it by just attaching it to an existing black wrought iron fence as recommended by the professionals?   Searching for product reviews on electric dog fences led me to Dog Fence DIY.   This is a web 2.0 site that is doing something right, and probably they don’t really think about that they are web 2.0, just that they are doing business in a good way. For example, giving you:

• Objective product reviews for several brands.
• An easy to digest competitive matrix, without them having a dog in that hunt – pun intended.
• Do-it-Yourself (DIY) instructions for choosing wire, installation, and carefully training your dog not to freak out when he gets buzzed the first time.
• Private consultation sessions over Skype with a webcam if you need help.
• An ongoing blog with lots of useful tips and tricks.

Best of all, there is no strong sales pitch.  Just lots of helpful information, and oh by the way, they can also sell you whatever brand of dog fence you would like at a competitive price if you are inclined to DIY.

I don’t know about you, but I like people that do business this way.  They “pay it forward”, and anticipate that good things will come.  It worked with me.

What a good example that web 2.0 principles can be applied to [Anything].  Just fill in the [blank].

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