A good business reputation is a terrible thing to waste

Picture this. It is your wedding night, and you and your spouse enter the hotel where you will be spending your first night together as husband and wife. The both of you decided to spend the night at a beautiful hotel with an excellent reputation of taking care of their guests.

You go to the reception desk at 1 a.m. after a long night of dancing and socializing with a few hundred of your closest friends with one thought on your mind, grab the key to your honeymoon suite and spend the rest of the night enjoying each other’s company. The last thing on your mind is to get into a difficult and argumentative situation with a night clerk who could care less about your special night, and its meaning.

You walk into this gorgeous entryway and head right for the reception desk in order to proceed with a quick check-in. You are told that unfortunately your special room is no longer available. After half an hour of heated dialogue, the night clerk’s position was that the honeymoon suite had been blocked off for a guest who is checking in tomorrow but a standard room is available immediately.

The bride realizing the situation, then asked to speak to a manager or supervisor and after an additional 20 minutes, the night clerk came back and stated that a suite was available at three times the normal price.

This exact scene is what I witnessed this past week at an exclusive hotel on the north shore of Long Island, New York. As a small-business owner who provides a service to the general public, seeing these types of actions taken by an employee on behalf of an owner makes me feel sick.

Business Reputation

I thought to myself, if I was the owner of this hotel, would I want my employee to treat any guest, let alone a bride and groom on their wedding night this way. It got me to think whether or not, this exclusive “mansion like” resort truly lived up to its impeccable business reputation.

Business reputations are extremely difficult to develop. Quite often it can take months and even years to develop a solid, strong reputation for your business. The sad thing is that destroying such a reputation may only take a minute, an hour or even a day.

There are many things that you can do to build up your business reputation. However, more importantly you must pay particular attention to the day-to-day activities that solidify and maintain your business reputation. Focusing on your employees, what they do and how they do it is critical to maintain your business reputation.

Concepts such as proper hiring, ongoing training, oversight, and monitoring of your employees are truly important in maintaining a positive reputation. You must hire candidates that believe the way that you believe that your customers are extremely important to your business success.

Same Commitment

Your employees must also possess the same commitment to 100 percent customer satisfaction if you wish to maintain that level of customer satisfaction. You must be committed to initially and continuously training your employees to work with those goals in mind.

Equally important is to oversee and monitor all levels of your organization, making sure that your values and goals as the owner of the business are executed by your employees on a day-to-day basis.

Leaving your business solely in the hands of your employees can ultimately lead to a quick and unexpected downturn. There are multiple issues of liability that can arise due to the actions or inactions of your employees.

There are also many economic consequences such as ongoing or unexpected losses of revenue when your employees are not working to their potential or to the standards that you have set for the business.

My advice is to continuously monitor all levels of your business by reaching out to your customers and clients on an on-going basis in order to confirm your business reputation in the community.

If you begin to receive comments that don’t properly reflect what you want for your business and how you want others to perceive your business, find the source of the problem and make the necessary adjustments to correct the problem.

In business, a positive solid business reputation is all that you have and on-going adjustments and minor tweaks along the way are the easiest ways to maintain it.

Ian M. Berkowitz is a former attorney/advisor with the United States Small Business Administration in Washington D.C. During his tenure with the Federal Government he specifically worked in the areas of disaster relief for homeowners and businesses and government contracting. He is currently a practicing business and real estate attorney in Boca Raton. In addition to his law degree, Ian also holds a Masters Degree in Government from The John Hopkins University.