It is just human nature that we tend to spread bad news faster than good news.
I wish that wasn’t the case but unfortunately it is.
Just think about the evening news. How often do you get a feel good feeling after watching it for even half an hour. In many cases you end up feeling hopeless and wondering what has become of humanity. This overall vibe has really rang true lately with my company. We made the mistake of hiring a repair person that turned out to be a disaster. He was rude to customers, did shoddy work, and even failed to show up for some of the appointments. When you are in the service industry this spells trouble for the company’s reputation on a whole. We are one of three HVAC repair places in town and this mistake has cost us some of our valued customers. They heard through word of mouth that this guy was working for us and even called to cancel appointments that were on the books. We have tried doing damage control by notifying our customers that we no longer employ him but it will take a bit to regain the confidence that they had in us. I only hope that they don’t sign on with the competitors during that time. We really can’t afford to lose our baseline customers and we may even have to come up with a promotion and offer them some great incentives to stick with us. Either way this is going to hurt our bottom line for the year and I hope we can recover next year.