I am pretty sure I have listened to and read at least 2,000 to 3,000 books and videos on selling, how to sell and customer service and one theme that I have found has been - The Customer Is Always Right?

This is the biggest load of rubbish I have ever heard. If you take on this philosophy, from my experience, you will go broke let me explain

One of the most common stories I hear bandied around the customer service industry, is the case of a Manager at Wal-Mart who had an irate customer who had bought a set of tires and was not happy with them. She went to Wal-Mart and abused the manager and told him the tires were no good and the Manager gave her a full refund. The point to this example was that Wal-Mart did not sell tyres and the manager went above and beyond the call of duty and gave her a full refund. But as far as I am concerned, he did not do the right thing, he should have politely informed the customer they did not sell tyres. Could you honestly imagine giving a refund for a product in which you did not sell. As a small business owner, you would go broke but

So, many of the customer service gurus use that story as the shining light in the way that we should be serving our customers. To me, that is crazy to be pushing such a philosophy. I wrote this article because I felt it was important as a small business owner to share with you a few things I have learnt about balancing the needs of the customer to the needs of your business as a small business owner. But also, as a small business owner that believed in the philosophy of the Customer Is Always Right and how it almost sent me broke.

For years, I have been in small business and I had bent over backwards to accommodate my customers and I still do, but what I realised about 6 months ago, is that by not setting clear guidelines on how I was prepared to do business but also sticking to those guidelines, my business in the end was being dictated to by other companies. My company has done a lot of work with Government agencies and big business and many people who work in these organisations think they are high flyers and can railroad small business and many of them do.

When I started picking up work from some of these organisations, I would get a call saying, we want your training but this is how we are going to do business. We only buy services on purchase orders and that is the only way we do business and we will pay you in 30 days or on the cheque cycle run (which might be 90 days). If you want our business you either accept our terms or we will go somewhere else.

Now as a small business owner and somebody who wants to grow their business, you think, excellent, okay, yes sir, no sir, we accept your terms. Then you do a fantastic job, on time, within budget, then it comes down to payment. On some of our work we had to wait six months to be paid. Now like most small businesses we work on credit and being so small we rely heavily on credit cards. But its this reliance that almost destroyed my business. We found that because some of our large clients did not pay us for six months, the interest from the credit card payments actually cost us more than the business in the first place.

One of the government agencies I worked for had a policy of putting 10 people on a purchase order for training, but their policy was that you did not get paid for any of the training until everybody on that purchase order had completed the training. In this particular case we had 2 people over a 12 month period change their course dates at least four times and in the end one person cancelled altogether. Now the training manager of this government agency had the audacity to tell me that they did not have to pay for any of the training because they had not finished the training. In the end, I realised for the first time, why many of my larger competitors ended up going broke. They simply were not getting paid and being railroaded. It was at this point I realised one important lesson, the Customer Is Not Always Right!

I will say one thing, when you get to the point where you are about to lose everything, your perspective changes and I think personally its incredibly liberating. I decided it was time to act and I learnt a very important lesson. This is my business and I decide how I want to do business! Not my customers!

In the end, I wrote to everyone of the customers who owed me money (we are talking tens of thousands of dollars) and I was quite blunt to them and I said, your failure to pay has damaged my business. The terms you wish to do business on are no longer acceptable and as such we no longer are prepared to accept your business. Pay now or else and then I set out the rules of how I was going to do business.

I figured in the end I would lose all of my big customers but it really did not matter they were not making me money, in fact they were losing me money in a big way because of the interest owed on my credit cards. So I did not care. You know the funny thing, I never lost a single customer and now every single business pays upfront and with a credit card. It was not until I put my terms on that table that things changed. In reality, I should never have accepted their terms but I guess hindsight is a good thing.

I did come to a really important realisation, I would rather have a small business that makes a profit, than all the business in the world but not make a single cent. If you are in business or thinking about going into business let me share my strategies I now use for surviving my customers

1.I set the rules on how I want to do business not my customer 2.Set very clear rules on how a customer must pay for your services or products 3.If the customer doesn't pay cash up front (this includes credit cards), require them to give you authority to debit their bank account. 4.Be wary of any business that only buys using purchase orders only (Very few companies do this, many of them have credit cards so tell them you only accept payment by credit cards) 5.Do Not be frightened to say No 6.Do Not be frightened to say to a potential Customers, "I am sorry, but your not the sort of customer I am looking for" 7.Do Not be bullied into doing any product or service. Do only what you can handle and want to do. 8.Be Assertive and Stand Firm on your decisions 9.Be upfront to a customer if they are hurting your business 10.Always treat the customer fairly and equitably

The world is a big place, there is lots of business out there for you to go after, no customer is that important that they should be in a position to bankrupt you.

I keep getting told by my business mentor that business is supposed to be fun. I think it should be too, but its only fun if you have the money to enjoy it.