If you find yourself in a position where your customers always insist on speaking with you directly instead of your employees, then you might want to consider shifting your structure so you can improve the value of your business.

Here’s why: a business that can thrive without the owner at the center of all its operations is more valuable because processes can run smoothly with or without you. If you’re too stuck in the weeds, you’ll have a difficult time improving or evolving – and your employees won’t have the opportunity to grow and become advocates for your brand.

 To maximize the value of your business, you should set a goal to quietly slip into the background and let your staff take center stage. Here are five ways to make customers less inclined to call you:

If you display the bio of key staff members on your website, re-order the list so that it is alphabetical rather than hierarchical.

If your surname is in your company name, consider a re-brand. There’s nothing that makes a customer want to deal with the owner more than having the owner’s surname featured in the company name.

Giving someone the title of president conveys the message that they have real authority to solve customer problems.

Tim Ferriss, the author of The 4 Hour Work Week among other books, made the email auto-responder famous, and it can serve you well. Set up an automatic response to anyone sending you an email explaining that you are travelling or attending to a strategic project and unable to answer their questions immediately. Instead, train customers to direct questions to the person best suited to answer them quickly.

A word of caution using this strategy: if you continue to answer customer emails after setting up an auto-responder, it’s going to become transparent that you’re just trying to hide behind your autoresponder, which could diminish your credibility. If you set one up, you need to be ready to let others step in.

If you have the kind of business that customers visit in person, set up a home office so you can spend more time away from your location.

For a hard-charging A-type entrepreneur, the steps above can be complicated and feel counterintuitive. They may even have a short-term negative impact on your company’s sales, but once you get your customers trained to go to your team, you’ll be able to scale up further and ultimately maximize the value of your business.

Find out how you score on the eight factors that drive your company’s value by completing the Value Builder questionnaire:

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To have a winning mindset, it sometimes requires time and effort as it involves changing ideas and assumptions that no longer serve us. The power of mindset is not just about talents, it mainly involves changing and improving. It also involves awareness and a ‘we’ attitude to create better environments for ourselves and for our organisations. The main traits to adopt a winning minset are: being aware of cognitive biases, cultivating a growth mindset and to improve our conversation intelligence.

1 – Being aware of cognitive biases

According to different authors in the field of behavioural economics, the human brain contains different cognitive biases and heuristics which clouds judgment and reasoning. The most common biases are the framing effect, anchoring, overconfidence, loss aversion and hindsight bias. These biases affect our decision-making progress leading to undesired outcomes.  

Many people  in the business sector are not even aware of the mental shortcuts generated by our brains so many cannot even distinguish between a subjective and an objective thought. For instance, overconfidence is something that is commonly heard in the business world. The idea that a person considers their judgement as much more reliable than the objective accuracy of those judgements. In other words, thinking that statistics do not apply to you or to your business only to others is a common mistake. 

 2 – Cultivating a growth mindset

In her book Mindset, Professor Dweck explains why it’s not our abilities and talent that bring us success – but whether people approach their goals with a fixed or growth mindset. A fixed mindset mainly consists of believing that one person’s talents and abilities are fixed and unchangeable. On the other hand, a growth mindset is all about improving our abilities through practice.  

If we use this perspective to observe our organisations, we will soon notice that leaders with a fixed mindset believe they are superior to others and they must affirm that they are superior through words and actions. This, in turn, creates and reinforces an environment of distrust. On the contrary, leaders with a growth mindset make the effort to create a supporting environment where no person or role is either superior or inferior which increases levels of trust and cooperation. 

3 – Conversational intelligence

According to Judith Glaser, author of Conversational intelligence, conversations have three dimensions.  

First dimension – Biochemical  

At this level, people are not communicating, their thinking gets clouded by assumptions, judgements and aggression. There is a lot of frustration and there in very poor listening. 

Second dimension – Relational  

This level is about sharing needs and aspirations with other who listen and are in a state of reciprocation. Ot is about connecting with others at a relational level. 

Third dimension – Co-creational  

This level is about co creating a new reality where both parties feel happy and satisfied. This goes beyond reaching goals or meeting needs. It is also more about engagement and influencing others at a transformational level. 

In conclusion, putting these ideas in practice will help you managing your organisation with the right mindset. However, if you need further assistance with integrating these ideas in your business, do not hesitate to book a consultation with us.