Mom taught me how to pick up the phone & call and talk to my customers.

At age 15 the phone seemed to weigh a ton-But mom made sure I knew how to call my customers

My very first real business was a lawn mowing business.

Before I bought my dad’s ’63 Chevy and drove all over Vinita, OK mowing 14 lawns I needed help with transportation at age 15 and needed mom, dad or my brother to drive me to my lawn mowing jobs.  I had ran the ads in the newspaper, serviced my lawn-mower with a sharp blade and new spark plug and was ready to make cash.

Inevitably we’d get a good Oklahoma rain on the Saturday it was time to mow and I’d have to do what I hated most….pick up the phone and call every single one of my customer’s and tell them I wouldn’t be mowing until it was dry enough. “But they already know this, I’d complain to mom.” “Yes but they deserve a phone call and they will appreciate hearing it directly from you.” Those early days of phone calling my customer’s didn’t come easily. Like many kids I felt I felt self-conscious around adults. It didn’t help that I stuttered as a child and although I had grown out of that it was still hard to call customers and talk on the phone.

But my mom’s persistence and my determination took me through several summers of quality cash and Entrepreneurship that will later pave the road to many more business ventures that involved using the phone and closing the deal.
People skills-Sales people need this skill.

My Childhood Lawn Mowing Business Helped Prepare me for my Future

I learned how to:

submit bids
invoice customers
budget money
plan operations
hire and pay subcontractors
how to market
negotiate
offer the ‘up-sell,’ save,
plan expenditures, and expand into new markets and how to buy and sale a business.

Not only do I think every kid in America needs the chance to be mentored in running their own business but I think every business owner and Entrepreneur needs to be reminded of the value of the telephone in growing a business. Nothing can replace a personal phone call. 

Email is great, Social Media is even better but nothing can replace the value of picking up the phone and making a call. Making a sales call, a customer service call, a difficult call or termination call. When it needs to get done and needs to be done right. Pick up the phone and do it with class and professionalism. You’ll be remembered long after you are gone.

In fact, I recently ran into one of my very first lawn mowing customer’s that was a client in Vinita, OK where I grew up. Bruce Niemi is now in Tulsa and ran for Tulsa School Board recently. Stay tuned for more of Mike’s Musings on Sales Training and Entrepreneurship soon. Do you have some ‘life lessons’ about business to share that you’ve learned on the journey? Feel free to comment below.

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