If You Sell a Service or Product, This is the Ultimate Question

If you are in a line of work that involves the sale of a service or product, the ultimate question you ought to be asking yourself is, would I buy my own service/product?

When you are completely honest with yourself, how do you answer that question? What would give you pause? Are you too expensive, underqualified, too slow, too sloppy or disinterested in your work? Does your product stink?

We have used this question as a guide to how we serve clients and how we price our services, to make sure that we’re priced well, that costs are known upfront, that mistakes are avoided, that the quality of the advice we provide is exemplary, and that clients feel comfortable and relaxed dealing with us and coming into our office. These are all the things we think matter if we were in the market for the services we provide, and we feel like we check these boxes better than anyone else.

But if you step out of your own shoes and look at your business as though you are the consumer or client, you’ll undoubtedly see some room for improvement. If you cannot structure your firm or business so that you confidentially can answer this question in the affirmative, then…well…dang, that’s rough, you have some work to do. If you can structure your firm or business so that the answer to the question is “YES!,” then you can still keep looking for ways to add exclamation points.