Test Your Business and Yourself

When a small business owner looks at his business, he looks at it like, well, like an owner. He knows all about it and he knows why things are the way they are - both the good things and the bad ones. If he's a good businessman, he is confident that all is well or, at least, as good as it can be.

How does the customer see this business?

What any business owner has to do every now and then is to experience his operations from his customers' and from his suppliers' point of view. How are valuable suppliers being treated and how are even more valuable customers experiencing doing business with his operation?

To really test his business, it's not enough to just walk through the store or visit the web site and look around - the business owner has to really put himself in the place of one of his customers and imagine how his operation looks to that particular customer.

The best way to do this is to choose one of the business's best customers and to take on his views, preferences and concerns as much as possible. A business owner has to temporarily become this Mr. X and look at the business from his perspective.

So the owner visits his web site as Mr. X and notices that the products which Mr. X buys are not easily accessible. Mr. X, being local, would also not like the flat rate freight being added to his bill. Mr. X is older and wears strong glasses so the type on the web site is difficult for him to read. Finally, the owner knows that Mr. X buys his products because of some particular features which others don't have and yet, these features are not prominently emphasized on the web site.

What these examples show is that, when an owner visits his operations or his facilities "generically", as any old customer, he tends to view everything as generally OK. Nothing that he saw as Mr. X would have been completely wrong - it's just that Mr. X would have had other preferences.

Testing your business by imagining that you are a particular customer, not even necessarily one of the best ones, is a great exercise in finding problems and then fixing them. And if a visit as Mr. X calls to attention a number of shortcomings, just imagine what a visit by Mr. Y, one of the most difficult customers you have, would bring to light.

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