Keep the Wrong Customers – Become a Good Customer

To determine who your bad customers are, you must first determine the characteristics of your good customers. One of the best ways to determine the characteristics you want in a customer is to practice becoming a good customer yourself. One of the first characteristics of a good customer is realistic expectations.

My wife, Laura, orders the same drink from Starbucks almost every time. She orders a vente bleedy blah soy green tea latte with sugar free blippsy do instead of blippity wa. You can tell I don't speak Starbucks. It is a language all its own. She freely admits that the only part of the drink she doesn't change is the green tea. When I order from Burger King, I order, “A number five with cheese, please.” Which one of us is more likely to receive the correct order? Laura admits that her success rate is only about seventy percent. That is pretty good considering that most Starbucks baristas aren't working there to supplement their income from neurosurgery.

I am an easy customer for Burger King, since my order easily fits into their system. Laura is a more difficult customer for Starbucks, because her order takes the baristas outside their normal system. A good customer fits easily into your service delivery system. They want what you do well.

Here is how we apply that principle to our CPA firm. We humbly consider ourselves experts in preparing individual income tax returns. However, we are not experts in international taxation. If someone asks us to prepare a tax return for Pakistan, we aren't the right people. Yes, I know the basics. Payments to Al Qaeda are deductible charitable contributions. Everybody gets to claim Osama Bin Laden as a dependent, and you don't have to send 1099 forms to suicide bombers. But after that, I am pretty clueless about what appears on a Pakistan tax return.

That doesn't mean we can't help clients with international tax returns. We refer them to a good firm that does a lot of international tax returns. These clients don't fit well into our normal tax return preparation system. We know we can't make a decent profit on international tax returns. So we don't prepare them. That policy benefits us, and it benefits our clients. You should determine what you do well, and tailor your service offerings around your specialties. You can only meet your customers' expectations if they want what you do well.

While I have your attention, I would like to make another point about Starbucks. Real men don't drink coffee from Starbucks. They drink the swill from 7-11 and like it. Starbucks is Spanish for “No testosterone here.” In fact, the manliest of men don't drink coffee at all. I don't drink coffee. That is why my shirts split when I flex.

Thanks for reading. If you want real non-snarky advice, please visit the Stitely & Karstetter official tax blog at www.skcpas.com.