After 35 years of owning a window cleaning business in Omaha Nebraska I have learned many valuable lessons. One such lesson is that people are very loyal once they have chosen a service provider. As a window cleaning service provider this makes me very happy, but I have noticed a downside for the consumer. My wife and I run our office, and we were on vacation last week. As business owners you never get to leave your business when you go on vacation, so we took calls and answered e-mails whenever our schedule allowed. One prospect fell between the cracks and ended up with one of our competitors because “we did not follow up in a timely a fashion”. In essence she was dumping us for our shortcomings, but sadly it is her and not us that will be most injured. Sure we lost a prospective client, but she secured a relationship with a window cleaning company that is assuredly greatly inferior to Diamond, and if she is as loyal to that company as the average consumer, then she will spend many frustrating years paying more money than she would have paid us for a fraction of the quality service that Diamond would have provider her. Loyalty is a virtue much like faith, hope and love, and we all want to strive to be virtuous, but I once learned that having hope when you are in a hopeless situation is actually a vice. Loving evil is in fact evil. Believing in someone who regularly and reliably hurts you is foolish. So what have I learned about loyalty? We must never cheapen our loyalty–it is suppose to be a reward for honesty, hard work, fairness, excellence and pleasantness. Do not give your loyalty to just anyone–make people earn it and your life will be so much easier. In fact, that is Diamond’s motto: “We Exist to Make Our Client’s Lives Easier”. Diamond greatly appreciates your loyalty and we promise to continue to earn it.
