My tenant asked that I don’t increase his rent this year and at the same time requested a month’s delay in paying it. He’s been having problems with his business so if I would please consider.
At first, I didn’t like to agree. Finally, I did. My tenant had been a regular on-time payor and had agreed to rent escalations in the past. I decided to concede.
There is that famous Aesop’s fable about the Goose & the Golden Egg (http://read.gov/aesop/091.html). A man owned a goose that laid a golden egg every day. One day the man killed the goose and cut it open in the hope he’d get all the eggs. There was none. The man ended up with no more golden eggs.
Regular customers are like the geese that lay golden eggs. They buy regularly and pay regularly. The money we earn from them often makes up the majority of our revenues.
Our customers experience good and bad times, just like everyone else. There would be days they’d buy more and there would be days they’d buy less. We would be happy if they buy more and we would be concerned if they buy less.
Enterprises sometimes offer discounts, promotions, or product upgrades to get regular customers to buy more and contribute to sales growth.
But sometimes, when times may be not that good, for some adverse reason or another, regular customers just won’t be buying. And there’s not much enterprises can do about it.
Some enterprises seek new customers to make up for any revenue shortfall. They invest in new store branches at new locations or expand product lines to different markets. But if resources are limited because times are bad, some enterprises would resort to cost cutting.
Cutting costs, however, doesn’t mean cutting our regular customers off. Unfortunately, some enterprises inadvertently do when they cut costs. Some enterprises cut staff that communicate with regular customers or cut logistics budgets that result in poorer delivery services. Enterprises end up losing the regular customers who already have it hard and are getting it harder because the service has become worse.
When enterprises lose regular customers, they lose their geese that lay their golden eggs. It’s one thing to have fewer eggs; it’s another when there are no more eggs.
We may have the best of intentions to begin with but as the saying goes: the road to hell (in this case business failure) is paved with good intentions.
Ellery's Essays 