Shielding Yourself from Most Customers

I fully recognize the value of customers, as I hope I've made clear in this chapter. But their access to you can only go so far. In my opinion, it's best that the guy at the top doesn't talk, write, email, or communicate directly with any customer, ever—except for when they go to seminars or similar events. By not having a boundary with customers, you can get sucked into doing things that aren't profitable.

In my case, seminars are my dedicated time to spend a lot of time with customers. It's the time where my sole purpose is to meet, consult with, and help them—not any other time. Customers can rarely talk to me otherwise, because me interacting directly with customers isn't scalable. I believe this is true of any company. As you grow, the more customers you'll have, and the worse this problem will get if you don't draw the line. Anything you need to resolve with customers needs to go through customer support; and if it's customer correspondence, it should be summarized by customer support before it gets to you. If you don't already have a system for customer service in place, get one going now before you get bogged down in the details. And that will happen if you're not careful—I know it from personal experience, and any experienced entrepreneur can tell you the same. Customer service is important, but it can't take over your life!

Here's what I mean. Suppose you worked the standard 40 hour work week. There are 4.3 weeks per month, 12 months in a year, and 60 minutes in an hour; so you'll be working 124,800 minutes this year if you stuck to a 40 hour a week schedule. At the time of this writing, we had about 16,000 customers. If I spoke to each of them just once this year (doing nothing else), that would work out to 7.8 minutes per customer…and I would've killed off the whole year doing nothing but:

Listening to sob stories.
Listening to health problems.
Listening to poverty/scarcity mentalities.
Listening to pleas to get into the program for free.

I could literally waste my entire year doing nothing but talking to customers; but since I'm not a counselor, that would be fruitless. And believe me, if most customers could get me on the phone, it wouldn't be for a measly 7.8 minutes, no; it would be for half an hour, maybe longer. And it wouldn't be just once. They'd treat me as their phone buddy, calling frequently. I'd never get anything else done.

Here's what it comes down to, for you as head of your company:

Being on the phone with customers is NOT profitable.
Being on the phone with customers is NOT scalable.
Being on the phone with customers is NOT time well spent.

I can't think of any earthly reason for me, or any other company head, to talk to customers on the phone, through email, or by letter. If I can ruthlessly guard my time enough to write a sales letter, we can see what happens. Let's say, for example, that I wrote a profits sales letter and it brought in $65,000. Suppose it took me 65 hours. That's earning the company $1,000 an hour.

So what's the choice here? Go out of business by talking to customers all day long, or ruthlessly, vigilantly defend your time to the point where you can write sales letters and investigate new products and opportunities? The results will bear out the decisions. You want your company to succeed, so that you can pay out bonuses to employees and create happy customers, and ensure that everything works. But that can never happen if you don't spend your time doing what you need to do.