Be your own worst customer for an hour
You have never bought anything from your business.
You've watched other people do it. You've heard about it when it went badly. But you have never come at it cold, from the outside, with no idea who you are,
which means the version of your business in your head is the staff version, and the staff version is always better than the real one.
So book an hour. Set a timer. Try to buy from yourself and be difficult about it.
Ring your own number
Actually ring it. From your mobile, not the office phone.
Count the rings. Note where it goes when nobody picks up.
Listen to the whole voicemail message, the one recorded by someone who left in 2022, in a role that no longer exists,
telling people about hours that changed last winter.
Then leave yourself a message and see how long it takes anyone to notice.
Fill in your own form
Go to your website on your phone. Find the contact form. Fill it in like a customer would — half the fields, no detail, a vague question, a Gmail address nobody recognises.
Then wait.
Two things to watch. How long before a reply, and where the enquiry actually landed. A shocking number of small businesses have a form that goes to an inbox nobody has opened since it was set up. It's the single most expensive broken thing on the internet and it's completely silent.
Find your prices in the car park
Stand outside the IGA on one bar of reception and try to find out what you charge.
Not "get in touch for a quote". A number, a range, a starting-from, anything that lets a person work out whether they can afford you before they have to talk to a human.
If you can't find it in thirty seconds on a bad connection, neither can they. And most people won't ring to find out.
They'll assume it's expensive, or they'll assume it's cheap, and either way they've decided without you in the room.
Ask a stupid question
Send yourself the question you get most often, phrased badly, from an address that isn't yours.
Do you deliver to Wangaratta. Can you do it by Friday. How much roughly.
The reply you get is the reply everyone gets.
Read it as a stranger.
Does it answer the thing?
Does it sound like a person?
Does it tell them what happens next, or does it end in a full stop and leave them to work it out?
Try to give yourself money
Go all the way to the point of paying.
Add to cart, book the slot, accept the quote, whatever your version is.
Do it on a phone. Half the country will only ever meet you on a phone.
Count the steps. Count how many times you have to type something you already typed.
Note the exact moment where you'd have given up if you weren't the owner.
What to do with the hour
You'll finish with a list, and it'll be shorter and dumber than you expected.
Not "our brand positioning is unclear".
More like: the form goes nowhere, the voicemail is wrong, the price is buried, the reply takes four days, the checkout wants a phone number twice.
Fix the free ones today. Most of them are twenty minutes and a settings page.
Then hand the rest to whoever can do them and put a date on it.
Do the whole thing again in six months, because it drifts.
Things change, people leave, a plugin updates, and slowly the front door gets stiff again without anyone hearing it.
The uncomfortable part
Every one of these problems has been costing you money the entire time it's been there.
Nobody tells you.
People who can't get through don't send a note explaining why, they just go somewhere else, and you never find out they existed.
An hour.
Be a pain.
Write down every place your own business annoyed you.
The Creative Unload works with small businesses across the world from North East Victoria on systems, automation and the unglamorous behind the scenes underneath them.