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Slacker
There was a time, oh, about six weeks ago when I was glued to the computer and pounding the keyboard to dust. It was all about getting an effective website up and running, and I got maybe 75% of what I was aiming for. Part of the process was delving into WordPress and Google Analytics, expanding my FaceBook reach, tweaking Twitter. The deeper I got into social network marketing the more it felt like that scene in Lord of the Rings when Frodo is wending his way through a gloomy marsh, getting sleepier and sleepier and sleepier.
I had to take a break, shake it off, then recommit. In the meantime I learned that placing ads in FaceBook had as much effect on website traffic as not placing ads in FaceBook; that placing broad spectrum ads had as much impact as placing tightly targeted ads. And now that there are no ads, the traffic graphs spike up and down and up and down in a sign of life all their own.
As modern as it may all seem, it’s really back to the days of steam. To make steam someone’s gotta pick up the shovel and start feeding coal into the fire. I may be too much of a slacker. I haven’t been tweeting regularly. I haven’t been posting new material on Xomba or my website. My FaceBook entries have fallen way off. And the gap that exists between what truly interests me and what I would need to do to keep the engine running simply deepens.
In other words, I need a schedule. I need to be my own program manager. How much material does a blog/website need in a week, and when will I produce it? How much administrative maintenance is necessary, and when will I carry out those tasks? What kind of self imposed continuing education is necessary to keep up with changes, and when will I do the work? That kind of stuff.
The alternative is to let it all slide. But a certain fondness has developed in the meantime, and to stop now would be a little like showing the cat the door.
The overarching question here is how do you keep it interesting? And not interesting for anyone who happens to find the blog or website, but interesting for me. How do I keep it interesting for me?
Such is the nature of business. Once you have it up and running, how do you keep it interesting, for yourself?
I think of my grandfather, who owned and ran a five-and-dime general store in a small town in the west his entire adult life. I can picture him standing in front of the greeting cards rack, checking the cut of his fingernails from time to time, waiting for a customer to appear. At night he would take home the day’s receipts, count everything out on the dining room table, and make the appropriate entries in his books. He started his professional work life as a bookkeeper, and I suspect the store was his excuse to have books all his own. Accounts. He weighed the tedium of the day against the elegance of well-kept accounts. And when he closed his books at night, he was done for the day.
Balance. I need balance.
The New Thanksgiving Table: BHM Cookbook Review
For food magazines, Thanksgiving rolls around in late spring, when the turkeys are all frozen, not fresh, but the photos have to look perfect anyway. It’s the problem with lead time, the time it takes to put a holiday issue together. Newspapers have it a little easier, but those holiday issues come earlier than the holidays themselves, and there’s all the disassociated planning to deal with, the time out of time. Year in and year out. Imagine facing down yet another Thanksgiving issue and you are 25 years in to your food writing career, hoping the next round of newsroom cuts head over to sports and leave the food section alone. Just a thought. What the hell could possibly be left to say?
Well, the answer comes from Diane Morgan and can be found in her lovely new cookbook, The New Thanksgiving Table.
She cops to the writer/ recipe developer struggle right off: “So there we were, my husband and I, enjoying an al fresco Thanksgiving dinner in May, followed by numerous other Thanksgiving feasts with family and friends in July, August, September, October, and – at last – November!” She goes on to talk about how writing about holidays and holiday cooking brings into “sharp relief the real stuff of life: baking bread with family and friends, sharing traditions, and creating memories.” As a result, what comes through in The New Thanksgiving Table is a refreshing honesty. This isn’t a cookbook based on a gimmick or a marketing plan, a cookbook written to fill a need and niche that never existed before. This is an honest embrace of a critical meal in American life, and the proof is in the food.
Diane Morgan begins with mouth watering and relatively easy to prepare appetizers such as Vermont Farmhouse Cheddar Cheese Straws, a tip of the hat to convention, and Tex-Mex Honey Pecans, an acknowledgement of expanding cultural definitions. I am particularly taken by the Crostini with Fig and Kalamata Olive Tapenade, as well as the Crostini with Gulf Shrimp, Jalapeno, and Lime. Nice way to start.
Her soups include an Oyster Stew designed to elevate the lusciousness of fresh oysters. Her Butternut Squash Bisque is garnished with Fried Sage and (believe it or not) Popcorn. Salads include Hearts of Romaine with Crisp Red Apples, Celery, and Cider Vinaigrette, Butter Lettuce Salad with Persimmons and Pomegranate, or a Chicory, Pear, and Toasted Pecan Salad with Buttermilk-Black Pepper Dressing. I don’t know about you, but I am feeling the season.
Turkey, of course, is the focus of the chapter on main courses. How to buy a turkey, how to brine a turkey, how to make turkey stock for gravy, how to truss, roast (those critical times), carve, and present the big bird – it’s all here and, from my modest experience, it all rings true. I am a big fan of brining and I intend to try Morgan’s Apple Cider and Ginger Brine this year. But then there’s her recipe for Juniper-Brined Roast Turkey with Chanterelle Mushroom Gravy. There’s also the Maple-Glazed Roast Turkey with Applejack Giblet Gravy to consider. Were the recipe for Jack Daniel’s Whiskey and Brown Sugar Crusted Ham not so engaging, you might think it an after thought.
And that’s not even half the book. There’s a chapter devoted to Stuffings, Casseroles, Biscuits, and Breads. Linguica Sausage Stuffing with Mushrooms and Caramelized Onions gets my vote, as do the Hazelnut and Fresh Herb Popovers. The chapter on side dishes has some show stoppers, to whit, Honey and Chipotle Glazed Sweet Potato Spears with Lime. The Sauteed Brussels Sprouts with Smoked Ham and Toasted Pecans looks particularly delish. There are also sauces, compotes and salsas.
Desserts include Spiced Pumpkin Layer Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting and Bourbon Pecan Pie with Buttermilk Whipped Cream. And finally, the chapter on leftovers.
I am actually looking forward to Thanksgiving this year, a holiday meal that too often shouts out for the same tired old recipes because that’s the way it has always been. Well, not this year. This is the year of The New Thanksgiving Table.
The New Thanksgiving Table
By Diane Morgan
Chronicle Books
ISBN: 9780811864930
$24.95, 224 pgs.
Cooking the Cowboy Way: A cookbook review
Grady Spears has staked out the Texas cowboy-turned-chef territory with such cookbooks as The Texas Cowboy Kitchen, A Cowboy in the Kitchen, Cowboy Cocktails, and the minimalist The Great Steak Book. He either owns, has owned, or been a consultant to scads of restaurants from Ft. Worth (home) to Beverly Hills (hallucination).
In Cooking the Cowboy Way, which he co-authored with food journalist, June Naylor, Grady gets downright philosophical: “It’s a life where boots and hats are always about function, not fashion… When your days are filled with the smell of fresh-cut hay and the creaking of worn leather, when you wake up with the sun and to the smell of coffee on the boil and biscuits from the chuck wagon, you are living the Cowboy Way.” Which is to say, I guess, don’t bother trying if your days have nothing to do with that.
The Cowboy Way is a sidebar design feature that turns up every few pages in the book with cowboy insights and information such as, “Each cabin has a remote controlled gas fireplace, so you don’t even have to get out of bed to adjust the flame.” Ah, the Cowboy Way is the life for me. It’s kind of a repetitive thing – Cowboy Way, Cowboy Way, Cowboy Way – and, like those oft repeated Weapons of Mass Destruction, say it often enough and you find you have good reason to invade Iraq, or serve cowboys Green and Citrus Salad with Lemon-Basil Vinaigrette.
OK. I’ve had my fun. There are a lot of terrific recipes in this book, the one I just mentioned among them (it has Spanish chorizo in it as well as a mix of citrus and avocado). Why it has to be packaged as something it isn’t, I don’t understand. The tag line says the recipes were inspired by campfires, chuck wagons, and ranch kitchens. But the (mostly) Texas ranches in Cooking the Cowboy Way are of the dude persuasion, if not outright spas. Ranches with steakhouses and conference accommodations attached. There isn’t a working cowboy alive who can afford a night at Rancho de la Osa in Sasabe, Arizona. And that’s a shame because the place sounds fabulous and the food that shows up in this cookbook is ever so tempting: Lamb Tenderloin with Green Olive Jam, Asparagus and Portobello Enchiladas in Chipotle Cream, Baked Acorn Squash with Pistachios. I’m down.
There are desserts to be tried like Toby’s Crème Brulee or Kumquat Refrigerator Pie, cocktails like Blood Orange Mimosas, Bloody Maria, and West Texas Sunrise; meat dishes like Ranch-Rubbed Prime Rib, Porterhouse Steaks with Wildcatter Steak Rub, Ranchero Grilled Quail with Vaqueros Migas, Fish Tacos, and Longhorn Chili. The baked goods are an impressive lot, and so too are the salads and the dressings.
But hey, I’d really like to see Grady Spears explain to a working cowboy how using good-quality balsamic vinegar is the key to his Wild Mustang Salad. It’s not that I disagree. I just don’t get the Cowboy Way of it.
Cooking the Cowboy Way
By Grady Spears with June Naylor
Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN-10: 0740773925
$29.99
Recipe Road Test: Cuban Picodillo
This just in: Cowboys in Florida eat Cuban food. This according to Cooking the Cowboy Way by Grady Spears, a new cookbook from Andrews McMeel Publishing. They also drink minty mojitos and eat kumquat pie for dessert. Things are different on the range in Florida, but who am I to argue?
I figured I might as well give the picodillo a try.
Cuban Picodillo from Cooking the Cowboy Way by Grady Spears
3 tsp vegetable oil
1 ½ pounds lean ground beef or turkey
1 large white onion
2 or 3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 (6-ounce) can tomato sauce
¼ cup dry white wine
1 cup pimiento-stuffed olives, coarsely chopped
1 cup golden raisins
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
3 cups fluffy cooked white rice
In a large skillet over medium high heat, warm the oil and brown the meat with the onion, garlic, and pepper. Decrease the heat to medium-low and add the tomato sauce and wine. Simmer for 15 minutes. Add the olives and raisins. Add the seasonings, and simmer for 20 to 30 minutes longer. The consistency should be similar to chili. Serve hot, over rice. Serves 6
Recipe Road Test: True confession time. I didn’t have a white onion. Mine was yellow. Well, the outside peel was yellow. The onion itself was white enough. Maybe what Grady meant was that the meat of the onion should be white, and don’t worry about the skin. As opposed to a red onion.
I used ground beef (organic) not ground turkey. If you think the beef industry is hairy you don’t even want to think about turkey. Those birds have it almost as bad as commercial pigs. And the way pigs are raised you don’t ever want to think about that, either.
So then there’s this direction to brown the beef with the onion, garlic, and bell pepper. I sautéed the vegetables first, letting the garlic and onion brown a little, just to develop their flavors. Then I tossed in the bell pepper (mine were orange and yellow) and beef. Once the beef had changed color I added what was probably a cup of home made tomato sauce. Hard to tell since it was still a little frozen and chunky. I didn’t have any white wine.
Grady doesn’t say anything about covering the pan, but I did. I didn’t want to cook off excess liquid at the beginning. I added the olives and raisins, and I added some red pepper flakes, too. This is contrary to most things Cuban, which is not a cuisine that ever calls for hot spice. But to tell you the truth, when I tasted the picodillo, it seemed a little on the bland side. Since the jar of Trader Joe’s Steak and Chop Grill and Broil spice mix was sitting right there on the counter, I sprinkled some of that in, too. You see how this is headed.
The picodillo finished cooking with the lid off to thicken up the juices. I served it over short grain brown rice, which has a nice nutty flavor.
Road Test Result: The picodillo turned out pretty tasty. It was simple to cook, and once it’s on rice you can see how it’s a kind of stretch the hamburger dish. The little edge of spice gave it a nice kick. With a big Caesar salad, you are good to go.
Tomato Soup: Where Culinary Discoveries Come From
First of all, you want that gourmet type tomato soup. It comes in a box, not a can. The one I buy comes from Trader Joe’s and they say it also has roasted red peppers in it. I empty the contents of the box into a pan, which is to say I squirt the soup from the box into the pan. It ends with a rather disgusting noise, the kind that simply pleases the hell out of any four year old boy child. All you have to do at that point is heat the soup. I use a modest flame. I don’t believe in rushing good food. And the microwave is for reheating a cup of coffee.
So, I have done, or am doing all this. It’s lunch time. I can tell because I have this empty feeling. And a bowl of tomato soup doesn’t quite look like enough. So I get out the Orville Redenbacher’s original popcorn. You will find no Jiffy Pop in this household. And you will not find any microwave popcorn of any brand or kind, either. I am a popcorn traditionalist and make it on the stovetop, in a pot, a single layer of kernels plumping in a bit of hot peanut oil. Lid on, mind you.
This is where the butter comes out, too. Not margarine. I don’t just melt it. I brown it. This was one of my wife’s discoveries, and it makes all the difference. That and sea salt. Ahhh. The perfect snack.
So. I put the two bowls of tomato soup on the table, then the bowl of popcorn. Joyce finds this amusing. She digs around in the refrigerator for the grated Parmesan cheese, and brings that to the table. I am happily eating my soup, and enjoying fingers full of popcorn. Joyce sprinkles her soup with the cheese, which seems like a good idea, and then dumps a handful of popcorn onto her soup. Et voila! This is where culinary discoveries come from! A perfect marriage.
The next time a child of any age shows up at my house, I know exactly what I am going to serve: tomato soup and popcorn.
Recipe Road Test: Oatmeal Griddle Cakes
This was a case of how well my memory serves me. The recipe is from a book I co-authored with Sharon Kramis back in the 1980’s, a first peek at the cooking of the Pacific Northwest. I can’t say it has been 20 years since I last tried the oatmeal griddlecakes, but 10 years probably isn’t too far out.
We eat a lot of oatmeal in this house, and I had simply grown tired of the same old pot-stirred stuff. This isn’t to say my version of oatmeal isn’t exemplary. Au contraire. It is the oatmeal from which most others would rather not be measured. None the less, too much of a good thing gets tedious. So I figured I would switch up. Hence, the griddlecakes.
I have wicked good buttermilk pancakes in my history, but they should remain there, if only for the sake of my slight paunch. And I always feel like I have been poisoned afterward, moving from breakfast table to couch to snore it off. Not so with oatmeal griddlecakes — none of that leadenness you get with wheat only pancakes.
And the oatmeal somehow heightens the natural sourness of the buttermilk and sets up an extraordinary interplay with the oncoming collision of melting butter and maple syrup. Lace the edges with a little bacon and you are, my friend, looking right in the face of the Almighty Yum.
Oatmeal Griddlecakes from Northwest Bounty by Schuyler Ingle and Sharon Kramis
1 ½ C oatmeal
2 C buttermilk
½ C flour
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 eggs, beaten
Mix together the oatmeal and buttermilk and let sit for 15 minutes to soften the oatmeal. Then stir in the remaining ingredients. Bake on a hot griddle.
Yield: 12 cakes
Recipe Road Test: My only little tweak here — and who knows if it is necessary or not — I sift together the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt and then gently whisk that around to be sure it’s all mixed together.
This is a thick, gloppy batter and I find it works better when you make smaller cakes and cook them at a moderate temperature. It’s kind of a feng shui of griddlecake cooking that you are shooting for, getting the centers to cook through without overbrowning the surface. I find it takes a little experimenting and heat adjusting. Also, I use a two burner-long cast iron griddle I have had forever and a day and with which I intend to be buried. It has ridges on one side for meat, and the flat griddle on the other. I know I got by without it before I had it, but I forget how.
Road Test Result: My wife loves me even more than ever before.
Undercapitalized: Another word for stuck in first
I have the concept. Hell, I even have the products. I can pick them up, handle them, admire them, and imagine them sailing out the door, one order after another.
I have the company name, and I own the domain. I even have the beginnings of a functioning website.
What I don’t have is a website that functions the way I want, particularly the shopping opportunity. I call my store BHM Mercantile, and it is supposed to have various aisles down which a customer might wander. No shopping cart. This is all pretty much custom, made-to-order merchandise. So a facility for direct email contact, the means to begin a dialog, is much more important than a shopping cart. I’ll need a PayPal button for the moment the dialog ends and a down payment is forthcoming. These would be the basics. And I had hoped to have these basics up and running by October 1. I had hoped to get out ahead of the holiday season, such as it is in this economy, and begin the effort of driving traffic to the website.
But today is October 15 and I am not any nearer my objective. The fundamental, underlying issue – and one that is so incredibly common to any entrepreneurial effort – is capital, or the lack of it. I don’t have the capital to actually go out and hire someone to initiate the website design I have in mind, to take a Wordpress theme and tweak it into shape. These are not skills I happen to have. I have other skills. So I can trade. I can barter. I just can’t pay. And that’s the rub.
When you end up in the trade/barter economy, you have no leverage. The guy who swore up and down he would help me out, that all I had to do was pick a theme, load up my digital imagery, and produce appropriate editorial copy, and he would take care of the rest – that guy has disappeared. Poof. Gone. After several attempts to connect by email, texting, and voice messaging I did get a voice message back telling me he was really busy. Which was a relief. This is a guy who hangs out with biker gangs and uses his pyro skills to blow up junker cars in the desert, for fun. So at least he wasn’t dead. Just useless.
I have contacted other people who have the skills and figure a trade is an ok idea. But they, too, are busy. The best they can do is put me in the queue. So my timing is shot, and I may as well look toward having everything running the way I want by the first of the year.
The lesson here is simple. Trading and bartering isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s a great thing. But it flies in the face of the basic laws of capitalization. If you want something and you want it now, you had better be able to pay for it. Money talks; nobody walks.
Otherwise, build in more time. Maybe twice as much time. Because the workflow won’t be mechanistic. There will be no schedules, no program managers. Instead, it will be an organic process, like the flow of a river. And you can’t leverage running water.
[For more writing by Blue Hat Man, click here]
Recipe Road Test: Shrimp with Tomatoes, Oregano, and Feta
Joyce Goldstein has a couple of dozen cookbooks under her wing. Literally. Taverna, from which this recipe comes, was early on, in 1996. It’s about the “best of casual Mediterranean cooking”, something about which Joyce knows a thing or two. That, and flavor. In her time, Joyce Goldstein has been chef at the Chez Panisse Café, has owned and presided over the ground breaking Square One restaurant in San Francisco that emphasized Mediterranean cuisine, and Café Quadro for pizza and sandwiches. She currently consults on all things culinaire and can be found at her own website. Her recipes in Taverna are brief, to the point, and accentuate distinct flavor.
I have a cat. When she runs out of canned food, I make a Costco run, usually picking up a few other odds and ends. This time I added a pound and half of big shrimp to the cart. With those on hand, and the last big ripening of tomatoes in the garden, I reached for Taverna, figuring it was time for a recipe road test.
Shrimp with Tomatoes, Oregano, and Feta from Taverna by Joyce Goldstein
1 ½ pounds large shrimp (prawns) peeled and deveined
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 T olive oil
1 small yellow onion, chopped, or 6 green onions, chopped
4 cloves garlic, finely minced
Pinch of cayenne pepper, optional
1 ½ C tomato sauce, or 4 large tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and diced
Pinch of sugar, if needed
½ pound feta cheese, crumbled
¼ C chopped fresh Italian parsley
Preheat oven to 450°, or preheat a broiler.
• Sprinkle the shrimp with salt and black pepper. In a large sauté pan over medium-high heat, warm 2T of the olive oil. Add the shrimp and sauté, stirring briskly, until pink and beginning to curl, 2-3 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the shrimp to four flameproof ramekins or small gratin dishes, distributing them evenly.
• In the same pan over medium heat, warm the remaining 2T olive oil. Add the yellow onion or green onions and sauté until tender, about 8 minutes. Add the garlic, the cayenne (if using), and oregano and sauté for 2 minutes longer. Add the tomato sauce or the tomatoes and simmer until thickened slightly, about 2 minutes longer. Add the sugar if the tomatoes are not sweet and season to taste with salt and black pepper.
• Pour the sauce over the shrimp, dividing it evenly. Then sprinkle the feta over the tops. Bake or broil until the cheese melts, 5-8 minutes if baking, 3-5 minutes if broiling.
• Sprinkle the shrimp with the parsley and serve hot.
Recipe Road Test: Ramekins? Really? I suppose any self-respecting kitchen has a butt-load of ramekins or small gratin dishes. But not this one. So my first choice was about cookware, and I chose the Pyrex pie plate. It worked, though the presentation wasn’t nearly as cool. So, fear not in the face of directions and remain forever flexible.
I cheated the timing on the shrimp when it got right down to the sauté. I figured they had already suffered the indignities of freezing and thawing, so the last thing they needed from me was overcooking. If they got a minute in the pan, in small batches, I’d be surprised. Pink happens fast, and they were already shaped like commas. As each batch came out of the pan (slotted spoon time) I arranged them in the glass dish.
As for the sauce, how can you have too many tomatoes? I used everything that looked like it was about to get mushy. I hate growing food only to throw it away. I didn’t peel or seed the tomatoes – these guys were on the small side and I didn’t want the hassle. But normally I would. Stringy tomato skin in a dish is unappealing, so I don’t recommend it. And then there’s the issue of bittering by skin and seed. I can’t say I noticed that effect. But when I devoured the dish, I did push the skins the side of the plate. Fussy, huh?
I chose to go with the cayenne and it’s a good call. Gives it a little kick. I used fresh, not dried oregano because I grow it.
My wife is sold on the feta; I am not. I know. I know. It’s Mediterranean. I just find that the cheese interrupts the way the onion, tomato, garlic, cayenne, and oregano work with the shrimp – which is sublime. And it introduces a secondary texture, kind of soft and squishy. So, if you feel inclined to leave out the feta go ahead and do so. If anything, I’d up the garlic, but that’s just me.
With what is perhaps the final blow to tradition, I served this dish on brown rice.
Bottom line: I’d follow Joyce Goldstein just about anywhere. This is a simple recipe to prepare, and the results are indeed tasty.
Customer Service: It’s meant for more than customers
“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.
He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.
He is not an interruption in our work – he is the purpose of it.
We are not doing him a favor by serving him.
He is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to serve him.”
M. Gandhi
I have been sending resumes out for quite a while now, sometimes dropping them off, all in an attempt to hire on in a cabinet shop and start the process of working my way up. I don’t pretend where I stand. That’s at the bottom few rungs of the learning curve.
Any shop foreman I happen to engage face to face is generally pretty decent about the interruption, a little confused that they are looking at a guy in his 50s, and offers little hope, what with the housing crash. “We just laid a bunch of guys off,” is something I hear pretty regularly.
Of the resumes I email in, even when I have a specific name to email to, I rarely get any kind of response which, to tell you the truth, sucks. I mean, there’s a cold silence there that doesn’t speak well of the times or of human nature.
There is one company, however, and I might as well name it – Mueller Nicholls in Berkeley, CA – that automatically responds. Of cabinet shops and construction firms, this is a sizeable outfit that has been around close to 30 years.
So here I am, recent graduate of a cabinetry certificate program at a local community college, turning up with a resume. I not only sent a copy to the shop foreman, Eric Goetting, but another copy to the CEO and founder, Steve Nicholls. I figured, what’s the worst they can say, no? These are individuals, as you can well imagine, with plenty to do in their work days. Yet both of them took the time to respond. The answer was negative – they weren’t hiring; just laid a bunch of guys off – but encouraging. They both suggested I check back from time to time.
Wow. This is a company you want to work for. This is a company you want to give yourself over to, a company fully deserving of employee loyalty. I didn’t get the impression it was company policy that every piece of email had to be answered politely and personally. It’s simply the culture of the company, something that has grown through the years. It’s what is known as customer service, and this is a company that well knows the value in extending good customer service to everyone – customers, employees, managers, founders. Job seekers. Everyone.
My wife’s recent experience is a little different. She nailed a terrific interview two weeks ago with a delivery company that wants to build its brand in a tough market. They have a website that looks like 1995 and reads like broken English. At the close the director who interviewed her suggested my wife ping him if she hadn’t heard anything in two weeks, so she did. And the response? Nada. Zip. Well, maybe he’s way overworked. Maybe he found someone he likes better. Or maybe he’s just a lame-o, an inconsiderate jerk. Why would you ask someone to get back to you in two weeks? So you can tell them they didn’t get the job?
All this guy needed to do was attend to a little customer service. But, a job seeker isn’t a customer, right? Plenty of those out there. More where she comes from.
This is true. In this day and age this is so very, very true.
But what’s also true is that no one lives in isolation. This is a digital world. What’s to keep my wife from expressing her frustration and shabby treatment on Facebook and Twitter and Linked In and Yelp? And what if that expression of dismay finds a friend and gets passed on and on and on? Who in business needs that? Especially a company trying to build a brand.
So here’s the simple way out. It works in the small office as well as the large. It works for the one man business as well as the corporate giant. It works in your private life as well as your work life: Good customer service is meant for more than the customer.
• Start with yourself. When was the last time you added up the good things about you, your accomplishments, and patted your own back?
• If people – strangers – have a question, give them the best answer you can as soon as you can. If you don’t know the answer, tell them as much and find out when it’s convenient to get back to them.
• Don’t hang people up with promises you can’t or don’t intend to keep. It’s easy to slide out of a conversation with a promise you have no intention of keeping. Another way of looking at it, though, is that it is lazy. The little lie is lazy. So, don’t be lazy in your company, your life, your job. That’s with people you manage as well as with people you answer to.
There’s a human decency theme going on here. Have you noticed? Kind of a Golden Rule message. Is it any more time consuming to treat people decently – any people – than not?
Good customer service isn’t simply the front line in a successful company, it’s the bottom line. Some companies understand that. And those are the good jobs.
