This is the fourth of a ten-part series titled “Biztakes” featuring interviews and data from over 100 entrepreneurs detailing the biggest regrets of their business careers.  Click the following link for part three of this series: Biztake #3: Not Doing Enough to Get Referrals.

People want to do business with other people.  That’s not some romantic or Luddite take on business – it’s a fact.  The more you remove the human element from your brand, the less people are going to like it.  The more money you charge for your product/service, and the more important it is that your product/service functions properly, the more essential the human element becomes.  But even if you’re selling pencil erasers, you’d be smart to start interacting with your customers and getting your name out there as soon as possible.

The 100+ entrepreneurs that I interviewed for the Biztakes series identified “not identifying myself in with my brand” as their fourth biggest regret of their business careers.   Seems pretty obscure, right?

To be honest, I was shocked when I saw this.  There were a billion things I expected to come up before this: mishandled finances, bad time management skills, inconsistent PR efforts, etc.  But I was wrong.  When I sat down and thought about it, I realized how much sense this result actually makes.  I’ve learned the same lesson the hard (very, very hard) way, and if I had known how important my own identity was to my brand’s, I’d probably be a richer, happier, and more well-connected person today.

New business owners have a habit of pretending that their businesses are bigger than they are. There’s nothing wrong with this instinct: they know that people want to work with well-established brands, so they want to look like them.  The problem?  Your personal identity is your company’s BIGGEST STRENGTH, and if you’re covering it up, you’re killing your chances of success.

How Hiding My Identity Cost Me Nearly $200,000: A Tale of Stupidity Starring Yours Truly

Horn tooting alert: I’m really social, and the fact that I like people comes across when I talk to them.  As a result, most people generally find me easy to talk to.  Now for a second toot: when I get into something, I get really into it (just ask my brother, who has had to put up with my obsessive-compulsive behavior his entire life), so if I’m talking about something I’m interested in, I’m usually knowledgeable about it.  Yet despite these strengths, I decided that I needed to hide my identity from my customers and create more of a “company brand,” a decision that cost me nearly 200k over the course of a summer.

If you're hiding from your customers, you're killing your business and your own aspirations. Photo courtesy of industryreview.org

The decision to become more of a “product,” and to hide from my customers, came at the beginning of summer 2010.  I thought that if I could give my company more of a “corporate sheen,” using toll-free numbers, hired salespeople, and automated systems, I could create a stronger brand.  Once I set these things up, I was able to spend a lot less time interacting with my customers and “getting real work done.”  sounds great, right?  More free time, less customers asking me questions and making demands?  WRONG.

1. Spending time with your customers is THE most important thing you can do if you want to grow your business. Guess what the root of the word “marketing” is?  Your market is made up of your customers.  Talk to them.  Listen to them.  Learn from them.  You’ll get incredible feedback, leading to amazing ideas and powerful new directions.  More importantly, you’ll create intimate, powerful relationships with them that will lead to happier customers and more future business.

2. My company pitch turned from “Call Anthony Green, guy you can talk to at any time about his service, which he happens to be an expert at providing and curating” to “call toll-free, random phone number and speak to paid representative about company.” Surveys of website landing pages have shown that people are up to 18X more likely to work with an individual than with a company on a project that is important to them. What does that tell you?  It SHOULD tell you that if you’re hiding from your customers, you’re screwing your company over.  If you think you’re impressing people by seeming detached and massively corporate, put yourself in their shoes.  Would you rather have Tim fix your fence, or work with Empl.#5648?

Fast forward to the end of the summer, when it was time to look at our analytics and analyze them.  Working with a toll-free #, hiring a salesperson to talk with customers instead of doing it myself, and creating extremely low-touch customer contact systems had the following amazing results:

1. Website conversion DOWN from 2.7% to 1.3%. By adding a toll-free number and making ourselves seem less personable and more corporate, we cut out web visitor conversion in HALF.  Sweet.

2. Caller conversion down from 53% to 14%. When I speak with clients directly, I almost always convert them.  They like dealing with me.  Is it because I’m such an awesome dude?  No – it’s because I know what I’m selling and have full power to provide it to them in the way that will work best for them.  I’m knowledgeable and good at sales because I’m selling something I know about.  The salesperson we hired was the sweetest girl ever – she just happened to know nothing about our product and her conversion rate was 1/4 what mine was.  This is NOT her fault – don’t ever blame your salespeople for their failings.  If you don’t teach salespeople everything you know, and let them pass customers along to you when they need to, YOU are failing, not them.

Results:

1. In a 4-month period, we had 6,200 visitors to our website.  Our conversion rate before we made the corporate switch would have been 167 customers calling in.  With our new conversion rate, we had 81 people call in.

2. Of the 81 people who called in, 12 of them turned into paying customers.

Our average customer turned us about $2.5k in revenue, meaning we did about $30k in revenue off the new customers we secured over the summer.

If our website conversion rate had stayed at 2.7%, and if I had converted 53% of callers, we would have gotten 89 customers, and made revenues of $222,500.  Because we switched to a more “corporate” structure, we lost nearly $200,000 in revenue.  When we realized what was going on and switched back to a more personable model, we IMMEDIATELY toggled back to our old numbers.

Did I get a lot done during that time?  Sure.  But not $200k worth.  Worse, I didn’t interact with the customers nearly enough, and as a result I don’t think that they got the level of service that they could have if I had taken them on personally or worked harder with the salesperson to provide them with a similar level of service.

Lesson: it’s not just common sense that discourages the “fake corporate” model – data disproves it, too.

Cyrus Webb, an entrepreneur based out of Brandon, MS, and  president of multi-media company Shadow Play Entertainment, had this to say on the topic:

“The biggest mistake that I made since I began the organization in 1999 was to downplay my role in the overall business. There were times when I tried to yield control and responsibilities to others working with me so that I wouldn’t personally be seen as saturating the market, but the business suffered. I then learned that sometimes you might not want to be seen as the face of your brand, but that is the way you are identified and the way others identify your business.

After some bumps against the wall I realized that you have to play to your company’s strengths and for most of us, that strength is ourselves.”

Cyrus expressed a sentiment shared by many of the entrepreneurs whom I interviewed: you are your company’s biggest strength. No one knows more about your company than you do – why are you hiding?

In my next article, I’m going to focus on the 10 most powerful ways to promote your personal brand and inject it into your company.  For now, just ask yourself these two sets of questions:

1. Who do me customers think they’re dealing with?  Who do they think they’ll speak to when they call or email us?  Do they know I exist?  Am I present in my own marketing materials and activities?

2. Who is my point of contact for my customers?  Do they know as much about the company as I do?  Is this lack of knowledge hurting our conversion rates?

Tune in tomorrow for a full list of tips and strategies to leverage your own personal brand.  In the meanwhile, don’t hesitate to leave your thoughts and share your tips in the comments section, and don’t forget to sign up for my RSS feed and newsletter to get the next 6 parts of the Biztakes series!