A lot of things have slowly started becoming very clear to me lately. As I’ve thought more about my business, the more I’ve realized that I’ve been really blind to some obvious truths.
One of them is that never answering unknown numbers on my phone is costing me business. It’s likely that most potential new clients that reach out to me are probably calling, and of those, few will leave a voicemail or email me if I don’t pick up.
In high school I worked at a small business office and the owners would be furious if the phone rang more than 2 times without getting picked up.
I should probably have a similar mindset.
The problem now, of course, is that I believe almost all of the calls I get are spam. In the past, I would have said that virtually all of them are spam. But I guess I don’t actually know that.
So first, let’s deal with that.
I might have to sign up for a service that removes me from spam lists. I know there are a handful of services that do this, and I’ll need to research them and see which is the best. I just added this to my list.
If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll be removed from most lists and the spam will die off.
It’s possible it won’t. Given my position in the web design industry, it’s likely I’m on lists that you can’t be removed from.
If I’m getting too much spam even after that, I may have to look into other solutions. I could have a robot-answering machine or find other ways to filter out spam. Maybe I need a service that scans numbers and makes sure they aren’t on any lists.
And then once that is all set, I need to start actually answering calls. I might need to figure out a way to have a schedule on my phone to have it ring but only during business hours.
Hopefully, if all my efforts pay off, I’ll start having lots of potential new clients reach out to me and I can start signing them up for our services.
I’ll write more about that in the coming weeks but hopefully things will really start working out. Little issues like this one now seem obviously problematic to me and I’m hoping to work through them all.