A nurse has to perform a procedure he does not do very often. What are the choices if he is not sure of the steps? Ask questions, refer to directions, or just hope that he remembers how to do it. When applied to a nursing malpractice case, this scenario makes the answer obvious – refer to directions or ask questions but he should never hope that he remembers the steps.
Overconfidence leads to medical errors
What does this have to do with small business?
My error was less drastic but still resulted from overconfidence. I set up the shopping cart of my website for a 25% sale for the weekend, something I had not done for a year. I could have asked questions or referred to directions but I hoped I remembered how to do it. It looked right to me when it was done. But it was not. I made one critical error that resulted in the coupon code being invalid. My apologies to you if you tried to use TWE and got a message that it was invalid. I fixed the error and extended the sale until Tuesday night at 11:59 PM.
Overconfidence leads to shopping cart errors. I fixed my error without it injuring a patient or costing a life.
Small Business Saturday
Today is Small Business Saturday, a day we support our small businesses. Just about every business in the United States is a small business, defined as a company with 500 employees or less, which describes 99.7% of all companies.
That makes me wonder if we need to divide out small businesses like we do the elderly – there are old people, and old-old people. How about small and smaller? When I think of small business, I think of small firms that are local who help me at my house:
- The woman who runs a cleaning service sends women who faithfully clean our office and our house
- The guy who has a landscape company and cuts our grass, cleans up the garden beds and fixes our house
- The company who adjusts the pH and cleans the pool, fixes leaks and covers it up for the winter
- The neighbors who watch our house when we are away
I am thankful for these people. They make my life easier. Then there are the people who help our legal nurse consulting business:
- The printer we use for printing out medical records, who comes to our office to pick up the disk and delivers the job when through
- The accountant who comes to our office and runs the profit and loss statements
- The people at the bank who know us by name and welcome us when we walk through the doors
- The computer consultant who changed our entire network and workstations earlier this year
- The WordPress expert who backs up my websites and responds when I have questions
- The 200 expert witnesses we have under contract to review cases for us
- Our wonderful employees who make the business tick along
- The Fed Ex delivery guy who brings us cases with a cheerful smile and knows us all by name
- The UPS guy who always says, “GOOOD Day Ladies!” as he brings us cases
- The Lawyers Service guy who happily wheels in boxes of medical records.
These guys are our lifeline to work. I love to hear a truck pull up to our office condo and watch the cases come through the door. As a small business owner, I rely on this group of people. They remind me that my business helps to support them, just as their help allows me to run my businesses.
And part of running a business is making mistakes and fixing them!
Who are you thankful for? Who helps you in your business? Add a comment below.
Pat Iyer is president of the Pat Iyer Group. She is documenting all instructions for setting up a coupon code so that she won’t make the same mistake again.