As we emphasize throughout our website, reputation is the most valuable asset of any person or organization. It must be preserved and built with great care.
If you want to build reputation for your business, you will have to start with building your own self esteem and being true to yourself. Think and write down the principles and values by which you want to lead your life. Do not try to live by other people’s principles. In the long term, honesty towards yourself, your family, work, customers, employees, suppliers will pay off more than anything else.
So be honest and your self esteem will grow and would start impacting everything in a positive manner. Once you have got control over yourself, you can now start looking at ways to build your business reputation.
Here are some of the proven tips for building reputation:
- Be honest even if it costs you money. Admit your mistakes when you do wrong things. Trust can not exist without honesty and transparency.
- Do not make promises that you can not keep; learn to say no if you think you would not be able to keep a promise. Keep your promise to deliver on time and if you can not deliver communicate it asap.
- Do not try to be the cheapest at the cost of service. It would cost you more.
- Pay suppliers, creditors on time as per the negotiated terms, if you can not renegotiate the terms.
- Look after your staff well, they would reciprocate in the same manner with other business stakeholders.
- Communicate with authority, even if you communicate less.
- Let others speak about your virtues; let customers tell how good you are to other prospects; Let investors tell other investors.
Building reputation takes years to build but it can get crushed in a moment. It is your reputation that goes hand in hand with your business’ reputation so your actions are impacting your business’ reputation. So keep proper communication with any one and inform them if there are chances of default.
Try to have people, in your network/work area/ as friends, who have good reputation. This would automatically enhance your reputation. When you have people good reputation , businesses would start approaching you for business.
Whatever you earn in the end would make you happy as all through your life/career you have lived upto the principles and values that you had chosen for yourself.