The next lesson to learn was a tough lesson and something to this day I personally struggle with. At the time of establishment I had this idea in my head based on the errors I believed my pervious employers were making, I truly believed that I could keep 100% of people 100% satisfied.
Down the track I found for various reasons outside of my control this was not possible. But running parallel to this was a different problem I had not anticipated in the build up to starting the business.
The running and operating of the modified car club which I blogged about earlier helped greatly with our networking but also introduced a problem. It has been discovered that people who knew me well at the time of business start up had faith in my skills both as a mechanic and as a businessmen, but those who only knew me on a surface level did not.
Car club meant I knew lots and lots and lots of people but only as acquaintances and did not know many of them very well. That huge network in most cases is great for a starting small business but we found a huge number of this network did not believe the guy they knew as a car club organiser could be a decent mechanic. We found that many had in fact placed me in a box not as a poor mechanic but more just “that’s the bloke who administrated the car club, he cant possibly be my mechanic”
As time went on we worked hard at breaking that idea out of peoples minds and gradually a huge number of the car club members came to use our services. Yet some stubborn few have not, which is of course their right not to but we have discovered with some, there is a very large level of bitterness and even trash talk towards GDL Automotive Services which in some cases has spread to new generations of people who have not ever met me or used my services. This confused me as to how could anyone say such things without ever encountering our business.
The answer did come to us and I believe at some level its jealousy but the conclusion we made is this
“The amount of venom shot at you directly correlates to your level of success”.
Some people are beyond reason and nothing you can do will change minds. We have concluded the greater this level of trash talk goes on in the community (mostly within the modified car world) the better our business must be. The more success we have the more “nobody’s ” try to bring us down.
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