How to build your reputation and why that reputation matters.

Reputation matters. Your business’ reputation reflects everyone in your business. When people trust your brand, recommendations, business opportunities, company value, consumer reviews and employee satisfaction soars. Dimensional Research indicated that 9 out of 10 consumers say positive reviews influence their buying behaviour, while 58% of Fortune 500 executives believe reputation management should be front of mind in all areas of operations.

So why does it matter to you? Small to medium businesses now live online and having a good reputation can be more important than a high Google rating. Building a good reputation is the silent differentiator that can lead to advocacy, higher margins, empathy & forgiveness when you need help or things go wrong. As Henry Ford nicely summarised, “a reputation is built on action not on words”.

Imagine your reputation in the context of a bank account. If every positive action is a deposit and every favour you ask for is a withdrawal, are you in a positive or negative balance? The best savers are consistent. They make regular micro deposits and occasionally withdraw in times of need. Building your reputation is no different.

So who is responsible for a company’s reputation? The simple answer is everyone. It’s important to have strong internal coordination between people and departments to consistently deliver on promises, all of which lead to consistent action towards a strong reputation.

So what can you do? Building reputation boils down to the action of doing the right thing and doing what you promise you will do. If you are selling, it’s delivering what you promise at a quality, time and price that reflects your customer’s standing. If you are the customer, it’s paying your bills on time and earlier where it makes sense (e.g. receiving a discount for paying before the due date). The earlier you pay, the larger the deposit into your reputation account. Conversely, when a bill is paid late it’s a withdrawal from your reputation account.

Fortunately, we live in a society where there are APPs for everything. APPs for accounting, APPs for invoicing, APPs for brokering discounts for early invoice payments and APPs to centralise and automate invoices & bills payments. The trick is to discover & combine the APPs to automate consistent deposits to your reputation bank account. As your reputation account grows, so will your cash at bank ( https://bit.ly/3gA5qzc ).