Do I really want to know what people think of me?

As a small business owner I am really only accountable to myself and so I don’t get regular assessments of my performance, I don’t get feedback on how I am doing – unless you count the sales results and staff turnover (which has admittedly been rather high recently, but not just down to me).

So as part of a recent planning and strategy day with my team, I asked a friend (another business owner) to talk to the team about what I was doing well, what needed improvement and what I should stop doing – START/STOP/CONTINUE.

The feedback was then given to me by my friend without naming names. This is the same as a customer giving you feedback on your business or brand – something which is very hard not to take personally…

Needless to say, when given the feedback I had trouble to understand some of it – in that I didn’t feel I did certain things highlighted. The same way that each customer experiences things in their own way each member of my team experiences things in their own way depending on their past experience and personality.

The feedback has been insightful in that I now realise that I do tend to send about a million emails a day with different tasks – when in fact one big one might be better, so by changing my behaviour I will also influence my team’s productivity, which in turn is better for my business, so in theory everyone is a winner.

Now with a brand, there can be a tendency to get feedback and say – well what do they know? It’s my brand, I know what I’m doing, and I’ll do what I like. But how far is this getting you? If you ask for feedback, surely you should do something with the feedback rather than dismiss it?

Feedback is something to embrace (especially after a few glasses of wine to take the edge off!) because it means that someone cares enough to think about what it is that you do well or not so well and is giving you a chance to rectify it. Sometimes you need an outside perspective, if you can’t see the wood for the trees.

Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks, mobile phone socks www.MyMocks.com and author of Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business. Lara’s business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.

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