My role is the health and safety consultant or The Cat in the Hat. When I was a young girl I loved the story of The Cat in the Hat, the cat balancing 50 to 100 multicolored very beautiful hats on his head and getting into all sorts of trouble. Health and safety entrepreneurs are a little like The Cat in the Hat.
You have to juggle marketing so you wear the marketing Cat in the Hat hat. You have to drum up sales and always have work in the pipeline to keep you going. It is easier to drum up existing work with existing clients so you want to have good client retention strategies and use another one of your Cat in the Hat strategies which is customer service to keep them. Clients have a lifecycle so you always want to have new clients that keep your business growing. You don’t want to plateau. Organize your work, word process information and be up on technology and phone and set appointments.
In your customer service hat you have to under-promise and over-deliver. You must meet and exceed customer expectations and give stellar customer service. You’re building relationships so you should always have the best interest of the client in mind.
You also have to develop new products as a health and safety entrepreneur so that is your other hat and you have to be innovative. Your products should be unique, they should be different and they should meet the hot buttons of your clients – those areas that really, really upset them. For example, legislation that is coming in that could have a huge impact on their business if they are not prepared for it like the globally harmonized information system which is in the U.S. but hasn’t been as yet implemented in Canada.
You have to wear your time management hat so you have to manage your time as time is your most precious commodity. You can’t print more of it so you want to maximize your efforts and make sure that all of your projects are “Wow” or stellar.
So just like The Cat in the Hat as an entrepreneur you have got to balance a lot of hats and you can have a lot of fun doing so.
