In this day and age the cult of positive thinking and “the law of attraction” are still very much alive and well in the business services industry. Here are a few simple questions that you can ask prospective business service providers to help you gauge if they are the real deal or just caught up in the fad of “say yes to everything,” or “outsource everything” being populated online by countless “thought leaders” and cult gurus. Classic con artist.
Lots of people will ask, “What’s the harm of people trying to make something of themselves?”
Well, I’m here to tell you there is huge harm in taking risks with a client’s money and manipulating people into trusting their “expertise” when they have none.
Business owners: Due diligence is more important than ever these days.
There are whole communities of people helping to prop each other up as experts in fields they know nothing about while outsourcing their tasks with little or no oversight into the actual work being done on your behalf.
It is nearly impossible for you to tell if this is even going on. Don’t worry. I am here to help you avoid a con artist.
How? By showing you how to weed out the bad actors by asking really simple questions.
This set of questions is perfect for people who need to distinguish if the expert they are talking to is really just an expert in bullshit with a likable personality.
Why do these questions work? Because people who are into this kind of stuff are rarely hesitant to talk about it when you ask them direct questions. They believe that what they are doing is a good thing and so they are more open to sharing this information with you because they think by you asking that you are also into similar things.
It is a fun little trick I picked up while learning to do consumer polling and political surveying.
The Questions:
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- Who influences you professionally?
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- Do you follow any “thought leaders” “gurus” or coaches? If so, who?
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- What “school” of thought do you ascribe to in your profession, and where do you learn what you know?
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- Are there any industry standards you do not agree with?
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- How do you apply the services you offer to your own company?
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- Can you please tell me the background of your support staff and can I see their CVs?
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- Do you outsource or white label any of the work your company does?
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- May we audit your process before buying your services?
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- May we discuss your proposed strategies with others in your industry to ensure quality?
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- Would you be open to speaking with an independent consultant that is knowledgeable about your industry about your proposals?
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- Can you show me examples of your past successful jobs?
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- Do you have any industry-accepted certifications and how many hours of study do you do in a year to keep your knowledge up-to-date and current?
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- How many clients have you had in the past?
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- How many clients do you have currently?
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- How many clients are you able to handle at one time?
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- How many other clients do you have that are in the same industry as my company?
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- How long is your onboarding process before we start getting down to actually making changes to help solve the issues my company is facing?
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- Can you explain to me the steps you will take to identify my company’s needs?
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- Have you ever taken a course in NLP or any other similar course of study?
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- Have you ever been a part of a Multi-Level Marketing company?
Fun. Right? Well, we aren’t done.
It is not just enough to ask these questions… you have to pay attention to the answers, as well as the WAY they are answering questions.
And you also have to RESEARCH the company after you get your answers to make sure they ring true.
You cannot keep accepting people at face value, not when the risk is to your business, employees, and clients. There is little to no risk for a person who is being dishonest about their capabilities and skillsets. They will walk away with your money, ready to go find another target for a chance meeting that seems amazingly perfect.
Do not leave your business decisions to chance encounters at networking events. Research before saying yes.
No matter how likable or appealing the person you are speaking with is.
How do you research? Easy. THE INTERNET. Look at the website of the company you are considering working with.
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- Does it look professional? (do not use your website as a standard for professionals unless you have had it done by a professional)
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- Can you see a list of their past clients?
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- Do they effectively tell their story as a company or are they just selling?
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- What do their social media profiles look like? Do they have many followers? Are they updated regularly?
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- Do they have any positive reviews on social sites? (Yelp, Facebook, Linkedin, etc)
You can also do some simple things like running SEO Website Checkers on their websites. There are tons of these online for free and they will give you a pretty good indicator of if they are using best practices on their websites – you can even do this research on their clients’ websites.
Also, if you know anything about SpyFu, you can run their website through that to see how they are doing their own online marketing (the same can be said for their clients if they are selling this service).
Facebook also has a cool section that shows you ads that a Page is running. You can find this info connected to their business Page as well as the Pages they manage for their clients as well. None of these things automatically disqualify a potential service provider, but their answers to the question of “why” things are the way there are might be very illuminating to you as a business owner.
This may seem like a lot of work, and it can be if you do not do these things regularly and have them down to a system, but the cost of not doing these things is way too high. A con artist is born every day, thanks to the internet.
You have a right as a business owner considering services from a vendor to ask these questions.
They also have the responsibility as a service provider to answer these questions in a professional manner. Sometimes the way in which they answer the questions is far more important than the actual answer.
If all of this seems too overwhelming for you to handle, that is okay.
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- You can ask one of your staff in your company to take on this role and responsibility.
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- You can hire someone to come in and help you with these decisions (and you can ask them all the same questions as above before taking their services).
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- You can reach out to other business owners in your network to see if they have recommendations for someone who could help you with things.
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- Heck, you can even call up companies that look like they are doing as well as you want to be doing online and ask them who they are using for their services. Try successful companies in other industries as your competitor won’t likely be interested in sharing their secrets with you…
What is important is that you are asking questions, researching, and ultimately making sure that you are doing as much as possible to ensure making the best decision for your company.
Final thoughts:
“But, Jay, what’s wrong with taking a risk on an up-and-comer?”
The answer to that is NOTHING. There is nothing wrong with taking a chance on someone. Someone being green doesn’t make them a con artist.
The issue I am raising is in the honest portrayal of businesses and their capabilities. It is about honesty.
I am a huge fan of working with people who are new and passionate about an industry. But I only work with people who are honest with me about who they are, what they can do, and how their processes work.
I have worked with tons of people who are still learning on the job. It can be quite educational for a business owner as well.
Just make sure they are being honest about everything upfront. You are not obligated to give anyone a chance when it comes to your business’s success, and it’s not right that someone might manipulate you into doing so.
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Jacobus Lavooij
October 27, 2015 at 6:14 am
I have no clue why business people use Wix. Yes, easy, but when you are doing business, keep to your core business and have someone else build your website. Anyway, Hannah, thanks for pointing it out. I hadn’t heard of the problem yet. Always good to know and another tool for the ones that sell websites to close the client to use something else (like WP).
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James
October 27, 2015 at 10:45 am
Can you post some of the sources to this? I’m not finding much else aside from this article.
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Phil Simon
October 27, 2015 at 11:50 am
In a word, wow. That type of thing could puncture Wix’s business model, certainly for new clients.
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Andrew Anderson
October 27, 2015 at 1:59 pm
The truth is Free Website builders are never free. They in fact can cost you your whole business. Get yourself a hosted WordPress site and be done with it. Why put your financial future in someone else’s hands like that? If you have a real business then you need a real website.
Cheers,
Andrew Anderson
ContinualCustomer.com
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Andrew
October 27, 2015 at 5:52 pm
Does anyone know specifically what caused the deindex, whether it was Wix’s actions or a fluke?
Not arguing for them in any way, but the article does seem a little biased against them.
Kansas City
October 27, 2015 at 6:25 pm
Proof positive that you need to own your own asset as much as possible. WIX, Weebly, these could go belly up at any time (and Wix has, essentially). Only your own site can prevent these kinds of penalties (unless, of course, you use spammy SEO tactics)
Bryan Rempel
October 27, 2015 at 11:43 pm
Great article. I have been talking about this for months after learning WordPress, and still having about a dozen sites on a similar website builder to Wix. I have been with this unnamed company for over a dozen years (starting with Home and ending with Stead), and they have been punishing their customers with an upgrade over the last two weeks, making thousands of sites un-editable. If you are with such a company you cannot migrate your years of work and hundreds of hours of development to a new website service provider. You are a “renter” not an “owner” of your website. I have replaced about half my sites over the past year with WordPress sites that I can pack up and move to a different host whenever I want. I now “own” my work and can control it. These so-called free websites are like Hotel California, “You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.” I am now working on the rest of my sites to get them out of website purgatory.
ryan
October 28, 2015 at 12:01 am
Ive always hated wix. It ruins businesses as people are cheap and always go for whats cheap and easy. But, like most things, you get what you pay for. Maybe our industry will get a bit busier now 😀
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Alexis Kasperavicius
October 28, 2015 at 7:38 am
You kind of made the argument for using Wix: Google is paying attention, they will fix it. Do you think Google would fix a bug in their ranking code, much less respond to you if it was only affecting your site?
arun
October 28, 2015 at 9:49 am
sometimes im fear because iahve one site in wix
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Tyler
October 28, 2015 at 3:46 pm
I’ve transferred a few client sites from Wix to WordPress so I got a chance to see the backend of Wix. It is actually a decent platform for simple sites, but falls short when it comes to complex CMS, advanced services, and complete customization. One problem, as seen today, is all these sites are squeezed onto the same servers. I’d imagine it has to be quite a task to keep that server clean from spammy sites.
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Larry Launstein Jr.
November 6, 2015 at 1:47 pm
Not a fan of Wix at all. Too limited in design options and a SEO nightmare. Prefer WordPress and HTML-CSS better. Even with so many templates in each format, you can take them and call them your own, especially the premium templates.
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David C. Brandon
December 18, 2015 at 3:52 pm
Wow, thats a huge hit right there. Why would G specifically target these?
Generally speaking and regardless to this ‘update’, Wix users are not thrilled with their online presence on search engines.
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John
February 22, 2016 at 11:25 am
Although it’s odd that Google would penalize Wix user sites as a whole, I can tell you from dealing with users of free website builder services like Wix, there has been a decline in user satisfaction as a whole.
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Michael
June 1, 2016 at 8:11 am
Where is the truth in this I have 20 wix sites and none have suffered any penalty.
Lani Rosales
June 1, 2016 at 12:22 pm
You’re right – it was a temporary de-indexing, and many felt no impact whatsoever.
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