Hey babes. These holidays have got me all excited for the upcoming year, and all of the amazing advice I get to give you all. I'm so sure that my die-hard fans have been religiously following my column. Maybe I should start a cult, ha ha.
So with the end of the year nearly here, a lot of you have been writing in about resolutions. Most of them are about how to be more like me, which is a really good, but lofty, goal. Not that I can ever write enough about myself, but I decided to take a slightly different tone this week and respond to one of the most unique letters I've had.
D.T. from Washington, D.C. writes, "Cassie, I'm a huge fan. I'm a much bigger fan than all of your other fans. People are always telling me what a big fan of yours I am. So nice. Well I wonder if you can help me out of this little problem [with your infinite wisdom]. Let's say I'm the head of a very large company of sorts. We import and export a lot of things, and I thought it would be a good idea to start charging a huge fee for those things we import an export. This has started a 'war' of sorts, and I'm not sure how to get out of it. Any thoughts?"
You know what, D.T.? If there's anything I have about anything, it's thoughts. It sounds like you've got yourself in quite the pickle. It may seem like a good idea on paper to just start making people pay extra for what they send in, but what happens pretty quickly is that your customers will be absorbing most or all of those extra costs, and that will get them super grumpy.
Have no fear, though. This sort of thing is pretty straightforward to get out of. First, what you don't want to do is start making up for the increased costs to your customers by offering other services or discounts somewhere else. That's going to be too much to handle for your business, and you'll have to micromanage to keep it under control, but it will blow up in your face eventually.
The best thing to do at this point is just admit that you were wrong, and stop charging those extra fees. I'm not usually a fan of admitting I'm wrong, but that's because I never am. In your case, though, you were wrong. Take a deep breath, admit that the fees were a bad idea, and make them go away.
If you have any sort of staff or advisers or anything, maybe you can shift the blame to them. I do that all the time. But whatever you do, stop the silly charges.
I hope that's helpful to everybody! Let me know what things you really want to get going in 2019, and I'll pour my deepest thoughts out into your thirsty mouths!