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These 8 Yard Sale Lessons May Improve Your Advocacy Practice
We’ve made the decision. My husband and I have decided to leave cold Northeastern winters behind, and in just a few weeks we’ll be moving south. We’ve sold our home in Upstate NY. We’ve purchased a home in Florida. We’ve put together the details for the actual move itself… The only continuing challenge is one that will sound familiar to many of you. We have too much stuff. When we moved into our current home in 2007, we were newly married. We jammed two entire households worth of stuff into this home – most of it simply moved to the basement. Then parents passed away and we collected even more stuff. Over the years our kids have removed their stuff, we’ve sold a few things, we’ve given a lot away… From holiday decorations, tools, and hobby supplies to old tax records, books, grandkids’ toys, games, and luggage. Family, sentimental, nostalgic, even historical. It’s the stuff accumulated throughout two lifetimes and those of our loved ones and… well, overwhelming, really. But in Florida there are no basements! Therein lies our problem…. The solution? A yard sale, of course. So Saturday’s sale was round one. Throughout the day I haggled, chatted, rearranged and sold stuff. But I also spent time just observing shoppers, and by the end of the day, I had put together a list of relevant customer service lessons for private, professional patient advocates. Granted, there are some major differences between yard sale shoppers and patients who need advocates. But I hope you’ll be able to use this list to improve how you conduct business with the general public – most of whom will need to hire a private advocate sometime in the future. Here are the customer service lessons that may be helpful to you: 1. Be prepared. We spent weeks moving thousands of items into the garage. But moving them was just the start. We had to display them in some way – on shelves and tables, or even just on the driveway. Then we had to price them all too – and there were hundreds we missed. At…