How important is your reputation?

This week’s blog has been inspired by a sad but significant event that took place earlier today (Sunday 17 July). As some of you may recall, last August my father passed away after many years of ill health. The reason for bringing this up is that in the Jewish religion it is the custom to set the tomb stone in place approximately 1 year later and today was the stone setting for my late father.

The first thing I noticed was despite the appalling July weather a significant number of people attended the ceremony, in fact someone counted that there were around 100 people. By and large they all said the same thing to me and my siblings that one of the things they admired and valued about my father was his reputation for being trustworthy and honest. The second thing I noticed was that a number of the epitaphs read like CV's! It was this that reminded me of a question that my father posed, when I was quite young.

He asked me “what was I given as a baby that was mine for life, but once lost or tarnished could never be recovered?” after much head scratching he finally gave me the answer and that was my name. He was quite right, you only have to look around you at the reputation, or lack of some of the people making the news. We have the sight of famous actors such as Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan hypocritically pontificating about the activities of some journalists when just a few short years ago they were caught out by the papers for behaving inappropriately.

I was always led to beleive that in business your name was your most important asset, which has led me to wonder why executive officers go out of their way to put themselves and or their company in a position to damage it. Lets take the recent phone hacking scandal, while the Chief Executor may not have known, or not been made aware of what actions were being carried out, the moment to resign was when the allegations were proven to be correct and not when the worlds press and politicians were calling for it. Had she resigned at the beginning at least her reputation would not have been so badly damaged.

While the brouhaha about the phone hacking was going on, I had a meeting with a potential customer for Deanem Collections. I had been asked to meet the senior management of a registered social landlord, the meeting went very well and before it ended I asked them why they had requested to meet me. They said that it was that our reputation for hard work and total honesty meant they felt they could trust my company to assist with the collection of their tenancy arrears. I was delighted, as it has taken many years of hard work to get to this position and I know that I would never knowingly do anything that could change people’s perception of Deanem Collections Ltd or myself.

If you would like to find out more about David Baum or Deanem Collections Ltd please do not hesiatet to email David at david@deanemcollections.co.uk or visit our website www.deanemcollections.co.uk