Hey everyone its Friday and time for another blog post. I’ve been writing about Covenants for my book and I thought I’d share a few thoughts.
Namely this one: If you have a Covenant, enforce it!
And this one: If you aren’t going to enforce your Covenant, don’t have one!
For your Second Life land business to prosper, you need to train your customers, which means you need to be consistent in enforcing your rules and regulations. I don’t care if your Covenant is strict, lax, or somewhere in-between, if you don’t enforce it, it is worthless. In fact, I’ll go a step further and say having a Covenant you don’t enforce is worse than not having a Covenant at all.
Don’t be scared of your customers. You need them, and they need you too. It’s easy when times are tight, vacancies are high, and the dreaded “summer slump” is near, to relax the rules. You might be scared of losing a customer by asking them to follow your rules, or to (heaven forbid) pay tier on time.
What you need to realize is if you have a Covenant and don’t enforce it, you risk losing all your customers, not just one.
Let me give you an example.
Let’s say you have a sim with a residential Covenant, and a customer opens a new club in your sim. Your first thought may be to “let it slide.” After all, one club won’t hurt anything right? And if you tell them clubs aren’t allowed, you might lose that customer!
But here’s what will happen otherwise. Let’s say you look the other way and ignore the club. You might keep the club owner on your sim, but what are the other tenants going to do? You guessed it. They’re going to clear out.
Then what are you left with? One club on an otherwise empty sim, that’s what! That’s not good for you, its not good for the customers who moved out, and it’s really not good for the club owner either because that’s a sim you will have to clear, sell, or abandon. Everyone loses.
Keep your Covenant enforceable. Use language that is clear, to the point, and easy to understand. Then, enforce your Covenant!
Have fun, and good luck.
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