When you’ve been a small business consultant as long as I have (six years now and counting), you start to see the world in a very different way.
Back when I was CEO of NetCreations, I often grew impatient with what I saw as the laziness and incompetence of the people around me. After all, if I could leap tall buildings, why couldn’t my employees? Today, I see management problems waiting to be solved and business models in need of an overhaul.
While I’m still not the most patient person in the world, I’ve become a lot more understanding now that I know how business really works. But while I’ve learned to control my temper, I can’t always stop myself from doling out unsolicited management advice to unsuspecting servers and sales clerks. (”I realize it’s only 10 a.m. and your restaurant generally doesn’t get busy until noon, but if you brought in another server between breakfast and lunch, that might bring in some extra business.”)
I also find it difficult not to applaud good management practices when I see small businesses adopting them. Last week, I was finishing breakfast with a local VC at The French Roast (the West Village coffee shop that serves as my office away from the office) when the server came over with the check. But before she put it down on the table, she asked me whether I would mind filling out a card with my name and e-mail address. She seemed embarrassed that her manager had asked her to do this.
“Wow, that’s great!” I told her. “I’ve been coming to The French Roast for years, and finally you’re going to put me in your database. Now you can e-mail me about special offers and promotions any time you want!”
She must have thought I was insane.
The downside to being a business consultant is that sometimes you see problems that aren’t there. Also last week, a contractor who was supposed to begin repainting the ceiling of my apartment on Monday morning didn’t send over his painter to start the job until Wednesday afternoon. Sure, his project manager gave me the usual grab bag of excuses, but I began to suspect that, like so many other contractors I’ve hired in the past, the firm had put my small residential job on the back burner while it finished some big commercial project. After speaking to the painter, I discovered that my hypothesis was wrong, and all was forgiven.
My point is this: After six years of playing family doctor to hundreds of startups and small businesses, I have a hard time getting mad at small companies that drop the ball because it’s so obvious to me what their problems are (I still have zero tolerance for large corporations that screw up my payroll, however).
On the other hand, it’s still frustrating to deal with companies like my old car service from Brooklyn that would promise me a car in five minutes in the middle of a rainstorm when it was clear that the car hadn’t even left the base.
The solution: Honest communication. How much better would our world be if every service provider (doctor, lawyer, plumber and electrician) would simply lay his or her cards face up on the table and tell the truth about what was really going on with his or her business?
Instead of conversations like this:
Homeowner: How soon can you start work on my bathroom?
Contractor: Just give me a deposit and we’ll get started next week.
We’d have conversations like this:
Homeowner: How soon can you start work on my bathroom?
Contractor: Can I get back to you on that? My best guy just called in sick and, because the order from the manufacturer got screwed up, we still haven’t finished the bathroom renovation on the Upper West Side we started three months ago.
Replace contractor with software developer or web design firm, and you get my drift.
Of course, clients don’t always win awards for honesty, either. That’s why contractors and other service providers often must jump through hoops of fire to collect their final payment. It’s a whole lot easier for customers to hold back money for what they claim is shoddy workmanship than it is to come clean and admit that they maxed out their credit card taking their kids on vacation.
That’s why I’ve gone out of my way over the past six years to build a network of reliable contractors and other service providers to help me with the host of business, investment and real estate projects I’ve embarked on since leaving NetCreations. On the rare occasion that a service provider does drop the ball, I try to put my anger on the shelf and give him or her the benefit of the doubt. The last thing I want is to tear somebody’s head off only to find out that he’s in the hospital with his dying mother.
That’s why, when I told Dominick, my appliance repair technician, that I understood that it might take a couple of days before Viking shipped the parts for my dishwasher and a few more days before he could come by to install them, he paid me the ultimate compliment.
“It’s a pleasure,” he said, “to work for somebody who gets it.”
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 7:06 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Leave a Reply
