Business is Personal – Case Study #2

One thing I’ve learned having worked for large companies, medium sized companies, started a few companies of my own, and consulted for many more, is that one should keep the big picture in mind and chose battles wisely.

However, when someone calls my character or integrity into question, or claims I’m not doing my job when speaking with others or better yet, someone that is my direct superior, it becomes personal.  …and yes, as the title suggests, another thing I’ve learned over the years is that Business is, in fact, VERY PERSONAL. Without the personal relationships people develop over the years between buyers and sellers, coworkers, partners, ect., commerce would simply amount to a bunch of machines exchanging information and products… and last I checked, the human race is still very human.

This brings me to case study #2 which I’ll call “Young Entrepreneur Gonna Learn the Hard Way”

Entering the stage is a young, just got out of college or just dropped out of college aspiring entrepreneur who thinks he’s going to make it huge developing applications for a large social network.  He and his partner, another of the same breed, create a top 10 app, are bombarded by the lemming Venture Capitalist crowd thinking they need to “jump into the game” and add something from this space into their portfolio.

After some wining, dining, trips on the company yacht, invitations to nearly every social network application conference on the planet, and being interviewed in magazines, blogs, podcasts, and even a high profile newspaper or 2, these young ambitious entrepreneurs (who are just barely covering their expenses with ad revenue from their application and deals with companies that think they need to be “hip” and tap this “new social networking thing”) are made a few offers by said lemming Venture Capitalists to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars, or even possibly a few Million dollars if they sold themselves well, in return for a chunk of the company and perceived windfall profits within this new and exciting medium.

With a new found ego, these enterprising entrepreneurs decide to decline the investment capital because they think they can make it happen on their own and continue to storm the social scene of Silicon Valley.  They are admired by young and old alike by their bold decision and ability to leverage such a small amount of code and turn it into so much hype.  So much hype, mind you, within a medium that is evolving daily and catering to one of the most fickle generations to ever walk the planet, who can embrace a product/service by the millions just as quickly as they can forget it ever existed.

Clearly though, having spent maybe 6-9-12 months trying to convert this hype into cold hard cash, these 2 entrepreneurs are gradually viewed by their community as “experts” at both running a business and “scaling” a social network application.  …Clearly…  because perception rules the day and if you’ve had an application that was ever listed in the top 10 most used or viewed social network applications at one point in your life, one must be an expert.

Unfortunately, as time goes on, the application and business never really materializes into the multimillion dollar empire these entrepreneurs expected. Worse yet is that they get themselves stuck into a few contracts for services they simply didn’t need anymore due to their applications declining use (mostly due, predictably, to the millions of other flashy, nifty, gimmicky applications that simply took its place within the social network mediums). So, what do they do?

Well, I’ll tell you one thing… WHAT YOU DO NOT DO is point fingers and claim that you deserve to get out of your contract because the individual who actually bent over backward to proactively accommodate for your company, and solve/resolve any issues you may have been having as quickly as possible, was “mismanaging” your account.  You especially do not make these claims to that individuals superior, as for damn sure information is going to leak down to the individual whose character and integrity were called into question.

Actually, I take that back, if you plan on living in a cave the rest of your life it might not be a bad idea to talk smack about someone involved with your account.

See, here’s the thing, those in sales and business development and who serve as account representatives of companies are rejected daily, so there’s really not a problem or need to feel as though someone is rejecting the individual directly when someone says no to the product or service the individual may be offering.  More often than not, the person selling the product could care less about the product or service, and thus it really doesn’t make any difference to the person selling.

This being said however, reality is every action has a reaction, this world truly is VERY SMALL and for some strange cosmic reason, Karma really is a bitch.  Thus, if you’re an asshole to someone for ANY reason, or you make false claims about someone for ANY reason, you better know damn sure who that person is, as chances are the individual will remember you, what you did and the way you acted.  Sometimes, they’ll even go out of their way to remember you.

Long story short, you bet your bottom dollar that the individual who was falsely accused of mismanaging an account will forgive, but never forget, the actions of that scrappy young entrepreneur trying to negotiate his way out of a contract.  This entrepreneur’s actions in fact will likely affect him for years to come in ways he’ll never know.  Why?  Because people would rather do business with those they can trust, and in fact, BUSINESS IS PERSONAL.