Business Owners Are Worst Clients

I see another explanation. A generous take would be that digital marketing agencies generate mixed results. But many would have far worse things to say about the ROI these agencies produce.

I don’t know anything about the author’s agency, but I can imagine that if I were a small business owner and I allocated budget to them, I’d absolutely let them know how I felt if they failed to produce results. This would not be the case if I were a salaried employee at a larger business responsible for outsourcing digital marketing. It just doesn’t matter to an employee in nearly the same way.

I’ve been a founder and I’ve been in sales most of my career, I’ve sold to enterprises as well as to small business owners. This isn’t to say the author isn’t right. I just disagree with a lot of the comments on here about the inherently misanthropic nature of small business owners.

This is kind of similar to what we are experiencing, but there is one important caveat: only business owners with no employees tend to be mean and borderline fraudulent. Not all but there is a tendency.

But that kind of makes sense to me. If a business has no employees, then either 1) it is not a real business, or 2) the owner is a jerk (unpleasant) and nobody wants to work with

In other words some people start the business because they are forced to start “business”. Because nobody will hire them or they lack “social intelligence” so they are never prompted.

But if a business has at least one employee, the owners are usually very nice to work with: professional and to the point.

I’ve owned some trivially small businesses, and something I think is missing in the discussion is how quickly people’s presumptuous bullshit has me on the phone burning time-money. They think I’m rude, it’s them though, and their sloppy sales ‘lies’.

In those roles it’s not that I’m king whatever of wherever, but I know intimately how much my hours capitalize for, and given that lots of sales/customer communication is happening on the phone, you get a big impedance. Smug low tier sellers trying to talk past me, and flatly disrespecting me when trying to rationalize their pre-packaged pitch.

Architecture is customer facing. I am nice, and soft spoken the first time. But when kindness is misunderstood as ineptitude and people start talking to me like I’m a girl who could just never, like, understand a transmission…? My only regrets are not hanging up hard enough and refraining from swearing at them in the early years.

Other people’s C-tier employees and D-tier operations are not my problem unless and until they pay me.

Lots of spot on comments here.

They have 35% relationship terminations over 15 years and are just now wondering why?

No way.

This is just a new spin on something they have already believed.

An interesting post would include exploratory data analysis and a discussion of how they came up with the categories they used for their final analysis.

Sure, but as a business you're ideally already somewhat diversified in clients.

As employee, it's all or nothing.