Business Owners Are Worst Clients

I was assigned to support sales people in a job long ago. I learned a lot about sales but it was enlightening to see their strategies for maximizing their reward to effort ratio.

A key strategy was to find someone in the company with decision making power or influence but who also was not really spending their own money/budget directly. You were wasting your time talking to anyone without power to make or influence decisions, but you didn’t want to go too high up the chain because the closer you got to the people who owned the business or the P/L of a division, the more questions they asked to make sure they were getting the best value.

So the optimal sales target was a middle manager who wanted an easy solution that felt like it would help their KPIs but who also didn’t really care if it was a good value as long as the number wasn’t so high that people started asking questions.

If you got pushed up to the business owner level you were going to get grilled on value and efficiency, so they would actually try to push down the chain to someone who didn’t feel like they were spending their own money. Middle managers will spend as much money as the business will let them to build their empires and hit those KPIs for the next raise. There is also a mentality that you need to spend a lot of money every quarter to avoid having your budget cut next quarter, which consultants are happy to help them do.

So it makes sense that any provider looking for the easiest clients wouldn’t want to go up to the business owner level.

I wonder if there's an element of self-selection. The type of people to own a business could be more likely to put up a fight when things don't go their way (e.g. to protect the business and their investments), whereas the typical consumer is more likely to accept things as they are and not fight the business ("whatever, I'll just use another service").

I haven't seen much of business owners being ornery like the article describes, but there's other challenges:

Business owners (thinking SMBs) tend to have a holistic view of their entire business, to know what everything costs, how the numbers work out, etc., and to personally feel the risk. They also generally don't have a lot of time to invest in changes, and may not want to delegate too much. And they know that a lot of vendors are full of poo.

(Source: Our anti-counterfeiting slash supply chain integrity startup ended up working with major brands, but we also tried small businesses (e.g., designer who had their own production line of huge CNC machines in their studio). We tried tailoring solutions to some of these upscale small businesses, but in the end we only ended up getting money from large enterprise prestige brands. Enterprise sales, OTOH, is a painful and risky slog of numerous stakeholders, foot-dragging dependencies, opaque politics, changing priorities, etc.)

One possible explanation: business owners have more skin in the game and care the most, so they are the most demanding and can’t tolerate waste. So they are the hardest to satisfy.

Additionally, they are not used to mincing their words because they don’t have bosses and are the most direct (and also egoistic).

I own a business and I go out of my way to respect other businesses, because I know how hard it is to own one.

> I did some manual verification on most of the data because this peaked my curiousity.

It's "piqued my curiosity".

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.

Business owners carry a lot more stress than salaried employees (generalization but directionally true). They also don't have a "boss" that can fire them. Those two things are likely the reason for a higher likelihood of bad behavior.

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.

Familiarity breeds contempt. If business owners are your target, you'll quickly see the negative patterns. But same can be said about any target audience/persona.

I'd be interested if the author ever focused their efforts on a broad consumer archetype. Or worked in retail like a grocery store.

Every segment has a type that will spoil the bunch of you let them.

When consulting, I've found the opposite to be true, but I've tended to work with smaller businesses, often as a solo developer on whatever project I'm on (my current employer, who I've been with for a long time, started as such). Then again, on every project, I've tried to understand the business and the role I play, understanding that the technology itself serves the business, not the other way around.

I worked for a technology consultancy which had an unwritten policy that they would decline engagements where the primary point of contact (or champion) would end up being the owner of the client company.

My wife is a freelance digital marketing specialist, this post basically describes what she's been seeing since the start of her career 10 years ago.

As a tech guy, I've found that business owners tend to be way more pushy. Normally they fall in the boomer category, or they simply are not in the field.

Both categories seem to assume that "ahhh IT, things are instant and tomorrow I'll have 10'000 daily visitors", while that's very far from the case. They think that spending money today means results tomorrow as in "next sunrise", while digital marketing is basically subject to the whims of Google/Instagram/... and their algorithms, and investing today means seeing results at the very earliest after three months.

You tell them beforehand many times, they sign a contract, they agree with everything... and then after 2 weeks they start asking you daily why things are not improving, with zero respect for work hours or personal boundaries. That's how they choose someone else via "high-friction", and they normally land on bigger agencies because they think bigger agency = faster results.

I've had completely the opposite experience at Ritza, my dev rel agency, for the last 5 years.

My favourite is to work directly with owners, cofounders, etc. They know what they want, and they have the authority to approve stuff - it's really nice just focusing on the 'real' work instead of the admin and to know that the goals they set are likely valuable and not just someone trying to check a box somewhere.

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.

> I’ve always been struck by a recurring trend: whenever a customer throws a tantrum, threatens legal recourse, or takes things to an extreme, they are almost invariably another business owner.

If a business owner threatens legal recourse, then, probably it's them. If multiple business owners threaten legal recourse, it's definitely something you're doing wrong. And that usually is along the lines of over-promising and under-delivering in an agency context.

Well yeah, in a B2B context, it's far easier to satisfy some random employee who's not actually paying the cost versus a business owner who is.

Also, if multiple business owners are threatening legal recourse against you instead of simply dropping you, you're probably the problem...

Why is this a surprise? A business owner speaks his own money. A "non-business owner" means "an employee of another business" who doesn't care about anything but clocking out at 5pm and not getting fired - they are totally not interested in stirring trouble. It's just a metric of them not caring, not of them being "better clients". And representing bigger and richer entities than those where a business owner is a point of contact, meaning whatever money is/was at stake is usually not worthy of bothering.

Naturally, it is a lot better to work for richer entities with less control and attention over money spent, milk the fat cows.

Devil’s advocate: they’re more demanding because, unlike employees, they are not pushovers. They have skin in the game.

You seem to have equated “more likely to terminate with critical comments” to “worst.” Seems pretty reductive.

I'd like to see the prompts used here because Claude will simply reinforce whatever conclusion you already reached if your approach to prompting isn't neutral.

"small business owner" imo lol

Fucking marketeers. STFU.