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In our last office, we had the same cleaners as everyone else. It’s not that they had a monopoly. But if you asked any of the other tenants in the complex who they used, they’d all give you the same name. Which is how those cleaners came to be our cleaners.
Our cleaning needs, it should be noted, were not so intense. But it became clear after a few visits that the cleaners weren’t cleaning. So we called the general manager of the company and asked if he’d come check out our space. Just so we could point to what we expected would happen (wiping down surfaces, sweeping floors) and make sure we all had the same thing in mind.
He arrived. And within two minutes of entering our space, he started badmouthing his staff. We hadn’t even said hello or pointed to anything before he started laying in on how lazy the team was. How little they wanted to work. How turnover made it hard to keep anyone good. After several minutes of this, he picked up his head to see if we understood that the lack of cleaning wasn’t a reflection on him or the cleaning company. It was a reflection on their employees. And, hey, whaddayagonnado? Hard to get good people, amirite?
This happens a lot. Particularly when people don’t know about the work we do at Raw Signal Group, but even when they do. They often look for affirmation of a bad or broken or downright abusive approach to management. We are not the management police. We do not issue report cards. But obviously, failing marks for the general manager of the cleaning company.
Once he was out the door, a member of our team approached us to say that wasn’t ok. We assured her that we knew and didn’t condone his approach to his staff. And she said, “No, I know we don’t. But I also don’t feel good about continuing to work with that company. They treat their employees like crap. And that’s so far from how we think about things. Can we find someone else to work with?”
Overflowing with possibility
A cool fact about the universe is that you can run a business any way you like. Immediately after filing your incorporation papers, you can pick your clients or customers. You can employ people. And you basically have full say in what happens next. The world is overflowing with possibility.
So it always feels like a strange choice to run a crappy business. But people do it. They run crappy businesses and are crappy to their staff who provide crappy service to crappy clients. And it’s just crap all the way down the line. And while it seems like this might put you out of business quickly, in the story about our old cleaners, remember that nearly every tenant in the complex used them. We were the outliers when we decided to switch.
Once we were switching, we had a list of things that were important to us. Did the cleaners actually clean? Did the owners respect their employees? Did they have lower-than-average turnover for their industry? Did they pay a living wage? Here’s the thing. We found new cleaners who did all of these things. And it took about half a day of internet research and a few phone calls.
Now maybe all the other tenants were thrilled with their service and maybe they weren’t. But the thing our team member said stuck with us: “I don’t feel good about continuing to work with that company.”
So we didn’t.
Switching costs
Last week, we had a bad encounter with a crappy software vendor. Crappy in that the software itself is old and archaic and unloved. And crappy in that the people working within the software org long ago stopped caring about making things better.
Tech people affectionately refer to this as the “milk it for all it’s worth” phase in a company’s lifecycle. Tech loves a good disruption story. And so any startup that has a foothold and gets some customers and grows enough to be interesting will one day find a smaller company coming up behind them. But at that point, they will be bigger and they will have large contracts with large enterprises who don’t like change. And don’t appreciate platform upgrades to bring the original tech, now decades old, into the modern era. So the big org stops building new features, stops listening to customer feedback. And, instead, invests in things that make it harder to switch.
And somewhere in your head, a voice says:
“I don’t feel good about continuing to work with that company.”
The current state of play
From a place of empathy, most leaders are not procurement specialists. They’re just trying to solve a problem so they can get back to the rest of their job. The harder it is to tell things apart, the more they want it to be easy. Sometimes they’ll cobble together a scoring rubric that looks at functionality, cost, support levels, and try to make a data-based decision. But, real talk, a significant number of vendor decisions are made by yelling “fuck it!” and signing up for the thing with name recognition on the assumption that it probably isn’t that bad.
And those companies know it.
And so you start working with them and it’s…fine? Their customer support isn’t very responsive, and their chatbot isn’t very good. And your counterparts over there don’t seem very happy with their jobs. And everything you ask about involves an upsell to the Enterprise version, but even the person pitching you doesn’t seem very excited about it. You report a bug and they tell you they won’t fix it. And maybe that’s just what it means to work with a vendor these days? And you sort of hate it any time you see their email in your inbox because you know it’s gonna be transactional and slimy and they’re gonna suggest a call you don’t need for a product you don’t want. And they sound so bored, or sad, or actually…angry? with you? while they’re trying to pitch you this…thing? They sound angry? Why do they sound angry? And why is this what it means to work with a vendor these days?
It isn’t. Not really. You probably have other folks you work with who are great. Maybe your office caterers are super friendly and skilled. Maybe you love the little boutique shop you work with on social media ads. Or the freelance designer who has felt like a member of your team for years. Those are vendors, too, but they feel like extensions of your team. When you really sit with those relationships, it makes it visible just how awful the other ones have become. So now what?
Staying costs
Most bosses we work with come from organizations with a set of stated values. Your org probably has some, too. Values about how you treat each other, and how you relate to your work. If you work hard to live those values, it can create incredible coherence and safety for your teams. They know what’s expected of them, and what they can expect from others. But values that stop at the walls of your organization create a weird dissonance for your people.
What does it mean if we value taking ownership, but our vendor dodges and redirects to deny any accountability? If it’s true that we value treating each other with respect, what are we supposed to do about our vendor who treats their own people like shit? Is that none of our business? Even when it’s done in the name of our business?
Every time your team picks up a new vendor relationship, every time you sign a new contract, you’re really picking up two things: some new abilities, and some new people. The new abilities might be incredibly powerful, or mundane-but-necessary. We have seen teams openly weep when their customer support spreadsheets and macros were replaced with proper software. Good tools matter and most people make decisions on the basis of those tools. But you’re also picking up some new people. Sales, support, client management, billing. Your team gets bigger in that moment. It’s why every vendor wants to talk about partnering with you, instead of just selling you something.
If your vendor team is great, that’s great. You can get unfairly great work out of vendors by just showing up delicious in every interaction and trusting them to match that energy. But if the relationship is not delicious, we’re here to tell you that that is a problem that won’t go away. The more high-touch that interaction, the more you need to work through those people to get things done, the more of a problem that is. It’s an irritant that sits, and festers. Your team starts to expect every interaction to be a fight. Imagine paying for the privilege of…that.
If you’re reading this and you know who we’re talking about for your org, this is your clarion call. You’ve been putting it off because the switching costs are too high. Because that tool is built into your automation. Because you don’t really want to deal with data migration, or training, or their half-hearted attempt to win you back. But, most of the time, the cost of your team feeling crappy about their work is higher. When your team says, “I don’t feel good about continuing to work with that company,” they’re telling you something important. Something you can plausibly fix in about half a day of internet research and a few phone calls.
— Melissa & Johnathan
