Adii Pienaar

The title to this post probably sounds a little cynical, considering the well-travelled business mantra that “the customer is always right”, but I’d really like to challenge that point of view in the business environment.

As a company grows, the user- / customer-base normally grows as well and the increased number of people that requires your attention, leads to added strain on your customer service functions. So during this growth period, it is important to streamline one’s policies & activities in such a way to allow you to scale the energy & resources required to service an ever-expanding number of customers.

What I’ve found though, is that some customers are just simply more difficult than others, which is probably an indication of the varying personalities that one encounters in business. This isn’t a problem in itself, since most of the “difficult” customers actually have valid points and they just require a little more attention than average to feel as happy with your company as the “easier” customers. But even though I can objectively say that, I have also encountered the type of customer that is being difficult purely because they want to be difficult. It is also this kind of customer that simply doesn’t trust your company from the get-go, calls of your actions into question and becomes offensive & insulting when they don’t receive an e-mail response within 5 minutes (if this seems like I’m exaggerating; I’m not).

Pulling The Plug

I recently made the call with a customer that I just wasn’t interested in working with them anymore, after they had become extremely insulting and called my character into question. Whilst I’m always willing to deal with any seemingly difficult situation on merit, I draw the line when it becomes unprofessional, as that is normally a clear indication that someone is being difficult purely for the sake of being difficult.

So what did I do? I simply recommended a competitor’s product instead, refunded the customer’s purchase and noted that I don’t think it would be possible to continue a professional relationship in this regard.

This may be a tad radical, but I’m not telling the full story here obviously. Instead I’d like to point out that I was trying to avoid a 20/80 situation whereby the 20% of customers who are difficult will drain 80% of the energy & resources devoted to customer support. I’m not suggesting an exclusive approach here whereby only the “easy” customers gets your attention, but I am suggesting that your good customers should receive the same amount of attention.

By eliminating the odd (really) bad customer, you are thus freeing up resources to invest in your best customers who don’t necessarily request / demand customer service, but are actually most worthy of your time.

“Right to Admission”

Ultimately this comes down to the standard “supply & demand” argument, whereby just as much as a customer may choose a company, a company may also choose its customers. Service companies regularly chooses which clients they’d like to work with, so why shouldn’t a retailer be able to do the same? Just because you are selling to the general public, you don’t necessarily need to accept every single customer as your customer and even less do you need to accept them being difficult without rational reason.

This however becomes more complex when you consider how much customer service resources is spent entertaining difficult & irrational customers; so this behaviour is almost endorsed in a way where companies are saying “it’s okay sir / madam, you can be irrational and we’ll offer you the best customer service available and make you feel better”. To that, I’d like to say: Bullshit!

Back to supply & demand. When customers purchase from a company, they enter into an implicit sales agreement whereby they agree that they are paying X and in return they receive Y. That’s the bottom line; it’s normal supply & demand. Customer service operates on a different level (probably marketing and / or public relations), which means that no customer is *entitled* to being difficult and even less should they be allowed to demand a company dealing with their irrational / offensive / unprofessional behaviour.

If the company handles those situations really well, then kudo’s to them. But when you’re looking to scale a business, you’re gonna find that you can’t entertain 100’s or 1000’s of difficult customers every day, unless you increase your overhead expenditure on support resources significantly.

So I’d throw my hat into the ring for companies to stop entertaining difficult, irrational customer behaviour and instead fight fire with fire in an objective & professional manner. The sooner that customers realize that the company-customer relationship is a two-way street, with equal “power-sharing” amongst the parties, the sooner we’ll get rid of difficult clients.

“If you’re customers (existing or prospective) do not understand what you are telling them; everything you say will purely be marketing speak.”

I wrote that bit down recently as I was contemplating additions & tweaks to WooThemes and realized that as marketers we have an integral part to play in the education process for our products & services. See, I don’t think it’s that easy to sell your products & services to someone that is uneducated about what they are really purchasing and spending money on.

Prime example of this (in our context), would be the addition of ExpressionEngine themes to WooThemes’ collection. Instead of just being able to market them (side-by-side) with our WordPress themes, we’re busy building its own, unique channels, with its own angles. It’d be a lie if I said that it has been easy to introduce our WordPress users to the idea of using EE as an alternative CMS. But why?

Simply put, the only way I ever see a WordPress user switching to ExpressionEngine** is if they are properly educated about the pros & cons of such a decision. So part of our marketing strategy should be to include that educational information and in such a way, interact with our users about those pros & cons. Without that understanding of why they’d potentially make such a decision, all of our EE marketing talk would be limited to sounding like us just pushing something new & shiny at them.

So just something to consider in your marketing efforts: people can’t spend money on something that they don’t understand.

** This is not a WP vs EE post and neither is it about the viability of platforms.

Most entrepreneurs seem to be keen to develop & establish their brands as umbrella’s for a whole business empire, in that they grow the company both horizontally & vertically. Whilst this may not be on every startup’s radar, the more established a business becomes, the bigger the need seems to be for diversification & increased sustainability (whilst you wouldn’t be too surprised if you found that every second entrepreneur was a ruthless, greedy business person).

A great example of what I consider to be an “empire” within the online spaces that I move is Envato. Not being content with only having one content-generating website or one marketplace, I think Collis & co should be lauded for really building a massive business with different, yet related, arms & vehicles.

So whilst this is all great, here’s a bit of a proviso of sorts…

Making it seem like you’re building an empire is relatively easy, when you’re creating projects that definitely seem much cooler than they are actually profitable or viable. So the trick is in ensuring that you continue to fuel the mothership (the main / umbrella brand) [with all these cool projects], whilst obviously blowing the “look at us building an empire over here”-horn.

See, when it comes to publicity, the profitability of individual projects / departments aren’t that important, as they were never destined to be considered as an independent vehicle. Instead they should be geared towards fueling that mothership, as that is the cash cow; not necessarily the shiny new idea that you are implementing.

The main brand also has a longevity that far surpasses the lifespan of an individual project. Whilst some of your newly introduced projects may be great enough to be the next cash cow, their first aim should be to contribute to the building of the brand.

That way they’re also indirectly contributing to the profitability of the business as a whole. It may seem irresponsible to allow one side of your business to operate at a loss, but this is where you need some balls and you need to view the situation from a holistic point-of-view. Don’t let isolated situations impair your judgement. Focus on the mothership, as that is where you will find the greatest value, sustainability and hopefully profits in the longer term.

I’ve been shopping around for bigger office space (since both WooThemes and Radiiate has been growing immensely) in the last couple of days, when I came to a realization that I was trying to be too fancy here.

See, when I started out (with Premium News Themes, which became WooThemes and freelancing before it became Radiiate), I was working out of a student apartment with a crappy broadband connection. Even when Cobus & I moved into our current offices in July 2008, there wasn’t much here beyond our two desks, a couch and a broadband connection. So why the sudden need to upgrade?

At this stage, we have 8 people (comprising of the WooThemes, Radiiate & Rockstar Foundation teams) in our Cape Town office and admittedly we’ve just about maxed out the space. Realistically we could stay here for the foreseeable future or until our needs really change, but I’d still prefer a slightly larger space. The decision to purchase instead of leasing like we do now is purely a financial one, as it makes more sense to spend money on the down payments of my own assets, compared to leasing and helping pay someone else’s asset (with capital growth being the carrot we are after).

So upgrading isn’t an overly radical idea; in theory at least. But when I put those “wants” into the context of where I had come from, I realized that I don’t really “need” to upgrade at this stage or move offices at all. Hell, I’ve bootstrapped everything we’ve done until now, so why now suddenly heap bucketloads of overheads to our monthly bill?

The decision is a straightforward one in terms of pure financial considerations: upgrade away, as both revenue & profits allow for it (unlike Twitter who has no revenue stream to justify their fancy new offices). But that still doesn’t necessarily mean I should, because we don’t *need* to do so just yet.

Screw the fancy. I’ll keep my money in my pocket and bootstrap for a little while longer.

DISCLAIMER: I may still purchase office space if I can pick it up at the right price, because it is a great investment vehicle. But I will only do that when it makes much more sense than it does now.

I’ve been enjoying my tumbling content on here ever since I switched to this design (which is built on a standalone install of WordPress) late last year. To be honest though, considering that I was situated alone on my own island, my tumblog content was never gonna have the same traction as it would have in a community like Tumblr.

So I’ve been considering switching this design over to Tumblr and then just keeping my longer written articles on here (eg. all of my Project 52 contributions) and in the past week I actually ported this design over to Tumblr (the design is too awesome to lose imo). But if you’re reading this, then you’re still reading it on WordPress and not Tumblr…

Before I get into the reasons for not switching to Tumblr, I’d just like to tell you why I was even considering switching:

• There’s a community on Tumblr, which makes the sharing & distribution of one’s content much, much easier. The re-blog functionality is especially awesome and it is also something that I can’t replicate on a standalone version of WordPress.
• Even though I’ve replicated most of Tumblr’s posting functionality in my WordPress environment (something that we’ll also be implementing at WooThemes soon), it is still not as easy and quick to update my tumblog as it would be on Tumblr.

So why didn’t I switch then? Basically I found that I was being limited in terms of porting this design over in its current state. Tumblr has some awesome template tags, but they’re not as flexible as WordPress is, which is a shame. For most people considering Tumblr though, this wouldn’t be an issue, because they could design around those apparent limitations. For me, it has meant that I will continue to tumble on my lonely island over here.