How Being Nice is Killing Your Shot At Success

(And how I changed my nice girl ways.)

Every business is an ecosystem—we all have a mix of customers, employees, boards, investors, freelancers, and vendors. Mediocre vendors are often the overlooked problem that is wasting more of your business’s time and money than you can afford.

Vendors have ONE job, so you need to be incredibly picky about them doing it with excellence. In the past 5 years of running my business, I’ve been through three bookkeepers. None of them were a nightmare, no one stole money, and I don’t have any dramatic stories. But the first two certainly weren’t incredible.

Their sins were things like not fully understanding the technology that I use to communicate (email and Google docs), consistently delivering reports a few days late, or repeatedly misunderstanding what I was asking for. So off they went, no doubt to someone whose company and working style they were a better fit for.

When I fired one bookkeeper because I was getting my monthly reports a few days late, I did wonder if I was being too harsh. But here’s what I realized: you make huge gains with tiny incremental changes, and your vendors are no different.

If your bookkeeping improves every single year, whether it’s by getting a new provider or improving the work with the person you already use, that will make a significant difference in your business. My current bookkeeper called me recently to let me know she had contacted my merchant account to negotiate my rates because she thought they looked a bit high. This was an initiative she took on her own, saving me tens of thousands of dollars with one phone call (and much more over the lifetime of my business). When she told me the news, I was pretty damn happy I had fired Ms. A-Few-Days-Late, who definitely wasn’t looking proactively for ways to save me money. If you want to call it “harsh,” I’ll gladly wave that banner.

I’ve also been through several payroll companies in my short time in business. (Note to the financial services industry: clearly there’s room for major improvements here.) I fired the last company immediately when I received a payroll report for final approval that included paychecks going out to not one but two employees who were no longer with the company. There was a time when I would have let this slide, telling myself they deserved a second chance before they got the axe.

But you know what? This is my business! I can’t have other people dragging it down with glaring mistakes like that one. I can’t spend my time second-guessing their work. And I firmly believe I’m not doing that company any favors by letting this kind of thing slide. I hope they were able to take something from the experience and form better internal systems. (I realize that’s an optimistic outlook. My experience tells me it’s likely that kind of oversight would be repeated, which is why I moved on.)

It’s easy to complain about a bad vendor. However, you’re the one with the poor judgement for continuing to work with them. Last year, I had a redesign project that stretched out six months beyond the date of delivery. He just kept letting the timeline get longer and longer; I moved him as fast as I could but was ultimately powerless over the outcome.

Then one day I had a big wake-up call on exactly how ineffectual I was being —we hired him because we needed a new website, and he hadn’t been able to make that happen. All of a sudden, I clearly saw just how much his delay was causing massive problems in my business. Each day that passed was another day we could have been making more money with the new website.

I would have loved for him to finish the work but that simply wasn’t happening, so I cut my losses and moved the project to someone else. Was it messy? Of course. It’s never ideal to transfer a project mid-stream. But what’s far more important than the mess is the fact that after months of delay, this project finally got finished.

We often hesitate on pulling the trigger because we don’t want to deal with that messy in-between time and all the work it takes to find someone new. Go through the muck. Deal with it. Every day you accept less than stellar work is a day your business is suffering.

This all brings up the question of loyalty — where does that come into play? Aren’t you supposed to be loyal to a company that you’ve worked with for years and years? To be frank, I don’t care about loyalty. Every business relationship should be mutually beneficial — you trade money for a product or service. When that relationship stops being mutually beneficial, for either side, it’s time to move on. It doesn’t matter if we’ve worked together for five years or five weeks — when you stop delivering what I’m paying for, I’m going to look for someone new. (This works both ways of course. If I stop paying you, it’s time for you to find a better customer!)

At the risk of going nuts comparing options, I try not to become complacent with the people and companies that I work with. Are we REALLY happy with this solution, or does it have a lot of holes that need fixing? If there are issues, there’s likely something else out there that’s a better match.

Here’s my rule of thumb: if you find yourself complaining out loud about a vendor more than once, find someone new. Make those incremental improvements to take big strides in your business.