Business Relationships That Matter

Earlier today I called up my personal insurance provider and the person who initially took my call thanked me for being a customer for 15 years.  This phrase stuck with me after the call.  I’ve been doing business with them for 15 years in that time I’ve never had to change insurance providers.  Sure, they’ve been doing something right for a tough customer like me to choose to stick around for so long.  They don’t do everything right – for example, the insurance company also offers banking services and their loan rate is consistently 1-1.5% higher than my preferred banker’s rate on the two occasions when I’ve bought a car that required financing.  By contrast, I can’t imagine my company being stuck with the same health insurance provider for more than 1-2 years.  Health insurance is a hot button issue right now, but the way that my business health insurance provider operates leaves much to be desired.  To start off with, the employee benefits experience is cumbersome and the customer service and paperwork that they interact with my benefits team through is horribly unpleasant.  User experience aside, they tried to double my health insurance premium as soon as year two rolled around.  As a startup company owner and executive this is incredibly frustrating.  I can just see some fat cat party in a conference room with piles of money being counted when I think about this.  To get a rate that isn’t double the first year a switch to a new provider was required.  The disturbing irony is that the switch was to a different, virtually identical, plan from a different division of the same provider.  Disgusting!  As I watch the months on the calendar and start preparing for my end of year accounting work I can’t help but think about how much I can’t stand my business health insurance provider.  It feels a little like being on a blind date except I’m stuck with them for a year.  Even more disgusting.  Somehow I doubt that I would have a different experience if I switched providers.  I guess this is part of being your own boss, you trade that guy from Office Space (I had that guy as a boss and I actually did TPS reports, seriously…) for a series of extremely ambiguous and unpleasant hydra like organizations that are required parts of doing business.  There has got to be a better way.  And insurance is just the tip of the iceberg.

Business to Business and Business to Government interactions are not the only ones that leave room for desire in my book.  How companies recruit and how recruiters recruit is another such subject.  A very good friend of mine recently spent two days in a row telling me how much he hates how he was treated by a recruiter in a salary negotiation.  While this is refreshing in the sense that the most common vent from job seekers I hear is that they don’t hear back from the employer, i.e. you suck we’re not hiring you  so go crawl into a hole someplace out anywhere but here, would be a step up from a one way ticket for the resume black hole express.  My own personal favorite was the recruiter who called me 5 times in two weeks about a sharepoint developer job.  I’ve never developed in sharepoint and I explained this the first four times that the recruiter called.  The fifth time I simply told him to never call me again.  Uh, that was when I was a recruiter and my resume wasn’t even technical.  Ok, I’m a recruiter on some days and a CEO on other days now so I can see both sides, but this guy should have been given a literacy test before he was hired.  There is no excuse for that and I fault the big huge company that also somehow missed the fact that the guy was totally out to lunch in general. 

So back to the point: “Dating vs. Doing Business”.  Why is it that people don’t seem to get the importance of business relationships these days?  You go to a restaurant or store and the people working there are of the most temporary quality.  Fast food is even worse.  When I was in high school I had friends who worked in the local fast food places.  I remember being rejected for a job at Burger King and thinking that I was never going to get over it until I found another part time job.  These days, especially in the big cities, local kids wouldn’t be caught dead working at a fast food place.  I remember being shocked when I went to a diner in Bethesda and a student home from the summer from Duke was working there.  I guess today’s kids, at least here, are obsessed with nailing the SAT or running charities they founded out of their parent’s basements or trying out for the Olympic Speed Walking team so that they can get into their favorite school Ivy League School. Why bother working your way up the food chain when you can skip to the top, right? 

This all has the feeling of a house of cards.  If we keep stacking the deck with people who don’t care about their jobs, about the business’s relationships with people and vendors, sooner or later the whole house of cards is going to come tumbling down.  Or is that not important for wealthy business owners who have diversified portfolios?

In writing this I hope that it will inspire a few people to think about the importance of being a part of a good healthy business relationship.  Let’s be the change that we wish to see in the world.