What Your Gut Instincts Can Tell You In Business

People will tell you that your emotions will kill you in business, and a good deal is done with a poker face and the drive of a hired assassin. However, what if your business is about freelance writing, or about something where you’re passionate about what you do? That’s when your emotions are there for a reason, but they can still lead to being used by others who try to take advantage of that emotional charge.  The key to understanding how your emotions can help, instead of hurt you, in business is to learn how to use your business judgment, along with your emotional instincts, to cue you into bad customers before you get into relationships with them.

Every Business Relationship Is Like Dating

We can laugh or cringe at the dating horror stories of the woman who always ends up with the batterer, the drunk, or the just plain weirdo. Yet, sometimes our businesses attract the same types of deadbeats and we just drum it up to a bad economy, when it might be the way we’re doing business that is generating these bad business relationships. Just like a woman who does too much upfront in a relationship, a business owner who provides too many products or services before figuring out what the other party is going to provide back is in for the same sort of co-dependent, miserable, times as a single on the dating scene.  How do most people avoid these soap operas in their lives? They tend to rely on their “gut instincts” and emotions to let them know when they should pass on a relationship that’s going to be a downer, no matter what. When faced with a one-liner from a potential deadbeat customer (whether romantic or business), your gut instincts will tell you something is really wrong, and you can choose to acknowledge this or face the consequences later.

So Many Frogs, Few Princes

There was a question posted on Facebook recently: “Do I prefer the customer who offers a high price and fails to pay on time or the one that offers a low price and pays immediately?” What’s missing from this question is the value of the work. What sort of value do you place on your work? Is the customer willing to recognize the actual, intrinsic, value of the work or are they looking at the dollar bills? If you are working with a low-paying customer, be assured they’ll never be satisfied with the value of the work. They’ve already said as much by refusing to pay what it’s worth. More than likely they will try to chintz you even more in future projects. The same is true for the one that offers a high price and refuses to pay, as if your work is free or you are not a top priority when it comes to paying their bills. Sometimes, you get a high paying customer that is so demanding that you spend so much time with them, that if you added up the hours, you’d make less than the low-paying clients. Unfortunately, the additional criticisms and demands spell out exactly the same thing:” They don’t value your work.” Which begs the question:

Why don’t they go elsewhere then?

How You Create Your Own Customers

The reason, as hard as it may be to believe, is that you allow them to stay there repeatedly disrespecting the value of your work because you don’t believe it’s worth much either. The irony of the whole situation is that just like an abusive partner picks someone who they admire to belittle,  these customers actually like your work or they wouldn’t be there. It gives them great joy to find someone who wants to be involved with them because they don’t think much of themselves either. As the relationship continues, of course, the emotions become louder. Something is wrong, but the familiarity of it may lead to ignoring the fact that the pay is getting less and the demands are getting more. It may be hard to cut these people out of your life, but ultimately, it may be what your business requires to survive.  Ignore your gut instincts at your own peril at this point.

Learning To Trust Yourself In Business

Once you learn to disentangle yourself from these types of customers, the newer ones that are worth your time will appear. At the point you start to trust in your own innate worth, the deadbeats and abusers will begin to scatter because you either 1) Refuse to engage these customers, or 2) State the value of your work upfront and expect and get fair recompense for your work or they walk away. You learn to negotiate difficult customers so that you’re both on the same page or you clearly realize from the start that the relationship is not a match. At that point, you will have learned to trust yourself and appreciate the value of your own work enough for it to generate the customers who can do likewise. Whether in dating or business, once you learn to trust your own judgments and listen to what your emotions are telling you about the other party, the ability to select the right relationships becomes clearer and easier, and far more profitable.

Why Big Business Will NEVER Get Social Media

Why don’t they just throw up their hands and give up? Honestly, if the Horizon Realty fiasco (Can a tweet cost you $50k? Maybe, if you get sued like this woman: http://bit.ly/4A60v (via @ColonelTribune)) is any indication, big business will never get social media. They’re still working on the old assumption that a market is profitable only when it’s controllable, but social media is something quite different. It is open source technology in action where people are the code that connects and creates a new reality, no matter what input or large infrastructure is already in place.

It’s Kind Of Funny To Watch…

I admit it, I was immensely amused by Horizon Realty’s online debacle. Who wasn’t? A big company sues a little Twitterer with at most 20 followers for an off-the-cuff remark about some moldy apartments.  What’s in the suit? A claim for $50,000 dollars in damages for one tweet with an exposure of 20 people on an inactive account, no less.  Regardless of whether the defendant “started it” as Horizon Realty suggest by wanting to sue over the issue first, the point is that social media is about the dissemination of information, whether accurate or not.  You can’t target one Twitterer in the hopes of controlling information on the Internet, it has a tendency to highlight these offensive attempts as “censorship” and they get widespread attention by way of “The Streisand Effect.”  What would have led to 20 people being told now has become a case of instant Twitter stardom with Horizon Realty placing number four on trending topics on July 28, 2009. Unfortunately, what they got with that stardom is permanent association with the company’s spokesman’s quote: “We’re a sue first, ask questions later type of organization.”

I’d Be Running Scared Too, Right About Now…

Big business is trying very hard to control places like Facebook, Twitter, and any type of social media that is taking the profit out of their pockets. The newspaper and magazine industry is collapsing because of the ease of information access via the Internet. Iran is having trouble squelching rebellions because of one pic tweeted across the globe of a girl named Neda. The establishment has lost control of the framework by which it tells us what it wants us to believe and how it shapes public opinion. What’s next? Are we going to demand that industry create jobs, products, and services that actually create value in society, instead of exploit it? What will happen to the profits then?

That’s Okay, They Have A Solution

And, that solution is to join up with what they can’t control, and infiltrate the new “system” so that at some point they have a handle on it. That’s why people who were previously canned for saying nasty things about their companies online are now being courted as social media gurus with an audience that can be harnessed for good publicity, not just bad. Now, they actually want people who are on Twitter and Facebook and the larger the audience, the better, even if on the surface it appears very hypocritical. They want to know how many Twitter followers you have on your resume because that’s just the type of person they want to hire, right? Once you’re on their payroll, they have control of that voice and they have a bigger share of that market to create profit, and not losses. They’re going to control the Internet, not by controlling the technology (which they clearly can’t do), but by controlling the voices that access the technology. That’s the thinking, anyways, and it’s completely misguided. They still don’t get it and they aren’t meant to get it. Social media isn’t for big business, as it stands now. It’s for the individual, and they should just get out of the way and let us do our thing before they get run over. In order for big business to truly get it, they have to revamp their companies from the bottom rung to the topmost CEO, and that’s just not going to happen by grabbing a few Twitterers or Facebook stars on their side and putting them on the payroll. Every voice is just as powerful, whether it has 1000 followers or 20 followers, as the Horizon Realty example clearly shows. That’s the concept they clearly don’t get, and that they aren’t going to get any time soon.

How Many Jobs Are There In The Auto Industry?

We keep hearing that if one of the Big Three goes bankrupt that it will have a devastating effect on the economy, due to job losses. I have a tough time believing that the auto industry itself has that many jobs in our economy. I can see that there might be associated jobs like car dealerships, but I doubt it will affect auto repair shops as just because cars aren’t made here does not mean they aren’t being repaired here. So, what are the real numbers?

What Are The Real Numbers?

I had this discussion with a very brilliant man who is a millionaire. While I don’t know how much he actually is involved with the auto industry, he claimed that people who get a job in one of the Big Three have jobs that can start at $40/hr because they are unionized. They get health benefits, they get overtime pay too! Many can make over $100,000/year having no skills other than assembly skills because of the union contracts. So, what are the real numbers? Is it because of the bad economy or the juicy labor contracts that they could go bankrupt? Why are they working overtime when no one is buying cars? A lot of this makes no sense…

What are the real numbers? In a time when everyone is belt tightening are the labor unions willing to give a little? Doesn’t it seem odd that someone with no college education can make over $100,000 working for someone else? I thought the whole point of the American dream was to become your own boss so you could make a lot of money and live a full life? Wouldn’t that help to create jobs by creating more businesses? What’s the incentive for the U.S. economy to keep paying people large amounts of money when 1) It creates no new jobs, 2) It rewards people for not improving themselves.

The Bottom Line Is Jobs, Isn’t It?

So, are we really going to suffer a large number of job losses if one of the Big Three goes under? More than the financial industry fall-out? More than the mortgage industry collapse? More than the dot com burst? I want to see some hard numbers, not in comparison to the auto industry, but to all the other industries that want a piece of the bail-out pie. I find it hard to believe that the auto industry has that big an impact on our economy. Somebody please tell me what the real numbers are, because right now, it just looks to me like they are plain old greedy, both the management AND the workers.

Should we reward the type of behavior that is basically bankrupting our country in the first place? Why not set up some incentives for other small businesses that want to compete with the Big Three? They can hire all the people who get laid off by the Big Three and start their own factories, at a lower pay rate. Or, we may find they can go into other industries that will create more economic security for the U.S. in the future. Or one of the Big Three can turn over their holdings to the workers as a co-operative that limits wages, just like they did in Argentina. They can get tax incentives for 1) educating their workforce, and 2) Creating more jobs. I would think $100,000/year would hire at least three people at $30,000/year and that is a livable wage. Even if they decided to only pay them $50,000/year it would double the workforce. More jobs, and I don’t know anyone who will turn down a $50,000/year job in this economy.

So, yes, I know nothing about the auto industry. Someone please educate me, because right now, it sounds to me like they just want something they don’t at all deserve. If they really deserve to be “bailed out” then I think the American public, which is footing the bill, needs to see the actual numbers forecasted for future job losses in comparison to present employment (no I don’t want any pie-in-the-sky fantasies of how many jobs they think they are creating for the future!), comparisons to other industries, other business plan options, etc. You name it. I want to see the business plan, for the economic growth of the United States, if they really do have as much impact as they say they do. Please, convince me, because right now, I am entirely unconvinced.

Oh, And Maybe They Don’t Really Need It

I just love this reasoning. We’re told they may not actually need the money, but they want to earmark it for themselves (pretty much freeze that money’s liquidity in the marketplace) in case they need it! I thought the whole point of the bail-out was to give it to unfreeze the market’s credit problems NOW. If they don’t really need it until maybe a year from now, come back in a year! I think there are other industries that have more impact on the economy and who make a better case for getting taxpayer’s monies right this instant.

Who Cares If It’s A Buyer’s Market In Raleigh?

I put my house up for sale this year. I bought it in 2001 and every time I think about putting it up for sale someone says:”Why would you do that? It’s a buyer’s market!” I don’t get the logic of this whole idea. Like, instead of making a financial decision based on what’s right for you, you have to make it based on what the environment or the media dictates to you? Yeah, I hear them screaming that Raleigh is the best place to own a home right now, the point is what will it be like next year?

I’ve been reading a lot of books on wealth creation because the universe is seeing fit to drop them in my lap for free, and I had the time this weekend to read them. Some experts argue that housing is not a good investment because after deducting taxes, interest, and maintenance, you’re often not beating other investments you could have had. Of course, you have leverage, but here’s the thing that’s we’ve all learned since the housing crashed in the rest of the country (excluding Raleigh), that leverage can work against you just as easily as it can work for you – especially in housing at this time!

So, here we are sitting pretty in Raleigh with a real estate market that hasn’t declined as much as the rest of the nation and yet I haven’t had a seller’s market since I bought this place. So, logically because this house is a loser in the sense that I am not in a seller’s market, I should hold on to it even longer and somehow think I will magically escape what the rest of the nation is going through. This is despite the fact that unemployment is up, housing prices only increased 1% over last year, and foreclosures went up 25% from last year. But, heck, I wouldn’t want to be caught ditching my losers! No, I should hold on to this very bad investment until the whole market collapses and I’m left holding the bag on the rest of a mortgage. The thought is sickening, and so much so, I am selling and moving into an apartment. I will have no maintenance fees, I will have no real estate taxes, and I have the freedom to move elsewhere at the drop of a hat. Not to mention that if I pay about the same amount of money on my rental as I did on my mortgage, I get a much nicer apartment than the house, I pull out the money that might disappear by next year due to potentially dropping prices, I pay off debt, and I’m free to concentrate on my business rather than babysit a house. And, I get to watch the housing market from the sidelines, where I am far more comfortable with the risk level.

Yep, that was one of the things I read in one of those books. The difference between winners and losers in the money game is that losers buy high and sell low (because they panic and can’t release a losing investment) and winners buy low and sell high. I will make a profit on this house and, frankly, I’m not greedy or stupid enough to think this market is about to turn into a seller’s market with the rest of the country in the housing doldrums.

*Photo courtesy of byrdiegyrl from Flickr Creative Commons