How Leaders Win - A Lesson in Responsibility

This is (probably) your fault.

If you opened this email because the subject seemed a bit offensive, just know it's entirely true and all of this, is in-fact, your fault (probably).

Two reasons...

I ran a survey to legacy LTL subscribers where 100% of you said you prefer "Stories with a lesson", so this email is going to be a story with a lesson, and therefore longer than usual. - you did this to yourself.
Small business owners (including me) cause their own grief more often than not, buy not focusing on solving the right problems.

Let me explain...

Last week, a Facebook memory popped up. It was a video that I made four years ago. It was a short compilation of "angry" customers. The point was to bring some humor to otherwise, unfortunate interactions, by poking fun at… I'll quote from the video:

Giant children masquerading as adults, who somehow, have found the capacity to coexist with the rest of us, without the basic ability to communicate.

Anyone in a sales or support role knows the kind of people I'm talking about...

Karen’s, we call them Karen’s.

Stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.

The video was witty, and I even made fun of myself for saying the wrong words to describe the situation.

And for context... the only reason it existed on the internet was to make my fellow business friends laugh. You all, fully understand what was going on.

Anyway. When the video came up again for its annual review on Facebook, I did not see it with the same appreciation as previously...

There is certainly a part of me (and anyone else who runs a business-to-consumer brand) that will yell "say it louder for the people in the back" when they see an angry customer "get owned".

I have always felt a little weird about it though.

From day one in business, I have cared, more than anything, about the end user. Like most of you, I dedicated my life to being "right", not because I don't like being wrong, but because by having the right answers, I can ensure that the buyer has all the tools they need to make a good decision. After all... that is why they trust us to begin with.

So, if you are willing to listen for a few more moments, I will break down how we landed in the unfortunate situation, where, I was being yelled at by an angry guy from Colorado over a part we didn't even sell, over $18 that meant nothing to me.

Important note… it's a deep problem most small business face. And like most times, it's our own fault.

Also, before we begin, know this: This story is not intended to teach how to avoid one angry dude from Colorado (although that is a good thing to avoid). The lesson is in how you make decisions and in making them for the wrong reasons, will inadvertently land you in situations like these, further down the road.

Context - In the trenches

Three months before the Angry Colorado Guy, we had received an RFI from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Essentially, it was a huge document from the federal government stating that the EPA believed our company had broken federal law by selling products that were in violation of the clean air act. And in order to determine whether we in-fact were in violation of these laws, we had 30 days to submit sales and communication records from the previous 24 months.

Of course, we hired a lawyer, and responded to the request promptly.

Many conversations with the EPA and our lawyer later, we concluded that we had sold products that were in violation, but it was such a tiny part of our business that we were not even involved in anymore - it was not a big deal.

At the time, we only sold about 200 products on our store. And most of our profit came from a few products we had developed in house, which were not in question.

Until they were…

Months into this interaction with the EPA, they took an interest in our main product, our in house developed product.. And the one we made nearly all of our profits from.

There was still another year and a half of negotiations before we would know how it was going to turn out, but knowing there was a chance we would lose our profit pieces, we started diversifying.

We chose to make a switch from a boutique shop for custom-builds on old trucks, to an "everything" store for all diesels, with a focus on Modern things that were 100% legal to sell. (actually harder than you would imagine, there is not a very clear description of what's legal or not)

We added thousands of products, automations, categories... It was kind of insane. We were wildly unprepared, and definitely not knowledgeable enough to pull it off.

When we only had a few products, it was really easy to manage everything. But there was really no way to manage what we were currently building.

Turns out, we were not getting into the parts business, we were getting into the data business, which is a VERY different beast.

I will also note, this was 2020… Beginning of COVID. Part inventory and prices were highly unstable, changing sometimes daily - adding to the complexity.

So, you may be wondering. "Why was angry Colorado guy so angry?"

I don't know. I don't have the option of regulating other people's emotions…

But I can tell you how he found an unlisted part, for a price we could not sell it at, on our store that we were barely able to manage.

So here is What Happened (technically)

We built tooling to automate getting prices from vendors, but vendors were mostly 3rd party distribution centers would often send the wrong prices to us.

We watched it closely, and when products from one brand had unreliable inventory, we would turn the product “off”, so it was not possible to find on our store. - a dead simple solution for the time being.

We did not delete it, since we were going to use it again later. It was just not searchable or findable(?) on our storefront.

Also, because we were venturing into a "new" market, we hired a company to help us run ads on Google to start getting traffic to the huge new catalog.

Since we had no idea how to run shopping ads, and were so slammed trying to make the catalog work, we let the ads company take the wheel and I did not pay any attention to how it worked... (It was stupid, I am aware of that)

I did not know better until later, but the way our shopping ads were set up, they pulled product data one time a year… you heard that right - ONE TIME. It was NOT dynamic to match data as it was changed on our store.

The ads, with potentially one-year-old data, would feed the clicks to the products on our store.

So, angry Colorado guy did a Google search, and found a Google ad for the part he wanted. He naturally chose the cheaper price. ($18 cheaper)

The problem was, our Google data was wrong because we were not paying any attention to it, and it was months old. That was my fault.

And disabling products did not make them disappear on our store, if you had a link you could still reach them...

So guy searched, found good price on ad, clicked link, found part. Then called to verify that we had them in stock before ordering. Nothing weird about that, actually, is expected shopping behavior.

Now, I will never justify behavior like he displayed in my video. It was wrong. It is never ok to let anger takeover and treat anyone like dirt.

But that's not the point of the story.

Your Job as a Leader

This interaction was a direct result of poor management by me over my company.

I took us down a path we did not understand at all, because it seemed like the best move.

I as the CEO put my full focus on building a new path so WE could win, and in the process lost focus on making something our customers wanted.

Every decision that was made, from the ground up of our attempted rebuild, was made in fear of loss. When everything that had made us successful to that point was serving at an extremely high level.

Our job as leaders is to NEVER lose site of the goal. Every single decision we make needs to be made with quick, but careful consideration of our values.

When we hire and train, or develop and sell.

If we don't have values to filter decisions through, all it takes is one big punch, and we go completely off track. Then… Justify how it was the punches fault.

You don't get that option. You don't get to call yourself a leader and then stay down when you get punched in the teeth.

If you get punched, it was probably something you did to cause it. - We would not even be telling this story without my screwup early on selling illegal parts
If you do want to be a leader, understand your job IS THE HARD STUFF. It always will be.

I LOVE entrepreneurs. I love learning with, teaching and encouraging you. The hardest lesson I have learned was that it is my responsibility to make my company win, and it's my fault when it doesn't. I hope you can learn that faster than I did, and it doesn't take you such hard hits to realize it.

So, next time you are getting your teeth kicked in, think long and hard about how you landed right at that moment. There is a good chance, it was choices you made.

And know, that if you got off track, and you KNOW you got off track, the only way forward is to hop back on right now. Fire people, apologize, split partnerships, close down and start over.

Whatever it takes to correct it. Winners act as soon as they know more than they used to, losers pause, stagnate and usually blame someone else.