You already know what your customers need

Okay, here’s my thought slash rant for the day. I’ve kind of always been bothered by early-stage startup CEOs. The crazy visionary CEO type is obviously incredible at something, otherwise they wouldn’t have hit product-market fit. They wouldn’t have hit revenue. So they’re doing something right.

But there seems to be this want to get rid of things before understanding them. The founder wants responsibilities off their plate before they actually, truly understand those things.

I’m not saying do everything yourself. That’s not possible. That’s why you hire people. My concern is that they’re too quick to farm something out to somebody else before they understand it.

Too quick to farm it out

I’m thinking specifically about a founder team of under ten people. Honestly, probably five-ish people, doing a few million. They’ve hit some version of product-market fit in a couple of places, a couple of times, but they can’t reproduce the founder’s success.

And a lot of times, instead of diving in and trying to understand the thing, they immediately go hire the first really good self-promoting vendor, without really testing whether that vendor knows what they’re doing, or recognizing that success in one genre does not equal success in another.

Some people are very good at promoting themselves, and I’m sure they’ve had plenty of successes. I don’t want to downplay that. But success in getting gym memberships is not going to create success in B2B real estate sales, or whatever you sell, because everybody overlooks the fundamentals.

The fundamental job of being the leader of a business is to know exactly what your business does and exactly what your customer needs: the experience your customer wants to go through. That’s the job of the person who came up with the idea and founded the company. And founders tend to farm that out too often, to flashy promises of strategy from people who are really just good at marketing themselves, not so much at marketing your business.

I’ve seen way too many people who are overwhelmed by the work and the difficult hours that come with early success, and they’re just too fast to farm it out to highly unqualified vendors. They assume that vendor’s success in some other thing will equal success in their business, and it rarely does.

They know what the customer needs

Almost every client we’ve talked to has been through two, three, four marketing vendors, who I assume are great at marketing themselves but end up not being good at marketing that company. And to some extent, I have to lay the blame on the visionary founder CEOs, because they haven’t taken the time to really understand what their customer needs.

Actually, I’d argue they do know what their customer needs. So yeah, I take that back. They know. What they don’t do is hold vendors accountable. They don’t push back and say, “No, that is a lousy experience that I don’t want for my customer. Make it not lousy.”

It’s your job

So yeah, my beef is this: crazy visionary founder types who are getting market success need to own the process. They need to own the user experience. And yeah, we’ve got spreadsheets to do, and process diagrams to do, and stuff that all sounds super lame and boring to a visionary.

But their job is to own the relationship with the customer and make sure everyone else does exactly what that customer relationship needs. And to make sure we don’t run out of money by doing the finances correctly, and that we don’t get screwed by paying too much in taxes because something was done wrong, and all the other things a CEO has to do. Obviously. Otherwise the business doesn’t work.

But somebody, somewhere said it’s okay to outsource the customer journey, the customer experience, to a bunch of people you haven’t fully transmitted that idea to. And then you just don’t hold them accountable. And then you wonder why you’ve been through four marketing departments, or multiple outside sales companies, or insert any number of other vendors.

And the answer is that it’s your job. It’s your job to hold vendors accountable. It’s your job to make sure those vendors are doing exactly the process that you figured out.

I don’t have the answer yet

I’ve got to tell you, I don’t have an answer in this rant. I really just have the question. I don’t know why yet. I know it gets busy. I know it gets difficult. But founders and CEOs go to lots of masterminds and lots of groups, and somebody somewhere is saying it’s okay to outsource this part of the business. I’m saying it’s not.

That’s why early success turns into whitewater in the Predictable Success model (Les McKeown’s). I’m not saying you can skip whitewater. It’s going to happen anyway. But somewhere in that process, founders just give up too much. They cede too much control to people who don’t fully understand it, because they haven’t fully articulated what the customer journey is going to be.

I really want to get to the bottom of it. It’s something in the business-o-sphere. That’s not a word. It’s something in the business coaching world. And I may not be articulating this very well, and there’s a chance the way I’m saying it right now is actually wrong. But it is definitely a problem: outsourcing too quick, and not holding people accountable to how the relationship with the customer should be.