The Accidental Entrepreneurs
Two different innovators that stumbled on ideas in the veterinary field, built a company, then sold for millions........ without having any idea what they were doing.
Each week, Ira and Stacee will spin the wheel of start-up questions and share the knowledge they wish they had back then.
The Accidental Entrepreneurs
Ep 28: Have you ever fired a customer?
In this episode, we reflect on Jerry Seinfeld's memorable commencement speech at Duke University. We delve into his three keys to life—bust your ass, pay attention, and fall in love—and discuss how these principles are essential for entrepreneurial success. We will also share a few stories about overcoming imposter syndrome, handling the pressures of starting a business, and even making the tough call to fire a customer to maintain the integrity of your venture.
We tackle the difficult subject of toxic clients and the strategies we’ve developed for handling unreasonable demands while prioritizing employee well-being.
Hello and welcome. I am Ira Gordon and, along with Stacee Santi, the host of the Accidental Entrepreneurs podcast. We each previously founded successful companies Along the way. We became business owners and eventually sold those businesses despite us having no real background in business or ever even planning to become entrepreneurs. In other words, we did this all despite originally having no idea what we were doing or getting ourselves into. In each episode of this podcast, we will share stories and tips from our journey and we'll answer a randomly chosen question about our experience. Let's jump right into the show.
Stacee:Good morning Ira. How's it going?
Ira:It's going well. How have you been, Stacee?
Stacee:Good morning, Ira. How's it going?
Stacee:It's going well. How have you been, Stacee?
Stacee:Been doing pretty good. I was excited to talk to you this week because I wanted to ask you if you saw Jerry Seinfeld's commencement speech at Duke.
Ira:Oh, my goodness, I heard a little bit about it. I have not watched it, but yes, it is. It is graduation season, I suppose.
Stacee:I know it is graduation season. It's kind of funny, right. Like I've been going to these graduation parties for friends and family and like, oh, how exciting, you're 18. Or you know, for me these are high school graduations and I remember being 18 and thinking like how much I had it dialed in, right, like I kind of knew everything I needed to know. I thought, and then when you look at it from this perspective in life, you realize like you're just getting started, like it is just starting right now.
Ira:High school is so stupid, like now you're getting going so stupid, like now you're getting going, yeah, and I remember I guess it has name now but sort of firmly feeling like I had imposter syndrome, like going to you know a decent college, and feeling like I had no idea what I was doing and I'm a little bit freaked out about all that.
Stacee:Yeah, how could you know what you're supposed to be doing right now? So much pressure on everybody? And you think like at 18, should I have known exactly what I wanted to do in my life? I think not.
Ira:Yeah.
Stacee:Well, let's play part of his commencement speech, and then I want to hear what you have to say about it.
Jerry Seinfeld:I will give you my three real keys to life. No jokes in this part. Okay, they are. Number one bust your ass. Number two pay attention. Number three fall in love. Number one you obviously already know. Whatever you're doing I don't care if it's your job, your hobby, a relationship, getting a reservation at M Sushi Make an effort, just pure stupid. No real idea what I'm doing here. Effort, effort, always yields a positive value, even if the outcome of the effort is absolute failure of the desired result.
Jerry Seinfeld:This is a rule of life. Just swing the bat and pray is not a bad approach to a lot of things. Number two pay attention. If you're in a small submersible that looks like a giant kazoo and going to visit the Titanic seven miles down at the bottom of the ocean and the captain of the vessel is using a Game Boy controller, pay attention to that. What are you checking out down there?
Jerry Seinfeld:Oh, I see what happened.
Jerry Seinfeld:This ship sank. Now I understand why it never made it into port If the fish where you are have eyes like Shelly Duval and a bendy straw with a work light hanging off their head. You do not belong there. If the fish are going.
Jerry Seinfeld:I can't see a goddamn thing you won't either. Number three fall in love. It's easy to fall in love with people. I suggest falling in love with anything and everything every chance you get. Fall in love with anything and everything every chance you get. Fall in love with your coffee, your sneakers, your blue zone parking space. I've had a lot of fun in life falling in love with stupid, meaningless physical objects.
Jerry Seinfeld:The object.
Jerry Seinfeld:I love the most is the clear barrel big pen $1.29 for a box of 10.
Jerry Seinfeld:I can fall in love with a car turn signal switch.
Jerry Seinfeld:that has a nice feel to it A pizza crust that collapses with just the right amount of pressure. I have truly spent my life focusing on the smallest things imaginable, completely oblivious to all the big issues of living. Find something where you love the good parts and don't mind the bad parts too much, the torture you're comfortable with. This is the golden path to victory in life. Work, exercise, relationships, they all have a solid component of pure torture and they are all 1000% worth it.
Ira:Gotta love the, the bust your ass. You know what could be better than giving something your all? And I think that's that's great advice for anybody. I think, when he talks about falling in love with something, I think, yeah, that's really about having, about having passion for things, and also, I think very important is really like celebrating the good things, even when they seem like they're small good things, and I've had to learn this from people along the way, because I have instinctually been more focused on sort of long-term challenges and rewards and trying to accomplish something that's fairly far out, but in my more advanced age, have really taken to excessive celebration over small steps in the road to that ultimate goal.
Stacee:Well, let's hop over and talk about the question of the week, which is have you ever fired a customer?
Ira:Oh boy, this is something that I'm sure anybody that's run a business or been a leader in a business has had to consider when they've been faced with a particularly difficult customer or client.
Ira:We really didn't have a lot of bad examples of this in my online test prep business, but we did have a couple of people that did bad things right and we had to decide what to do, and really the only thing we could do was cancel them and fire them. And so we had some people that posted our content, you know, online and various forums for people to access, which, of course, is a violation of our terms and conditions and the threat to our business and all those things. So we had to do that. We had somebody that I remember and I just thought it was so funny that they did this on on Twitter back when it was still called Twitter. But they like, oh, like I have like a month left on my subscription and I finished my exam Like who wants to buy the last month of my you know access to vet prep, which also, you know, not aligned with our terms and conditions, not allowed to be done, and then you know, we had to fire them.
Ira:Yeah, they gave him a red card, you know, and of course they get super mad. They're. You can't go. I'm sorry you feel that way, but what are you thinking? How about you?
Stacee:You know, I have fired some people from Vet2Pet but I can't really remember all the details. But I definitely remember some of my more traumatic firings at the veterinary practice, which I think is a much more escalated environment. You know, and maybe that's where I went to the school of hard knocks to learn the importance of firing a client, a bad actor, and so maybe it's not as traumatic and burned into my brain as those at vet to pet than it was those earlier days.
Ira:You know what I mean no, I definitely have had to fire a few veterinary clients, and usually not because of anything they did to me, but because of things that they did to people that work for me.
Stacee:Um yeah, that's the kicker is like these most, most of these people will even in you know any company, I think once the head honcho comes into the scene, you get this whole other person show up. You know you're in the situation where you have your employee who's super upset about what they heard or said that was done to them, and then this person that is like that didn't happen this way.
Ira:And and especially when that doesn't align with your experience working with them, because they put on their nicest face to talk to you the doctor or the owner or the leader and but then you hear from other people like this person was really rude or this person, you know, I had to fire a client because he was inappropriate to multiple female employees of mine and ultimately, even after a warning and being spoken to, like it continued and it's like I can't.
Ira:I can't let my people be, you know, treated this way or made to feel this way or put in these positions. Like you know that's my responsibility as as a business owner to not have them be in an uncomfortable you know environment for them. And and it's tough because you know that you know firing somebody is going to make them defensive upset, probably post some nasty stuff about you and or your clinic on the internet for everybody to see, and it it really puts you in. I mean, in some ways it's not a tough position because you know what the right thing to do is, but in other ways, you know you're just inviting a bunch of hardship for yourself.
Stacee:Yeah, I think the fear of the backlash is what keeps a lot of people from doing what I would say is the quote unquote right thing to do, which is to red card the client.
Stacee:And I remember when I was pretty new at my veterinary my second veterinary job here in Durango I had a great boss there. Here in Durango, I had a great boss there. He was really one of the first bosses I had that was really great at what he did. I mean, he was stern, don't get me wrong, but he was really really good at leading. And he came in one day and I think he had realized there was a big problem with the clients that had gotten away with things and we had created this culture of prioritizing the client, no matter what, over the staff, which happens in a lot of businesses. And during a staff meeting he asked us all to write down the top three clients that gave us an ulcer when they walked in the door and he took them all and the ones that had repeat showed up on multiple people's list. He canned them and it was really bold.
Stacee:I mean, it was really bold, especially like if they hadn't been in recently and they hadn't done anything recently. And I think he just approached it honestly and said, hey, listen, I asked my staff this. Your name came up, you're out and like I'm giving you a fair warning so you can find a provider before you need it. And I think, god, what if every business did that?
Ira:It's really, I think, a change in the way businesses think about their workforce as being their most important asset, even more so than their clients or customers.
Ira:You know, I grew up working before I was a business leader.
Ira:I was just a lowly entry-level employee like the rest of us, and in most of those jobs there was very much the mindset that, like, the customer is always right and even our, you know, rudest and most entitled customers like we would try our best to sort of bend over backward for us from the you know, take the heat and, just, you know, be super, duper polite and try to basically just do everything that we could to make a rude, unhappy client a little bit happier.
Ira:And I think that the result of that is that employees like they just feel like they're not valued, right, like you know, like, yeah, you just got to put up with this because this is our customer and our customer is our top priority, not you Right. And and I think that good business leaders have come to the realization that that's actually the opposite of what's true, right, like, what is really most important to this business is having productive, happy and valued employees that feel that value and feel that support from their leaders. They're going to do their best work and that's going to lead to you putting out the the best product, and that's actually going to lead to having the most and happiest customers too. And sometimes that means identifying. You know what this customer is just not worth it, or it's not really the customer that we want.
Stacee:Of course there are no-go zones, right, immediate red card situations. Sure, it should be right. Someone talks inappropriately to a staff member, like one time this guy at our veteran clinic asked our receptionist if she would scan, you know, the microchip scanner. He had just had prostate surgery and he was fairly sure someone had inserted a tracker in his surgical site and he wanted our employee to use the microchip scanner to scan him for this chip. And you know they call me. Hopefully you have a culture where the employee feels empowered to call in the boss and hopefully you have a culture where the boss will handle it and not just brush it off. But you have to go in and say, like you're, what are you doing? Like this is not appropriate at all. And then you have to decide if they're mental and they just needed a little, you know, get a grip, shoulder shake or if they're more, this is how they truly think and behave and they're toxic. You have to make a decision there.
Stacee:But I feel like outside of the weird wacko ones, when it's in the gray zone, is the hardest and I always try to ask myself is this client worth it? And I hate, you know, really you're saying my employee versus my client. But let's be honest, that is what's happening and sometimes you have maybe an employee that has problems with lots of clients, so you sort of can see the trend there. Or for me at Vet to Pet, like I had the nicest, most amazing customer service person she was. I can't even think of a nicer person I've ever met in my entire life. And so when she would come into my office with a client that had she was having issue with, with tears in her eyes, I sat up right. I'm like what is going on? Because we're just having software here, like no one should be crying, and then I'm going to take the side of the employee, like always. But I had to learn that the hard way. I'm not saying I got there like so easily.
Ira:I had to learn like what are the challenges or the risks of keeping a toxic client around yeah, I had a client that told me that, um, that he was diagnosed with, you know, some type of massive depression or something like that and that he, um was planning to kill himself when his cat died.
Ira:Because I was kind of like the only reason he was hadn't done it yet um was he had to take care of his cat and um, and that, like you know, he's, he's like thought about it and, like you know, he's very sort of like very rational, although kind of, you know, dark and weird about it. Um and uh, that's kind of like oh shit, like what, like what am I supposed to do here? Like this, this guy's cat is gonna die um soon and um, and you try to like encourage him to get help, just like you know what else you can do, but, um, you know we do see some crazy shit what are some of the downsides do you think on the business for keeping regular toxic people around, not like psychopath toxic people, but regular toxic people around?
Stacee:Well, first off, let me ask you what are some of the symptoms of a regular toxic client?
Ira:So somebody that's there. They're seemingly never happy, right, they always have something to complain about. Um, they tend to be rude to, as usually employees, sometimes to you too, but usually it's the the people that work there that they don't, uh, for whatever reason, treat with the respect they deserve. And, um, yeah, and or they, they just they make people uncomfortable, they dread talking to them. You know all those things how about you?
Stacee:what do you think? Well, I think that that's a great list. And also there are some people that feel that if they talk louder, if they're more bullish, that you'll somehow bring the secret answer out from the back room and give it to them. Right, like they're never happy and they think if they pull forward on it I don't know if that's the right word, but they push harder, either with escalated voice or language or just behavior, they'll get what they want. And our culture rewards people like this, right Like the squeaky wheel gets the oil, like that is the culture in our society. So they're sort of trained Like if I can be more of an asshole, I'll get what I want and they get rewarded for it. But to me that's a big red flag well.
Ira:I'll get what I want and they get rewarded for it.
Ira:But to me that's a big red flag. I think another thing is when there's like a mismatch between the volume of the complaint and the severity of the insult, right, like if you have an extraordinarily upset client because I don't know, for example, they brought in what they thought was a healthy animal, that you know something terrible happened, and say the animal died while in your veterinary clinic, it was like, yeah, the fact that they're extraordinarily angry and upset is appropriate relative to the magnitude of the insult that happened. It doesn't mean they're a toxic client. It means that they're really upset because something really bad happened and they may need time to process. You know they may need additional explanation and they may still be upset, but it's not kind of inappropriate.
Ira:But when somebody is yelling and screaming and what have you because of, you know a medication wasn't ready and they had to wait 10 minutes or something like that, and yet that's kind of like, yeah, like I get that's, that's upsetting too. But there's sort of like a relative magnitude of response compared to the you know, the precipitating insult, that that should be in alignment. And if somebody is freaking out that much about a relatively mild insult, like just imagine how they're going to be when there's a moderate one or a major one, because those things do happen too.
Stacee:They definitely do, and I think part of what goes wrong, at least for me at Vet2Pet was and I've seen it in other companies, so I think it's universal, probably to some degree is the sales team is super motivated to sign up people, right Like that's their job and they get paid on it, and so they sign up lots and lots of people, as many people as they can sign up.
Stacee:But sometimes they sign up the wrong people where once you get them into the funnel, into the ecosystem, you realize they have totally different needs that your product can't meet, your product or service can't satisfy. It takes a while, usually for the account manager to figure out like, oh my God, like you got sold something that we can't really do or we can't do it the way you want it done. And now I have to be the bearer of bad news to you and you've already signed up and invested this time. So I find that in this situation it's super hard because they're both. They have enough invested that they're trying to push forward, but the thing won't do what they wished and hoped it would do and it's probably, if we're being honest, not going to do that thing for a long time or possibly ever. So you have to just kind of someone has to hold up the flag and be like whoa, whoa, whoa, pump the brakes. This is a mismatch.
Ira:How do you fix that? I definitely dealt with this and I think it's particularly hard at a startup Sometimes it's relatively new business when the sales team they want to be able to say yes, and so yeah, I think why can't we do that Right? And and it can put that you know, product delivery or account manager team in a really difficult spot of then having a new customer that's been promised things that you're just not set up to to really give them and you hate to, you know, hate to discourage a motivated sales team. Like, yeah, it's a really tough problem. What do you think?
Stacee:I think that, at least for me. My experience is that in many companies the sales team is super siloed away from the customer success team, and that's what happened at my company, and so when I saw the sales people would make the sale and then I could see the customer success people be pissed Like you just handed me the worst situation ever. Our product can't do this and it won't do that. And you didn't interrogate the customer enough before you signed them up. And this was all this back channel crap going on. So I put them together.
Stacee:I'm like sales and success will do. Not only will they do a one-to-one handoff, but we started setting up. There were certain milestones. We tried to identify three milestones a customer needed to achieve to be happy, and then, when those were achieved, to have the success team report back to the sales associate like we did it, you did it, I did it. Great, and I think once those people can see what winning looks like, maybe there's a chance they'll be a little more accountable for the kind of clients to bring it in the door. I don't know. Sometimes too, I think the sales team needs to have the I don't want to make them out to be the bad guy? Because they're not. They don't have the deep intellect of what the product can and can't do sometimes. So they need to be empowered and hopefully encouraged to bring the customer success member on to a call pre-sale to like, if it's a little weird, like hey, can you come and just listen to what they want to do before we sign them up and make sure I'm reading it right? Yeah.
Ira:Yeah, I think that's good advice. For sure, I think sometimes the people that are most motivated to buy a new product after they get a pitch are the ones that are. They're kind of like the most desperate for something to come in and solve a lot of their problems. And sometimes you know a product can't solve everybody's all of your problems, right, it can solve a specific problem.
Stacee:In most cases problems right, it can solve a specific problem in most cases. Yeah, we had a practice that signed up for Vet2Pet that had lost their main texting provider. They got bought by Twilio and then they were getting their texting service sunsetted. So they definitely needed an alternative. And this particular practice was like a super user of texting. Before it was even cool to do this and we had texting, but it was pretty early stage. But, yes, we had texting, yes, you can text your clients. So I can see definitely how the salesperson made the sale.
Stacee:But then, when we got the client in, they needed a lot more of bells and whistles on the future that we were working on and would have in the future. How long in the future, I don't know. But this client starts applying so much pressure to us that it's starting to affect the development roadmap and I think that's where it gets dicey that you're building out systems that one day will be helpful for a lot of people, but at the moment it's going to really be helping a small subset of people. That's not good, not good at all. I had to cut the client loose and just say, listen, we can't do what you want, we can't right now, so come back in a year or two. But setting the expectation is going to just take so much pressure off you as the team lead, or the founder, or whoever's you've found beneficial along the way.
Stacee:This week I am going to share one of my favorite quotes from my mentor, my first boss, that he wasn't my first boss, he was, he's my first really good boss and he ran the clinic. I worked at the animal hospital and he had the saying that just do what's right for the animal and everything else will work out. And it seems simple enough, it seems like obvious, right, but it's actually a super hard thing to do in many situations to just do what's right for the animal. But the reason I love it is because it gave you a priority, a triage. Like you knew who the key stakeholder was all the time.
Stacee:And sometimes it was hard, like if the animal bit somebody and the client is there and you're not sure what you should do. Like what is best for the animal? Is it going to be to put it to sleep? Is it going to be to rehome it? What's it like going to be? What's its life going to be like if you rehome it, if you know it's going to probably bite again? Is it just going to live in a cage its whole life? Like, maybe the best thing is to put the animal to sleep? Maybe the client doesn't want you to put the animal to sleep and you have to. So it's not.
Stacee:It sounds very simple, but it is actually not very simple. And the reason I love that quote is when I started Vet2Pet, I had to figure out who the key stakeholder was, the top dog, and it was the veterinarian, right, the customer. And this gave us kind of a North Star, if you will Like, when we got into challenging situations. Well, what is the right thing to do for the veterinarian? Because that is why we're here, and it kind of made it a little easier to make difficult decisions.
Ira:It's great, that's awesome. So I sort of alluded to this person earlier. I'll mention him again. But my old, oh, you should tell me who that person was.
Stacee:Your first mentor Give us a name Dr Dan Parkinson.
Ira:Excellent. Well, thank you, Dr Dan. So my you know, really influential mentor and business partner, Chan Khanna influential for a bunch of reasons, but I would put towards the top of that list the fact that he is an impossible optimist, right, you know, just believes in, you know, impossibility and that, you know, things can always be better. And I love that.
Ira:And I think, going along with that, I remember having a conversation about, you know, something we were thinking about doing for the business.
Ira:I was like, oh man, that's going to be really hard, right. And he just said to me he said, ira, everything is hard and some things are just worth it, and so that sort of just reframed the thing. It's not about how hard this thing is to do, it's whether it's actually worth it. And I thought that was a really helpful kind of way to reframe the way, you know, I would think about various things and and I almost have kind of like this, I imagine, like this little matrix that you think about well, this is how much work or how hard this thing is going to be, and this is going to be the impact or benefit. And you know, you don't want to pick the things that are at the edge of that curve where they're extraordinarily difficult, time-consuming and the like, but the impact they're going to make is very, very small. You'd rather prioritize things that are the other way and things that are really hard but are going to have a big impact. Who cares if they're hard, they're worth it.
Stacee:I love that, and in my consulting company I'm finding that hardly anybody spends any time thinking about what success looks like. You know what is the. If everything goes great, what do I get at the end of the rainbow? Is it a bunch of money? If so, how much Is it like help so many people? If so, how many? Like nobody thinks about what the the end game is, which makes it to your point like how hard do you want to work? How much effort are you going to put in? Because? Is it even worth it?
Ira:Yeah, what does success look like? It can be a little bit overwhelming to sort of combine both thinking long-term when there's so much short-term uncertainty as well as the variety of different sort of stakeholders that are pulling on you in terms of what success looks like.
Stacee:Well, let's spin the wheel.
Ira:Well, actually, we only have one question left, because it's oh, my goodness, we are reaching the end of the road.
Stacee:The final question of the season is what were some of your most creative or successful customer engagement ideas?
Ira:Well, yes, that definitely should be a good opportunity for us to share some experiences that maybe involve a little bit of outside the box thinking. So I'm sure I'll probably be sharing other people's ideas when we get to mine.
Stacee:All right. Well, I look forward to seeing you next week, Ira.
Ira:All right, thanks, stacey, take care. I look forward to seeing you next week, ira. All right, thanks, Stacee, take care.
