Mind Readings: Get Rid of Bad Customers

In today's mind reading, I lost 2,000 subscribers to my newsletter two weeks ago. And I'm actually okay with that. So here's what happened. Um, for those of you who've been around for a while, uh, I publish a newsletter if you're not familiar every Sunday called Almost Timely News. And two weeks ago, as of the day of this recording, uh, which was the end of February, uh, the war, the invasion of Ukraine began.

And I dedicated the entire issue of the newsletter to um letting people know how they could help. And got a bunch of positive feedback, and I got a bunch of negative feedback too. Um, everything from people saying it was fake news to people to saying all sorts of crazy, crazy stuff uh that has no basis in reality. Um to people saying, you know, I'm uh a sock puppet for certain politicians, all sorts of stuff, and the net result was uh probably 10x the normal uh amount of people unsubscribed from my newsletter on a weekly basis. And I'm okay with that.

The reason I'm okay with that is not because of the politics, not because of uh the issues, not because of the negative feedback, it is because the people who had a negative reaction to what is a fairly cotton dried as close to black and white as you can get uh in the real world. Example, those people would be terrible customers, right? Those people will be terrible customers for uh me and my company and my business, because my company, Trust Insights, is built around data analysis, data science management consulting. And fundamentally, our business is predicated on getting as close to the truth as possible with data and analytics. Which means that somebody who is so resistant to the data that is in front of them that is fairly close to objective reality, their vehement denial of reality means that they wouldn't be a great customer.

Because you know that that same mindset, that same um denial of reality would apply to anything we put in front of them. It would say, hey, here's your attribution model. And it shows that you know your favorite social network actually has a minus 60% ROI. And we could expect the same reaction. Oh, no, no, no, that's that's that's fake.

That's a fake. You know, Google Analytics is set up wrong, or uh it's you know, you've got bot traffic interfering, or pick your excuse, right? Pick your excuse for refusing to believe in the data that is literally in front of you. Um and these are also folks who are for their point of view as informed by data points, and they will tell you that they've got proof of their point of view, and I'm sure they do, but it's wrong. Um it's objectively incorrect.

That also means that they don't have the ability to think critically about their sources of data and to understand what is and is not credible data, right? Um and that's true of any conspiracy theorist on any part of the political spectrum. Um liberal, conservative, right wing, left wing, pick a wing. If all of the data that you rely on is coming from suspect sources that have not been peer-reviewed, that have not been vetted, that have not been validated in some way, then when you do work with a company like ours, where we say, yeah, you gotta check your sources, you gotta make sure that your your code is operating, your tracking pixels are working, that um your UTM governance is good, they're gonna be resistant to that too. Say it's not important or it's not real, or the system's not working right, or you know, take your pick.

And so one of the things that I think would be worth contemplating for our businesses, yours and mine, is how do our values and our points of view about the world and the different issues in the world, how do those values translate into business? How do they translate into identifying whether somebody's gonna be a good customer or not? Right? Let's say somebody is racist and doesn't like Koreans, right? It's gonna be really hard working with them.

Uh when you know, on every video call, here's me saying, Hey, what's going on? And they'll be like, oh, that's I don't really want to work with this person. That's a case where the values will be so far out of sync that it will be hard to get any real work done. It'll be hard to get any any meaningful work done. And it's been an interesting shift mentally in the last sort of 20 years in business from going from a perspective where business should be absolutely neutral and devoid of um politics or religion or perspective for all these things, um, and just be strictly about the making of the money, to where we are today where things like values are actually starting to take hold in business in meaningful ways, and in ways where companies are willing to say no to people whose values they don't align with.

And I think that's a good thing. It does increase, you know, sort of the the environment of polarization and make civil debate more challenging. But at the same time, if a customer is fundamentally opposed to who you are and what you do and the things that you stand for and the things that make your staff happy, they're not gonna be a great customer, right? No matter how much money they bring to the table and stuff like that, they're not gonna be a great customer. And we are seeing more companies, particularly startups, that are more values driven, where they say, Yeah, there's some customers we're not gonna take.

We're going to say no to them, we're gonna say no to their money. And that's of course everybody's right. Um there's some things that you say, yeah, we we're not okay with that. And because it's a private, these are for the most part private industry, um, that's okay to say that yeah, I'm not comfortable working with a company who is unwilling to believe that two plus two literally equals four, the who is unwilling to believe that this regression model says what it says because it does, and I can't change the numbers. I can't change the truth, um, the objective reality of what the data says.

Um I can change my interpretation of it, sure, but reality is reality. So that's today's mind reading. Give some thought to what would it look like if your values impacted who you decided to take on as customers. You know, would you take on a customer who is opposed to your values? Would you take on a customer who not just a little, but substantially did not believe in the same things as your company and the things that your company was trying to accomplish in the world, part of your mission, your vision, your value statements.

Would you take on customers that were opposed to that? And if so, why? If not, why not? Give it some thought. I have, and I'm okay with saying goodbye to people who don't believe in the value of data and and in basic objective truths.

Thanks for watching. We'll talk to you soon.