03.18.07
No Respect
When I was a child, I can recall occasional appearances of Rodney Dangerfield on variety shows that I watched. Mr. Dangerfield’s brand of humor was never insulting or dirty (at least not that I recognized at that age). His big thing was to be in a situation where he was treated as if he were unimportant. He would then remark, “I don’t get no respect.”
When you start and run your own business, you may expect to get respect from people in the world around you, but you probably will not. Whether it is the high school reunion, where the owner of a janitorial service is mocked for cleaning johns, or your own family, where your time entering data for invoices into the computer is interrupted because “you are not doing anything important right now,” a small business owner-manager is less likely to be respected than the CEO of a large corporation.
This is also true when you deal with larger suppliers. In my business, for example, I deal with information, and in particular I deal with management and technology issues in smaller businesses. That is my so-called target market: smaller businesses in the High Desert and Inland Empire areas of Southern California.
I applied for zero-price subscriptions to industry-related magazines, as is standard practice for those in my industry and was turned down. I checked my e-mail today and had six rejection messages from TradePub, which is a kind of clearing house for trade publications .
The odd thing about it is that they supposedly target leaders and influencers in industry-related organizations. A consulting organization is nothing if it is not a leader and influencer of other organizations. So you would think that it would be fairly easy for WebConnect Consulting to qualify. In fact, I and my co-workers in the FEMA IT department got some of these magazines despite the fact that we had zero influence on policy or purchasing. It seems that it is better to inflate subscription numbers with large numbers of people who can not utilize the information presented than it is to risk the chance that a small business is really just an excuse for a student to get a free magazine.
You will find this lack of respect for smaller businesses if you are a manufacturer, trying to get your products carried in the big chain stores as well. This is another reason that I say, If there is a local owner-managed business that provides the product or service you desire, it is better to patronize that business (even if it costs more to do so) than it is to patronize a large, out-of-the-area corporation.
If enough of us support local businesses, and especially owner-managed businesses, the big boys will have to treat smaller businesses (whether customers, suppliers, or competitors) and consumers better. As long as every spending decision is a trip to <insert large corporation name here>, they will have no reason or incentive to improve.
So I want to say thank you, TradePub. Thank you for helping me to see that this business does not need what you have to offer. You need bodies for your subscription numbers so you can get higher advertising rates and more advertisers to pay them. I provide solutions for smaller businesses, and I can get much of what I need from places like Apache.org and Sourceforge.net. It is likely that neither I, nor my clients, need the high-priced and proprietary non-solutions your advertisers offer.
