A short YouTube interview clip (YouTube Shorts) with Mike Andes addressing how growing businesses must change customer relationships. Andes explains that as a business expands and delegates tasks to employees, longtime customers may resist losing direct access to the founder; some early customers may no longer be suitable for a scaled business and must be left behind to allow growth.
As the business has evolved, have you had any pushback from longtime customers in response to any of those changes? And how do you manage and maintain those relationships through the growth period?
Absolutely. A lot of times it has to do with the fact that as a small business owner, when you're first getting started, you service their property, you service their account, you take all their customer service calls, like everything is through you. As the business grows, you're going to somewhat have to give up that because you have other employees that take on those roles. And guess what? Employees will never be able to do as good a job as you. And to cry over that basically means you're going to never grow your business, so they're not going to care as much as you. So therefore, sometimes that does create friction with a customer that has had your name, your address, your personal contact, and now that's being somewhat torn away from them. But that's just part of a business. You got to realize that some customers that are great for you when you start are not going to be the customers you need to grow and scale, and that's going to have to evolve and grow along with the business.
