Listening to Analog(ue) yesterday in the car on my way to work, Myke talked about his disdain for people who say to him “Oh, I wanna start my own business one day”. The disdaining part is - these people don’t actually have a clue what they wanna do. They just wanna be their own boss, which in Myke’s opinion, is a dumb goal to have. The thing is, you never have “no boss”. They just appear in different forms. And his theory is a very similar one I have preached to my subordinates for years.
Most people think of our ‘boss’ as the person who you report to at work. Usually that is your direct supervisor. Sometimes, that means two levels up - your direct supervisor, and his/her supervisor. Eg, your team lead and your team manager. That is not wrong, but there’s a way bigger picture to this.
I call it the Four Customers. (Not bosses, but customers. The theory is similar, but the priorities are slightly different).
The first customer - the External Customer
This is usually what we think of as our customer.
The person who pays our company for whatever goods or services we sell.
Eg. if you work for HP, people who buy your computers are your customers; if you work for a bank, people who deposit money and/or take loans are your customers.
The second customer - the Internal Customer
This one is also fairly easy to understand.
If you work in a role that isn’t in the frontline, you may not have a “customer” to speak of. Or maybe not…
Your work serves a purpose to someone else within the organisation, who may directly or indirectly serve a purpose to the end-customer. In that case, that person you’re providing your service for is your internal customer.
Eg. You’re in procurement. You buy stuff for the company. But you never work with the end customer. You work with suppliers, so you are their customer. But unless you’re working for a tiny company, you can’t be buying stuff just for your own use can you? (But then again, tiny organisations probably wouldn’t have a procurement team anyway). In comes the person whom you’re buying stuff for - they are your internal customers.
Ok, now I’m finally closing in on Myke’s point.
Most people don’t interpret it this way, but your boss is probably one of your most important customers. After all, he/she is the one who dictates how you should be serving your first two customers.
Eg. if run into a nasty customer and upon consulting your boss, he/she says - “that customer is an asshole, we don’t need to bend all our rules just to keep him happy”. Unless you violently disagree, you would likely make life easier and begin to stop treating the asshole with the mentality of ”the customer is always right”.
Likewise, if your boss says “Nope, this customer has a huge influence and brings in millions of dollars of revenue at a twitch of his thumb”, you would usually just suck it up, and continue being the slave to this asshole.
Bottom line is - your boss ranks higher up in the priority chain compared to your actual customer(s). Hence he is your customer as well.
But there is one other customer who is even higher up the chain than your boss.
Contrary to popular belief, in the four customers that you interface, your subordinates are unknowingly your toughest customer of them all.
We generally expect our bosses to be yelling at us, being nasty to us. So despite how much we hate being in this position, we sorta think this is the norm. Boss yell at me, I get work done, I move on; if I’m not happy, I move on, permanently.
On that same line, if we have subordinates, we also usually think that our subordinates are there to be yelled at by us. They are there to be our slaves aren’t they?
Obviously anyone with a sane mind would know my last statement is complete bullshit. Unless you’re a helluva nasty boss.
Besides the internal & external customers, you usually have to answer to your direct supervisor. And if you have direct staff reporting to you, you usually need a lot of their help in order to meet those the objectives of your supervisor, the internal and the external customer.
Unfortunately, your subordinates don’t always behave like they’re your slaves. You have to pet them, motivate them, guide them, encourage them, humour them, and at specified intervals, conduct appraisals with them. Appraisals that are shallow quite often negate some of the other good things you do throughout the year.
And if you don’t “perform” well in their eyes, they wouldn’t reciprocate and perform well back to your objectives either.
Ugh, in short - subordinates are a big pain.
People generally think only about the first two customers. Sometimes they realise their boss is also in the line, though not necessarily categorising them as a ‘customer’. But most people overlook the forth one.
In the order of logical thinking, we usually rank them in the sequence I listed:
Most important - External
Finally - our subordinates
But in the order of priority, they are usually ranked the reverse:
Most important - Our subordinates. If they sabotage you and don’t perform well, you can forget about treating your other three customers well.
Next - Our boss. If our boss tells us one way or another, we will treat the internal/external customer one way or another in accordance to our boss’ directives.
Next - The internal customer. If you’re nasty to this guy and don’t recognise them being important, chances are they would complain to your boss. Or if that option is not available, they may gossip and influence your subordinates to start thinking negatively about you. Again affecting your entire chain, but to a smaller degree.
Finally - The external customer. We expect them to be nasty. They are our paying customers, everyone knows that they must be served the best. But you generally deal with them independently. I.e. you usually work with a customer for a finite amount of time. If it’s a project for 5 months, you’re stuck with them for five months, if it’s a one-off customer, it’s that one day that becomes bad. And on top of it all, if you have a nice boss, you can always get some “encouragement”. But your three other customers are usually stuck with you for a much longer time than a pain-in-the-butt external customer.
Coming back to Myke’s point, people who think that setting up their own business is nice and rosy completely overlook the fact about subordinates, or their ‘employees’ in this case. Not only do you have to pet, motivate, guide, encourage, humour, appraise them, you have to PAY them. And as Marco and Dan Benjamin mentioned many times during their Build & Analyze days, having the pressure of ensuring that your employees have money to bring home and feed their families is waaaay of a magnitude larger than satisfying a nasty boss.
You take one or two customers out of your four - your boss and the internal customer. But what you get in return is a massive pressure in maintaining your entire business, i.e. your external customer must continue to buy your stuff. Otherwise, your subordinate/employees have nothing to bring home and the entire chain tragically collapses.
Short of “making it big” and becoming a rich person because you “started a business”; and short of doing something you’re truly passionate about, like in Myke’s case, starting his own podcast network, being your own boss has huge downsides that most people naively overlook.
