Letters to companies that suck

I just sent a letter to our hosting company, which used to be the best on the planet in my estimation but is fast becoming a big lumbering wildebeast of an IT enterprise. I can't figure it out - what happened that took them into a careening, sharp left turn toward disaster...perhaps they're just getting too big for their virtual britches. Who knows what the problem is. All I know is my site was down for the entire day yesterday, not to mention a number of our other websites and all because the hosting company provided us with a polluted batch of IP addresses; sort of like the grocery market here in Kathmandu happily selling obviously moldy bread and blackened mayonaise right off the shelf; which I'm equally inclined to rant about now that I'm on a roll. (My analogy may not mesh seamlessly, but you get the idea.) With our webhost, it's not just the one incident, but numerous others, now all piling on top of eachother to produce a leaning tower of frustration that threatens to topple over and take us with it into the rubble of a company that is now my blueprint for me for how *not* to do business.

And of course there are always those companies who are just rank from the get go, like our local ISP who gouges us for U.S. standard prices but provides truly third world service...but for the sake of brevity and sparing you the traumas of what it is to run a business from anywhere on the outskirts of technology I'll just move on to the case in point.

What is this swift degeneration that happens to so many small companies when they get an economic fuel injection? I saw it happen with my cel service provider back in the States when a smaller company was merged with mega-giant AT&T, I saw it happen with my landline service company US West when they underwent some kind of internal transition and renamed themselves Qwest, I saw it happen with Whole Foods - easily my favorite place to shop regardless of the many times I encountered sullen cashiers who seemed to resent my innocent purchases of tofu and organic fruit and flung my cash around as if it was an insult to them to have to count out my change.

Hamid and I make it a point to study incredible business models - smaller companies who are taking the old ways of doing things and mashing them up into exciting new standards or better yet, writing them over from scratch with nary a nod to old-school entrepreneurship. We strive to mimic, not their literal moves or agendas, but their overall approach and philosophy to the way business is accomplished.

We now talk about growth weekly; worrying over the long term satisfaction of our existing clients who've been with us since the seedling of our little enterprise brought in it's first dollar. We're constantly marking up ways in which to protect them from the one thing every business desires but is in danger of suffering from at the same time: success. Sure, I want us to get bigger, make more money, build more stuff, network at higher levels of commerce - but at a loss to my core values system? No way. It is, after all, called a 'business relationship' and for me, the more important qualifier in that term is the secondary - because if I'm not relating to the people I'm working with then I'm just another cog in the capitalist wheel, churning out an income like a robot. And I want more. And our bank account is proof positive that so does the purchasing public. We study incredible business models, but I'm realizing that there is just as much, if not more, to be learned from the lame ones. Particularly, the ones that had it right but lost their grip.

And when I have to use thick phrases like, 'I may not be your biggest customer, but if these things aren't resolved, I'll certainly be your loudest...' to converse with a company I used to send veritable love letters to you can pretty well bet that something, somewhere along the way has been lost - grip or otherwise.

Are you listening Acenet?