What’s your bold move this week? Maybe it’s ending something as soon as you know it’s not a good fit.
Hire slowly, fire quickly is good in theory, but sometimes it’s easier said than done.
We recently switched marketing vendors for one of my businesses. The early conversations with them were all about partnership and collaboration, and I took their word at face value. I should have clarified the process on the front end and asked what my involvement would look like before signing anything.
After we switched, we noticed an immediate decline in lead quality. I know there’s always a dial-in period with any new campaign and wasn’t expecting perfection out of the gate, so I asked for routine advertising reports and information to see where we could make some tweaks.
I was surprised that I couldn’t get a straight answer about which stations our ads were running on and when. I chalked it up to us figuring out our groove on how to work together and asked again, in a different way. I was getting increasingly frustrated by the lack of transparency.
Two months in, he was placing ad buys with our budget, and I still had no visibility into where any of it was going.
When we finally connected and I explained what I was looking for, he brushed it off with “it just takes awhile” and danced around the info I had requested. He tried to convince me our results were just fine, even though we were seeing something different in the field. I asked again for clear and standard reports, including dollars spent by station and the time slots where our ads were running, hoping we could dial things in more quickly.
Then he told me point blank that they don’t provide what I was looking for, and they won’t. They were the experts, I shouldn’t concern myself with those details, and they would take care of it. When I pushed back that I assumed he’d want my feedback so we could stop wasting money on advertising in the wrong places, he called me a micromanager and told me I just needed to let go.
Asking for information is not unreasonable.
And it did not make me a micromanager. It made me an informed buyer. Those are two different things.
It became clear that we were fundamentally misaligned and this would never be a good fit.
In that moment, I had a decision to make. Do I try to make peace and accept that this is how it will be going forward? Or do I hire slowly, fire quickly with my new vendor?
I chose to fire quickly.
Even without Plan B in place.
Hanging on to what is familiar seems easy. You tell yourself it’s going to turn around, and you talk yourself out of the signs along the way that it won’t. Part of it is the hole you’ll create, because once you make the call, someone has to do the work, and that’s all you can think about.
Part of it is admitting you made a hiring mistake, so you hang on trying to prove you didn’t.
The hole is already there. You aren’t getting what you need, but you’re paying for it anyway.
This rarely resolves itself. Once you know you’ve made a hiring mistake, whether it’s an employee or a vendor, move quickly and figure out the rest as you go.
A few calls later we had Plan B in place, and I feel good about it. There was a flutter in the space between Plan A and Plan B, but I’d take the flutter over the frustration.
My bold move this week: Firing quickly.
→ Are you avoiding a move because you’re afraid of the flutter between plan A and plan B? Let’s connect.
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