

Use a Fictional Tony to Maintain Customer Relationships, and Get Money Faster - jason_tko
http://blog.makeleaps.com/2010/07/use-a-fictional-tony-to-maintain-your-customer-relationships-and-get-money-faster/

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krmmalik
I have been wanting to do this in our own company, and in fact, we had decided
to do this with a number of roles, assigning them as virtual roles, but a
legal adviser told me that if i ever fell into a dispute with a client, where
they made their purchasing decision based on the (apparent) size of my
company, they could take me to court for mis-representation and i could be
done for fraud.

So i think legally, you need to be very careful.

~~~
jason_tko
Thats a perfect storm of several very unlikely events.

I think when lawyers are involved, theres always a danger of optimising for
the worst possible situation, which takes up a lot of time and effort, and
often doesn't leave you, your customers or your business in a better
situation.

In any case, no matter your final decisions, it's always prudent to be aware
of the worst case scenario.

------
thehodge
This is the reason that we send all invoices out in my girlfriends name
because I'm a freelancer and a very small company most of the work I get is
from people who know me directly and there is a massive personal relationship
there.

It's really easy for money to get in the way of a friendship / client
relationship but having a separate third party makes that so much easier to
deal with.

It makes it very easy to bring up billing in the middle of of an email.

"It would be great to get together to discuss x next week, I'm across your way
on Tuesday if your free (by the way, x mentioned that your invoice is still
outstanding, any chance you could take a look at that so she stops moaning at
me! :) )"

Makes the whole thing much simpler and gives them an easy way of responding
with some humor.

(I will mention that x actually does exist and it is her email, she also looks
after the accounts.. my main point was that the separation of the billing
parts from the 'doing the work' parts has been a good thing for us)

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mechanical_fish
I think this identifies a real problem, but I agree with those who are
suspicious of the proposed solution. All that goodwill I would gain from
playing good-cop-bad-cop with a sockpuppet as my partner will vanish,
threefold, if and when my customers begin to suspect that I'm making stuff up.
They will commence to wonder how many other aspects of my company are
completely fictional, like my portfolio, or my qualifications.

What I wonder is how much it would cost to outsource Tony. The job of being
Tony is, in the simplest form, _really_ simple: You have to physically exist,
and send out stock emails that I compose for you, and forward the responses to
me. Obviously if your Tony candidate can write and speak well and has great
customer-service skills they can do more, like actually respond to calls and
emails without checking back with you.

~~~
stuff4ben
sounds like a neat business idea. You could get a bunch of polisci majors who
can't find jobs in this economy
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545019>) and hire them out to be
"fictional tony's". Sort of like a more specific version of the Amazon
Mechanical Turk.

~~~
donw
Amazon Mechanical Jerk. I like it.

~~~
bugsy
Nothing about the article says that Tony is a jerk or a thug. Tony's requests
for payment will be exactly the same as any other company trying to get paid
for their hard work from a customer that is a jackass who won't pay. You start
out with polite reminders, and gradually increase the sternness of the
letters. At some point you start sending physical letters in the mail, via
certified mail, you start printing headers in red, then you switch to the
phone calls, and finally, Tony shows up in their front office and sits there
every single day and asks to see the president, for as long as it takes. Then
you'll get paid. And after the first time this happens, no more products on
credit for that customer, payment in advance only.

Also, no products on credit for new customers either. Credit is only for
ESTABLISHED customers.

------
thinkzig
This is terrible advice.

If a client isn't holding up their end of a contract with you it doesn't
suddenly make it okay to start lying to them to get what you want.

What happens when the client finds out that you invented a fake person to
pressure them into paying you? What happens when word gets out in your
industry that you are a liar who will stoop to deceiving your customers if
you're not getting what you want?

There are few, if any, things more important in business than your name and
your reputation. I would much rather take the loss on the contract and move on
than risk being seen as untrustworthy.

~~~
bugsy
The fake person is not to pressure them into paying you. It is to separate
financial and customer service concerns.

If you want to talk about dishonest no good lowlifes, let's talk about the
client who doesn't pay for the product.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Dang it, meant to down-vote you, but the voting arrows are broken here
forever.

There is no excuse for lying.

~~~
bugsy
Establishing a fictional name in order to separate concerns is not lying
unless you are prepared to assert that Marion Morrison, Samuel Clemens and
Brian Hugh Warner are lying when they do the same.

------
kranner
What if one feels uncomfortable with inventing a fictional person? Is signing
emails 'Company X Accounts Dept' a reasonable compromise?

Opinions?

~~~
patio11
You'd be shocked how easy it is to make The Computer into a bad cop.

This is your automatic notice: our accounting system has classified your
account as delinquent because $YOU_FAIL_AT_TIMELY_BILL_PAYMENT. If you do not
bring your account into positive status, the system will mark your account for
escalation of collection activities. To make a payment,
$PAY_AS_AGREED_YOU_MAMOO. If you believe you are seeing this message in error,
$FEEL_FREE_TO_ASK_ME_TO_MARK_YOU_CURRENT_BEFORE_YOU_PAY because
$THAT_WILL_BE_A_FUN_CONVERSATION.

You can automate paper nastygrams -- not that anyone will notice if they're
actually sent by hand, mind you...

~~~
andrewljohnson
I like how you present a reasonable solution, in the face of a blogger
presenting a total nutjob idea addressing the same problem.

It IS much more scary to get semi-automated collections threats, than to talk
to some fake guy on email.

~~~
jason_tko
I'm sorry I gave you the wrong impression with that article. My aim was to
outline how important this kind of separation is, and I then provided an
example of a strategy that I don't employ myself, but other people do.
Unfortunately, instead of a discussion based around separation of accounts
people and the service providing people, the discussion turned to the ethics
of creating fictional employees.

I've edited the article in order to keep the focus on the point I was trying
to make. In any case, thanks for taking the time to comment.

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dododo
i dealt with a company that did this: after a short time it became obvious
what was going on.

as customer i no longer trusted the company: they were lying to me, trying to
make their business look bigger than it actually was.

if they were dishonest about this, what else were they being dishonest about?

at the first opportunity, i took my business elsewhere.

~~~
jason_tko
This opens up an interesting discussion.

To what degree is it alright to 'peacock' your business and appear bigger than
you are, if (a) you're absolutely certain you can cover the client
requirements, and (b) the client is choosing between you, and a few other
solutions/providers?

Out of interest, did this company do something bad to you? Was the service
unacceptable, and did you previously have a good working relationship with
them?

~~~
dododo
after some time, they delivered me a faulty product: i wanted to return it. it
turned out they were 'peacocking' their customer service team as well as their
accounts team.

i don't think it's ok to 'peacock'; it's tantamount to fraud.

if your clients are concerned that you cannot cover their requirements, you
should address these concerns, not lie to them as this impedes their due
diligence. if you get caught, your reputation is destroyed, and i would be
surprised if there were no legal recourse.

~~~
bugsy
It's amazing you took your business elsewhere because they were "peacocking"
and not because their products were faulty, as you said. Most people would
take their business elsewhere when they find the quality is unacceptable. But
you were OK with the unacceptable quality and planned to continue to be a
customer, it was only because of the peacocking that you left.

~~~
prodigal_erik
Sounds to me like dododo was initially willing to give them a chance to
rectify their mistakes, but not after discovering "they" was a lying weasel.

------
jason_tko
When I went back to read the article, I realised that I wasn't portraying my
point very well.

My main focus was the importance of separation between accounts and day-to-day
client relationships, and I've made changes in the original article to reflect
that.

As always, thanks very much to everyone who took the time to post their
thoughts, it helped me focus the article on the main issue I was attempting to
discuss.

------
philwelch
Does anyone else think this sounds weirdly passive-aggressive?

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sjtgraham
I've thought of this before, but dismissed it as being completely dishonest.
What happens when your client decides he/she likes Tony and decides he wants
to take you and Tony out to celebrate some business milestone that your
service was key to achieving? Do you get a buddy to play Tony? How far down
the rabbit hole will you go? Even worse, what if the clients decides to sue
based on some bad advice "Tony" gave? Then you're in all kinds of trouble.

I appreciate the advantages of psychological separation between founder/pal
and money chaser, but why not just send an email from 'Accounts?'

------
rriepe
This is unethical. What happens when a client discovers that you've been
deceiving them?

~~~
jason_tko
It's unethical if you're doing it purely for personal gain.

If you're unable to hire a person to do this for you, having some distance
from clients about sensitive financial matters can be beneficial for both you
and the client.

It's a decision you need to make though - are you comfortable with this level
of 'deception' if it's conducive to better relationships with your clients?

If so, go ahead.

If not, ideally hire someone else, or do it all yourself.

I was fortunate in that I could support an accounts person very soon after I
started my business, but I think this strategy is akin to "No, you look great
in those jeans", a statement that also benefits both parties. :)

~~~
kranner
Can you outline a scenario where you would be doing this for gain other than
personal?

~~~
jason_tko
Sure - my point was that it's beneficial to you and the client to have one
insulating layer in regards to accounts.

Ideally, you'd want this to be your accounts person.

~~~
kranner
Yes, but in the non-ideal case, the client is still being deceived.

The general question is: do we have the right to deceive people "for their own
good"? I say no.

~~~
bugsy
They are not being deceived. They are being told to pay for the product they
received in accordance with the contract terms they agreed to. There is
nothing deceptive about a company wanting to be paid for services rendered or
products delivered.

------
mcculley
You don't have to lie to your clients in order to decouple the billing role
from individual people. In my company we have a "billing@company.com" alias.
Invoices go into a database and are mailed out to customers from that alias.
Our billing system logs when the invoice was sent (and re-sent, if necessary).
Incoming mail to that alias gets routed to the people responsible for dealing
with invoices. Notices of overdue payment can come from the same alias
(however we prefer to handle such matters personally and more directly).

If you are a one-man shop, go ahead and create the role alias and then
delegate when you grow.

------
moconnor
Even better but not explicitly mentioned in the article, a fictional Tony
gives _you_ some much-needed emotional distance in any money-related dispute.
I see countless sole-proprietor businesses suffering damage because the owner,
perhaps understandably, takes customer disputes personally. With a fictional
bad cop, you are left free to 'play' the good cop, which might even help you
to see the customer's side of the situation. Yes, you should do this anyway,
but it's clearly harder than it sounds.

~~~
kranner
Are you saying it's easier not to take abuse directed at Tony personally even
when you know you are Tony?

~~~
tomjen3
When you don't sign your own name, it is easier to think your are really
playing a role, so it isn't you they are criticizing, it is that guy.

~~~
kranner
Personally it doesn't work that way for me.

On top of it, I'd feel bad constantly for pretending to be a Tony when I'm not
one.

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JabavuAdams
Nah, that's unethical, but...

It could be useful to do this internally. I'm just starting up a business by
myself, and I was thinking of making a list of all the roles I need to fill,
as a reminder to not just code.

It's easy to put on different hats when reacting to external crises, or
events, but I don't want to forget about internal initiatives. E.g. proactive
sys-adminning, creating marketing plans, etc.

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tomstuart
It seems like the best-case scenario here is to just rely on software to do
the chasing. Everyone already knows that software is a jerk.

FreeAgent does a great job of telling me when invoices are overdue. If I could
configure it to send an obviously-automated email whenever that happens, it'd
solve most of my invoice-chasing problems.

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torsy
How would this idea fit in with a web startup? Should the founders be directly
handling money issues with users?

~~~
philwelch
If you have more than one founder, can't you have one founder be the one
dealing with money issues and another founder be the one handling other
interactions? Like a good cop/bad cop thing?

