Business equals Respect

These days I was remembering some of the worst situations involving the consultancy-client relationship I’ve been part of. It is quite shocking the amount of crazy moments we have lived in the last 6 years, and I don’t know about you, but things got really creepy after the Pandemic started.

I always found that any business relationship is, first of all, based on respect. It is a polite, adult, formal situation. The client has a need, a challenge, a “pain” as startup people decided to call it nowadays. The service-offering company has a solution or event “THE” solution and obviously will be interested in being hired to deliver said services.

I can’t imagine this exchange of information and networking happening outside of the common sense respectful personal contact. In the end, companies are made of people, and these people should behave as ambassadors of whatever they are trying to bring to the world.

Again, for me at least, the terms above are just…obvious.

Well, guess what, it is not. My impression is that, for some people, having financial status or the power to “hire you or not” believe in some sort of ego-powered award where they just decide to treat you like trash, to be misogynous, xenophobic and disrespectful.

We try to be as diverse as we can at GamePlan, and besides done by me, business development and client relations are done by two excellent and professional ladies. Believe me of not, we have prospects and clients that would simply not believe in them because of their genre. One of them said it explicitly (!). It gets worse. They heard from a client that the fact English were not our first language was responsible for all communication problems (while also confirming NOT reading any of the documentation we sent.). He was just being xenophobic.

In a global market, where companies from anywhere hire companies and professionals from anywhere, this posture is simply unacceptable, and at GamePlan we do not accept that kind of ill-empowered behavior. We try to discuss, to show that some terms and causes need to be avoided, but sometimes it is just too much, and we had cases where we “fired” clients for their aggressiveness. It is just unjustifiable and our work environment and mental health are very precious assets.

We should always stand for a safe and equal market for everyone, and, in my opinion, putting passive-aggressive, out-of-the-box insane people back where they should belong is the minimal we can do. Paying someone to do something does not give you the right to mistreat and disrespect them.

Even if you are not paying, let’s keep bad behavior out of the way, shall we?