Quality counts, and so does sincerity, at a cost

I try to do the best I can to provide high quality and do it with sincerity. But I fall into the same trap again and again. Once I get over some threshold of things to do, I start to ignore the facts and details in favor of my preconceptions. Here's the problem I face:

• I now get about 400 applications per month for our accelerator programs.
• We offer free and for fee services, and most folks take the free, with a few going for the fee.
• Folks seeking assistance don't seem to get it that I can only be so helpful one-on-one for free.

And yet I hate it that sites like Google almost never offer real human assistance before pushing me through gobs of reading material. I pay Google about $1K/mo for their services, and they provide a lot of outstanding services for that price. But when things go wrong, they fall down, taking lots of my time even when they do provide a human to help. Of course I almost never need their Tier N service level, and escalation is the thing that takes lots of time.

But Google also keeps trying to get me to do things I do not want to do, in some cases forcing me into their new things. AI is the latest of these abominations. They raised their prices and added AI to things I do NOT want AI put into. They keep pushing me into it by pestering me until I accidentally click the wrong thing once, and from then on, there's no way out.

My response was to reduce the number of accounts I have with them and drop services to get my cost back down, and pretty soon I will simply go elsewhere, giving up on most of the things I like about their services, and perhaps keeping one or two accounts at most. Why is it this way?

None of this is irrational. It's all quite obvious if you look at it from 'their' point of view. In this case, 'their' includes 'my' in terms of the things I offer from my companies. But I am always seeking a way out of it.

It's really all about the tradeoffs between quality, sincerity, and cost.

• Quality: Google has good quality in most of their offerings. We try to have best quality in the meaningful part of our offerings by using human experts for most activities. to do this we have chosen quality over scalability. Google is the opposite side of the spectrum, doing good quality at the maximum volume.
• Sincerity: Google does not in any way show sincerity. They are a huge business that sells your information as advertising advantages to its advertisers. For those of us with pay accounts, we get a little better service, but no more sincerity. We try to be as sincere as we can be, subject to the level of volume we have, and the payments you make. For free you get as much as we can reasonably give in the time we make available for you, usually in groups meetings with nominal follow-up for those who ask for help but are not interested in paying for it.
• Cost Google is free to many users (paid for by monetizing your information through advertising and increasingly its use in training Google's AI. To those of us who pay, they are near the least expensive for the most services, and generally they ask before using our content for training their AI, although they are increasingly pushy and forceful about it. We on the other hand, charge a lot compared to lower quality and less sincere alternatives, for the things we charge for. We use and pay human beings well, as well as developing custom software to support out efforts and make our people more efficient and effective.

AI is NOT the answer

We use AI to augment our technology, including AI from 50 years ago (now just called automation), from between then and now, and generative AI available today. We use each for what it brings us, and only at the level of quality we believe justifies its use. We mix generative AI with other technologies to get and keep the quality high, but following and applying relevant research results produced by people doing their jobs well over time.

But AI is not the answer to increased quality with sincerity at reasonable cost. It just updates the tradeoff by allowing us to do a little more here and there, do it a little better, a little faster, but not really less expensively. Because people need to make sure it makes sense and tend to the inputs as well as the outputs. "Garbage in, garbage out", as the old computer saying goes.

What do you do?

If your goal it to be average, recognizing that average quality and sincerity seem to be going down along with cost, you know what to do... what everyone else does.

• If you want higher quality, you will have to pay the price. The extremes of quality have the extremes in cost.
• If you want extremes in sincerity, you need to keep the volume low, because actual sincerity comes from actual personal interactions and empathy. You cannot bottle it, but you can select workers for it.
• If you want lower cost, you will have to trade away quality and sincerity.

Your business model, your sales sieve, your customer acquisition and retention levels, and lots of other things will depend on these tradeoffs. And from a business standpoint, these are top management decisions that ultimately make or break your company.

There are niches for all of these things, and finding your niche is a fundamental goal of every line of business. It is often called something like product/market fit. When you trade these factors off, you get better success with different market niches.

Consistency and mismatches

One more thing (as Columbo says). If you are going to be high quality, medium cost, and medium sincerity - or whatever you choose to be... it should be reflected in everything you do in the company. Your advertising, sales processes and people, execution and fulfillment, governance and management approaches and people, contracts and legal approaches, and everything else should all match with the reality of what you are as a company.

This is one of the places A2E apparently falls short... sort of. According to the many folks who complain about our Web site not looking the part, we have tried perhaps 2 times per year for the last 10 years to change things up here and there, copying structures of pages from other similar sites, but always measuring results. And we keep finding that nothing we do to the Web site does any better than what we had 10 years ago. Folks who work closely with us request changes, we accommodate till they say it looks right, and no change in outcomes. The the next one comes along and does the same thing.

Meanwhile,we have moved over the last few years from the 6th, to the 5th, and now to the 4th largest accelerator/incubator in the Bay Area of San Francisco, which is about 120 miles away from where we operate. But it's not because of our advertising or Web site. It's because of our changes in service offerings, and our lead generation. Not that this was our objective of course...

Conclusions

Establishing the tradeoffs between quality, sincerity, and cost is fundamental to establishing the nature of your company, scalability, and from there, makeup of your governance, people, and most everything else about your company. Being who and how you are is core to your success or failure.

More information?

Join our monthly free advisory call, usually at 0900 Pacific time on the 1st Thursday of the month, to give your first 10 seconds of a pitch and then see if we want to know more.

In summary

Know thyself.