One day, I was walking along one of the piers of Manhattan, and we were talking about how one of his friends wanted to start her own little business.
I don’t exactly remember what type of business, but I know it’s related to selling handcrafted products.
But the problem was that this person had a lot of fear that held her back from getting started.
Specifically, fear of not being liked and fear of rejection.
To which my friend replied, “In business, you have to be cold-blooded.”
Now, don’t take this the wrong way.
He didn’t mean treating your customers, clients, and team members like disposables, tossing them to the side after extracting every single drop of value and money from them.
Or being “friends” with people purely for your own personal gain.
There are times where you do have to show compassion and care for the people you do business with.
There has to be a balance. It’s not an all or nothing case.
If I had to guess, when my friend said you have to be cold-blooded, he most likely meant:
1. Not taking rejections personally. I forget where I heard this, but someone once told me, when people reject you, they’re not rejecting you necessarily, but they’re rejecting your product or service.
2. Forget the people who don’t like you. They wouldn’t do business with you in the first place. The email I wrote about the response I got from a friendly businesswoman to my cold email is a perfect example. And two, it’s just exhausting and self-destructive being a people pleaser.
I heard stories where people who despise certain business owners would go around and talk trash about those business owners. And the people who came across those haters would check out the supposedly bad business owners and end up becoming customers.
So best case scenario, the people who don’t like you may become pro bono PR agents for your business.
But for the people who are true supporters of your business, you want to show compassion and care towards them.
Part of that means giving them a good experience of doing business with you.
That includes sending valuable and enjoyable emails to their inbox for them to happily consume.
And you can learn how to write those said emails in my book, How to Become an Email Titan.