Don’t reply when you are angry
…specifically never reply an email when you are angry. You will almost always repent it.
In my 13-year long career running Digicorp, this is one of the most important things I have learned.
At Digicorp, we offer product design and development as a service to our clients, mostly startups. And when you are in a service business, you will inevitably face situations, when client is not happy with your work for valid or invalid reasons.
Also as an owner of the company, you will automatically develop an attitude for defending your team in such situations, especially if you care for them a lot! You would end up becoming the wall between them and your clients. And that is why we are at the risk of alienating our clients and becoming unreasonable.
Let me tell you a story, pretty old one but worth telling here.
One day, I got an email from one of our clients. He was not happy with the latest deliverable from our team. Specifically he was unhappy with our design and wrote a pretty harsh email. It made me very angry because we were not even doing the design. His designer gave us the designs with required html/css coding. I wondered why were WE getting his wrath for the poor design done by his designer.
But I have taught myself never to reply an email when angry so I held my nerve and waited for that weekend to get over.
On Monday, first thing I asked my team, “Who is doing the design? Client or us?“
And guess what? We were the culprits.
After we received the original homepage and inner pages design, we were coding those pages and doing minor modifications too. Most of the issues client raised were valid.
Now if I had replied him on that very day with my own version of “harshness”, I would have made a fool out of myself.
After gathering all the details from team, I replied him with proper reasoning and things settled down immediately. Disaster avoided!
So, fellow entrepreneurs running services business, here are my 2 cents for you.
“Don’t promise when you’re happy, don’t reply when you’re angry, and don’t decide when you’re sad.”
I am Abhishek Desai, co-founder of Digicorp.
Digicorp is a venture builder based in Ahmedabad, India. We build usable software products for startups. We also work on home-grown ideas and spin off the most promising ones as separate ventures.
