Clique Bate
“The louder the dogs bark the less a lion feels threatened.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo
When the first ten founding mobile vendors sat at a table in early March 2019 and decided to go all in on forming an owners association for all Mobile Vendors in the State of Nevada, we went through an exercise you may have gone through yourself if you’re part of a smaller or more modern, lean organization, called SWOT.
We passed a sheet of paper around the table and captured input from everyone about what they perceived to be factors in any of the SWOT categories, and by the end of that exercise and the discussion that followed, it was clear that the thing that had to be addressed first was, well, not a surprise. The existence of Cliques.
If SWOT is an unfamiliar term, well who better to give a 1-minute rundown on what it is than “Jared” from HBO’s Silicon Valley, and this should be a YouTube link to a video excerpt that is just about that long:
A Room Full of Alphas
Apropos for a Nevada organization such as ours, an observation about the infamous Downtown Project: When you collect founders and entrepreneurs in a room and tell them to get to work, they all realize rather quickly that while they are all starting off as friends, they are all competing for resources, not the least of which is staff to make their dreams happen. When you fill a room full of alphas and they ask who wants to work for them, not a lot of hands go up. In many regards competition is healthy, and that is never more true than in a startup ecosystem, but the ecosystem has to be understood going in [you may disagree] and in this case the resource constraints in general and the challenges for bringing on people specifically were perhaps not completely realized going in. The goal here is not to pick on the downtown project, though, so let us take from this that entrepreneurs are a special bunch and like DTP, we have selected that population to work with.
In the case of Mobile Vendors, there is similar competition for resources, but the resources in this case are legal locations at which to conduct business at a reasonable cost. Legislation and regulation can impose some unusual and at times archaic restrictions on places and times, which is something that can be argued against prima facie or over time with case study data and analysis. Here, as luck would have it, the customers and fans of Mobile Vendors have some leverage, because they have numbers and they have votes, and often these are the things that matter most when arguing for these changes.
The market, on the other hand, is a bit of a wildcard at times, and will depend a great deal on how organizers, hosts, and venues all participate in the marketplace we intend to reform somewhat. The lack of perfect information on the part of individual vendors most definitely presents them a disadvantage more often than not, which over time leads to skewed expectations and flawed assumptions about how the marketplace seems to function versus the way it could function versus the ways it should function.
The challenge for an organization such as ours, then, is to provide a structure in which individual entrepreneurs can continue to compete for resources (as described) while elevating the marketplace by working together, to increase the size of the resource pool and over time, better-understand which parts of the pool work best for each of them. This is where competitive and cooperative game theory principles will come into play, so that competitors can derive measurable benefit from cooperating and cooperative entrepreneurs can become better at what they do through competition.
Cliques can undo much of this…
Peer-sourcing, Crowd-sourcing, and Social Media, Oh My!
Mobile Vending… all of the challenges of starting a small business, and then you’re not in the same place every day! Often true, always a challenge, and it can lead to some shortcuts when it comes to obtaining information.
The first obvious source of information if your peer group. Clearly the small business to the left and to the right at the local farmers’ market or food truck fair or whatever the event might be, will know what’s going on, right?
Paul Reiser has a nice bit on the topic of anonymous authority figures known as “They” and “The Guy,” and if you don’t recall it, let us pause and flip through ancient David Letterman history:
The authority in the marketplace thus becomes the peer group with which you work, and if not the people and small businesses within reach, then certainly the crowd out and about. While research and due diligence are always good ideas when entering or operating a business, the lack of time often leads reliance on peers and the crowd for answers.
More recently, as social media has come to dominate all aspects of daily life, what was the one surefire way of reaching customers (remember Twitter back in the day?) is still that, but it is also the more common way that Mobile Vendors obtain information. With closed Facebook groups providing breeding grounds for FUD and misinformation in general, and reliance on the peer group and the somewhat-anonymous crowd, competition for resources in an adversarial marketplace can lead to construction of a clan or tribe mentality as a form of defense, and so the formation of Cliques.
Just Undo It
It is wishful thinking to believe that cliques can be un-formed in any short order, but the challenge remains. How to enable small business people — already a challenge — operating as Mobile Vendors — more of a challenge — to have access to good and correct information on which to base decisions, which they can trust and rely on to do so? The important thing to keep in mind is that cliques want to remain in place, and they survive on a form of self-reinforcement where any suggestion that the clique is wrong or bad must be seen as an assault on the clique and its members and thus must be repelled.
Luckily, there are some who are willing to look beyond the clique, or who may not have become entangled in the clique culture enough to be drawn away from rational consideration of the marketplace, and it is this population that forms the basis of an organization such as ours. The ones who get a glimpse outside of Plato’s Cave, if you will, and who can then convince their peers that there is some real sunlight just outside.
A common adversary (or adversarial force) seems to be an enzyme-like activator that can take most mobile vendor groups into the unifying mindset. Getting “over the hump” to set aside differences and realize the power of unity, if at least for the sake of opposing restrictive regulations, stifling legislation, or plain old ridiculous market conditions can provide the activation energy to get to the other side. Logically, a clique is a defensive mechanism that forms to defend against those adversarial forces on a limited basis (to the benefit of a subset of the Mobile Vendor population in our case), though they also tend to form to defend against other cliques. This has a mitigating effect on our enzymatic efforts.
The largest risk in forming a Mobile Vendor Association, in its early days, is the perception that it is just another clique, and one that is attempting to corner the marketplace or in some other way take control or take over or perhaps push out the other cliques. Because a business league can, with few exceptions, form without any opposition of any kind from external forces, most if not all of the resistance is internal, in this case due mostly to existing cliques.
Transparency
While there are several factors that make up the formation strategy of the Nevada Mobile Vendors Association, one of the core values from day zero has been Transparency. An inclusive organization that invites members from the Mobile Vendor population at large, can build a community on that basis by first “opening the books” with communication, a fair business plan, and a long term strategy that accounts for the success of the community as a whole and on an individual basis.
While the formation of a business league such as ours may appear to other cliques as Just Another Clique, in fact it is formed on opposite principles. Zero energy is wasted on clique bating and lateral argument, with all efforts focused on the three targets, namely Mobile Vendor Advocacy, Marketplace Elevation, and Community Education. Our association has formed to make its members stronger and more successful, which will make for more happy customers, and more events, better interactions with event hosts and venues, and everyone’s favorite platitude, “a win-win-win situation!”
In addition to attitude and policy, we can also take advantage of modern technology and slightly-older game theory to analyze and evaluate various decisions not with passion, but with math. By “showing our work” as we capture marketplace data and measure change over time, we can and will reveal to our members and to our detractors, how and why our efforts work, and where they sometimes do not.
Clique Bate?
A search for the etymology of “bate” is left to the reader. Suffice to say that it is a bit of commentary on “clique thinking” where far better decision-making resources are available in these modern times.
