The Stink of Trump

 

CROOKED TRUMP ASKED HIS ATTORNEYS TO LIE AND COMMIT CRIMES FOR HIM

 

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

How to Fire Your Customers

Not all of them. Just the ones you don't need. Recently, insurers State Farm and Allstate demonstrated how that's done by dumping longstanding clients in California. Love'em when they're profitable; leave'em when they're not.

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

Mark Twain said that a banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining but wants it back the minute it begins to rain. I'd say his view was a little narrow, since plenty of investors are certainly charter members of the same unreliable club. The overnight run on Silicon Valley Bank and that institution's ultimate collapse -- which most of us believe was driven by the panic of a few key, well-connected, and cowardly VCs with social media megaphones -- is just one of the latest cases in point. As my old friend and mentor Bill McGowan, the founder of MCI, used to say: These guys have great loyalty to their businesses, but their No. 1 loyalty is to their own tush. When the heat is on, they're hard to find and you'd be a fool to depend on them.

And the heat is on, literally, as well as the water, which is why State Farm and Allstate are abandoning the California market for homeowners’ insurance. You're apparently no longer in good hands and it's not exactly neighborly, but if you live in the land of wildfires, floods, and mudslides, you're really up a creek.

We've all experienced versions of the disappointment of fair-weather friends, in both our business and personal lives. They're there cheering you on in the good times but bail the moment that the going gets rough. They have wishbones where you thought they had backbones and they disappear without a trace when you really need them most. And then -- down the line and after the fact -- the ones who utterly lack the courage to contribute always seem to find an explanation to justify their cowardice. If you really want to do something, you'll find a way; if you don't, you'll find an excuse. 

This painful recurrence is part of every entrepreneur's journey. Where there's always an uphill part of the path, where promises that seemed so solid go up in smoke, and where sometimes you feel that you can't tell your courage from your desperation. They should print t-shirts saying something like: "count on self-interest, not self-sacrifice, and you'll never be surprised" along with the rest of each startup's swag. No one enjoys the process when friends and even family flee, and the pain and heartbreak don't get any better when you've been part of that particular movie too many times yourself.

But there are unavoidable times when the shoe is on the other foot - where you've got to disappoint people and leave them hanging. Then it's your job to break the hard news to some of your own customers that some changes are necessary and that it may even be time for you to part ways entirely. Especially these days, you're going to have to get ready to say "No" and it won't be easy. Not easy or simple, but simply necessary. The reality is that you're not required to burn down your own business just because you feel the need to be a good sport and try to be there for everyone else.

And, as the triage begins, you're going to need to carefully pick and choose which clients, customers, partners, and vendors you can stick with and help, and which are going to have to be "fired," because these choices will ultimately determine the course of your own firm. There are some basic rules in these cases that can help, but in the final analysis, the process is very often seat-of-the-pants. These discussions turn out to be far more emotional and confrontational than you would imagine and there's often a lot of sad and bitter talk about loyalty, values, and trust.

That's why it been very interesting to watch as both State Farm and Allstate have announced that after decades of doing business in California and making boatloads of bucks as the economy and the population there dramatically expanded, they've both decided (separately, I'm sure) to stop writing any new homeowners insurance policies in the state.

They have plenty of explanations and justifications - climate change and associated weather risks, higher repair and material costs, increasingly challenging regulations, overbuilt and insecure geographies -- but the real bottom line is that they have no loyalties, customer commitment, or empathy. They only have "interests" and for now at least they're no longer interested in insuring California homeowners. Love'em when the dollars are there and leave'em in the lurch when things go south. It may feel painfully personal to you, but it's just business to them. And don't think that because the big guys have moved on you can expect to see a herd of other insurers rushing in to fill the void. Quite the opposite: they'll get out of town just as quickly as they can. They have about as much courage as the last tackler jumping on the pile in a football game.

Commercial real estate is next. This has serious implications not simply for downtown skyscrapers, but also for strip malls and smaller buildings nationwide, which house many startups and SMBs. Borrowers, and especially smaller businesses that have taken loan renewals and rollovers absolutely for granted for years as they've been loyal and regularly paying customers, are about to get some very rude awakenings when their loans are pulled, accelerated, or not renewed. These situations are a lot like pouring too much cream in your coffee. Easy to do, hard to undo.

When the prime borrowers collapse and the banks grudgingly have to take over these properties, you can bet that basic tenant services, ongoing maintenance, and promotional support will all take a huge hit.  Needless to say, in the midst of all the crap we've gone through over the last three years, having to quickly repay a line of credit or retire some revolving debt (or having to quickly relocate from a mall or a building that's falling apart around you) couldn't come at a worst possible time especially when any spare funds you might have had were going to be critical to bridging any remaining revenue or inventory gaps as the economy started to grow again and customers returned.

And it's not like there are a bunch of other banks waiting in the wings to offer you some alternatives. If you sensed that draw requests, fundings, and paperwork processes were slowing down before, these days you're looking at a timeframe between forever and never. Even the biggest banks such as Chase are slowly and steadily (and somewhat stealthily) stepping away from their commercial real estate portfolios and hoping at the same time that they'll get out of most of their positions, even with a haircut, before the true deluge begins. The people running these operations may have virtues, but courage is not one of them. They may be smart, but they're scared as well. Staying the course and partnering with longtime clients and customers isn't the kind of risks that make sense today for middle managers who are frankly worrying about their own positions as well.

There are no easy answers, and the current financial climate is unlikely to improve for another year or so as the waves of cancelations, foreclosures, repossessions, and shutterings rise, crest, and hopefully start to subside by next fall. In the meantime, the smartest and safest things to do are fairly simply: conserve and save your cash, don't rely on renewals or new borrowing, hunker down and don't make any big financial bets at this point, and hope that the MAGAts in Congress don't make things much worse.

LOOP NORTH NEWS

 

My advice to graduates: all bets are off (Above) Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav delivers a commencement address met with boos, screams, and angry chants from students at Boston University on May 21 (AP Photo/Steven Senne). Making graduation speeches used to be fairly conventional. But change is so rapid that the old rules no longer apply. Good luck, kids. By Howard Tullman 12-Jun-23 – We’re now in the annual and painful ritual of graduation speeches which – as a parent, entrepreneur, employer, college president, speaker, author, and columnist – have been an essential and challenging part of my springtime for decades. Speechifying is both thrilling and thankless and gets tougher every year because so many of the previous pronouncements, truisms, and tropes that got us safely here simply don’t have much to do with where the next generation is headed. All of the past guidance, along with the sum total of our experience, doesn’t help a whole lot when today’s graduates are setting out to do what’s never been done before. Uncertain times, uncharted waters, and a world in constant crisis that seems to regularly be on the verge of bursting into flames is, at best, a precarious platform for profundity. The pressure in these instances to proffer astute and forward-looking suggestions and prescriptions in a “suitable” fashion while being bold, brave, and – above all – brief is intense and gets worse each year. The unwritten and often unspoken (until after the fact) ground rules, goal posts, and verboten topics for these talks continue to change and move in confusing and contrary directions. Saying things no longer makes them so, even the firmest foundational concepts are now subject to challenge and criticism, and everyone’s a newly and self-anointed expert or an easily offended snowflake on virtually every subject. Protests are a prominent part of every graduation ceremony now as the recent blowback against Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zavalav at Boston University made clear. And he’s an alum. And, of course, the accelerating rate of change, the massive shifts in our societal norms, objectives and expectations, and the growing and complex impacts of technology and social media make the whole attempt to suggest any specific directions or career decisions to any group of graduates a fool’s errand. In my defense, I can at least solemnly attest to the fact that I’ve never been sucked into the unrewarding swamp of offering advice to the lovelorn, whether they be friends, family, or foolish strangers. But, in defense of continuing to make the mid-year effort, I can say that preparing these pithy “words of wisdom“ has been a far more productive use of my time and a valuable opportunity for some modest reflection on important matters than any of the traditional December-January nostalgic, regretful, or cathartic compilations and trips down memory lane that regularly appear at year’s end. That being said, the real challenge is always coming up with something you’re comfortable saying and that is also worth listening to. In preparing past presentations, I used to pull up a few prior examples and try to decide what content still made sense for a given audience; what needed to be added to or dropped to avoid merely repeating myself; where to remove any outdated references; and finally, how to add some new and hopefully valuable thoughts and information to the text. Some choice old wine in new bottles saves a lot of prep time. But this year I’ve concluded that there needs to be a fairly substantial shift in the content of the conversation. I’ve written before about the frank new messages we need to be giving to our employees and to our kids. Stressing resilience, optionality, and admitted vulnerability turn out to be far more impactful than some of the more typical admonitions about hard work, etc. And it’s not too Darwinian to acknowledge that survival in the long term depends more on adaptability and the willingness to change than on simple strength or sheer intelligence. Flexibility and fluidity trumps fierce focus and single-mindedness in times of radical and rapid change. Another shift in tone relates less to which particular journey is undertaken and more to the pain and perils of any journey. While you should never let anyone talk you out of your future, it’s essential to understand and appreciate that parts of everyone’s journey will be uphill; that things don’t typically improve or get better over time; instead you get better by forging the skill sets critical to success; and that, while both personal and familial sacrifices will be required and crucial, there are practical and philosophical limits and boundaries to the process. You’re not required – regardless of what others may say – to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm. You can’t accomplish great things and end up feeling good about the process if you’re ultimately doing it for someone else. Let others worry about making their own dreams into reality. Finally, for the graduates, there’s also the matter of their folks. There’s nothing more painful than being a parent – and that’s on a good day. Whatever hopes mom and dad may harbor in the vain belief that Junior will follow in their career footsteps, it’s becoming clearer all the time that the most valuable parental lessons to be learned by their offspring aren’t about the job choices they made, but rather about the examples they have set in their behaviors and the values they have shared with their kids. The work may change, but the importance of empathy, honesty, and authenticity will never diminish. The key contributions are far more qualitative and subjective than specific and quantitative. The jobs parents may have held for decades, even if their descriptions survive mainly in name only, won’t be the same in terms of depth, function, and value to their organizations.   And as hard as this may be to acknowledge and discuss, those jobs won’t really be worth having much longer. The daily onslaught of A.I. is aggressively hollowing out millions of jobs and compressing entire tiers of middle management as routine procedures and repetitive activities are eliminated. Many of the new jobs, being created on the fly, will require far more in the way of people skills, creative problem solving, critical inquiry, and knowledge retrieval rather than technical or procedural abilities. Mom and dad have little detailed knowledge to add to the conversation about these new tasks; mastering them will be a matter of hands-on experience and OTJ training rather than traditional parental direction or academic instruction. The future premiums will be paid to those who learn to master the overwhelming floods of available data – essentially the world’s aggregated knowledge – by asking the right questions so they can extract the correct answers. Employers will seek out graduates trained to ask the critical and difficult questions rather than those who think they’ve been taught all the right answers. There’s no great prize for coming up with even the very best answer to the wrong question. Howard Tullman is General Managing Partner for G2T3V, LLC – Investors in Disruptive Innovators, and for Chicago High Tech Investors, LLC. He is also the author of Words of Wisdom: A 60-year compilation. Share

BED, BATH and TRUMP IN THE TOILET

 

CROOKED TRAITOR

 

Hypocrite Crook and Traitor

 

Fooling the Fools is Too Easy