A friend of mine emailed me the link to this blog entry.

It is a fascinating letter and reply letter well worth reading. The gist is this: Angus and Robertson (an Australian book seller) wrote a childish, swarmy letter to an Australian publisher. The bookseller ranked all of their suppliers based on how much net profitability each supplier made the bookseller. Then, calculating that the publisher fell below a certain amount in net profitability charged the publisher the difference due immediately. That’s right. The bookseller was not making enough profit, so it said, and it felt compelled to charge the publisher the difference.

That’s absurd. It is not the publisher’s business to make the bookseller a certain profit. There are so many variables that are so completely out of the control of the publisher, such as the cost of overhead, stupid marketing, wasteful advertising, poor business decisions, unprofitable stores and the list goes on and on that to punish, yes, I mean punish, one of your suppliers for your bad business mistakes is outrageous.

And that is exactly what the publisher said in a well crafted letter back to the bookseller.

It is worth remembering that it is not anyone else’s responsibility to help you make your business profitable. It is solely your responsibility. I mean it. Suppliers can help you by offering innovation, speed, quality, and the like, but how you make your profit is entirely your responsibility. Do not shirk it and make it mine, unless of course, you plan to give me the keys to the place and a majority vote, then we’ll talk.

Please take the time to read both letters. It will help you counter this same argument that your customers might make of your company.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 11:12 pm and is filed under Tactics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.