The bigger a company gets, the more space there usually is between the end consumer and the top of the company. Having worked in the startup world, I’ve seen firsthand the transition in communication in this regard.
When you first start a company, you often have the CEO directly involved in the everyday business. Talking to new prospects, getting new business, etc. They have to wear multiple hats and are both the customer-facing and the operations side of the business. As they grow, if they’re good at what they do, they delegate work out to others to start to take on the more time-consuming tasks. Especially the tasks they are not as good at.
Inevitably, this starts to form the middle man in every company. The middle man between what the customer experiences and where the decisions are made. When a company is first starting, customers often have a heavy sway on the direction of where that company may go. As they have needs, those become the company’s needs. As the company grows though, the problems of one customer can take less and less of the focus.
If you think of it in percentages, when a business has only 10 customers, when one of those customers is trying to work on something, that’s 10% of your business. That is a large chunk to lose if you do not work with them to solve their solution. When you have 1,000 customers, 1 customer becomes a much smaller focus. You can no longer put things on hold for this one customer.
Because of this, if you’re a leader in a company, you put people in between those customers and you so that you can have a filter to what is really important. If things are important enough, you know that through your filter of people you have set up in the company, you will hear about those things so that direct action can be taken.
At any time, this filter can break, or let pieces through that don’t need to go through. Or there may be a personal connection that allows something to get through that wouldn’t have had it gone through the normal channels.
Every person only has a certain amount of time in their day, and I’m realizing more and more that all of the world is centered around this one fact. The biggest corporations are centered around the fact that one man only has a certain amount of time, so they have to delegate responsibilities to others to take do more at once.
The bigger the company, the more the requirement builds for having the middle man. Many companies have tried before to try and take this away as much as possible. Whether it’s through having a flat organization structure or some other idea. In the long run, though, you’re not going to escape it. Different people have different giftings, and everyone only has 24 hours in their day.
The middle man is a necessary evil. Remember that next time you’re on the phone with a customer service rep trying to do their job.