I’m being flooded with business offers by friends and family

by Alison Green on November 27, 2024

A reader writes:

I work in an industry and on a product where business is booming. We’re making headlines internationally and people are flocking to the product. With this attention has come a large amount of in-bound sales offers from other companies. Software, insights tools, celebrity talent agents, you name it. My inbox is flooded and I have account managers calling my personal cellphone.

Not only this, but they’ll reach out via “warm intros” through friends who I can’t really be very blunt with, and it’s at the point where even lovely family members are sending me business proposals for consulting, etc. It feels like a lot of pressure because we are actively and obviously spending on many things.

How can I say we’re not interested? Normally I’ll say something like, “Thanks, we will reach out if it makes sense for us.” But many of these personal connections are low on business. They do good work but I just don’t have a business reason to use their services. It’s feeling very awkward and I’d like to be kind. I feel like I’m in a position of financial power and the guilt is something I haven’t dealt with before, especially for family. I suppose I’m looking for something a little more sensitive to say. It feels a bit like being a lottery winner when others are struggling and have something to offer.

I answer this question — and two others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.

Other questions I’m answering there today include:

  • Performance reviews with two managers
  • Can I ask that an underperforming employee not be assigned to important work?
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{ 19 comments }

{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }

  1. I'm just here for the cats!!*

    With #1 I would tell my friends and family to stop with these. Time to put up some boundries. A simple “I appreciate your help, but we are overwhelmed with inquiries. I’d appreciate it if you would not add to them.”

    Reply ↓
    1. Jellyfish Catcher*

      I would add a message on your personal phone to cut off calls from other companies.

      It’s somewhat forgivable that family and friends would call your personal phone. You can kindly cut that off: family time, don’t have business info at home, etc.

      BUT….other company’s managers know darn well that calling your personal phone
      (unless your company’s building just caught fire) is Not OK.

      Add a message on your personal phone, after the normal greeting, “If this is a business call, please call my company contact number, X, Monday through Friday, 8 am to 4 pm, and leave a message, thank you.”
      Be sure to also reply to those calls during work hours, to train those folks that it Really Is Mon-Fri.
      Congratulations on your success.

      Reply ↓
  2. StephChi*

    For #3, I really don’t understand what value there is to the company in keeping an employee who is so obviously not just useless, but actively harmful, employed. Does she know where the bodies are buried??

    Reply ↓
      1. Admin of Sys*

        That’s not a trivial process in a lot of IT layouts. Even beyond technical complications, deciding to start blocking sites from company access can be a fraught process due to how people react to it.

        Reply ↓
        1. Seven hobbits are highly effective, people*

          Also, then you have to unblock it for everyone who needs to shop for or order things for work-related reasons. A least where I work, we have Amazon Business accounts where we can order things on Amazon that then get sent off for approval through our internal processes, so blocking us all from “online shopping” would mean finding a new process for buying office supplies.

          Presumably if shopping sites were blocked the Problem Employee would then shop on her phone instead, or switch to a different but equally non-work-related way to entertain herself. (If I wanted to waste time on an extremely locked down work computer, I’d probably build elaborate ASCII art animations using a text editor and the page down button, but in my adult life this is not a problem I often encounter.) You can’t technology your way out of people problems, and someone prioritizing non-work-related tasks over work-related ones is firmly in the “people problem” category.

          Reply ↓
    2. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      My experience, having worked with several, is that they usually have a Guardian Angel somewhere high in the organization. Some used to be hard working, excelled, or otherwise standouts, and their reputation hasn’t caught up to their decline, others have connections or nepotism.

      Reply ↓
      1. StephChi*

        You’re probably right, in which case it makes sense to do what Alison says, which is to make this employee her manager’s problem, so that person has to deal with the consequences of failing to do anything about this woman’s performance.

        Reply ↓
      2. blood orange*

        This or the disciplinary/termination process is so lengthy or otherwise difficult that no one wants to jump through those hoops. Both scenarios are incredibly frustrating.

        Reply ↓
    3. NothingIsLittle*

      Working in government, there are so many hoops to jump through that it can be functionally impossible to fire someone for anything short of embezzlement.* Not to mention how impossible it becomes when unions are involved. Usually the problem sits in the highest levels of power where disinterest or fear puts a kibosh on change.

      *Not literally. But think “actual crime” not “bad at job.” We had someone high up bungle post-disaster payroll to the tune of multiple millions and she was only reassigned to a cushier job with higher pay and no reports.

      Reply ↓
  3. Antilles*

    For #3, the way I’ve handled this in the past (especially if the manager recognizes she’s a problem) is just to proactively head it off with a discussion. Look, I just didn’t have a good experience with Jane on the last job. We ran into all sorts of issues like X and Y. So going forwards, I just don’t think it’s a fit and I don’t want her on my projects.
    In my experience, this usually neatly resolves the problem. Maybe her manager will start actively addressing Jane’s issues or maybe he’ll just coordinate so you don’t deal with her, but either way, it’s now Somebody Else’s Problem.

    Reply ↓
      2. Antilles*

        It’s a reprint of an old letter, so it likely pre-dates the current AI craze. But there are plenty of hugely-hyped media frenzy trends in the past decade that it could be – anything from crypto to Groupon depending on exactly when the letter came in.

        Reply ↓
    2. Be Gneiss*

      Chocolate llamas? Teapot grooming?
      I know some people don’t like it, but as someone who works in a chocolate-teapot-adjacent industry, they make me smile.

      Reply ↓
  5. CubeFarmer*

    RE LW#3: every, every, every organization I’ve worked for has had at least one teflon employee. They’re held accountable for very few of their actions and get away with doing (or not doing,) whatever they want. That sounds like what’s happening here.

    We had one woman who abused PTO–and her manager never noticed (a colleague who did started tracking it and…yup, she sneaked in an extra week or so most years.) We had another colleague who disappeared for days (we think he was working a consulting gig on the side that required site visits, and he hid it as “working from home”–but his team couldn’t reach him during that time.) Both of those people left after several years. We currently have a colleague who just does…nothing. He’s a lot of bluster and delegation to his team, but he’s not actually out there setting goals and helping his team to meet them.

    Reply ↓
  6. blood orange*

    For OP #2 I had/have this situation with one of our positions in my company. An assistant manager has a dotted line to one department but directly reports to another. In my role as HR, I’ve had both managers submit their performance feedback, I have a pre-game meeting with them so they can exchange the feedback they have, and then I facilitate a performance evaluation with both managers and the employee. It’s definitely not ideal, especially since I facilitate performance reviews which adds to the people in the room, but I do my best to make everyone comfortable.

    That role has since changed a bit, and the dotted line responsibilities are going from about 40-60% to about 10-20%. I’m expecting to shift the performance evaluation system so that the dotted line manager provides feedback to the manager ahead of time, but doesn’t directly participate in the evaluation.

    Reply ↓

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