Use a Fictional Tony to Maintain Customer Relationships, and Get Money Faster

I have been wanting to do this in our own company, and in fact, we had decided to do this with a number of roles, assigning them as virtual roles, but a legal adviser told me that if i ever fell into a dispute with a client, where they made their purchasing decision based on the (apparent) size of my company, they could take me to court for mis-representation and i could be done for fraud.<p>So i think legally, you need to be very careful.

This is the reason that we send all invoices out in my girlfriends name because I'm a freelancer and a very small company most of the work I get is from people who know me directly and there is a massive personal relationship there.<p>It's really easy for money to get in the way of a friendship / client relationship but having a separate third party makes that so much easier to deal with.<p>It makes it very easy to bring up billing in the middle of of an email.<p>"It would be great to get together to discuss x next week, I'm across your way on Tuesday if your free (by the way, x mentioned that your invoice is still outstanding, any chance you could take a look at that so she stops moaning at me! :) )"<p>Makes the whole thing much simpler and gives them an easy way of responding with some humor.<p>(I will mention that x actually does exist and it is her email, she also looks after the accounts.. my main point was that the separation of the billing parts from the 'doing the work' parts has been a good thing for us)

I think this identifies a real problem, but I agree with those who are suspicious of the proposed solution. All that goodwill I would gain from playing good-cop-bad-cop with a sockpuppet as my partner will vanish, threefold, if and when my customers begin to suspect that I'm making stuff up. They will commence to wonder how many other aspects of my company are completely fictional, like my portfolio, or my qualifications.<p>What I wonder is how much it would cost to outsource Tony. The job of being Tony is, in the simplest form, <i>really</i> simple: You have to physically exist, and send out stock emails that I compose for you, and forward the responses to me. Obviously if your Tony candidate can write and speak well and has great customer-service skills they can do more, like actually respond to calls and emails without checking back with you.

This is terrible advice.<p>If a client isn't holding up their end of a contract with you it doesn't suddenly make it okay to start lying to them to get what you want.<p>What happens when the client finds out that you invented a fake person to pressure them into paying you? What happens when word gets out in your industry that you are a liar who will stoop to deceiving your customers if you're not getting what you want?<p>There are few, if any, things more important in business than your name and your reputation. I would much rather take the loss on the contract and move on than risk being seen as untrustworthy.

What if one feels uncomfortable with inventing a fictional person? Is signing emails 'Company X Accounts Dept' a reasonable compromise?<p>Opinions?

i dealt with a company that did this: after a short time it became obvious what was going on.<p>as customer i no longer trusted the company: they were lying to me, trying to make their business look bigger than it actually was.<p>if they were dishonest about this, what else were they being dishonest about?<p>at the first opportunity, i took my business elsewhere.

When I went back to read the article, I realised that I wasn't portraying my point very well.<p>My main focus was the importance of separation between accounts and day-to-day client relationships, and I've made changes in the original article to reflect that.<p>As always, thanks very much to everyone who took the time to post their thoughts, it helped me focus the article on the main issue I was attempting to discuss.

Does anyone else think this sounds weirdly passive-aggressive?

I've thought of this before, but dismissed it as being completely dishonest. What happens when your client decides he/she likes Tony and decides he wants to take you and Tony out to celebrate some business milestone that your service was key to achieving? Do you get a buddy to play Tony? How far down the rabbit hole will you go? Even worse, what if the clients decides to sue based on some bad advice "Tony" gave? Then you're in all kinds of trouble.<p>I appreciate the advantages of psychological separation between founder/pal and money chaser, but why not just send an email from 'Accounts?'

This is unethical. What happens when a client discovers that you've been deceiving them?

You don't have to lie to your clients in order to decouple the billing role from individual people. In my company we have a "billing@company.com" alias. Invoices go into a database and are mailed out to customers from that alias. Our billing system logs when the invoice was sent (and re-sent, if necessary). Incoming mail to that alias gets routed to the people responsible for dealing with invoices. Notices of overdue payment can come from the same alias (however we prefer to handle such matters personally and more directly).<p>If you are a one-man shop, go ahead and create the role alias and then delegate when you grow.

Even better but not explicitly mentioned in the article, a fictional Tony gives <i>you</i> some much-needed emotional distance in any money-related dispute. I see countless sole-proprietor businesses suffering damage because the owner, perhaps understandably, takes customer disputes personally. With a fictional bad cop, you are left free to 'play' the good cop, which might even help you to see the customer's side of the situation. Yes, you should do this anyway, but it's clearly harder than it sounds.

Nah, that's unethical, but...<p>It could be useful to do this internally. I'm just starting up a business by myself, and I was thinking of making a list of all the roles I need to fill, as a reminder to not just code.<p>It's easy to put on different hats when reacting to external crises, or events, but I don't want to forget about internal initiatives. E.g. proactive sys-adminning, creating marketing plans, etc.

It seems like the best-case scenario here is to just rely on software to do the chasing. Everyone already knows that software is a jerk.<p>FreeAgent does a great job of telling me when invoices are overdue. If I could configure it to send an obviously-automated email whenever that happens, it'd solve most of my invoice-chasing problems.

How would this idea fit in with a web startup? Should the founders be directly handling money issues with users?