But what about the donuts?

A good long while ago I worked at a company that was acquired by a holding company. For those that are not well-versed in company acquisitions and sales you may not know what a holding company is.

The long and short of it is a holding company buys companies it thinks it can make a profit of, usually by making it super profitable in a short time frame and selling it off for significantly more money.

On face value, I am not opposed to this. Sometimes company sales can lead to changes that are gravely needed. Updates to antiquated technology, safety standards finally being followed, and dead weight and projects cut where previous leadership didn’t have the guts to deal with prior.

But, as can be the case, the changes can go too far, resulting in a poorer product/service than what was purchased.

My company had a lot of dead weight for example. People that should have been let go for years (The company had a no firing policy which led to people who came in. Sat in a chair and contributed nothing.) We also had “company initiatives” that provided no financial value, causing parts of the company to bleed money.

The business ran better instantly, but when the holding company couldn’t sell us right away they kept the cuts coming. I could go into all the gruesome details, but that is not what this blog is about.

This blog is about donuts.

One of the latter cuts the holding company made was getting rid of Friday donuts that were a nice little bonus that people looked forward to throughout the week. Was it small? Yes. Would people survive without them? Sure, but debatable. Was it a lynch pin? Turned out yes.

The company had gotten rid of potted plants, trash services (we had to empty our own cans), and plastic silverware. All those changes kinda sucked, but we understood, at the end of the day they were nice-to-haves.

Yet, when they cut Friday donuts, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The holding company would have these “State of the Company” meetings about changes and enhancements and every time afterward they would have a Q & A. And, ever since the donuts got cut, there was a constant question the President of the holding company would get. “When are the donuts coming back?”

After many of that same question over many SotC addresses the President exploded on the video stream about why !&$#$# donuts were such a big deal.

You see, I tell you that story to explain this concept to you.

Know Your Audience

This guy who was running the holding company was telling us all these amazing things to make the company more attractive to potential buyers. Which to nearly everyone on that call wasn’t going to make a lick of difference. Our company didn’t have stock options to get us financially pumped. When the company was sold none of us were going to see any benefit.

Each day was really business as usual. Usual, that was, until the donuts disappeared.

A “good” president would have seen those questions as a sign. A sign of what is important to the people that were looking to him for leadership and importance. People that he was looking at to run the company profitably.

But this guy was not a good president. He was tone deaf and unable to line up “his” desires and views of importance and “his people’s” desires and views of importance.

This broke back camel started to fall apart. Employees began to see that their values weren’t lining up with the company’s leadership anymore and they left. The company last I saw had yet to be sold (this was nearly 7 years ago) and had lost most of its high profile clients because the staff that stuck around couldn’t make up for the loss of talent.

Because of donuts.

So how does this apply to writing?

Good question, you attractive human person.

As a writer I have a balancing act between what I want to write and what readers I am trying to court want to read.

There are many people in the industry of writing, or I should say, that ‘want’ to be in the industry of writing that view this whole author thing as art and art should never be stifled.

I get that. Most author’s have a vision for their work. They have a story they want to tell. I am there with those people. BUT, and there is a big ‘but’ here (and I cannot lie) there is still the other side of books. The readers.

If the reader a writer is trying to grasp is turned off by the book because of content, style, ideology, whatever, then it wouldn’t matter how good a book may be.

There were a couple of high profile flops last year in the book industry. I am not here to belittle anyone in particular - you have the internet you can search to see what those were. These books had $100k advances and barely sold a thousand books. The books were purely what the authors and the publishers wanted to make, but not what the audiences wanted to read. Those that read those books posted comments on very visible book forums that weren’t very flattering on the author. It was a mess.

“Their” desires and views of importance and “their people’s” desires and views of importance didn’t line up.

Now I don’t have a published book at this moment, but I do know one thing. I want to make sure I get my readers a donut if they want a donut.