Learning from the negative

There is no business in the world that makes every person happy. Even the best organizations that focus on customer success will have their slip ups and mistakes, or just deal with an unruly customer.

We deal with a good amount of negative feedback here too at Secfi. In our analysis, most of the feedback is in response to being rejected by us for various reasons. Unfortunately we cannot provide funding to every person that applies and there is only a small subset of companies that would actually qualify.

All that said, it’s our job to correctly set expectations. Of course, that’s really hard to do in our world as it’s not black or white. Individuals often come to Secfi and do not really understand their equity or the potential value on it. Perhaps someone at the company got them excited about the prospects of their equity or they had a friend who went through an IPO and they expected the same.

The reality is that only a small percentage of companies will ever realize an exit event in which common stock gets paid out. That fact is something in which Secfi is often the bearer of bad news on as we reject an individual who is looking for cash on their shares.

I am by no means saying this is an unfair circumstance. It’s the world that we live in and we need to do better in our communication to clients. One of our initiatives this quarter is to overhaul our rejection system based on the feedback we’ve received. People want more detailed explanations on why they were rejected and we plan to do just that.