When a managing director doesn't act like a managing director

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19 August 2026 · Aston Gapes · about 6 minutes
Part of Get the enquiry

Cold emails. We all get them. We all despise them, yet I continue to do them. When a reply lands you get a little sense of mystique, not knowing what it is going to say. Is it a yes? A no? Or is it just an out of office.

The reply I got the other day was none of those.

For context, I had been on an air conditioning company's website. The normal ten or fifteen minute pre-check before emailing through. After you have done a few of these you know what to look for and what is out of place. There were a few things wrong. Nothing exotic, just the kind of thing you stop being able to see because you have walked past it so many times before.

So I wrote to the managing director and told him. Short email. Here is what I found, here is what it is probably costing you, happy to walk you through it.

The reply came back that same morning. I looked at the unread message with glee — first response of the day. Expecting a no, because it is usually a no, but there is always the element of hope.

It was a normal reply.

“No thanks Arseton. We don't need your help. Thank you.”

Okay, all goo— wait.

Arseton? Did he really just call me that? I looked at my keyboard and wondered whether it could somehow be a typo.

Sent from my iPhone

It wasn't a typo then. Autocorrect would've picked that up.

I would love to tell you I was the bigger person and laughed it off. I didn't. I sat there seething, working up the greatest comeback of all time, the one that would totally destroy him. Not a rant. An epic one-liner that would make him think twice about ever calling me Arseton again. I had a few in mind. Some of them were quite good.

I didn't send any of them. Apart from sweet, sweet revenge, what would it have done?

The problems are still on his website

That is the bit I keep coming back to.

He didn't just bin me, he binned the information, because it turned up attached to somebody he had already decided wasn't worth listening to. Those issues are still sitting there this afternoon, doing exactly what they were doing before I looked, and now he hasn't even got the vague awareness that someone thought they were worth an email.

I'm not telling you that to feel clever about it. I'm telling you because I don't think he did anything unusual. He did the completely normal thing, which is to judge the message by who sent it — and a stranger with an opinion about your business is about as low as that scale goes.

The trouble is that his customers are strangers too. Every single one of them, right up until the moment they aren't.

What a first enquiry looks like from the inside

Here is the thing that makes this expensive rather than just rude.

From inside a business, a genuine first enquiry and an unsolicited approach look almost identical. Unknown name. No context. Wants something. Vague about what. Might be a time waster, might be worth forty grand, and there is no reliable way to tell in the first four seconds — which is about how long anyone actually spends deciding.

So whatever reflex a business has towards people it doesn't know gets applied to both of them. If the posture at the top is someone I have never heard of wants something, get rid of them, that posture doesn't stay at the top. It is in how the phone gets answered at ten to five. It is in whether Friday's website enquiry is still sitting unread on Monday. It is in the tone of the reply that does eventually go out.

Nobody writes that down as policy. It just runs.

What we find, over and over

I look at a lot of these businesses, and the pattern is never stupidity or carelessness. It is that nobody inside a business can see it from outside, and nothing in a normal week makes them try.

The enquiry form asks eleven questions, because every one of them was added by somebody sensible solving a real problem. Nobody ever sat down and asked what it is like to answer eleven questions about a job you haven't even decided to do yet.

The phone number on the mobile site isn't tappable, so a bloke standing in a plant room with one hand free has to memorise it, close the browser and type it in. Nobody noticed, because nobody in the business has ever had to ring their own number.

The enquiry goes to an inbox three people can see, which means it belongs to nobody. It gets read. It doesn't get answered, exactly. It gets acknowledged, two days later, by whoever felt worst about it.

None of that is a character flaw. All of it is a business that has never once watched a stranger try to approach it.

The feedback loop is broken by design

And here is the part that makes it stick, which the managing director demonstrated rather better than I could have.

The people most likely to tell you what is wrong with the way your business meets strangers are, unfortunately, strangers. Cold emailers. People with something to sell you. Complainers. The bloke who couldn't get through and made a fuss about it.

Every one of those is easy to dismiss, and dismissing them is usually the right call — most of them are wrong, or selling you something you don't need. So the feedback that would genuinely help you turns up wrapped in exactly the packaging you have trained yourself to ignore.

Your happy customers won't tell you, because it worked for them. Your staff won't tell you, because they can't see it either. Your mates in the industry won't tell you, because they have got the same problem.

So it never gets fixed, and it never feels like anything is broken. There is no alarm for the enquiry that didn't come.

How to actually see it

You don't need us for this bit.

Get your phone out, not your computer. Search for what you sell the way a buyer would say it — not your company name. Find yourself, if you can. Try to ring the number without typing it in. Fill in your own enquiry form as though you had never heard of you, and count the questions before you give up. Then wait, and see how long it takes anybody to get back to you.

That is an afternoon, it costs nothing, and it is the closest you will get to standing outside your own business and looking in.

Most people who do it find one thing that has been quietly costing them money for about three years.

P.S. My epic replies are still sitting in my drafts. Just in case…