Some People Just Aren’t Going to Like You

One of the things I’ve learned from running a business in the fire service is that some people just aren’t going to like you.

That’s it.

You didn’t do anything to them. They’ve never bought anything from you. They’ve never had a conversation with you. In some cases, they’ve never even met you.

They just don’t like you.

I used to have a hard time with that.

When we first started Blue Collar Firemen, I paid attention to everything people said. Probably way too much. A negative comment from some random person could bother me more than 100 positive ones. I’d wonder what their problem was or if we were doing something wrong.

As the business grew, I started realizing that it’s just part of putting yourself out there, especially in the fire service.

This is a funny industry when it comes to business.

Start selling shirts and somebody says you’re trying to make money off the fire service.

Build a following on social media and now everything you post is “for likes.”

Promote your own company too much and you’re full of yourself.

Don’t promote it enough and nobody knows it exists.

You really can’t win.

And I think for a long time I was trying to.

I wanted everyone to understand what we were doing and why we were doing it. If somebody criticized something, I wanted to explain it. If somebody had the wrong idea about us, I wanted to correct them.

At some point you realize how much time you’re wasting.

There are absolutely people whose criticism I listen to. There have been plenty of times over the years where somebody has called something out and they were right. We’ve made mistakes. I’ve made mistakes. If you’re going to put yourself out there and run a company, you better be willing to hear that.

But that’s different from somebody who just wants to see you fail.

Those people exist too.

Sometimes I think we have a weird relationship with success in the fire service. We tell people to work hard, take pride in what they do, train, get better and go after things.

Then somebody actually builds something and we immediately start questioning why they’re doing it.

“He’s just trying to make money.”

Well, yeah. It’s a business.

I never really understood why that became such a bad thing.

You can care about the fire service and own a business.

You can genuinely want to help firefighters and still need that business to make money.

You can love the job and also want something you spent years building to become successful.

Those things don’t cancel each other out.

BCF has taken a ridiculous amount of time, money, work and stress over the years. There have been plenty of nights sitting on the couch working on it after my family went to bed. Plenty of ideas that didn’t work. Plenty of money spent that I probably wish I had back. Plenty of times I’ve wondered if something was worth continuing.

And then you see something work.

Someone takes one of the classes and tells you what they got out of it. An instructor gets their name in front of firefighters across the country. Someone messages you because a video made them think differently about something. You raise money for someone who needs it. You meet people through this thing that you never would have met otherwise.

That stuff is why I still enjoy doing it.

Does that mean everything we do is perfect? Hell no.

Does it mean everyone has to like BCF? Absolutely not.

Does everyone have to like me? Definitely not.

That last one probably took me the longest to figure out.

The older I get, the less interested I am in trying to convince somebody to like me or what we’re doing.

If you have legitimate criticism, I’ll listen.

If we screw something up, we’ll own it.

If we can make something better, we’ll try.

But if you just don’t like us?

That’s fine too.

There are too many people who do support what we’re doing to spend all our time worrying about the ones who never will.

If you’re building something in the fire service, you’re eventually going to deal with it too. A business, a training company, a product, a social media page, whatever it is.

Some people will support you.

Some will criticize you.

Some will copy you.

Some will wait for you to screw up.

And some people just won’t like you.

Keep going anyway.