This Means WAR.

Business owners are getting disrespected, degraded and screwed every single day with a massive, fuck-you sized power drill.

 
…and I’m fed up with it.
 
I hear stories all the time of clients shortchanging service providers what they’re owed, flat out refusing to pay them (“we aren’t going to use your design, so…”), expecting them to be available 24/7 (…”I know it’s Saturday night but could you get this to me by Monday?”), guilt tripping them when they can’t take on a job last minute (it’s called lead time, and it’s not just a professional courtesy—it’s a necessity), and generally running around with the attitude that every small business owner is a freelancer, and every freelancer must be desperate for work, so I’ll see how much I can get away with because “they need the money.” <Insert ever-so-gentle chuckle.>
 

I’m fed up—

 
Hearing stories of people getting stood up by the people they’ve hired, of contractors pulling disappearing acts, of employees stealing clients, business partners stealing businesses, competitors stealing content and even of arrogant, overly entitled readers who send bloggers more cruel emails than they would their worst enemy. 
 

I’m fed up—

 
—hearing stories of work getting ripped off, copy getting stolen, and full-on products being illegally re-sold on the black market. (Once upon a time, we had one comedian tell our intellectual property lawyers that he would continue to illegally sell a book I wrote unless we paid him $1,000 to the Paypal address he provided. We thanked him for his Paypal address and then promptly got his account shut down.)
 
Yet, there seems to be some internal dialogue that goes on with online business owners in particular that apparently goes something like: Well, what can I do? I’m just small potatoes. I don’t want to cause a stir, so I’ll just chalk it up to a part of doing business. 
 
Bullshit.
 
That’s right. I said bullshit, and no, I’m not replacing the i with a twatty little asterisk. And if you want to stop reading TMF because I said that, then go ahead, sweetheart, PLUG YOUR EARS – the X button is right on top.
 
We need to cause a stir. The internet is our land, our opportunity, our future—and somebody’s got to protect the spirit, the enthusiasm, the courage of everyone who’s trying their hardest right now to make a business, a project, a life.
 

So I’m officially declaring war.

 
A war on the crooked. The unscrupulous. The dishonorable. And anyone online acting like a high ranking dickhead.
 
It’s about principle. And it’s time the internet raised the bar.
 
The computer screen does not give every Tom, Dick and Harry a license to swindle, take advantage of, or otherwise treat other people without the same level respect they would if they walked into their physical shop and wanted to do business face-to-face.
 
And since the world sometimes forgets, our websites are our shops. We are our shops. If someone wants to come into your shop and leave a racist, disgusting, belligerent comment? YOU GRAB THEM BY THE NECK AND THROW THEM OUT. If someone sends you an email telling you they hope you go to hell because they don’t believe something you wrote? TELL THEM YOU’LL SEE ‘EM THERE. (And remind them that they’re spamming you—after all, you didn’t opt in to get their emails.) And if someone tries to steal something from your shop without paying for it, whether it’s your time, your ideas, your products, or your Aunt Ethel’s antique inhaler, YOU REPORT IT TO US.
 
You can now officially consider The Middle Finger Project the unofficial Better Business Bureau of the internet, with legs like Erin Brockovich, guns like Desperado and zero tolerance for anyone who messes with our kind. 
 

We’ve started a brand new column where we’ll publish your business horror stories.

 
Client do you wrong? Customer write you a berating email? Web designer fall off the face of the earth? Colleague ask you to do something unethical? Whatever you’ve put up with as a business owner, past or present, you can now write a blog post about it, remain totally anonymous, (if you want), and submit it to our brand new This Means War column, day or night, all by yourself through the form below. Tell your story like you were writing a blog post, or telling a friend, and then using the form below, go ahead and submit. It’ll automatically get queued to publish in the column. (Pending approval, of course.)
 
All we require is that you omit all identifying information. (And if you submit a post that identifies a party, we’ll either have to change the information, or reject the post.) While that would be fun—wink—the goal of the column is to show a real day in the life of a small business owner, what we put up with, what we go through, and what others need to look out for…while sharing our common plight and sending a message to the world, loud and clear, that you probably shouldn’t mess with us.
 
We’re a crazy bunch, after all. Be careful, because the next thing you know? We’ll be telling the story on the internet. 
 
 

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Ash Ambirge

Ash Ambirge is the CEO & founder of this website, the world's most irreverent community for people screwing life & business as usual in favor of starting their own businesses, projects, books, ideas, or unconventional path. A trained linguist, brand language expert, and former magazine advertising executive and Director of PR for AWeber email marketing software, she'll help you shun the sea of sameness and come out punching. (With a fat glass of red in the other hand, of course.)

She's the creator of Brandgasm 101, a DIY kit for design & copywriting your website, THE Small Business Bodyguard, the world's most entertaining legal resource for online business, & Life Hooky Worldwide , a worldwide retreat company for overworked business owners, and, gained notable attention in 2011 for her 97 in ‘11 experiment, designed to demonstrate week-by-week how the everyday service provider could go from $0 to $97,000+ in revenue in a year or less using nothing more than a blog as a marketing tool. (It worked and the experiment closed out at $103,000.)

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