I\u2019m asking the same question Tina became famous for. But this time, we\u2019re talking about success in business. Read most any textbook on growing a business and you won\u2019t see much about \u201clove.\u201d On the contrary, even marketing terms such as \u201ctarget market,\u201d \u201cshotgun approach,\u201d and \u201cclickbait\u201d treat the customer as less than human, someone to be manipulated into buying whatever is being sold. <\/p>\n
You also won\u2019t read that the first customers of any business are the people working<\/em> for that business. <\/p>\n Business success doesn\u2019t come from manipulating these two important groups of people. Having helped literally hundreds of business owners increase their revenue, I can state with full confidence that real, long-lasting, dependable revenue comes from taking good care<\/em> of these two groups of people. <\/p>\n If this idea repulses you, or you\u2019re just in it for the money, you may as well stop reading now. Nothing I say here will change what you think you should do.<\/p>\n If, on the other hand, you are a person who wants to make the world a better place, and started a business partly for that reason, this article is for you.<\/p>\n One of the first lessons we learn, as infants, is who cares about us enough to take care of us, and who we can\u2019t trust to do that. There may be apparent admirers, such as \u201cAunt Mabel,\u201d who enthusiastically pinches our chubby infant cheeks (ouch!) and exclaims to all how \u201cadorable\u201d we are, but when it comes time for real care\u2014giving us food and changing our diapers\u2014she\u2019s nowhere to be found. <\/p>\n Even this early in our lives, we start to be wary of anyone who appears to be only faking their concern for our welfare. Years later, when we start to work in an organization, our radar is scanning the environment for those we can trust and those \u201cAunt Mabels\u201d who talk a good game but who really don\u2019t care for us at all. <\/p>\n Honestly, this is why there are unions. Enough workers looked around and observed that the Aunt Mabels outnumbered those who actually cared. Worse, often it was the people at the very top who were the real Aunt Mabels, in spite of their public proclamations to the contrary. <\/p>\n On the other hand, when the person at the top really does care about their people, their people are more than happy to work there, and will tell others how much they love it. We have a client, a husband\/wife team who own a food product company. The husband was a professor teaching business at MIT, and he was surprised, once he started running this company, how much the workers cared about the success of the company. \u201cI realized that if the house was suffering, the people in the house will suffer,\u201d he said recently.<\/p>\n This is what I would call a \u201creality of humanity,\u201d just as obvious as babies realizing that Aunt Mabels are to be avoided and caring people are to be trusted and cherished. <\/p>\n If you really don\u2019t care about your workers as humans, people who respond positively to genuine concern for their welfare, then hiring and retaining good workers will always be tough for you. They will speak negatively about you when you\u2019re not in the room, and will always be on the lookout for a better place to work. <\/p>\n Personally, I believe in this reality of humanity so much that my first goal as the owner of my company is to make this a \u201csafe place for nice people to work.\u201d I do everything I can to help them do their best work, to feel cared for and protected. I will, and I have, dropped any clients who don\u2019t treat our team with respect. Our nice people take care of each other every day and help each other gladly. <\/p>\n What\u2019s the point of even having a company if the people in the company are miserable? How does that contribute to \u201cmaking the world a better place\u201d? How can they possibly care about our clients if they are not being taken care of themselves? <\/p>\n What is love, anyway? It\u2019s simple: caring<\/em>. Finding out what people need and then giving it to them. In business, as far as your workers are concerned, that means working with them to create a place that they want to spend time in and give energy to.<\/p>\n What I just typed seems like a ridiculous question to even ask. I mean, when we\u2019re not running a business, we are customers, just like the people we sell to. And we know perfectly well how quickly we will leave a business that doesn\u2019t care for us. In a nanosecond. Without regret. We\u2019ll never look back, and we\u2019ll be sure to warn others away. <\/p>\n The companies that are run by people who don\u2019t care for their customers think they are competing with other companies in their space. Yes, there\u2019s no question that their customers are leaving their company for the other companies. But the real competition\u2014the force that is working against all of their marketing efforts and expenditures\u2014is what happens when those customers realize that no one really cares. They see Aunt Mabel, plain as day, and they leave.<\/p>\n Without customers, there is no success. In fact, there is no business. One of the dangers of getting outside financing is the business managers feel like they have money to spend even though they haven\u2019t gotten that revenue from real, paying, satisfied customers. They are acting like they are successful, but they\u2019re not. Until the business sustains itself exclusively with customer-gained revenue, success is a delusion.<\/p>\n If you have a product or service that actually solves real needs, and you are constantly listening to and responding to your customers, making improvements based on their feedback, you are exercising the power of love\u2014caring\u2014and you will be rewarded. <\/p>\n People work so they can buy. They want<\/em> to be able to spend their money, and they want that expenditure to be free of regrets. They want to be delighted, and if they are, they will be more than happy to buy from you again and refer others to you. <\/p>\n Most people who start a business set out to do what they love, and be the best they can be at it. This is the seed from which a company grows. If you love what you do, your passion will be infectious, and you will attract others who want to join you to share and bask in your enthusiasm. They will be pleased to be part of something \u201cbigger than themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n If you started a business because you were forced into it by family expectations, or it just seemed like a way to make money but you really hate going to work every day, that lack of love for what you\u2019re doing will drag everyone down. Customers and workers won\u2019t want to be part of something that feels unhappy and passionless. <\/p>\n _________________<\/p>\n What does love have to do with business success? Everything. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m asking the same question Tina became famous for. But this time, we\u2019re talking about success in business. Read most any textbook on growing a business and you won\u2019t see much about \u201clove.\u201d On the contrary, even marketing terms such as \u201ctarget market,\u201d \u201cshotgun approach,\u201d and \u201cclickbait\u201d treat the customer as less than human, someone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7317,"featured_media":1032662,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[128,95,14,92,83],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038759"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7317"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1038759"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1038902,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038759\/revisions\/1038902"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1032662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1038759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1038759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1038759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What do your workers have to do with business success? <\/h2>\n
What does caring for your customers have to do with business success? <\/h2>\n
One last note: Loving what you do. <\/h2>\n