If you are in business, and most of us are in one way or another, you have to focus your efforts. But sometimes its possible to focus on the wrong thing. Like profit, for example. As a business person, if all you focus on is profit, you may get some, for awhile. But in the long run, you will go out of business because business is not about profit, it's about serving customers.
It's about finding a customer need and fulfilling that need in a way that customers are willing to pay you money. Out of those individual decisions comes your profit.
Most business people intuitively know this because, at one time or another, we are all customers. We all know how we want to be treated so it is not a huge leap to understand how to treat your own customers.
But as businesses grow and mature, it is easy for the CEO to lose his or her focus on the customer. Life becomes an endless round of meetings. Mergers. Proxy fights. In other words, the customer is no longer the focus.
But it doesn't have to be that way. For example, this article from Inc. on an airline called JetBlue. The CEO, David Neeleman, regularly flies his airline not as a passenger in first class but as a flight attendant. He goes row by row personally meeting the needs of his customers.
By doing so, he stays in direct contact with who his customers are and what they need. When was the last time Bill Gates was at your local CompUSA getting your feedback on MS WindowsXP? Or when was the last time Scott McNealy sat down with you to discuss how Sun Microsystems could better meet your needs? Never?
Guess which company provides better customer service? I'll wait while you think that over. In the mean time, the profits are rolling in for JetBlue.
Does all this mean JetBlue is infallible? Not in your life. This is the same company that released
the names, addresses and phone numbers of its customers in September 2002 in response to an "exceptional request from the Department of Defense to assist their contractor, Torch Concepts, with a project regarding military base security." [See the full article here]
JetBlue have much to explain for that misstep, but they understand it was a mistake and will pay for it.
It is one of the paradoxes of life that the more you focus on profit, the less profit you will get. You decide where your focus should be.
Aloha!
