The people tied to your business are the reason why you earn superior profits with cash reserves in the bank or struggle financially. Failure to treat your customers and employees as they expect to be treated creates disconnects that lower sales and increase costs. This is how businesses make less money.
Avoid this mess by being aware of who your best customers and employees are, what they expect from you, and what you should expect from them to make more money.
Overview
Whether you think you understand people or how comfortable you are interacting with family, friends, neighbors, and strangers, your interactions with them change when a person transforms into a customer or employee. Even if you treat every person you interact with as you want to be treated, a customer when they choose to buy from you, and an employee when they choose to work for you have different expectations.
In both cases, there is an exchange of money that changes the person-to-person dynamics. Customers represent cash inflow for the business, with employees representing cash outflow. Both are important, with existing customers being your most critical assets, while your best employees enable you to hold onto your customers.
The customer is affected by every single interaction they have with your company. The failure to profitably persuade a sufficient number of people to buy from you and continue to buy from you is the number one cause of business failure. You won’t need people becoming your employees because you won’t have the cash flow from sales to keep your business open.
You protect your business by protecting your customer base. You do this by ensuring everyone in your company knows “who” the customer is and “what” your company does to serve their needs and satisfy their wants.
Your second most important asset is your employees, who can walk away from your business on any day. Your best employees hold the key to you making more money because they contribute more to your business than they cost. These people have behaviors to business values that lead to superior business results.
When employees understand what is expected of them and what they can expect in return, it creates a “win-win” situation. You best position your employees for success by actively hearing what your people think, telling them like it is, helping them see how they contribute, and keep them aware of what’s working and where the business is getting stuck.
For most businesses, the single greatest sustainable source of advantage is the people employed in the business. What matters then is the behavior of those employees to produce planned results. Clear evidence exists that employee behavior drives customer behavior, and customer behavior drives business performance. Having a work environment that inspires all employees’ right attitudes and behaviors is the best way to make more money in both the near, short, and long term.
