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Remember who pays the bills when you’re irritated
Lessons In Leadership
By Jack Hoey
Some years ago I had a customer named Ted, who had a glass shop in a busy shopping center. Most business owners would be thankful for the traffic Ted’s shop enjoyed, but Ted did not like it. He complained that customers were always coming into his shop and interrupting his work.
One day Ted told me he was moving the shop. He set up his business in a barn about 10 miles outside of town, surrounded by pasture on every side.
It was quiet there, and there weren’t any customers interrupting him all the time. Ted loved it.
Sadly, Ted did not enjoy the barn’s tranquility for long; he went out of business within a few months.
Nice as it was to be free from interruptions, it turned out that those customers did have some value. Without them, there was no one to request Ted’s work or to pay him for it.
Certainly Ted took an unusual approach to his business. But sometimes when I am in the role of a customer, I feel I am interrupting work that the other person thinks is much more important than answering my question or solving my problem.
We all have customers who interrupt us needlessly, and we all are busy with important work. Every one of us is tempted to hide from a pesky customer sometimes. But the minute you succumb to that temptation, your business has begun to die.
The process may take a long time, and the patient may look healthy for a while, but its best days are past. A company’s vitality is proportionate to its closeness to customers.
Some companies begin to die early because they are in business to serve themselves rather than others.
If you are more concerned with what you get than what you give, you will probably not give enough to be anyone’s preferred supplier.
But when service is your priority, you are likely to be rewarded richly for it. Success is a byproduct of serving others well; paradoxically, when success is the goal, it is much more difficult to achieve.
Other organizations lose vitality when they begin to have decision-makers without first-hand customer knowledge. This happens most often when a company grows large, particularly when it serves a broad geographic area. In fact, it is the biggest single reason that large companies often have difficulty competing with smaller rivals.
When leaders are making decisions without direct customer knowledge, the likelihood of a damaging mistake soars, and growing irrelevance in the marketplace becomes almost a certainty.
Other businesses become distant from their customers because they lose perspective on what they exist to do. Again, the leader sets the tone.
If you are too busy to attend to customer needs, you will find that people throughout your organization will also become too busy.
If customers are not your first priority, then you should not be surprised if your employees treat them as second-class citizens too.
Are customers getting on your nerves? Customers generally interrupt you when your system fails to provide the information they need.
You can reduce your interruptions if you will listen to them. They have the information you need to fix your system. This will make both you and your customers happier.
If your response is to hide, hoping your customers will leave you alone, you are likely to get your wish. Remember, though, that they will take their checkbooks with them.
Jack Hoey is president of Coastal Glass Distributors, a leading glass fabricator based in North Charleston. E-mail him at jhoey@coastalglassdist.com.
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