BRX Pro Tip: Decisions: Who Am I Really Serving?
Stone Payton: Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips, Stone Payton and Lee Kantor here with you. Lee, I’d like to pick up our conversation on decision making.
Lee Kantor: Yeah, something I’ve been thinking a lot about regarding service businesses in particular, I’ve noticed that there’s kind of three stages a service business goes through, or maybe any business, really. In stage one, everybody is just locked in about serving the customer. They just think, What do I have to do? What more value can I add to serving the customer, serving the customer, serving the customer?
Lee Kantor: But what happens as the company grows or as the business grows, the focus of leadership tends to shift a bit. And now, they start thinking about what do I have to do to serve the company? What am I going to do to serve the company? How can I improve my systems? How can I become more profitable? How can I scale what I’m doing? And then, the focus shifts a bit from the customer to the company.
Lee Kantor: And then the third stage, and this is something inevitable in most bureaucracies in larger, larger enterprise organizations, they stop thinking about the customer, they stop thinking about the company, and they start thinking about themselves and they start worrying about serving themselves. How can I use this job to get my next job? How can I get promoted over here? How can I take here and I can jump to this other company over here? And then, now all they’re doing is thinking about their own personal recognition, their own promotion, their next opportunity, rather than what’s best for the business or the customer.
Lee Kantor: And great leaders of organizations know this, and they don’t lose sight of these things. And they keep companies focused on the customer because the customer is foundational. You cannot just stop thinking about the customer. You know that when the customer wins, the company wins. And if the customer wins, the company wins, you are going to win too.
Lee Kantor: So start asking yourself today, who am I really serving with the decisions that I’m making? And get back on track. Serve the customer. If you do that relentlessly, everybody’s going to win.
