[ilamont]

Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers

Hard disagree. I certainly want to keep my customers satisfied and provide them with value, and they (along with employees and partners) are absolutely necessary to the success and continuation of the business.

But the number one consideration in any business are the needs of the owner(s), which may include financial, a desire to grow the business, family considerations, physical health, mental health, and many intangibles related to self worth, discovery, personal growth, creativity, and community.

If you can't find a balance, the business ends or gets sold. Or, the owner suffers damage, sometimes irreparable.

[bryans]

> Hard disagree. I certainly want to keep my customers satisfied and provide them with value, and they (along with employees and partners) are absolutely necessary to the success and continuation of the business.

If your customers are only satisfied, that means you end up spending significantly more on acquisition and retention, because nobody is going to be rabidly loyal enough to your business to extol its virtues to their friends and family and colleagues and on social media. That hobbles your growth and virtually eliminates the potential for word-of-mouth. People don't tweet about how a product "is satisfactory and provides an adequate amount of value."

I'd recommend checking out an amazing talk on exceeding customer expectations[1] by a Seattle business coach named Brad Worthley. And I get it, anybody (other than John Madden) with "coach" in their title is almost universally someone to avoid, particularly when they start their talk by mentioning the books they've written, but this guy really does understand how those customer dynamics work. He ELI5s the whole topic, along with excellent anecdotes to show each of the concepts in action.

And I assure you, things work exactly how he describes. If you bend over backward for them, your customers will take care of you. But if you treat them as a "necessity for the continuation of the business," they're not going to care about you at all, which means they'll leave you the minute something better or cheaper comes along -- or the first time you make a mistake.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40eyo7cgJ7w&t=4m30s

[ilamont]

> And I assure you, things work exactly how he describes. If you bend over backward for them, your customers will take care of you.

Do you own a real business, incorporated with real products, employees, P/L, etc.? If so, I would really like to hear your experience bending over backwards for customers and having the resulting social media and customer buzz solve everything. That's not the way things work in my admittedly limited experience (2 companies, one failed, one ongoing).

I haven't heard of Brad, but the thing that makes me hesitate is not the "coach" but rather the origin - Seattle - which is where a lot of the "obsess over customers" dogma originates.

[bryans]

You're just being inflammatory now. Questioning whether or not I have business experience, concocting some arbitrary definition of "real" business, pretending I said social media "solves everything," and then declaring that you've got it figured out better than the whole of Seattle's population just because you have a failed business and one "ongoing" -- which doesn't exactly scream "wildly successful using my current strategy."

Toward the end of 2020 I consulted with a handful of startups. Among many topics, my primary advice was to be as genuine as possible in all situations and to become "professional thankers." Universally, the ones who took that advice saw their growth skyrocket in 2021, while the ones who didn't are still wondering why they can't get traction. And they're going to keep wondering until they figure out that the personal connection between yourself, your employees and your customers is paramount, because that's how societies work constructively and successfully.

Whereas your owner-first approach is how we end up with every major company on the planet paying virtually no taxes, and selling customer data, and sometimes even literally colluding and plotting against users' mental health and well-being, never realizing that they'd be so much more profitable and personally enriched if they would only give a damn about their fellow humans.