More Quality Customers
Building your company with quality starts with attracting the right types of customers.
Jim Stein
Published Date: May 17, 2023
There are Quality Customers and then, well, there’s everybody else. The difference is striking, as seen in this simple table.
Divided into four key dimensions, it’s the Quality Customers who 1) seek quality as their number one shopping priority, 2) have the wherewithal to afford to pay for quality, 3) demonstrate a personal integrity that takes pride in fair dealings, and 4) are loyal and much more likely to speak well about your company.
Staying focused on Quality Customers allows you to prune the less desirable customers. In this way, you’re building your company based on 1) quality margin work, 2) a satisfied, loyal staff, 3) positive cash flow, and 4) your company growing in value so it can be sold at some point in the future. The other side of the coin isn’t pretty, as we’ve seen companies that struggle with: 1) bad customers, 2) pure price shoppers who spin their wheels with thin and no-margin work, 3) staff dissatisfaction and turnover, and 4) cash flow troughs that make their owners’ stomachs hurt. This all leads to a declining company value that’s ultimately unsellable upon retirement…if the company makes it that far.
So, here I stand on this soap box and shout, “Attracting and influencing Quality Customers is the best way to build your company. Taking any and all customers is a path to problems.” Yes, I’m describing a stark difference between customer types. I’m convinced that Thomas Hobbes was talking about company owners who didn’t focus on Quality Customers when five centuries ago he wrote that “…the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
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