Lesson 2: Reorder your priorities (Contd.)
Your business is not about you. People generally go into business with themselves in mind. The focus of a lot of businesses is their own survival. The business exists to maintain its own existence and, if possible, to increase its size in the process. This is folly. You may raise your arms in protest at this assertion, but on closer examination you will find it to be true. We have “customer service” but we do not mean true service. Instead, we have come up with this scheme in realising that the customer is an important agent in our self-centered agenda. For many businesses the customer is a means to an end, a tool to be “used” to achieve our end of self-sustenance and self-promotion.
Your business is about other people.
This is not primarily a change in activities but a deep change in mindset. You are in business to serve. Not just to join the trend of “service” as a business buzzword, but truly serve another person. To care for them like you would like to be cared for, to seek their wellbeing and welfare. Your business does not exist to perpetuate its own existence – it exists to improve the welfare of someone else. Your customers do not exist to make you great; you exist to make them great. Your priority should be the customer (if we can call them that at this stage).
Re-ordering your priorities in this light means you have to move from away from a profit-centered business model. Now, this is the crux of the matter –profit is not the aim of your business, profit is simply a consequence of your business. Many people struggle with this concept because we have generally accepted that profit is the true primary aim of a business (whatever else we may say to mask this). People often wonder, how do I run a business without profit? After all, staff need to be paid, expenses need to be covered and products need to made. And herein lies the confusion – we do not understand the real place of profit.
If your business were a human being, then profit would be like the air you breathe. Like profit in a business, air is essential for the human being to live and function. When air is in short supply or cut off altogether, the body lives on borrowed time – working from internal storage and finding alternative means to make up for the shortfall – until it can no longer continue and death ensues. This is true about profit in a business; a loss-making business can survive for a limited time only. Even though air is so important for the human body, it is not the primary aim of the human body. Air is the natural reward for the work of movement. Your body is made to move and as it moves, it draws in more oxygen. This is the same for your business and profit. When we have the genuine benefit and joy of our target in mind, we have the foundations for good profit. Profit is the fuel in the car of our business. It is important to get us to our target but is not the aim of the business. Instead it is a reward for a job well done.
This idea is something the global tech industry has understood better than most others. Facebook made profit for the first time five years after it was founded while Amazon, founded in 1994 did not make a profit until 2001! Both these companies guzzled a ton of cash on the road to profitability. What is the underlying logic that permitted and sponsored these profitability timelines? Simple: “If you can bring true delight to more and more customers and can prove that customers are benefited by and happy with you, you will eventually make profit even if you are not making a profit now.” This is not a tech-specific idea even though it has become a theme in the tech world, with Uber, Snapchat, Slack and others yet to make a profit.
It is a fundamental idea that if well understood, can be adopted and adapted across industries. The tech industry has simply taken hold of this fundamental idea and worked it out in the tech space. Before they did this, most investors/industries would simply not allow you move far without showing profit, regardless of true delight provided. Unfortunately, most business people across other industries have still failed to learn this lesson, explaining it away as a quirk of the tech industry. One of the biggest mistakes you could make is to explain it away for yourself too. You should not underestimate the transformative potential of this mindset change. It lies at the root of everything.
Join me next week to find out more about how you can adopt and apply this mind shift.
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Toluwanimi Osinowo
Dr. Osinowo is a thinker and teacher: coaching high-potential leaders, advising organizations and originating breakthrough ideas. He is the founder of CANTAB Associates and the pioneer of SAPIENCE which is both a philosophy and methodology of thinking. He previously worked in the London office of the leading global strategy consulting firm Bain & Company. He studied Medicine at the University of Cambridge where he was a Cambridge Commonwealth Scholar. He can be reached for your questions and comments.
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