In business, everything starts with the customer. Without customers, there are no sales, and with no sales, a business is bankrupt. Adam Smith knew this. “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of production,” he wrote.
Many companies forget this, however, and eventually pay the price.
Last week I sat, increasingly miserable, in an establishment I own, as a catalogue of incompetence saw a series of customers treated poorly. I could bear it no longer and intervened; now I shall watch like a hawk to see that our employees remember that without customers, there is nothing. On this occasion, the staff were too busy dealing with “internal” matters to attend to the very people who justify the whole undertaking.