If you burn out you aren't doing your customers or your investors or your employees any favors. You need to create a situation inside your company where you are going to be retained for a long time. I think that's your obligation if you're good.
If you're constantly making business decisions on behalf of your investors first, ultimately you're going to wear down your other stakeholders. It's going to be potentially hurtful for your employees and your customers and the community you do business with.
When you're running a company, you have employees - lots of them - that can interrupt your schedule. You have customers that can interrupt your schedule. You have a certain obligation to wave the flag because people expect to get out and wave the flag. The number of ways that others can command your time is high.
Products, profits, and paychecks are not enough anymore. These days, society cares how you treat your own workers. Customers want to know you promote the same values inside your walls as you do outside; job hunters want to know you care about them before they send in an application. Your culture is your brand. You need to create an organization where your employees believe in what you do.
If your employees are disengaged, and they don't take care of your customers, it doesn't matter how good your strategy is - your customers will still go somewhere else.
You have to connect with your market and your employees. First, understand that what your market says is fact and what you say is opinion. Then, take the time to create a good connection with your employees. Without those two key connections, your business will be stuck in mediocrity forever.
I would tell startups to just keep your head down, keep building. Your contingency plan, if you have one, should be because you are still spending more than you make and you still don't have a line of sight for that J curve. That is the most important contingency. Because otherwise you are betraying that equation to your cofounders, to your investors, to your employees and to your customers.
Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.
When you're running a company, you have employees - lots of them - that can interrupt your schedule. You have customers that can interrupt your schedule. You have a certain obligation to wave the flag because people expect to get out and wave the flag. The number of ways that others can command your time is high. At this stage, I get to pick and choose a little more. Not that there aren't some things that have to be done, but I get a little more control over my time.
As a leader, you absolutely must expend your energy engaging your frontline employees so that they will take care of customers, who will tell stories about how great your company is to other people, who will become new customers.
Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy?.?.?.?Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.
Let your customers be your partners; let your vendors be your employees. What's necessary in this transformation more than anything else is courage and a willingness to change.
Where does your security lie? Is God your refuge, your hiding place, your stronghold, your shepherd, your counselor, your friend, your redeemer, your saviour, your guide? If He is, you don't need to search any further for security.
Your company is a product. Who are its customers? Your employees, who use it to do their jobs.
Get your product into users' hands as quickly as possible and incorporate the crowd's feedback to iterate. Your customers will provide the data you need to chart the best course for your company and bury any competitor that goes it alone.
Every employee can affect your company's brand, not just the front-line employees that are paid to talk to your customers.
Your first obligation, I suppose, is to your God. Your second is to your family. And your third is to your community. And you ought to try to fulfill all of those in your life.