A Quote by Richard Branson
To succeed in business you need to be original, but you also need to understand what your customers want.
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Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business. Customers also help you fit your product to the market. And customers will help debug and improve the quality of the product.
Having been in the restaurant business, our job in the restaurant business is to be responsible for our customers' happiness. It's the nature of the hospitality business. You need to take care of people. You take care of customers above all others. Customers are your lifeblood.
I think if you want to be a successful president or a manager of a team, you need to understand what the business is all about because you have to deal with the business side of the game to be able to do what you need to do.
Consider the many financial industry executives who walked away with many millions as their organizations failed - I think the expression is "failing upward." People also need to understand that their "technical" job performance is correlated with their career success, but again, many other factors such as educational credentials, length of service, and yes, political skills, also contribute to success. So people need to understand business and technical issues but they also need to master organizational dynamics.
Visionary CEOs don't need someone else to demo the company's key products for them. They deeply understand products, and they have their own coherent and consistent vision of where the industry/business models and customers are today, and where they need to take the company.
If you wait for customers to tell you that you need to do something, you're too late. Good business leaders should be half a step ahead of what customers want, i.e. they don't actually quite know they want it. That's what innovation's about. With Plan A, we didn't wait for the consumers to tell us.
What we need to do is run our business. We need to come up with a value prop that is so compelling that customers have to go for it.
You have to have what your customers need because if you don't have what your customers need, you're not going to have customers.
No matter what your product is, you are ultimately in the education business. Your customers need to be constantly educated about the many advantages of doing business with you, trained to use your products more effectively, and taught how to make never-ending improvement in their lives.
Whether you're playing sports, starting a business or anything else in life, you need to identify your talents. Your responsibility is to find what you do better than anyone else. Once you identify what that is, you need to put yourself in the best position to succeed.
I wish there were fewer art dealers. I wish there were fewer auctions. I wish there were just two auctions a year. It's just too much. And at the end of the day, if you're a dealer and a professional, fine, that's your business, that's all you do. But as an individual, if you're not a dealer and it's not your business, you need time for these things. You need time to study what's happening. You need time to understand the market. You need time to go to a museum. You need time to see a show. You can't go to one every day. It's becoming a trend.
You have to understand not just what your customers need, but how and where they prefer to access information.
So that's the biggest lessonsI've learned it is your dream, you do not need a business loan, you do not need the support of others, you need to do what you need to do and when you become, what do I want to call the word, like legitimate, when people see that you are real, then people will support you, but you can't ask them to take a risk on you.
Customers are still setting the technology agenda. Not just you, our customers, but your customers as well. What more and more are telling you is what kind of services they need, and how and when they want those services delivered to them. And in fact, that is just the beginning.
It's kind of fun at my age to go back and talk to business-school people. I tell them, "I can summarize everything you need to know to lead a major corporation. Are you prepared to write this down?" And then they get all ready. I tell them I can summarize how I succeed as a leader: Listen to your employees, listen to your customers, shut the f - - up, and do what they tell you.
I can find only three kinds of business in the universe: mine, yours and God's. Much of our stress comes from mentally living out of our business. When I think, "You need to get a job, I want you to be happy, you should be on time, you need to take better care of yourself," I am in your business. When I'm worried about earthquakes, floods, war, or when I will die, I am in God's business. If I am mentally in your business or in God's business, the effect is separation.
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