Castles, Customers, & Leaders

Building castles and business leadership are similar!

Building castles in the middle ages was big business.  Seems like everyone had to have one! Designs and capabilities were constantly changing to meet new challenges.  At the time they protected your "business and customers" from "outsiders". (Your throne, peasants, merchants, subjects - users of your kingdom - from invading hordes.) Not much different than today.  Today your company is constantly being "bombarded" by competitors.  They move quickly, they scale the walls that you built up over the years with your customers through great customer relations, great products and services you thought could not be duplicated. You thought you had twenty meter thick walls around your customers. What happened?  The walls are breached and all your hard work is gone in the blink of an eye.

Unless your "troops" are ready and waiting to take corrective action your castle could be lost!  Maybe your competitors are utilizing some tools and processes that you need to acquire. Hopefully your customers are not unhappy with you - they just want to obtain the best return possible for each purchase they make.  They expect total quality, knowledge support, and a fair price. That is why you must be the one to supply them with these things and the solution to their problems or needs before they know they have a problem or need! You must deliver the highest quality product to exacting customer expectations.  You must be a lean, mean machine that is ever changing to meet the expectations of your customers in the shortest possible time at the most competitive price and at the highest quality. The only way to do this is to be flexible, understanding, motivated, lean, leading, competitive, cost aware, creative, trained, knowledgeable, quick to respond, and - by the way - very good at selling. You need an organization based on Lean Leadership principles.

Instead of stone walls 20 meters thick you need to build walls with The 10 Customer Facing Characteristics of 21st Century Businesses*:

1. Highly trained work force - focused on continuous learning to quickly respond to customer needs
2. Knowledgeable sales people who understand the customer's business
3. Lean manufacturing programs to produce high quality products at competitive prices 
4. Leaders focused on leading, coaching, and praising to ensure a customer-centric business
5. Managers focused on ensuring the business goals are met so customer expectations can be met
6. Employees empowered to make informed decisions that lead to customer satisfaction
7. Vision, Mission, Objectives, and Goals aligned to meet customer requirements
8. An enlightened, diverse work environment with personnel representing all generations to better understand the wide variety of customer types and expectations. 
9. Business principals based on sustainable qualities that meet all stakeholder expectations equally to ensure the business is there to serve it's customers, not the expectations of outside investors looking for short term gains.
10. Long term thinking led by senior management that maintains a close relationship with key customer personnel.

Once you put these walls in place they are going to be more difficult, if not impossible, to scale by outsiders.  Even if your competitors "lob a few" at you, you will be positioned to move quickly and counter attack! Throughout this blog are ideas and tools to help you become more competitive, cost effective, and focused.

* Trade Mark of Hibbard Associates LLC