I sign this newsletter with my little call to arms “Build What Matters.” I wear this slogan on a t-shirt. I keep calling it out in my presentations. Moreover, it is not only me — my dear friends at Google for Entrepreneurs have a t-shirt which reads “Building What Matters” and a Google search for the term leads to 66.5 million references across the web.
Recently someone much smarter than I am (Raj Sisodia, Professor of Global Business at Babson College), made an excellent and insightful point in a presentation of his:
Doing the right thing will lead to profit. It does not work the other way around.
Tom Gayner, CEO of Markel Corp added to this point that “profits equal your customer saying ‘Thank you’ for the product or service you sell”.
With that being said: Focus on two things — Doing the right thing and creating something which makes your customer want to say thank you.