When I ask people, “What is the purpose of business?” The typical response is, “To make money.”

To that, I have to ask, “How do you make money?”

There’s only one answer. You have to provide value that helps customers. And providing value that helps customers is …service. So, service must come first. It must be your priority if you hope to get financial results.

Additionally, customers are not the only partners in this endeavor. Not only do you have to have great products and services for customers who want what you do, but you also have to have suppliers you can trust to deliver the materials and resources you need for those products and services.

And it doesn’t stop there. You must have employees who show up and deliver what you do with a want-to, can-do, will-do attitude and use their imaginations to help you keep moving forward with new solutions. Moreover, you will need investors who provide capital and a supportive community that provides a reliable infrastructure and laws that make your business manageable. And if you build good relationships with all of those partners—customers, employees, suppliers, investors, and the community—you just might make money.

Thus, the chief objective of business leaders and their organizations should be to create, and keep creating, value for all those stakeholders so they will keep contributing to this ecosystem—a mutually beneficial service-relationship ecosystem.

So, if making money is the outcome you want, here are two critical truths you must realize:

1. There are, at minimum, five stakeholders who are partners in your business’s success, and
2. Service excellence is the key to earning their trust and sustaining the relationships.

This realization yields a success formula: SX + TSR = S (Service Excellence + Trusting Stakeholder Relationships = Success).

If you’ve never thought about this, it’s time to get to work.

==> If you want new posts delivered directly to your inbox, CLICK HERE to subscribe.