At the heart of every great leader and extraordinary company is one simple yet impactful principle: love. Love for your customers and employees transforms drudgery into passion, teams into families and customers into raving fans.
Love is not just a feel-good idea; it is the foundation of successful and profitable businesses. Love drives you toward service leadership and a desire to fulfill the deepest needs of your clients. By doing this, love pushes your business to the next level.
You can’t love your product more than your customer
In our business and leadership coaching events, we teach that the biggest mistake that most organizations make is falling in love with their product or service instead of falling in love with their ideal customer.
It’s understandable. You have invested so much time, thought and energy into your company that it feels like your child. But the trap people fall into is that they become so focused on themselves and their business that they can’t see or hear what their customers really want. In other words, they fail to pivot.
“Falling in love” with your ideal client means that you understand, anticipate and consistently fulfill their deepest needs and desires. Any business can be competitive, but the companies that dwarf their competition are the ones that develop incredibly high customer loyalty. They create raving fans.
“Do more for your customers than anyone else and maintain that standard consistently.” —Tony Robbins
YouTube started as a video-based online dating service. It would have been lost and forgotten if it had continued to see itself only as a dating site. Instead, the founders realized that customers really wanted a platform for sharing and viewing videos of all kinds. They shifted their business model to meet their customers' needs, and YouTube became the world’s largest video-sharing platform. It was eventually acquired by Google for $1.65 billion.
Instagram began as a check-in location-sharing app called Burbn. Unlike other check-in apps, Burbn allowed users to share photos as well. After evaluating their own app and observing the success of photo apps like Hipstamatic, founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger decided to pivot and build a photo-sharing app with social media capabilities. They anticipated what their ideal client really wanted and created a dominant social media company that was eventually acquired by Facebook (now Meta) for $1 billion.
