HOW DO YOU CREATE A COMPANY THAT PEOPLE LOVE TO WORK FOR…AND CUSTOMERS LOVE TO DO BUSINESS WITH?

For many entrepreneurs and small business owners, this sounds like some idealistic dream; some cultural nirvana for their company.
In fact, for most small businesses, accomplishing just one of those two monumental challenges would be great thing. But both? Well, it's not only possible, but if you accomplish one of them, you will almost always accomplish the other. In this talk, I’ll show you how you can do it.

It's rooted in a very fundamental premise that I’ve experienced with companies I’ve run and believe in totally - how you treat employees and customers are inextricably tied together.  Employees will treat customers EXACTLY how they are treated.  In short, to create a customer-centric company, where the create an employee-centric culture.

And there are examples everywhere of companies who operate just like that. Companies like Amazon, Southwest Airlines, Trader Joe's, JetBlue, Costco and Starbucks, to just name a few are consistently in Glassdoor's Top 50 Companies to work for and are highlighted in annual surveys by BusinessWeek or MSN Money as providing top flight customer service. There is a connection!

The talk is broken into two parts. First, we’ll show how to create an employee-centric culture, with topics such as:

• Create An Environment Of Mutual Trust And Respect
• Teamwork Encouraged Over Individual Endeavors - No Silos
• How to Hold Employees Accountable (Stuff that everybody misses)
• Provide Challenges/Encourage Risk-Taking/Allow Employees To Fail
• Communicate Constantly
• You're Allowed To Have Fun!

Then, we’ll talk about how to turn that into a customer-centric company. A customer-centric company is one where the customer comes first and is the prime focus of everything the company does, externally.  We’ll address things like:

• Get Everybody To Embrace A "Customers Pay Our Salaries" Attitude
• Make Every Customer Feel Like They Are Your Only Customer
• Make Customers The "Star" Of Your Story!
• Give Customers A Voice...And Then Listen!
• Make Customer Service A Critical And Respected Function
• Communicate Constantly (Face-To-Face, Whenever And Wherever Possible)

Creating a company with whom customers love to do business starts with creating one for which employees just love to work. Once you've done that, it means that you and your employees never stop showing customers the love! Those two fundamentals almost guarantee a company's success. They are absolutely connected. But as important, happy, satisfied customers beget other happy, satisfied customers! That's connected as well.