Shoot For Success By Aiming To Please

Author: Rick Beneteau

"Riches and honor are with me, enduring riches and righteousness. My fruit is better than gold, yes, than fine gold, and my revenue than choice silver. I traverse the way of righteousness, in the midst of the paths of justice, that I may cause those who love me to inherit wealth, that I may fill their treasuries." That’s a direct quote from the Bible. And what it means is that when one chooses to focus on helping others to attain satisfaction and achieve success they, in turn, enjoy ultimate success.

I was too young to really understand this wisdom when I bought my first business—a dry cleaning store—during the early 80s, during a recession when interest rates surpassed twenty-percent and made many a loan shark shy. But what instincts I did possess guided me to the realization that if I made it my mission to hire the best people and work with them in a harmonious fashion to produce the best product in my area, I would in turn bring success for everyone.

Pay Fair Wages And Encourage Employees

I paid my people more than any competitor. I wrote a sales manual with the direct input of my employees and had meetings at my home instead of my place of business, and I enjoyed regular dinners with my store managers—in nice restaurants. Generous bonuses were given to the truly deserving and I tried my hardest to make a true team by asking for their opinions and advice on every critical issue. In reality, I became friends with my staff and got great ideas from them!

The beauty was in the fact that they all thought like our customers did and what a way to approach customer service; especially in a business where the drycleaner was the last, in a long line of service businesses, that customers didn't want to spend their hard-earned income on.

Treat Customers Like Family

As for the customers…

It all boiled down to treating customers like family. Our training ritual became "Customers are King" and every one who joined the staff was trained in this mentality. And with each new complaint came a new opportunity to make every unhappy person a loyal, lifetime customer. A customer who would in turn tell everyone they knew that their drycleaner bought them a brand new suit just a week after losing their seven year-old suit. Competitors told me I was a "sucker". My heart told me this was the way!

Word-of-mouth became my number one form of advertising.

I was young and wet behind the ears when I made these choices but I "cleaned up" in my town. In one of the most difficult and complicated businesses to run, I simply parlayed my beliefs into a successful multi-store business with happy customers, happy employees, and a pretty darn good bottom line.

But the story doesn’t end there.

After having sold my dry cleaning business, at the age of thirty-six, my wonderful employees threw me the most wonderful and unforgettable retirement party. Their best-wishes cards still bring tears to my eyes, over a decade later, and their gifts—a gold neck chain and bracelet—are still worn to this day. And I'm forever running into my former customers who almost, without exception, in some fashion or another, say to me "I wish you were still in business".

Aim To Please

The thing is: I AM still in business, albeit in cyber-space, and I'm doing very well. I still hold dear to the values that made me a success in the dry cleaning business and know that those values are responsible for what I have achieved today—on the Internet.

If there is only one thing that I will ever write that has any kind of impact on you, let it be this: Shoot for success by aiming to please.