Take it from the titans, there's only one way to build a sustainable, built to last company and that's by putting the customer at the heart of everything you do. If you don't know the visionaries by name, you'll certainly know them by brand, as what follows are words of wisdom from leaders of dominant empire businesses
"Never Guest is nuisance, or Guest is marginally important, or important when it suits,
but Guest with a capital G. "
Mr. Blackpool
Little Touches® Hospitality
"Success and profitability are outcomes of focusing on customers and employees, not objectives."
"The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive"
"The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer."
"The single most important thing is to make people happy. If you are making people happy, as a side effect, they will be happy to open up their wallets and pay you."
"No business plan survives first contact with customers."
"Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable."
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
"No matter how many customers you have, each is an individual. The day you start thinking of them as this amorphous 'collection' and stop thinking of them as people is the day you start going out of business."
"Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless."
"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."
"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
"If you make a sale, you can make a living.
If you make an investment of time and good service in a customer, you can make a fortune."
"People may hate you for being different and not living by society's standards, but deep down, they wish they had the courage to do the same."
"Don't worry about being successful but work toward being significant and the success will naturally follow."
"All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts...not analysis."
"Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you."
"Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart."