How could an item on the menu of every fast food drive-through have anything to do with entrepreneurship?  Easy, both have everything to do with a wise investment of time and money.

Learn more about our partner’s “McNugget Principle” by clicking here.

“primum non nocere” = first, to not harm

This Latin tidbit actually comes from the Hippocratic Oath (the one doctors swear to).  But there is a lesson in there for all of us.  A business’s first goal every day should be to not cause our customers to feel harmed.   It doesn’t matter what your job or role, your real job is to make customers feel loved.  This manifests itself in many ways, but it should always be the centerpiece of your efforts.

Some people have a great deal of direct customer interaction, and some people have jobs where we rarely directly interact with a customer.  But as a rule, customer interaction should be a few things:

1. Clear and concise (i.e. don’t waste their time or confuse them)
2. Prompt (i.e. if a customer or prospect has to wait more than 24 hours for an initial contact, we failed)
3. Follow-up and Follow-through (i.e. if we don’t have answers yet, at least once per day, tell them we are working on it. And if we say we are going to do something, do it and let them know we did it)

Following these simple steps usually means you have very happy customers.  No matter what your role or job is.  Support is not a department, it is a mentality.

Primum non nocere….

“Leadership is the key to 99 percent of all successful efforts.”

-Erskine Bowles

One of our partners wrote an article about what is needed to be a leader, which as noted above, is a very important part of any successful business.  Click here to read this classic from the Entrepreneurial Archives.

I have traveled a lot.  In some years of my life, I have spent as much as 50% of the nights sleeping in a hotel.  But very few of those evenings have been spent in Hyatt hotels.  So, on a recent trip to Hawaii, I spent 9 nights at two different Hyatt properties - the Grand Hyatt in Kauai and the Hyatt Regency in Maui.  Besides being beautiful and amazingly well designed, the Hyatts also did a great job of showing what it means to deliver excellent customer service.

In one of the brochures for the hotels, the general manager had a note that every staff member was there to make our stay perfect.  And this statement seemed to be true over and over.  Every single staff person we passed during our stay would say “hello” or “aloha”.  They were always smiling.  They were always willing to give some local advice or direction.  In addition, they paid great attention to detail.  Things were constantly being cleaned and straightened.  Things were always in place and always looked fresh.  Customer service was an obvious focus, and it made us feel like we were important.

As entrepreneurs, it is our goal to make our customers feel as if they are important.  This is how you make customers become ambassadors for your business, just like Hyatt has done with us.

Government can do one of two things to business, it can expedite its growth by creating an environment with low taxes and minimal regulation or it can make taxes, permits, and regulation that are nothing more than roadblocks to entrepreneurs.  On a vacation to Kauai, Hawaii, this simple fact was demonstrated. Kauai is a beautiful island known as the “Garden Island”, and it is luscious, green and magnificent.

On Kauai, there is the Kauai Cigar Company, which was born out of the Blair Estate Coffee Farm.  According to the marketing brochure for the cigar company, the company is a place where “diversification and expansion are part of the intrinsic spirit.” You can read this to mean that they are an entrepreneurial group of people that run the company/farm.

But what really hit home was a message that you find later in the same brochure: “While it took nearly 6 months to obtain a federal permit to manufacture and sell cigars, the reporting, bi-monthly federal taxes, and whopping nearly 40% Hawaii wholesale tax made it financially impossible to hand make cigars in Hawaii.”  So what did these entrepreneurs do? They found a company in Nicaragua to roll and manufacture the cigars.  While a testament to the fact that the world is flat and that entrepreneurs will not be stopped by government silliness, it also demonstrates the backward thinking of many governments.  Instead of having jobs in the U.S./Hawaii for this work, the Kauai Cigar Company ships their cured tobacco from Hawaii to Nicaragua and then back to the U.S.  While we can congratulate them for their creativity and ability to make their business work, we have to shake our head at the stupidiy of the Hawaiian and U.S. governments.