If you really want to make money from your business, please make sure you take care of the people who take care of your customers.

Most business owners have very little or no direct interaction with their customers. So this becomes even more important then. It is easy to forget that your employees are also people who have dreams, ambitions and families.

It does not matter what the size of your organization is, good HR policies make a difference. And it is easy to identify a place where the people are taken well care of. Walk into any mall or retail store and you will know just after spending a minute there.

The minimum you should do is pay your employees on time – on the last day of the month. Every month. If you can’t do that, I think you should just shut down your business and get a job.

Remember, before there are customers, there were employees!

For most businesses, the first mindset is ‘how do I make money out of this?’. It is never – ‘What can I provide to the customer?’ ‘What is the value add that the customer gets?’ I am not saying that we should not look at the viability of our business models but in the process of doing this, we often lose focus of the important – the customer.

Seth Godin has a post about how retail stores arrange first by brand, then type, then style and then size. It would be so much easier if they would arrange by type first and then by brand or even type and size first and then by brand. It is quite an obvious way of doing it but I have never seen any retail store do it, except for bookstores. It would be a disaster if they had put all the McGrawHill books together and then separated them by topic.

It is so sad to see stores display the sign “Customers are our greatest asset” but don’t have a system in place to take care of that asset.