What can running a small business teach people about being customer-centric?

Many of us have at some point in our careers helped to run a small business, or a semi-autonomous department of a larger business, which can amount to much the same thing.


Don’t you remember the buzz you had when you went to work? The excitement on Sunday evening of looking forward to getting in on Monday morning and making things happen?

How often do people running small businesses or a semi-autonomous department of a larger business, ignore the customer’s agenda? Not often, perhaps, because quite apart from the inevitable pressing financial incentive to meet customers’ needs, the physical and emotional proximity of the customer makes it much easier to generate Customer Centricity than when one is working within a large organisation.

Mark McCormack, in What they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School, has some pithy and well-made observations about what it’s like running a small but growing business. These are drawn from his own recollection of the early days of the sports agency he created, IMG, when he and his team were representing, among others, great golfers like Arnold Palmer and Gary Player. He talks of the thrilling entrepreneurial feeling he had when he started out. As he puts it:



There is no other feeling like that in business, or at least any that I have ever experienced. It’s not just the excitement, although that is certainly part of it. It is more a sense of the immediacy and importance that everything takes on, the feeling that what you do from day to day matters, and generates a desire to do even more.



Unfortunately, in many cases, perhaps even in most cases, the larger an organisation grows the worse it becomes at devoting itself to customers.

As an organisation grows in size, its customers all too often become increasingly remote physically and emotionally from the people who work at the organisation. This has been a problem since the earliest days of industrialisation.

Also, when an organisation is becoming larger and more complex, it accumulates more and more of its own internal ‘stuff’ that it wants to focus on.

This is more of a problem today than it was, say, in the early years of industrialisation, when there was little legislation affecting large organisations, as governments adopted a laissez-faire (= ‘leave alone’) attitude towards business. Today, organisations must operate during a climate of intense regulation. Overall, the great complexity today of the commercial, economic, legal and technological frameworks within which organisations must operate require a correspondingly more collaborative and sophisticated approach to management.

But whatever the nature of an organisation’s operating environment, no organisation can afford to use the excuse that its size means it needs to focus on its own internal stuff rather than on its customers. Any organisation that thinks like that is most likely simply too lazy to take the trouble to look hard at itself and strip away the dead wood from its processes so that the whole organisation becomes truly customer-centric.

A useful (there are of course many) definition of customer centricity that I prefer  is:

the process of ensuring that every individual and department within an organisation is taking every step feasible to add value to what the organisation does for its customers.