Owners First, Customers Next and Employees Last: Is the Order of Business Priorities Changing?

Are the business priorities changing in these years of fast pace and change or are they as constant as they have always been? Let me share a few thoughts and perspectives and let’s have a discussion on this.

This is a fairly traditional top 3 of business priorities. 

1. Your owners
2. Your customers
3. Your employees

The Wall Street kind of guys tend to favor the owners. They need to be satisfied and especially in the short term, but this can lead to killing a business in the long term. The challenge is that in the future we don’t really know what the mind and long term business perspectives look like. Could this back up the arguments for a stronger owner focus even on the short term? Personally, I don’t hope so, but it could fuel some actions.

There is a lot of talk that customers should be the center of any business. I tend to agree on this, but I also like the insights shared by Richard Branson in this interview; Put Your Staff First, Customers Second and Shareholders Third.

This is a transcript from the interview:

Richard Branson: “It sort of should go without saying -- and it's surprising that it still doesn't go without saying at some companies -- if the person who works at your company is 100% proud of the job they're doing, if you give them the tools to do a good job, they're proud of the brand, if they were looked after, if they're treated well, then they're gonna be smiling, they're gonna be happy and therefore the customer will have a nice experience.

If the person who's working for your company is not given the right tools, is not looked after, is not appreciated, they're not gonna do things with a smile and therefore the customer will be treated in a way where often they won't want to come back for more. So, my philosophy has always been, if you can put staff first, your customer second and shareholders third, effectively, in the end, the shareholders do well, the customers do better, and yourself are happy.”

This makes a lot of sense to me.

I would like to add a fourth group which tend to be overlooked and that is your partners and thus the ecosystems you need to work with. In this era of open innovation, crowd/outsourcing and external collaboration, this has to get higher attention in many more companies.

So this is how I would rank the four groups: 

1. Your employees
2. Your customers
3. Your owners
4. Your partners

Or would I? Maybe the answer is that you can’t have a simple prioritization like this. You need to adjust to your specific situation and context which will be different from time to time and from the changing challenges and opportunities you face.

What do you think?