This is the worst kept secret separating successful from failed businesses

By Mike Ssegawa

If there’s one thing to remember about this article, for anyone already into business or is planning to run one; just create enthusiasm among your clients. This is the public secret for all successful businesses the world over. Everything in business is built around the customer. Not money. Not those flowery business plans.

Businesses grow if they get customers and die if clients fly away for one reason or another.

Unfortunately, many business people take customers for granted. They don’t take care of them. They cheat them. They lie to them. They do lots of unbelievable things.

Just keep silent for a minute and imagine, if you were a worker and the chairman or CEO of your company walks in, how do you react? How do you greet them? When they ask for a favour, how do you respond to them?

Well, the customer is more important than the business owner? She is more important that the CEO.

The sooner any business realizes that fact, and orients its business strategy and staff to take care of their customers, then, succeed is guaranteed.

In Uganda, however, I have come across many people who treat their customers like a pair of fat buttocks. You walk into a shop, and some attendant stares at you! Hell me, there is no road in your shop! Think about service companies in the country, they might be telecoms, water, electricity, banks, where employees don’t feel the urgency of taking care of customers and you wonder what these people are thinking.

Every coin a customer spends on the company is what makes that company live for another day. The moment those pennies stop flowing, that is the end of the game.

Therefore any business person worth the salt knows that what makes their business is a client. Nothing in business is more important than her.

I have heard someone say, no, it is the workers. Oh yes. Workers are key but, like the cliché goes, the customer is king or queen.

If you have workers who know how to take care of the customers, your head is one the money. If you have technology that helps you to take care of the customer better, you are on the money. If you have management that enables your processes takes care of the customer better, you are good to go.

At the heart of all successful businesses is the art of getting more customers as you keep those that you already have. It turns out that whatever you do in the business, is to massage, gratify and satisfy that person who’s the lifeline of your business.

The reason this country is said to produce more entrepreneurs than any other on the planet, but has the most failure rate for businesses, is because we don’t know how to take care of our customers.

Happy customers make their way back.

That is why I was amazed when I entered  KFC in Kireka recently as pangs of hunger got the better of me on Wednesday evening.

Inside the fast food eating area was a full house, which surprised me given the fact this particular Shell fuel station as you head towards bank is less busy than others. That tables were full told me there’s something special about the place.

I placed my order and I sat down to squeeze my chicken and flies, a guy and lady approached me.

“She’s a birthday girl of the day'” the dude introduced her. “She’s here to serve cake.”

I had a free cake which moved around the patrons in the eating area.

The place was full of life. This isn’t a bar where you find more smiling faces, than restaurants where people take eating business more seriously.

However, the smiling faces I encountered here made me realize why the place was full. There was positive energy. There was enthusiasm.

Usually enthusiasm is what drives the proprietor, manager or other staff going. However, when you effect that enthusiasm into your clients, that is the business magic.

That’s why the business that make their clients happy, get more customers. And those that make their customers unhappy, fast lose present and future clients.

If you’re running a business, even if it’s a hospital where people come in pain, ensure one thing, that your customer is able to get a “high” feeling.

That high is what drunkards or drug users feel before they get addicted. Therefore, your one preoccupation in business is how to make your customers addicted to your services or goods. That’s the secret in successful businesses. And successful businesses are ones that make their entire chain of production and distribution about giving their customers the “high” moment.