BUSINESS LESSONS
When Principles Guide Profit
A 19-year business journey built on values instead of shortcuts
I was a self-employed design consultant for nineteen long years. When I was at my peak of earning, I decided to close down my business and pursue my interest in a spiritually oriented life.
When I started my design consultancy business, I defined my professional goal in three lines:
- Whatever I do, I will do it to the best of my ability, striving for perfection. There is an oft-quoted phrase in my mother tongue, Tamil for it: “Seivana thiruntha sei”.
- I will accept only such orders which are within my capacity to conceive, design and deliver. In simpler terms, I will bite only as much as I can chew.
- I will make my earnings as a consequence of making my customer happy. It means my prime goal is not to make big money, but to make the customer satisfied with my services. Money will come as a consequence.
Did I turn out to be an extremely successful design consultant?
I won’t say so.
I never earned a fantastic income. I never had a phenomenal growth — because they were not in my priority list!
But what I could achieve was:
- A stable and steady business income that grew gradually year by year, except for minor ups and downs, which were part of any business cycle.
- A loyal set of customers who came to me again and again. Apart from a few new customers, the major customers I had in my first year continued to be with me in my 19th year too.
- Hardly any design that I made failed to work. Of course, there were one or two machines that failed to meet the customer’s expectations, but that was not entirely due to faulty design alone.
- Hardly any missed payments from any customer.
- Hardly any financial crisis. No loan repayment problems. No pending or delayed payments to any of my stakeholders.
- No bitterness or heartburn with any customer or stakeholder.
What paved the way for such a smooth run
As a spiritual person, I would primarily attribute it to divine grace. Next was my being a stickler for doing things right, striving for perfection.
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Meeting customers’ quality standards is one thing. Keeping our own quality standards higher than customers’ expectations is another. When I say “striving for perfection”, I mean fulfilling my own (higher) standards.
Let me give you an example. A few decades ago, when I lived in a suburb, I preferred to go to a specific salon for my haircut. The middle-aged hairdresser, after finishing his job, would take a mirror, show it behind my head so that I could see its reflection in the mirror in front, and ask me, “Is it okay, is it fine, Sir?”
I would say yes. He would keep aside the mirror, pick up his scissors and comb again, do a little trimming here and there, nod his head, and only then allow me to get up. My nod alone was not enough for him. He had his standards. He wanted to finish it to that level, irrespective of my approval.
Such craftsmen are my ideals.
Sometimes, I failed to deliver my designs within the promised delivery schedules. At such times, a typical conversation with the customer would be like this:
“Mr CV, I am afraid you are behind your promised delivery period by more than a week. Our production schedules are getting affected. This is not acceptable. When can I expect the designs?”
“I’m really sorry, Sir. I am doing the final checking of my finished design drawings. It does eat away considerable time, but I will never compromise on that. I have found some minor faults in my original design and I am in the process of correcting them. Hopefully, I will deliver all the checked drawings by next Friday; please bear with me…”
Expressing some unhappiness, the customer would agree anyway. But I knew pretty well that one week’s delay from my side was equivalent to several weeks of rework at the customer’s side, along with its costs and consequences.
After delivering my designs, one thing that would scare me always was a call from the manufacturing department of my customers. Sometimes they would ask for clarifications on my drawings. Sometimes they would question the correctness of them. Sometimes they would ask me to visit them personally to explain things. I would breathe a sigh of relief if the call ended up just as a need for clarifications, and not due to any fault in my design drawings that got exposed after the items were made!
Of course, there were one or two occasions where there was indeed some fault in the design (that escaped my scanner in my final checking process). I would immediately apologise for the error and come forward to compensate for any financial loss caused by it.
But mostly, my customers never demanded such compensation, but took it as a slip that can happen to anybody, and were magnanimous enough to absorb the cost.
As per my contract terms, I was supposed to be present when the machine was finally assembled and tried out. On many occasions, the customers never called me. It only meant that there was no hiccup during the final trials. Nothing gave me more happiness than when the customers cleared the final ten percent payment due to me automatically after trials.
My belief, based on my experience, is this: When you run a business based on ethics, principles, and values, God protects you.
