Businesses That Focus on Making Money Don't Become the Most Successful
The businesses that focus primarily on making money rarely become the most successful. Here's why relationships, not transactions, build lasting value.
Businesses need money to survive, that’s a fact. In the same way, we need oxygen to survive. But you’ve never once woken up and thought, “I need to breathe oxygen today”. Business is the same. If you want to build a successful business, your focus shouldn’t be on making money.
Look at any business you actually admire. It’s probably one that has been around for a while, it’s most likely built a beloved brand, and made a significant amount of money. However, I can pretty much guarantee that they didn’t get today by focusing on the money. They got there by:
Understanding problems that real people have, and solving those problems better than anyone else.
A lot of businesses that haven’t achieved this high level of success don’t operate in this way. They treat business as a series of transactions. I have a product, you have money, we trade, interaction ends. With this way of thinking, the goal becomes maximising these transactions and the profit from each one.
This transactional mindset creates three problems. Problems that aren’t initially visible, but become apparent later on down the line, and often when it’s too late.
No customer loyalty
First, customers have no loyalty. They'll leave the moment someone offers them a slightly better price or feature. They’ve been trained to see you as just one option among many.
Research shows that acquiring a new customer costs five to twenty-five times more than keeping an existing one, yet most businesses spend most of their energy on customer acquisition, because they're losing customers almost as fast as they gain them.
Sacrifice long-term value
Second, focusing on immediate profit makes you sacrifice long-term value. When you cut quality to improve margins. You use aggressive sales tactics that work once but create resentment. Each decision looks rational in isolation, but collectively prevents you from building something that lasts, because you’re destroying your long-term value.
No defence against competition
Third, you have no defence against competition. If someone can make a similar product cheaper or deliver it faster, they can take your customers. You're competing solely on features and price in a transparent market, where customers can easily compare businesses side by side. It's a race to the bottom.
The businesses that last work differently. They operate with a relational mindset. Their real asset isn't their products or customer list. It's the depth of relationships they've built with customers over time.
These relationships survive price changes, feature gaps, competitive pressure, and occasional mistakes. Because the relationship has moved beyond being purely transactional. The customer isn't just buying a product. They're participating in something they believe in.
The four principles make this work.
Purpose drives every decision
Purpose means having a clear reason for existing beyond making money. It's the answer to why your business should exist and what you're trying to accomplish.
Imagine two outdoor clothing companies. Company A's goal is maximum profit. Company B's purpose is creating excellent gear whilst minimising environmental harm. Both might make similar products initially, but overtime things change as decision are made.
When a customer wants to buy a jacket. Company A's employee tries to upsell to the most expensive option. Company B's employee helps the customer find exactly what they need, which might mean recommending something cheaper or suggesting they don't need a new jacket if their current one can be repaired.
In the moment, Company A makes more money. But what's the customer experience? Company A's customer feels sold to. Company B's customer feels helped and respected. Which one comes back? Which one tells their friends?
Purpose does three crucial things.
It focuses your energy on specific problems you're meant to solve.
It attracts people who share those values, both as customers and employees.
It makes decision-making clearer - “Does this choice move us closer to our purpose or away from it?”
But purpose only works if it's genuine. Customers can sense when purpose is just marketing language versus when it's authentically embedded in how you operate. It has to be the real operating system of the business.
Tell stories that matter to customers
When people make decisions, their emotional brain decides first based on how things feel. Then their rational brain constructs logical reasons to justify what they've already decided emotionally.
This is how we are designed to efficiently way to make decisions in complex environments. We use emotional shortcuts based on trust, identity, and values.
Over time, authentic stories accumulate and create brand equity. People don't just know what you sell. They know what you mean. They associate you with certain values and emotions. This accumulated meaning differentiates you in ways competitors can't copy.
Create excellent customer experiences at every touchpoint
From first hearing about you, to visiting your website, going through to purchasing, using your product, and contacting your customer support. Every moment shapes how the customer feels about you.
However, customers don't remember their experiences accurately. Our brains remember through specific patterns, particularly the peak-end rule - when you remember an experience, your brain primarily recalls the most intense point and how it ended. The duration and average quality matter surprisingly little.
Every customer interaction with your brand also leaves emotional residue - the feeling that lingers after the interaction ends. Positive residue makes customers more likely to return and recommend you and negative residue damages the relationship, even if the problem was eventually solved.
In business, mistakes happen. However, how you respond to these mistakes often has a bigger impact on what a customer thinks of your brand than preventing the mistake in the first place. Responding quickly, taking responsibility, fixing it generously, and making the customer feel valued throughout their experience and actually strengthens the relationship you have with them.
When you create experiences that consistently leave positive emotional residue, several things happen.
Customers develop trust
They learn that you can be relied upon. This trust becomes a defensive moat – even when competitors offer similar products at lower prices, customers trust you in ways they don't yet trust the competitor.
It creates switching costs
There's also an emotional cost to leaving. When someone has consistently good experiences with you, the idea of switching to a competitor creates anxiety. The known positive experience becomes more valuable than the potential benefits of switching.
Word-of-mouth marketing
Exceptional experiences naturally generate word-of-mouth marketing. When someone has an experience that exceeds expectations, they want to share it. This organic advocacy is more influential than any advertising because it comes from a trusted source describing real experience.
Prioritise loyalty and advocacy at all costs
Loyalty means customers stay over time. Advocacy means they actively recommend you to others. Together, these create compounding growth where existing customers become increasingly valuable and also generate new customers organically.
The economics of this are profound. Increasing retention by just five per cent can increase profits by twenty-five to ninety-five per cent. A customer who stays for ten years generates vastly more profit than ten customers who each buy once, because you only paid acquisition costs once versus ten times.
Loyalty creates stability and predictability. When you have a base of loyal customers, you have reliable revenue. This allows you to invest in the future rather than constantly scrambling for the next transaction.
Advocacy is even more powerful. It's free and more credible than any marketing you could create. When a friend recommends a business, you take it seriously in a way you never would with an advertisement.
But this principle is not just about wanting loyalty. It's about making it the primary metric for evaluating decisions.
Will this strengthen or weaken loyalty?
Will this make customers more or less likely to advocate?
You don't pursue short-term revenue that would damage trust. You don't exploit customers even when you could. You invest in keeping existing customers happy even when that's more expensive than letting them churn and replacing them.
When you genuinely prioritise loyalty and advocacy, you create a flywheel effect.
Happy loyal customers advocate, bringing new customers who arrive with higher trust because they were recommended.
These new customers have good experiences.
They become loyal and advocates.
The cycle reinforces itself.
The mindset that makes it work.
The overarching difference between this approach and conventional business thinking is the timescale on which each one focuses. Most businesses optimise for short-term outcomes. They want results this quarter, this month, this week.
But the issue with focusing on immediate results is that you make decisions that produce quick outcomes but prevent long-term value creation.
Building purpose, telling resonant stories, creating excellent experiences, and earning loyalty takes time. Early on, you're investing energy and often seeing relatively little return.
But over time, more and more people see and understand your purpose, which attracts more of the right customers. Stories accumulate and create deeper meaning. Positive experiences compound into trust. Loyalty strengthens with each interaction. Each element reinforces the others.
This compound growth is slow at first, sometimes frustratingly so. But compound growth accelerates. Each new loyal customer makes your business slightly more valuable, slightly more talked about, slightly more trusted. That marginally stronger position attracts the next customer slightly more easily.
The most successful businesses understood this at some point along their journey. They had the patience to build properly rather than optimising for quick wins.
How it works together.
Start with purpose. Your purpose determines what problems you solve, for whom, and how. This focus prevents you from being scattered.
That clear purpose gives you authentic stories to tell. These stories attract people who share your values.
These customers arrive with hopes shaped by your stories. The customer experience either validates what they hoped for or disappoints them. When you deliver experiences that match or exceed expectations, you prove you're authentic. This deepens emotional connection dramatically.
Customers with repeatedly positive experiences develop trust and loyalty. These loyal customers become advocates. They naturally want to share good things with people they care about.
These new customers go through the same cycle. The cycle reinforces itself and accelerates. Community emerges organically. Advocates recognise each other and connect over shared values and experiences. Relationships then form between customers, not just between them and you.
All of this is strengthened by the long-term orientation.
The purpose stays consistent, building trust over the years.
The stories accumulate.
The experiences compound into strong relationships.
The loyalty deepens.
The community grows.
This creates a recurring cycle. Each rotation makes the next one easier and more powerful. Early on, it takes tremendous effort to build momentum. But if you stay consistent, you reach a point where the system becomes self-reinforcing.
Why this matters.
Most businesses operate with an extraction mindset. They're trying to extract maximum value from each customer interaction. This creates adversarial dynamics where customers feel sold to or manipulated.
The one I’ve just discussed operates with a cultivation mindset. You're cultivating relationships, growing trust, nurturing community. You're optimising for long-term depth rather than short-term volume. This creates partnership dynamics where customers feel served and aligned with you.
The extraction approach can work financially for a while, but it creates fragile businesses. You're constantly vulnerable because you haven't built anything defensible.
The cultivation approach builds a durable business. You create genuine competitive advantages through relationships and trust that can't be quickly copied. Your economics improve over time as loyalty reduces costs and advocacy provides free growth.
Beyond business outcomes, there's also a human dimension. Operating with the extraction mindset is exhausting and often feels hollow. You're constantly chasing, constantly selling, constantly worried.
Operating with the cultivation mindset is energising and meaningful. You're building something you can be proud of. You're serving people in ways that genuinely help them. You go to work feeling like you're building something that matters.
This is how the best businesses actually operate. When you actually look beneath the surface of companies that have endured for decades and built beloved brands, you find these same principles at work. Clear purpose. Meaningful stories. Exceptional experiences. Deep loyalty and advocacy. And they think in decades, not quarters.
Businesses need money to survive, that’s a fact. In the same way, we need oxygen to survive. But you’ve never once woken up and thought, “I need to breathe oxygen today”. Business is the same. If you want to build a successful business, your focus shouldn’t be on making money.
Look at any business you actually admire. It’s probably one that has been around for a while, it’s most likely built a beloved brand, and made a significant amount of money. However, I can pretty much guarantee that they didn’t get today by focusing on the money. They got there by:
Understanding problems that real people have, and solving those problems better than anyone else.
A lot of businesses that haven’t achieved this high level of success don’t operate in this way. They treat business as a series of transactions. I have a product, you have money, we trade, interaction ends. With this way of thinking, the goal becomes maximising these transactions and the profit from each one.
This transactional mindset creates three problems. Problems that aren’t initially visible, but become apparent later on down the line, and often when it’s too late.
No customer loyalty
First, customers have no loyalty. They'll leave the moment someone offers them a slightly better price or feature. They’ve been trained to see you as just one option among many.
Research shows that acquiring a new customer costs five to twenty-five times more than keeping an existing one, yet most businesses spend most of their energy on customer acquisition, because they're losing customers almost as fast as they gain them.
Sacrifice long-term value
Second, focusing on immediate profit makes you sacrifice long-term value. When you cut quality to improve margins. You use aggressive sales tactics that work once but create resentment. Each decision looks rational in isolation, but collectively prevents you from building something that lasts, because you’re destroying your long-term value.
No defence against competition
Third, you have no defence against competition. If someone can make a similar product cheaper or deliver it faster, they can take your customers. You're competing solely on features and price in a transparent market, where customers can easily compare businesses side by side. It's a race to the bottom.
The businesses that last work differently. They operate with a relational mindset. Their real asset isn't their products or customer list. It's the depth of relationships they've built with customers over time.
These relationships survive price changes, feature gaps, competitive pressure, and occasional mistakes. Because the relationship has moved beyond being purely transactional. The customer isn't just buying a product. They're participating in something they believe in.
The four principles make this work.
Purpose drives every decision
Purpose means having a clear reason for existing beyond making money. It's the answer to why your business should exist and what you're trying to accomplish.
Imagine two outdoor clothing companies. Company A's goal is maximum profit. Company B's purpose is creating excellent gear whilst minimising environmental harm. Both might make similar products initially, but overtime things change as decision are made.
When a customer wants to buy a jacket. Company A's employee tries to upsell to the most expensive option. Company B's employee helps the customer find exactly what they need, which might mean recommending something cheaper or suggesting they don't need a new jacket if their current one can be repaired.
In the moment, Company A makes more money. But what's the customer experience? Company A's customer feels sold to. Company B's customer feels helped and respected. Which one comes back? Which one tells their friends?
Purpose does three crucial things.
It focuses your energy on specific problems you're meant to solve.
It attracts people who share those values, both as customers and employees.
It makes decision-making clearer - “Does this choice move us closer to our purpose or away from it?”
But purpose only works if it's genuine. Customers can sense when purpose is just marketing language versus when it's authentically embedded in how you operate. It has to be the real operating system of the business.
Tell stories that matter to customers
When people make decisions, their emotional brain decides first based on how things feel. Then their rational brain constructs logical reasons to justify what they've already decided emotionally.
This is how we are designed to efficiently way to make decisions in complex environments. We use emotional shortcuts based on trust, identity, and values.
Over time, authentic stories accumulate and create brand equity. People don't just know what you sell. They know what you mean. They associate you with certain values and emotions. This accumulated meaning differentiates you in ways competitors can't copy.
Create excellent customer experiences at every touchpoint
From first hearing about you, to visiting your website, going through to purchasing, using your product, and contacting your customer support. Every moment shapes how the customer feels about you.
However, customers don't remember their experiences accurately. Our brains remember through specific patterns, particularly the peak-end rule - when you remember an experience, your brain primarily recalls the most intense point and how it ended. The duration and average quality matter surprisingly little.
Every customer interaction with your brand also leaves emotional residue - the feeling that lingers after the interaction ends. Positive residue makes customers more likely to return and recommend you and negative residue damages the relationship, even if the problem was eventually solved.
In business, mistakes happen. However, how you respond to these mistakes often has a bigger impact on what a customer thinks of your brand than preventing the mistake in the first place. Responding quickly, taking responsibility, fixing it generously, and making the customer feel valued throughout their experience and actually strengthens the relationship you have with them.
When you create experiences that consistently leave positive emotional residue, several things happen.
Customers develop trust
They learn that you can be relied upon. This trust becomes a defensive moat – even when competitors offer similar products at lower prices, customers trust you in ways they don't yet trust the competitor.
It creates switching costs
There's also an emotional cost to leaving. When someone has consistently good experiences with you, the idea of switching to a competitor creates anxiety. The known positive experience becomes more valuable than the potential benefits of switching.
Word-of-mouth marketing
Exceptional experiences naturally generate word-of-mouth marketing. When someone has an experience that exceeds expectations, they want to share it. This organic advocacy is more influential than any advertising because it comes from a trusted source describing real experience.
Prioritise loyalty and advocacy at all costs
Loyalty means customers stay over time. Advocacy means they actively recommend you to others. Together, these create compounding growth where existing customers become increasingly valuable and also generate new customers organically.
The economics of this are profound. Increasing retention by just five per cent can increase profits by twenty-five to ninety-five per cent. A customer who stays for ten years generates vastly more profit than ten customers who each buy once, because you only paid acquisition costs once versus ten times.
Loyalty creates stability and predictability. When you have a base of loyal customers, you have reliable revenue. This allows you to invest in the future rather than constantly scrambling for the next transaction.
Advocacy is even more powerful. It's free and more credible than any marketing you could create. When a friend recommends a business, you take it seriously in a way you never would with an advertisement.
But this principle is not just about wanting loyalty. It's about making it the primary metric for evaluating decisions.
Will this strengthen or weaken loyalty?
Will this make customers more or less likely to advocate?
You don't pursue short-term revenue that would damage trust. You don't exploit customers even when you could. You invest in keeping existing customers happy even when that's more expensive than letting them churn and replacing them.
When you genuinely prioritise loyalty and advocacy, you create a flywheel effect.
Happy loyal customers advocate, bringing new customers who arrive with higher trust because they were recommended.
These new customers have good experiences.
They become loyal and advocates.
The cycle reinforces itself.
The mindset that makes it work.
The overarching difference between this approach and conventional business thinking is the timescale on which each one focuses. Most businesses optimise for short-term outcomes. They want results this quarter, this month, this week.
But the issue with focusing on immediate results is that you make decisions that produce quick outcomes but prevent long-term value creation.
Building purpose, telling resonant stories, creating excellent experiences, and earning loyalty takes time. Early on, you're investing energy and often seeing relatively little return.
But over time, more and more people see and understand your purpose, which attracts more of the right customers. Stories accumulate and create deeper meaning. Positive experiences compound into trust. Loyalty strengthens with each interaction. Each element reinforces the others.
This compound growth is slow at first, sometimes frustratingly so. But compound growth accelerates. Each new loyal customer makes your business slightly more valuable, slightly more talked about, slightly more trusted. That marginally stronger position attracts the next customer slightly more easily.
The most successful businesses understood this at some point along their journey. They had the patience to build properly rather than optimising for quick wins.
How it works together.
Start with purpose. Your purpose determines what problems you solve, for whom, and how. This focus prevents you from being scattered.
That clear purpose gives you authentic stories to tell. These stories attract people who share your values.
These customers arrive with hopes shaped by your stories. The customer experience either validates what they hoped for or disappoints them. When you deliver experiences that match or exceed expectations, you prove you're authentic. This deepens emotional connection dramatically.
Customers with repeatedly positive experiences develop trust and loyalty. These loyal customers become advocates. They naturally want to share good things with people they care about.
These new customers go through the same cycle. The cycle reinforces itself and accelerates. Community emerges organically. Advocates recognise each other and connect over shared values and experiences. Relationships then form between customers, not just between them and you.
All of this is strengthened by the long-term orientation.
The purpose stays consistent, building trust over the years.
The stories accumulate.
The experiences compound into strong relationships.
The loyalty deepens.
The community grows.
This creates a recurring cycle. Each rotation makes the next one easier and more powerful. Early on, it takes tremendous effort to build momentum. But if you stay consistent, you reach a point where the system becomes self-reinforcing.
Why this matters.
Most businesses operate with an extraction mindset. They're trying to extract maximum value from each customer interaction. This creates adversarial dynamics where customers feel sold to or manipulated.
The one I’ve just discussed operates with a cultivation mindset. You're cultivating relationships, growing trust, nurturing community. You're optimising for long-term depth rather than short-term volume. This creates partnership dynamics where customers feel served and aligned with you.
The extraction approach can work financially for a while, but it creates fragile businesses. You're constantly vulnerable because you haven't built anything defensible.
The cultivation approach builds a durable business. You create genuine competitive advantages through relationships and trust that can't be quickly copied. Your economics improve over time as loyalty reduces costs and advocacy provides free growth.
Beyond business outcomes, there's also a human dimension. Operating with the extraction mindset is exhausting and often feels hollow. You're constantly chasing, constantly selling, constantly worried.
Operating with the cultivation mindset is energising and meaningful. You're building something you can be proud of. You're serving people in ways that genuinely help them. You go to work feeling like you're building something that matters.
This is how the best businesses actually operate. When you actually look beneath the surface of companies that have endured for decades and built beloved brands, you find these same principles at work. Clear purpose. Meaningful stories. Exceptional experiences. Deep loyalty and advocacy. And they think in decades, not quarters.
Businesses need money to survive, that’s a fact. In the same way, we need oxygen to survive. But you’ve never once woken up and thought, “I need to breathe oxygen today”. Business is the same. If you want to build a successful business, your focus shouldn’t be on making money.
Look at any business you actually admire. It’s probably one that has been around for a while, it’s most likely built a beloved brand, and made a significant amount of money. However, I can pretty much guarantee that they didn’t get today by focusing on the money. They got there by:
Understanding problems that real people have, and solving those problems better than anyone else.
A lot of businesses that haven’t achieved this high level of success don’t operate in this way. They treat business as a series of transactions. I have a product, you have money, we trade, interaction ends. With this way of thinking, the goal becomes maximising these transactions and the profit from each one.
This transactional mindset creates three problems. Problems that aren’t initially visible, but become apparent later on down the line, and often when it’s too late.
No customer loyalty
First, customers have no loyalty. They'll leave the moment someone offers them a slightly better price or feature. They’ve been trained to see you as just one option among many.
Research shows that acquiring a new customer costs five to twenty-five times more than keeping an existing one, yet most businesses spend most of their energy on customer acquisition, because they're losing customers almost as fast as they gain them.
Sacrifice long-term value
Second, focusing on immediate profit makes you sacrifice long-term value. When you cut quality to improve margins. You use aggressive sales tactics that work once but create resentment. Each decision looks rational in isolation, but collectively prevents you from building something that lasts, because you’re destroying your long-term value.
No defence against competition
Third, you have no defence against competition. If someone can make a similar product cheaper or deliver it faster, they can take your customers. You're competing solely on features and price in a transparent market, where customers can easily compare businesses side by side. It's a race to the bottom.
The businesses that last work differently. They operate with a relational mindset. Their real asset isn't their products or customer list. It's the depth of relationships they've built with customers over time.
These relationships survive price changes, feature gaps, competitive pressure, and occasional mistakes. Because the relationship has moved beyond being purely transactional. The customer isn't just buying a product. They're participating in something they believe in.
The four principles make this work.
Purpose drives every decision
Purpose means having a clear reason for existing beyond making money. It's the answer to why your business should exist and what you're trying to accomplish.
Imagine two outdoor clothing companies. Company A's goal is maximum profit. Company B's purpose is creating excellent gear whilst minimising environmental harm. Both might make similar products initially, but overtime things change as decision are made.
When a customer wants to buy a jacket. Company A's employee tries to upsell to the most expensive option. Company B's employee helps the customer find exactly what they need, which might mean recommending something cheaper or suggesting they don't need a new jacket if their current one can be repaired.
In the moment, Company A makes more money. But what's the customer experience? Company A's customer feels sold to. Company B's customer feels helped and respected. Which one comes back? Which one tells their friends?
Purpose does three crucial things.
It focuses your energy on specific problems you're meant to solve.
It attracts people who share those values, both as customers and employees.
It makes decision-making clearer - “Does this choice move us closer to our purpose or away from it?”
But purpose only works if it's genuine. Customers can sense when purpose is just marketing language versus when it's authentically embedded in how you operate. It has to be the real operating system of the business.
Tell stories that matter to customers
When people make decisions, their emotional brain decides first based on how things feel. Then their rational brain constructs logical reasons to justify what they've already decided emotionally.
This is how we are designed to efficiently way to make decisions in complex environments. We use emotional shortcuts based on trust, identity, and values.
Over time, authentic stories accumulate and create brand equity. People don't just know what you sell. They know what you mean. They associate you with certain values and emotions. This accumulated meaning differentiates you in ways competitors can't copy.
Create excellent customer experiences at every touchpoint
From first hearing about you, to visiting your website, going through to purchasing, using your product, and contacting your customer support. Every moment shapes how the customer feels about you.
However, customers don't remember their experiences accurately. Our brains remember through specific patterns, particularly the peak-end rule - when you remember an experience, your brain primarily recalls the most intense point and how it ended. The duration and average quality matter surprisingly little.
Every customer interaction with your brand also leaves emotional residue - the feeling that lingers after the interaction ends. Positive residue makes customers more likely to return and recommend you and negative residue damages the relationship, even if the problem was eventually solved.
In business, mistakes happen. However, how you respond to these mistakes often has a bigger impact on what a customer thinks of your brand than preventing the mistake in the first place. Responding quickly, taking responsibility, fixing it generously, and making the customer feel valued throughout their experience and actually strengthens the relationship you have with them.
When you create experiences that consistently leave positive emotional residue, several things happen.
Customers develop trust
They learn that you can be relied upon. This trust becomes a defensive moat – even when competitors offer similar products at lower prices, customers trust you in ways they don't yet trust the competitor.
It creates switching costs
There's also an emotional cost to leaving. When someone has consistently good experiences with you, the idea of switching to a competitor creates anxiety. The known positive experience becomes more valuable than the potential benefits of switching.
Word-of-mouth marketing
Exceptional experiences naturally generate word-of-mouth marketing. When someone has an experience that exceeds expectations, they want to share it. This organic advocacy is more influential than any advertising because it comes from a trusted source describing real experience.
Prioritise loyalty and advocacy at all costs
Loyalty means customers stay over time. Advocacy means they actively recommend you to others. Together, these create compounding growth where existing customers become increasingly valuable and also generate new customers organically.
The economics of this are profound. Increasing retention by just five per cent can increase profits by twenty-five to ninety-five per cent. A customer who stays for ten years generates vastly more profit than ten customers who each buy once, because you only paid acquisition costs once versus ten times.
Loyalty creates stability and predictability. When you have a base of loyal customers, you have reliable revenue. This allows you to invest in the future rather than constantly scrambling for the next transaction.
Advocacy is even more powerful. It's free and more credible than any marketing you could create. When a friend recommends a business, you take it seriously in a way you never would with an advertisement.
But this principle is not just about wanting loyalty. It's about making it the primary metric for evaluating decisions.
Will this strengthen or weaken loyalty?
Will this make customers more or less likely to advocate?
You don't pursue short-term revenue that would damage trust. You don't exploit customers even when you could. You invest in keeping existing customers happy even when that's more expensive than letting them churn and replacing them.
When you genuinely prioritise loyalty and advocacy, you create a flywheel effect.
Happy loyal customers advocate, bringing new customers who arrive with higher trust because they were recommended.
These new customers have good experiences.
They become loyal and advocates.
The cycle reinforces itself.
The mindset that makes it work.
The overarching difference between this approach and conventional business thinking is the timescale on which each one focuses. Most businesses optimise for short-term outcomes. They want results this quarter, this month, this week.
But the issue with focusing on immediate results is that you make decisions that produce quick outcomes but prevent long-term value creation.
Building purpose, telling resonant stories, creating excellent experiences, and earning loyalty takes time. Early on, you're investing energy and often seeing relatively little return.
But over time, more and more people see and understand your purpose, which attracts more of the right customers. Stories accumulate and create deeper meaning. Positive experiences compound into trust. Loyalty strengthens with each interaction. Each element reinforces the others.
This compound growth is slow at first, sometimes frustratingly so. But compound growth accelerates. Each new loyal customer makes your business slightly more valuable, slightly more talked about, slightly more trusted. That marginally stronger position attracts the next customer slightly more easily.
The most successful businesses understood this at some point along their journey. They had the patience to build properly rather than optimising for quick wins.
How it works together.
Start with purpose. Your purpose determines what problems you solve, for whom, and how. This focus prevents you from being scattered.
That clear purpose gives you authentic stories to tell. These stories attract people who share your values.
These customers arrive with hopes shaped by your stories. The customer experience either validates what they hoped for or disappoints them. When you deliver experiences that match or exceed expectations, you prove you're authentic. This deepens emotional connection dramatically.
Customers with repeatedly positive experiences develop trust and loyalty. These loyal customers become advocates. They naturally want to share good things with people they care about.
These new customers go through the same cycle. The cycle reinforces itself and accelerates. Community emerges organically. Advocates recognise each other and connect over shared values and experiences. Relationships then form between customers, not just between them and you.
All of this is strengthened by the long-term orientation.
The purpose stays consistent, building trust over the years.
The stories accumulate.
The experiences compound into strong relationships.
The loyalty deepens.
The community grows.
This creates a recurring cycle. Each rotation makes the next one easier and more powerful. Early on, it takes tremendous effort to build momentum. But if you stay consistent, you reach a point where the system becomes self-reinforcing.
Why this matters.
Most businesses operate with an extraction mindset. They're trying to extract maximum value from each customer interaction. This creates adversarial dynamics where customers feel sold to or manipulated.
The one I’ve just discussed operates with a cultivation mindset. You're cultivating relationships, growing trust, nurturing community. You're optimising for long-term depth rather than short-term volume. This creates partnership dynamics where customers feel served and aligned with you.
The extraction approach can work financially for a while, but it creates fragile businesses. You're constantly vulnerable because you haven't built anything defensible.
The cultivation approach builds a durable business. You create genuine competitive advantages through relationships and trust that can't be quickly copied. Your economics improve over time as loyalty reduces costs and advocacy provides free growth.
Beyond business outcomes, there's also a human dimension. Operating with the extraction mindset is exhausting and often feels hollow. You're constantly chasing, constantly selling, constantly worried.
Operating with the cultivation mindset is energising and meaningful. You're building something you can be proud of. You're serving people in ways that genuinely help them. You go to work feeling like you're building something that matters.
This is how the best businesses actually operate. When you actually look beneath the surface of companies that have endured for decades and built beloved brands, you find these same principles at work. Clear purpose. Meaningful stories. Exceptional experiences. Deep loyalty and advocacy. And they think in decades, not quarters.