As an entrepreneur, I've learned how crucial it is to be able to call a spade a spade and avoid falling in love with a particular strategy or product. Instead, you need to let the customer tell you what she needs - and to change her as she changes.
Interpretation
Being straightforward and adaptable is vital for entrepreneurs to meet customer needs.
In this quote, Sallie Krawcheck emphasizes the importance of honesty and flexibility in entrepreneurship. Instead of becoming attached to a specific idea or product, entrepreneurs should prioritize understanding and responding to their customers' evolving needs, which requires a willingness to adapt and change one's approach based on direct feedback from the market.
In practice
In a business seminar discussing market strategies, this quote can highlight the importance of customer focus.
What you hear and what the research shows is that gentlemen negotiate for their first job. Women do not negotiate from their first job and on. And I tell women there is no H.R. fairy godmother. There might be, but you better not count on it.
The research indicates that when we women invest, we women do tend to be more patient, take a longer-term perspective and as a result of it, tend to be better investors than men. But the messages we get are that investing is sort of 'the guys' world.'
Somehow, there is this feeling that women require remedial financial education, and so everything must be dumbed down. The reality is that we all need a lot more education, but guys just go ahead and invest anyway.
If you aren't committed to diversity of thought, you have no business launching a startup.
In the old world of business, there was often just one seat at the leadership table for women, two at best. That meant that only so many women could advance. But in a world where women recognize the power that they own - and where technology can upend the traditional rules of engagement - one woman winning doesn't mean another loses.
Your career is not going to go the way you planned. It is impossible at the age of 23 to pick the right industry, the right company, and you can visualize what you're going to be doing in your 40s, 50s, and 60s, but chances are that it's going to be something quite different. So remain open to opportunities and change.
One of my business partners would remind me that no fashion line lasts forever, that we would hit the down curve eventually, and that we needed to look for new brands that complement the first one.
Look after the customer and the business will take care of itself
In the long run managements stressing accounting appearance over economic substance usually achieve little of either.
Profitability, growth, and safeguards against existential risks are crucial to strengthening a company's long-term prospects. But if these three factors constitute a company's 'hard power,' firms also need 'soft power': public trust and acceptance, won by fulfilling a company's social responsibility.
We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that, because we believe -- and we have to take this as an article of faith -- that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.
Companies that get confused, that think their goal is revenue or stock price or something. You have to focus on the things that lead to those.
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