Customer first – everything else follows

Customers are the lifeblood of any company. That’s why when we sat down as a leadership team we made our number one value Customer First.

In the past I have heard arguments that companies should value their Employees First.

While my job, and all manager’s jobs, is to put the employees first, the company as a whole has the single job to put the customer first. Without customers, there is no need for employees.

What’s most important for me, and for everyone to remember, is that I am not the most important person in the room. My title may sway someone to believe otherwise, but the truth is that the customer sits on top of the upside-down pyramid. We end up making decisions without the most important person in the room, the customer.

Having run multiple companies in the past, I have watched teams strive to excel and build features that customers want by ensuring the teams are very close to the customer and listening to their feedback.

At Centage, it’s no different. We are building what our customers want. We will succeed quite often, but we will certainly also fail along the way. However, we won’t fail without trying hard. Besides, failure is short-lived as we work under the “build fast and break often” mentality. This will come back to haunt us at times, but we are relentless in our mission to build what customers want. We will stop at nothing to get it right. Each and every time!

Building a product that works for all of our customers and their unique cases is what makes this fun and super difficult. You would think Financial Planning & Analysis is easy, it’s not. Each company does it differently, opening up a ton of edge cases. What’s normal to one customer is foreign to another.

The uniqueness of a customer will always be there, and the challenges will never stop. But rest assured that, as a company, we strive for nothing less than to put the customer first in our thinking and caring. The employees that support all our customers are equally important in this alignment and success, but we cannot forget that without customers, we have nothing more than a cool product.