Who Pays Your Salary

I just finished conducting annual reviews with our employees. About this time, I meet with each employee to review progress and goals from the past year, set new goals for the coming year and review the financial performance of the entire company.
These reviews are a useful opportunity to get feedback about what is working and what isn’t, from the employees’ perspectives. We ask for suggestions about what we and they could and should do better. Some of the best decisions we’ve implemented have come out of these meetings.
Of course, the employees are always interested to know whether they’ll be getting raises or bonuses—and if so, how much. But while conducting reviews this year, I found myself explaining the idea that their salaries, raises and bonuses really don’t come from the company—-or from a specific individual. They, we—-all of us—get our paychecks from our customers.
Of course, customers don’t come to us and buy our products and services because of their concern for our welfare or the welfare of our families. Customers come to us because they need our products or services to help them solve a problem or accomplish something they couldn’t do themselves. If we don’t provide these products and services to our customers, at prices they can afford, they will find suppliers that do.
In publishing, our first contacts are the advertisers. I need those companies to be successful using this product. To accomplish that, I spend a lot of time thinking about their customers (that would be you guys, the readers). If we didn’t have information of interest to you, the readers, and if we didn’t deliver the magazine to you, then our advertisers would have no economic reason to advertise.
Thinking about this concept, I started to wonder, Who really is the customer? The first reaction is that the customer is the company to whom we directly sell or ship our products. But in fact, the real customer may be farther down the line. Maybe it’s your customer’s customer who is the end user.