Pillar 01 – The Importance of Reputation

A good reputation is a better choice than great wealth; and good favor is a better choice than silver and gold.

These words came from the richest and wisest man who ever lived. It was Solomon. In this first pillar I would like to speak on the subject of reputation. I believe that this is the central pillar amongst the seven pillars of business that I am going to be discussing in this e-book.

This is the one on which all the others rely. This is the one that holds all of the others together. And all the others tend to combine together to give this one big pillar.

Having a Good Name

What exactly is reputation? Well, it means having a good name.

What does it mean to have a good name? I want you to think about businesses that you know. There are a lot of them out there. Some of them everybody knows; some of them maybe you have perhaps just dealt with personally. I want you to just for a moment sit down and think of a few businesses that you know by name.

If I were to use the name of a business, what is the first thing that would come to your mind? Would it be a positive response, or would it be a negative response?

What kind of name does that business have in your sight? What kind of reputation does that business hold in the public? This is very important for a business to succeed.

Of course a reputation can be good, and it can also be bad. A bad reputation is going to destroy a business. So you want you to develop a good reputation.

And if you are going to build a business, and if you are going to start a new business; if you are going to grow in business and succeed, reputation is probably one of the most important things that you are going to have to consider, before you can even begin to succeed in this world.

Be Consistent

How do you go about creating a good reputation? I would like to suggest a few things. It is a big subject, and I don’t have time to cover it in a lot of detail. However, probably one of the first important qualities that will help you to develop a reputation is being consistent in your behavior.

You see people must know what to expect from you. They should always see the same kind of behavior from you. And after a while you develop a reputation of having that behavior pattern.

So it doesn’t start with the business itself. It starts with the owner of the business. As the owner of the business, you are the one who is going to decide what kind of reputation your business will have in this world. I will cover this in more detail as we go on.

Keep Your Word

You must be consistent, and secondly you need to keep you word. People must be able to rely on any promise that you make.

If you say that you will do something, you need to follow through. If you continually follow through; if you are faithful to always fulfill your promises and to live up to the words that you speak, you will develop a good reputation.

If you fail to live up to the words that you speak, you will develop a reputation for being somebody that keeps changing his mind; somebody that can’t be relied on or can’t be trusted to keep his word. That is the kind of bad reputation you definitely don’t want if you want to succeed in business.

But most important of all, if you want to build a good reputation, you must learn to apply all of the rest of the pillars together. As we consider each one of them you will begin to see a picture coming together, and you will eventually see very clearly how you can develop a good reputation for your business.

Now, how do you develop a bad reputation? I’ve covered a little bit of that already.

Failure to Deliver

Firstly, it happens when you fail to deliver what was promised.

People will never forget. You know the amazing thing in this world, and especially in business, is that people will often forget the good things that you do.

But just do one wrong thing, and they will never forgive you. They will remember forever. The moment you fail to deliver what you promised, somebody will hold a grudge against you, and you may never recover that customer again.

Ignoring Needs

The other way to develop a bad reputation is by ignoring the needs of others. You see your main purpose in business is not just to make money, believe it or not.

If you think that the reason you are forming a business is just to become rich, then you have a very small picture of what being a business owner really is. And especially you don’t have a clue of how God views business, and of how God’s kind of business should be run.

You cannot ignore the needs of others, because most of your business is involved in meeting those needs. And if you’re ignoring peoples’ needs, then they are going to ignore your business and your product. You will not get any sales, you won’t get any financial flow whatsoever, and your business will die.

You will develop a bad reputation by being selfish in your business practices. You cannot afford to be selfish in business. When you do business for somebody, you don’t only sell them a product. You do them a service.

And actually, in many ways, running a business is like doing the work of the ministry. You’re helping other people to meet their needs. And as you meet their needs, they meet your needs. It becomes a two-way street. You cannot think that business is a one-way street where you say,

"I’m going to use you to meet my needs."

If you do that you are going to find out pretty quickly that people are not going to respond very well to you. You will develop a bad reputation and your business will never succeed.