Wake Up! Your Business Isn’t Actually About Your Customers (Yet)

Let’s cut through the corporate BS: Most businesses are lying to themselves about being customer focused. They’re trapped in a maze of pointless meetings, blame games, and soul-crushing governance processes that have nothing to do with delivering actual value to customers.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: While you’re busy pointing fingers at the tech team or preparing your next mind-numbing governance presentation, your competitors are out there actually talking to customers.

Who actually pays your salary? (Hint: It’s not your boss.)

Imagine this: A mere 5% increase in customer retention and wallet share could transform your business. But you’re too busy maintaining the status quo to seize that opportunity. That’s not just sad – it’s dangerous.

Forget the traditional hierarchy. Your front-line employees are the ones who can make or break your customer experience. Give them power. Let them take risks. Let them fail. Then watch the magic happen.

Want innovation? Stop suffocating your people with rules and start unleashing their potential. Push decisions down to those closest to the customers. That’s where the real revolution begins.

Take a page from Terry Leahy’s Tesco transformation playbook: He had the audacity to stop meetings dead if they couldn’t answer one simple question: “How does this help the customer?”

Don’t just talk about customers – bring them into your meetings. Let them disrupt your comfortable internal narrative. Test ideas with them. Fail with them. Learn from them. Be first, be bold, be customer obsessed.

Let’s be brutally honest: Your executive team probably looks nothing like your customer base. Where’s your Gen Z perspective? Your diverse market voice?

Stop being an echo chamber of similar thoughts and experiences. Seek out the uncomfortable truths that come from different perspectives. Then actually do something with them.

Strategic planning isn’t an annual retreat – it’s a daily revolution. Your market moves faster than your quarterly planning cycle, and your customers evolve faster than your five-year strategy.

Embrace experimentation. Celebrate failures as learning opportunities. Keep moving, keep changing, keep pushing boundaries. Standing still is the new going backward.

Forget rigid hierarchies and fixed departments. Your organisation needs to flow where the customer value is. That means building teams that can reshape themselves without drowning in change management bureaucracy.

But warning: This isn’t about moving deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s about building a completely different kind of ship – one that can change direction at the speed of customer needs.

This isn’t about incremental change or playing it safe. It’s about fundamentally transforming how your business thinks, moves, and delivers value. It’s about leading the revolution instead of being disrupted by it.

Transform your business by empowering frontline employees, making customers active partners in innovation, embracing diverse perspectives, adapting continuously, and building fluid organisational structures – because in today’s economy, a customer-obsessed culture isn’t just about satisfaction, it’s the key to unlocking Britain’s productivity potential.

The question isn’t whether you need to change. The question is: Are you bold enough to lead the charge?