The Heart of Capitalism: Service

If you help enough people, you don’t have to worry about money.

That’s one of the core values of Dave’s company, and it’s a motto Dave lives by. The idea being this: Good businesses are about serving people. And when you serve people, the profits will take care of themselves.

Ken Blanchard says, “Business is like tennis. Those who serve well, win.” If you own a medical supplies business, it’s about serving the people to whom you sell the medical supplies. If you own a restaurant, it’s all about hot, good food that’s provided by servers who know how to smile.

You do that, and you know what? You’ll start getting more customers. That means you’ll start getting more business, which means you’ll start making more money.

You see, at its core, capitalism is all about service. It’s not rocket science. When you provide customers with a great product and great service at a good price and in a timely fashion, you’ll start to see some amazing things happen.

How Curt Richardson Serves You

Otter Box is a great example of capitalism at its best. Curt Richardson started with a simple idea: providing consumers with a way to protect their smartphones. No one wants to spend hundreds of dollars on a phone only to watch it break into pieces after an accidental drop.

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From his own garage, he started creating molds that eventually became Otter Box cases. Turns out, Curt was pretty good at it. And today, millions of people use those cases, and Otter Box is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

So if you help millions of people not break their cell phones, you’ve done a pretty good job of serving people. That’s what capitalism is about.

Sniff Out the Skunks

Now, are there going to be some skunks out there? Sure. Some people do make a lot of money taking advantage of others. But they eventually get sniffed out, because skunks stink. You can smell them a mile away. They’ll eventually make the news, and then slowly disappear.

Capitalism actually eliminates the skunks a lot quicker than communism and socialism, which have a way of propping up skunks to the point where they become big and fat. That’s no good.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, who wrote Thou Shall Prosper, talks a lot about “sanctified capitalism,” which is just a fancy way of referring to capitalism with a moral component. He says our heavenly Father is inordinately pleased when we are obsessively and compulsively preoccupied with the needs of others.

Remember, if you help enough people, you don’t have to worry about money.

Service: It’s capitalism at its best.

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