Business & Leadership
The Customer in Front of You
About the Book
Nine practical lessons begin at a neighborhood deli counter and travel into four decades of sales, leadership, and customer relationships. Warm, candid, and commercially grounded, the book shows why everything else can wait when a customer is standing in front of you.
Available now on Amazon
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Read an Excerpt
A selected passage from the book.
When I was seventeen, I worked weekends in the deli department of a neighborhood grocery store. Every morning began with preparation. We made large batches of potato salad, macaroni salad, and coleslaw before the rush.
There was always plenty to do. Potato salad, I learned, is remarkably unconcerned with your schedule.
Then, almost like clockwork, a small elderly woman would walk to the counter. She could not have been more than five feet tall. She would smile and ask for six slices of ham, perhaps eight slices of cheese.
Priority becomes clear when a person is standing in front of you.
Our manager’s rule was simple: stop what you are doing and take care of the customer standing in front of you.
The salads could wait. The customer could not.
At seventeen, I understood it as a store rule. After decades in manufacturing sales and leadership, I recognized it as one of the best business lessons I had ever received.
Modern organizations are extraordinarily busy. We have forecasts, meetings, CRM updates, production schedules, dashboards, expense reports, planning sessions, training, compliance, project reviews, and recurring meetings to prepare for future recurring meetings.
Most of that work has a legitimate purpose. The danger begins when activity around the customer consumes the attention owed to the customer.
Meet the Author
John K. Milius
John K. Milius brings four decades of sales, leadership, customer relationships, and hard-earned commercial judgment to the page. His fiction turns that same eye toward Brugge—a city of water, memory, history, and stories waiting beneath the stones.
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