But what most business owners or even team leaders often fail to consider is their customers’ success. After all, your successful customer has the financial means to continue to support your business, which in turn increases your profit. So your customers’ success leads to your business succeeding as well.

By making customer happiness your top priority over new customer acquisition and then incentivizing customers to share the word about your business, less of your money needs to be spent on promotion. With a company of one, which can be profitable at any size, such slow but sustainable growth makes sense. You start with the idea of creating a trust-centric business, build products that customers love, make sure they’re educated and happy with what they’ve purchased from you, and then give them systematic ways to share their success with others.

The more a product is differentiated along a dimension consumers care about, the higher price premium it can demand.

... successful companies held three to 10 times more cash assets than average for their industries, and they did so from the time they started.

Lafley refocused the company of its top ten brands, the bestsellers that each generated over $1 billion in sales combined to make up more than half of P&G’s total revenues. “It’s a basic strategy that worked for me in the navy,” said Lafley, who, as a supply officer, ran a department store for servicemen. “I learned that even when you’ve got a complex business, there’s a core, and the core is what generates most of the cash, most of the profits. The trick was to find the few things that were really going to sell, and to sell as many of them as you could.