Figuring out your purpose requires actual reflection on both your own desires and the audience you want to serve. After all, doing business boils down to serving others in a mutually beneficial way. Customers give you money, gratitude, and a shared passion, and you address their problems by applying your unique skills and knowledge to what you sell them.

Customer education—providing an audience with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to become an informed buyer—is one of the most important parts of a sales cycle. Too often we’re so close to what we’re selling that we assume others are also experts on it, or know what we know, but most of the time that’s not the case. Customers don’t always know what they don’t know, or don’t know enough about something to realize how useful or beneficial that information could be to them or their own business.

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.

UNCOMMON TAKEAWAYS

• Service customers don't just purchase a service; they also participate in creating it. Among other things, they make the service faster or slower, better or worse, cheaper or more expensive to deliver — for themselves and for other customers. They are active producers (and detractors) of the value they end up consuming.

• For example, a customer at a salad bar affects the quality of his or her meal, whereas patients who skip dental appointments drive up the costs of running the entire practice. When customers are influencing the service experience in ways like these, we call them customer-operators.

• Customers can be more or less involved operationally, depending on your industry and on your specific design choices — for example, how much self-service you build into your model and whether you involve your customers in your improvement efforts.

• The more dependent your service business is on the behavior of customer-operators, the more important it is to manage them successfully. Similar to employee management, the four components of a successful customer management system are customer selection, training, job design, and performance management.

• Not all customer-operators are alike. When compared with each other, they are faster, slower, smarter, pickier, later, earlier, or more or less prepared to perform their operational roles. This diversity increases the cost and complexity of running a service business.

• Assume that you don't know exactly how your customers are affecting your operations or how well your efforts to manage them are really going. Reframe any certainties as hypotheses that need confirmation. Test them. Fortunately, the data you need is usually right at your fingertips.

UNCOMMON TAKEAWAYS

• Service customers don't just purchase a service; they also participate in creating it. Among other things, they make the service faster or slower, better or worse, cheaper or more expensive to deliver — for themselves and for other customers. They are active producers (and detractors) of the value they end up consuming.

• For example, a customer at a salad bar affects the quality of his or her meal, whereas patients who skip dental appointments drive up the costs of running the entire practice. When customers are influencing the service experience in ways like these, we call them customer-operators.

• Customers can be more or less involved operationally, depending on your industry and on your specific design choices — for example, how much self-service you build into your model and whether you involve your customers in your improvement efforts.

• The more dependent your service business is on the behavior of customer-operators, the more important it is to manage them successfully. Similar to employee management, the four components of a successful customer management system are customer selection, training, job design, and performance management.

• Not all customer-operators are alike. When compared with each other, they are faster, slower, smarter, pickier, later, earlier, or more or less prepared to perform their operational roles. This diversity increases the cost and complexity of running a service business.

• Assume that you don't know exactly how your customers are affecting your operations or how well your efforts to manage them are really going. Reframe any certainties as hypotheses that need confirmation. Test them. Fortunately, the data you need is usually right at your fingertips.