A founder's preferred way of working matters less than what customers actually want. Align your supply, values, and methods with your customers' preferences on service, marketing, and product. You don't have to abandon how you work, but you have to ask them first.
What's best for your customers? I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of them describe to me the structure of the business they're building as being around product or wanting to do a certain kind of work because what they want to do. And it's good to do what you want to do. But what I find is that businesses are built by the customer and it's going to be what the customer wants you to do and the way the customer wants to be served and where the customer wants to be marketed to. And there's often a compatibility between these two things. Like that entrepreneur who wants to work a certain way, That's often because they perceive that to be the high-value way of doing things. They think working other ways sort of constitutes wasting time. There are going to be customers who align with that. It's not like you have to completely change the way that you want to work, but when you want to work a certain way, you need to align your supply and your values with the values of demand. And when you put yourself in a position of asking, what do the customers who I really want to serve want? What are their values? You're going to find yourself aligned and create much more extraordinary value for your business.
