The CEO's most important New Year's resolution

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As the leader of your company, what you decide to do is what gets done. At least, that's how it should happen. What you have control over (to a degree) are your own decisions, your own actions, and the management of your employees. You have some influence with your business partners. You have no direct control over your customers.

Of course, without customers, you wouldn't have a business - no revenue, no employees, no partners. The people most important to your business are your customers.

Whom do you spend the most time with? Employees. You can spend your entire year, day in and day out, helping them, teaching them, guiding them, disciplining them, hiring them, warning them, firing them, figuring out how and what to pay them, establishing policies for them and about them, and on and on.

Meanwhile, that "most important" group of people - your customers - are also interacting with your employees. They see the results of your work. What is their impression? More importantly, how do you know?

I recently conducted customer interviews for a CEO. He got a word-for-word transcription of the comments made by his business partners. It was not a pretty picture. It was not comforting. It was, in fact, life-changing. It took him a couple of days to get used to the idea that his perception about his company's reputation, up until he read that report, was wrong. He was operating in an employee-filled universe. He had no idea how discouraged his partners had become, how far his company had strayed from the ideal in his head, and how vulnerable his company was to any aggressive, well-funded competitor.

The CEO did the right thing; he faced the music and rolled up his sleeves. Armed with the reality of the situation, the company is now moving in a new direction, one that will make them almost impossible to displace. They already lead the market in sales, now they just need to earn the right to stay there. As we make improvements, we will be communicating with their partners, letting them know that "we heard you," and "we're making things better."

Your partners and customers want you to "get it"

What's wonderful about this kind of turnaround story is how quickly a company's selling partners become cheerleaders again, once the solutions start to kick in. Distributors and retailers "marry" a business in the first place because they believe in it and they believe they will be successful selling the company's products. As a relationship sours, they continue to hope that the CEO will see the light and start making life easier for them again.

If and when a CEO finally does listen, and then starts moving in the right direction, partners are thrilled and surprisingly forgiving. They tell everyone, including customers, how happy they are about the improvements.

"Well, they had some problems for a while, but they really have turned it around. We are very pleased with where they're going now, and are optimistic about them." I've heard these statements many times, from partners who, just months before, were one step away from "breaking up."

If you really want your business to take off, to own the market, to grow in ways you can't even imagine today, to be solid and impossible to beat, there is one New Year's resolution that will do that for you.

Promise yourself that you will spend 10 to 20% of your time with customers this coming year. If you sell through a channel of some sort, spend just as much time with your channel partners. Just call them on the phone and chat. Ask them how it's going. What trends do they see right now? Ask them if there's anything you could be doing better. Ask them who else they work with in your market and what they think of them. Ask them to rate certain aspects of your business on a scale of 1 - 10 - and keep track of their responses over time.

If you got a call from the CEO of any company - large or small - you'd take it. If that CEO did not spend a second selling you, but just asked questions and listened, when you got off the phone, you'd think, "Wow." You'd tell others that you just talked to the CEO of X company. Everyone would be impressed.

One way to make sure you make these calls is to put your assistant in charge of getting one customer and one dealer on the phone with you every week. Give her a list of people to call to set up the meetings. When you reach the end of the list, start at the top again.

I've devoted my working life to helping CEOs and entrepreneurs increase their revenues. We've improved products, marketing, selling, websites, systems and processes, and built new teams. But I have to say that nothing makes as much difference as when a CEO spends less time with employees and more time with customers and partners. It's a breath of fresh air, a view into the world outside your conference rooms, a chance to see your company for what it is: An organization providing products and services to customers, through partners.

Life is a balance of risk, reward, and regrets. If you take a little personal risk and call customers and partners, your rewards will be great. And you can avoid some nasty regrets.