I had to deal with a client the other day who was quite upset. This is not my favorite way to spend a large part of an hour, but it comes with the territory. The conflict evolved around her asking me to treat her differently than we have all of our other thousands of customers over the past 22 years. She was angry that I wouldn’t make an exception to our policies for her. She stated, “No one will ever know.” My reply? “I would.”

“The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping.” —Izaak Walton

From the very beginning, we have had a policy at our company to treat everyone fairly and equally, regardless of how “big” of a client they are. We are passionate about making sure that every one of our customers is playing by the same set of rules.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
— The Golden Rule

I have been told by some other business owners that this business model is quite “old-fashioned.” Some have even called it “naive.” They tell us that in this day and age, you have to be aggressive, be a “do-what-it-takes” kind of business owner. They tell us that we have to be ruthless to succeed.

“People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.”
—Robert Francis Kennedy

Perhaps these people might be right. If we didn’t have this approach to business over the past 22 years, we might have grown larger, been more profitable—hey, maybe we could have even gone public like Enron! Hey, I could have emulated Kenneth Lay.

“Wait till these Enron guys find out that in prison,
the term ‘Insider trading’ has a whole new meaning.”
— Jay Leno

My husband, Jim, (who is also my business partner) and I were discussing this “slippery slope” that presents itself to us on an almost daily basis. We both feel very strongly about our customers, about treating them fairly, about doing what we say we will do. Over the years, we have both been faced with the choice of “the easier path.”

Would it have been “easier” for me to give into this angry client? At the time, yes. I spoke with her for close to an hour, listening to her frustrations, dealing with her anger. At the end, we got it resolved—at least to a point where she was no longer angry. It would have taken five minutes to “break the rules”—on a day that I had no spare time in my schedule. It meant that I had to stay at the office until well past quitting time. It meant that there is now a client out there who doesn’t agree with the way that we do business.

But you know what? Breaking the rules might have saved me time and made her happy. But as I explained to her, I would have to go back to all of our clients and do for them what she was asking me to do for her.

The bottom line? I have to look myself in the eyes every morning. The problem with her approach to solving the problem was that I would have known that I had, in essence, lied to all of our other clients over the past 22 years. And for me that simply wasn’t an option.

“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be
certain of improving, and that’s your own self.”
— Aldous Huxley