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54 • The 100 Greatest Ideas for Building the Business of Your Dreams

relationships. (If you get into trouble, it is more likely to be an amenable customer
than an amenable bank manager who will get you back on course.)

So, you want to be a leader? Make your mind up what sort of person you want
to lead.

Idea 35 - Ask the customer

The key to a good hire is the acceptability of the person's experience, knowledge
and even personality to your key customers. This is mainly true, of course, if the
person you are hiring will have direct contact with these people, but is also true for
back-room people who will have an influence on either your product or your terms
for doing business. So, before you hire anyone, introduce them to at least one of
your key customers. The feedback is invaluable.

Keep the meeting very low key and make sure that the customer is aware that
they are being asked for an opinion not being asked to make your decision. Just
arrange for you and the candidates individually to meet the customer for a short
time. Make sure that you leave them on their own for a while. After this, your
customer's view will confirm or deny your feelings about the person - very useful.

There are two main advantages of this approach. Firstly your customer will be
pleased with the trouble you are taking and, secondly, you will get an authoritative
view on the industry knowledge and customer awareness of the candidate. There is
a downside. If the customer does not like the person and you still hire them, you will
have to put extra effort into starting the relationship between the two. And the
opposite is also true; if you decide not to go ahead with a candidate that the cus-
tomer recommended, you risk some disappointment.

But in the experience of a lot of people, the advantages vastly outweigh the
disadvantages. This is true when you think about the enormous problem of getting
rid of staff you do not need or are not performing. If your customer can help to
avoid even one of those, you have proved the usefulness of this idea.