In Robbie Kellman Baxter’s book, The Forever Transaction she provides practical insight into why and how to build a subscription model for your company. The book reveals the complexity and alignment of people, processes, and resources required to create a subscription model, however at the heart of it all is an absolute commitment to continually delivering enough value to your clients so that they never need or want to leave you. The objective is to create and support a client for life.
From our perspective the deep level of caring, curiosity, and commitment to the client’s well-being to create a client for life, looks a lot like good leadership. After all, leadership is a people profession. We also believe that if your organization has the culture to successfully create clients for life, whether with or without a subscription model, you also have a culture that can support employees for life.
We are not ignoring the reality of the extremely fluid employment market, and we don’t expect a return to something like Japan in the 70’s, where virtually all employees stayed at one firm for a lifetime. Paradoxically, we believe that if organizations want to thrive in a fluid labour market, they should have a vision to keep employees for life and this will differentiate the organization in a very competitive labour market. Employees may not stay that long, but they and the organization will be better off while they are there. We also believe that a culture that puts clients first can also put employees first by having a people centered focus. Organizations don’t need to choose between employee and client focus, they can have their cake and eat it too by developing a people focused culture.
Leadership that cares about people enough to put them first will attract employees that will attract and look after clients for life.
