The honest path
This first path consists of working as honestly as possible, doing everything so customers are satisfied with the products offered to them, making sure products are sold at the fairest price according to the value they create, communicating regularly and calmly with customers, and putting in place the tools needed for exchanges to be as transparent as possible.
The ultimate goal is to be satisfied that customers are satisfied and feel they received value for their money.
I am lucky to have founded and taken part in many startups. The vast majority of companies in the sector have this vision: a vision where customer satisfaction is measured constantly and becomes the companys greatest pride.
But this first way of working is not only about satisfying customers. It is a whole that also includes making sure collaborators and colleagues have a good experience alongside us.
No low blows. No knives in the back. No discrimination. Commitments kept.
These two subjects are linked. If we want to live in a just world, that justice must shine through all our relationships. We cannot claim to be transparent with a customer while doing something dirty to a colleague. In the same way, a team united by the permanent goal of lying to customers will systematically be pulled into lies and bad behavior among its members.
The dishonest path
This second way of working consists of waking up in the morning obsessed with finding the best way to convince customers to buy a product or service at any cost, whatever its objective quality.
People who work this way think neither about the customers interest nor about the value created for them. They think only about how to present an offer in its best light, regularly cheating. There is obviously nothing wrong with highlighting the advantages of a service, unless the marketing packaging hides a problem the customer does not know about.
The dishonest path is the path of false promises, manipulated contracts, fake urgency, bad faith and the little arrangements that slowly become a culture.
I have seen both worlds. I have seen entrepreneurs, salespeople and executives who build long-term trust because they want the client to win. I have also seen people who confuse business with conquest and believe that every relationship is a battlefield where the smartest person is the one who tricks the other first.
There is no mystery: dishonest behavior always ends up poisoning the inside of a company. When a team learns to lie outside, it soon learns to lie inside. When founders accept small betrayals with customers, they will eventually accept small betrayals with partners, employees and investors.
Business is not outside morality. It is one of the places where morality is tested every day, because money, pressure and ambition reveal what people really accept doing.
I do not believe success requires abandoning principles. On the contrary, the only success that can be lived peacefully over time is success built on trust. A company that wants to last must make customers want to come back, employees want to stay, partners want to continue and investors want to support it again.
The business world is not without faith or law unless we decide to make it so. Each contract, each email, each negotiation and each promise is an opportunity either to raise the level of trust around us or to damage it.
We must choose the honest path not because it is naive, but because it is stronger. It creates cleaner relationships, more resilient companies and a life in which we can look back without shame.