The People-Customer-Brand Hierarchy
The customer is not always right — your people come first, and they'll take care of everything else.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Scudamore openly disagrees with 'the customer is always right.' His hierarchy runs the other way: people first, then customer, then brand. Take care of your employees and they will take care of the customer with love and respect; take care of the customer and they will take care of the brand's revenue and profit. He backs it with a personal consumer standard drawn from FedEx ('the world on time') and Starbucks (the drink done right, your name remembered, a voucher when they slip). The operational half of the framework is mistake-handling: when something goes wrong and it reaches him as CEO, the first move is to own it, then ask how to learn so it doesn't recur. Humans make mistakes; caring is what scales.
Origin
The hierarchy is the crystallised lesson of the nine-bad-apples firing plus decades of Scudamore's own consumer observations. He calls it 'a philosophy we have which has been something we're proud of and I think something that's been very impactful in our growth.'
Core principles
- 01Take care of your people; they take care of the customer; the customer takes care of the brand.
- 02'The customer is always right' inverts the true causal chain.
- 03Do what you say you will do — rare enough to be a differentiator.
- 04Own mistakes first, learn second; never defend.
- 05Little things done right are what let brands dominate.
How to run it
- 1
Declare the hierarchy out loud
Say it plainly and repeatedly: people are the most important, not the customer. Scudamore states the chain as take care of your people → they take care of the customer → the customer takes care of the brand's growth, profit, and revenue.
- 2
Make the promise specific and keep it
Pick promises you will actually deliver every time — on-time service, upfront rates, the house painted by end of day. Scudamore's benchmark is FedEx: 'their slogan in the early days was the world on time, and they deliver on that promise.'
Watch out 'There's so many experiences we have where a promise was made and it wasn't delivered' — a broken promise is worse than a smaller one kept.
- 3
Systematise the little things
Copy the Starbucks pattern: the custom drink made right, remembered next visit, your name used, a free voucher if they slip. 'What a business does, the little things right, that helps those brands grow and dominate the world.'
- 4
Own mistakes before you explain them
When a customer escalates, the first move is ownership. 'The first thing we do is we own it, we take responsibility for that mistake.' No defence, no context, no blame — ownership first.
- 5
Convert every mistake into a learning
Immediately after owning it, ask: how do we learn so this doesn't happen again? 'Humans make mistakes, it happens — but it's how you care about the customer, and if you can truly care, that's how things grow and scale.'
Pro tip Make the escalation path reach a real decision-maker; Scudamore takes them as CEO.
In the wild
Asked about customer focus, Scudamore directly contradicts the standard maxim. He argues the employees are the most important people in the organisation, and that the customer experience is a downstream product of how those people are treated. Employees who are treated right treat customers with love and respect; customers then drive revenue and profit.
→ The people-first hierarchy became the company's stated philosophy and, in Scudamore's assessment, one of the most impactful factors in O2E's growth to $400M+.
Common mistakes
Sacrificing staff to appease every customer
It inverts the causal chain. Staff who are treated as the lowest priority cannot manufacture a genuinely warm customer experience, and the brand degrades from the inside.
Defending a mistake before owning it
Scudamore's sequence is own it, then learn. Explanation offered first reads as excuse-making and destroys the trust that the ownership was supposed to rebuild.
Making big promises you can't keep every time
The differentiator is that you 'do what you say you will do, which is rare in this world of business.' An unkept promise is a worse position than never having made it.
Is it for you?
Best for
Service organisations where frontline staff ARE the product experience.
Not ideal for
Contexts where a specific customer's safety or legal rights must override any internal consideration.
From the transcript
“People will often say the customer's always right, that the customer is the most important. I disagree. I think the people, your employees, are the…”
“Take care of your people, they will then take care of the customer, and if you take care of the customer they will then take…”
“The first thing we do is we own it, we take responsibility for that mistake, and then we say how do we learn so this…”
From the episode
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