Ten Commandments of ISP Business
(Plus One)

Could your ISP continue to run effectively if you weren't around to take the helm? Here's a set of guiding principles that I believe would keep my company running on an even keel.

by Kevin Beauchamp [August 3, 1999]

By now most of us are acquainted with Mindspring's instructive and much ballyhooed "The 14 deadly sins of Mindspring." While pondering these tenets of superior service, I was struck with the notion of listing ways in which my company (Spire Communications, Inc.) approaches its customer service and offerings, and how we could improve. If, for example, I stepped out of the picture for a few years, what would our management need to continue if they had nothing else but a list of … of commandments; "ten commandments"?

It was a struggle not to list dozens of little tenets of my own, but to stick to those I felt would really impact the people who were really running things at all levels of the company. If I had the ten most important things embedded into the culture of the company, then everything else would likely just fall into place.

What resulted was my listing of the top ten commandments (eleven actually) I felt Spire's employees could use to maintain a strong corporate operation and services even if its top executives were no longer available to lead. (Some of these you will note contain more than one complete thought. Okay, I fudged a bit trying to get all of these together. If the First Amendment of the US Constitution can have more than one complete thought in a tenet then so can I.)

After reading and pondering these for yourself, think about commandments you might want to add. The point is not to set in stone my personal tenets, but to get your ideas brewing on how to better serve your customers. Start with mine, then build your own. In the end, the real winner will be a better serviced customer.

Send me your additions to these and I'll set them into a future article and call them the "The Laws of Superior ISP Business" with full credit to you and/or your company. Sort of a collection of Murphy's Laws with a positive spin.

SPIRE'S TEN COMMANDMENTS OF BUSINESS

I
Thou shalt not be unequally yoked.

We do not engage in business with vendors who do not share our values of above-average customer service. Any vendor who continues to provide less than above-average service must be removed even if it costs us internally or contractually for a brief period of time.

II
Thou shalt innovate; take responsibility for problems
and assume command of the solution.

We are leaders. We do not wait for opportunities to present themselves; we seek them out—create them. We continually brainstorm to take advantage of our intellectual talent and then immediately follow-up on a discovered opportunity.

When a problem arises, we do not pass it along to another staff member; all who hear about the problem are automatically owners of it until it is satisfactorily resolved. Employees and managers are authorized to take responsibility immediately and resolve the problem using whatever means intelligently available. If no means of resolution is immediately available, we quickly create one to please the customer and fulfill their needs.

III
Thou shalt only hire those who are more intelligent than thyself.

We never hire down. This only creates an organization less intelligent than the management currently in place. If you are afraid to hire someone more intelligent than yourself because you feel threatened, then you've placed the whole company on the path toward destruction; it won't have the intellectual stamina to compete in the marketplace.

go to page 2: IV - Thou shalt communicate . . .