Today's post is an article written by ProContractor Supply CEO Abhi Singh, and published on HBSDealer. We encourage you to check out the article on the HBSDealer website, in addition to reading it here.
Winning cultures say something, when they see something.
Recently, I had one of those life conversations with my son that every parent knows is coming eventually. He’s a newly minted 14-year-old rising freshman. And here in Kansas, kids get their temporary driver’s license at 14 years old.Â
Yes … 14. Horrifying.
If you know me, you know my son is my world. Raising him to be a good human being, avoid a victim mentality, earn his way through life, and have the courage to do the right thing, especially when nobody is looking, is what I consider my single most important responsibility.
Recently, somewhere in the middle of a gaggle of ten other 14-year-old derelicts, and I use that term affectionately because they’re honestly great kids, he temporarily forgot some of those lessons. They did something dumb … not fatal … not criminal … just extremely moronic. And they got caught.
Here’s the part that matters … he told us what happened. Not because he was excited to have the conversation. Trust me, he was not. He told us because we have tried to build a home where the truth comes first. We have always told him that if he tells us the truth, we can deal with almost anything. We may not like what happened. There may still be consequences. But the truth gives us something to work with. Lies don’t … silence doesn’t … avoidance doesn’t.
Mistakes happen.
As you can imagine, he wasn’t thrilled with the follow-up conversation about actions and consequences. But that’s life. You pay to play. And afterward, I found myself thinking about how closely that conversation mirrors what happens in business every single day.
Actions have consequences … and consequences can linger, last, or disappear depending on how people respond to them.
That thought immediately brought me back to a mistake I witnessed years ago inside a company I worked for. A company lost a major customer. Not an order … a customer.
The relationship had existed for years. The volume was meaningful. The account was respected. The business was profitable enough, but not by every metric that mattered to the new ownership group. Then one day, the orders stopped.
Why? Because the new ownership group of a 100-year-plus company decided the account was “bad business.” They started to squeeze … they became more rigid … they started to “flex” … if you know, you know.
On paper, I’m sure it looked logical. The margins probably weren’t perfect. The account likely required extra attention. Maybe somebody built a spreadsheet that made the relationship look worse than it actually was. Spreadsheets can be incredibly valuable, but they become dangerous when the people reading them don’t understand the business behind the numbers.
What leadership failed to understand was that this customer was an anchor account for a specialized product category. Their volume allowed the company to buy in larger quantities, improve purchasing economics, lower costs, and generate incremental margin across the enterprise. Losing the customer didn’t simply reduce sales. It weakened an entire category. The account wasn’t carrying itself … it was helping carry other business. And then it was gone.
Here’s the part that still sticks with me … the leadership team thought they were making the right decision. The people in the field, the ones grounded in reality, knew it was the wrong call. But they stayed quiet because that was the culture leadership had built.
That’s the dangerous part. The people in the field didn’t fail that customer. Leadership did. Leadership created an environment where disagreement was viewed as resistance, where experience was viewed as opinion, and where the people closest to the customer learned it was safer to stay quiet than speak up.
The customer didn’t leave because of one bad decision. The customer left because the organization stopped listening.
When people closest to the customer stop speaking up, the business is already in trouble. They may still attend the meetings … they may still execute the plan … they may still smile and nod. But if they no longer believe honest disagreement is welcome, you don’t have alignment. You have compliance. And compliance is not culture.
In fact, a culture without candor is little more than a group of paid hostages. People scared to act … scared to challenge … scared to share the facts … scared to tell leadership what leadership needs to hear. They’re there physically, but mentally, emotionally, and intellectually, they’ve checked out. That’s not a team … that’s a payroll.
The finance team saw margin pressure. Operations saw complexity. Leadership saw an account that didn’t fit neatly into their model. The field saw reality. They understood the customer’s influence in the market. They understood the leverage the volume created. They understood the broader implications of losing the relationship.
 
They were right. The customer left anyway. Not because nobody knew … because nobody talked about it openly. Or maybe worse … because nobody believed talking about it would matter.
Years ago, I wrote that fear-based leadership creates an environment where people only do what’s necessary to keep their job. They stop thinking like owners and start operating in survival mode. That’s how businesses stagnate. That’s how companies lose their edge.
That is exactly what happened here. The field wasn’t silent because they lacked experience. They were silent because leadership had unintentionally trained them to be. The people closest to the customer knew the decision was wrong, but the culture did not make disagreement safe, productive, or welcome. So they let the decision happen.
Eventually, the customer left. Not because of one mistake, but because of a series of decisions that were never fully challenged, openly discussed, or clearly understood.
That experience taught me one of the most important lessons of my career, perfectly stated by a former boss: It’s OK to lose an order. It’s never OK to lose a customer.
You’re going to lose orders. Price changes … competitors show up … markets shift … relationships evolve. Sometimes another company simply earns the business. That’s life.
Customers are different. Customers leave when small problems become bigger problems. When concerns go unaddressed. When communication breaks down. When leaders become disconnected from reality. And when people stop telling the truth.
Most customers don’t leave because of a single catastrophic event. They leave because of dozens of small moments that nobody was willing to address.
That’s why leaders must create cultures where mistakes are discussed openly. Not to embarrass people … not to assign blame … not to create fear. To learn.
If sales mishandles a customer issue, talk about it. If operations drops the ball, discuss it. If purchasing misses the bigger picture, walk through it. If leadership makes a bad decision, leadership should own it publicly. The goal isn’t punishment. The goal is understanding.
Everyone should understand what happened, why it happened, how to prevent it, and how the lesson applies beyond the people directly involved. One mistake should educate one hundred people.
The strongest organizations I have been part of weren’t the ones that avoided mistakes. They were the ones that surfaced them openly, honestly, without ego, and without fear. Because when people know they can challenge an idea, question a decision, admit a mistake, or raise a concern without being attacked, something remarkable happens. Problems surface earlier … solutions come faster … trust grows … customers stay … and the organization gets smarter.
As I thought about that conversation with my son, I realized the real lesson had very little to do with what he and his friends actually did. The lesson was that he told us.
He knew consequences were coming … he knew he wasn’t getting off the hook … he knew there would be an uncomfortable conversation. But he told us anyway.
Why? Because the culture we’ve tried to build at home values truth more than perfection.
The culture we built at home allowed my son to tell us the truth. The culture that company built taught its people not to.
One culture rewarded candor. The other rewarded silence.
And silence is expensive.
Companies rarely lose customers because people make mistakes.
They lose customers because people stop telling the truth.
And that is always a leadership problem.
-Abhi Singh
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