On Ethical Alignment

When deciding who to associate with, one of the most critical questions is whether your morals line up with the morals of the people, groups, or organizations you associate with.

Dear Friends,

For the last year, much more of my time has been taken up with trying to turnaround our family’s eighty-two year-old business, making up for some years of management from outside the family that depressed revenue and increased debt. It’s forced me to look at what kind of business represents my values, not just what kind of business that my grandfather and my father wanted to run.

Neither of them wanted to have a retail service department to work on customer cars. Their theory was that our technicians were busy reconditioning cars for sale, fixing the problems that they had when we bought them so that our customers could have a reliable vehicle that they could trust.

Of course, we did warranty work if a vehicle had a problem within the initial warranty period, because it was the right thing to do. But if a customer didn’t have an unexpected problem, if they just wanted to get the oil changed and the brakes replaced at the same dealership they bought the car from, they were told to find an independent auto repair shop near their house because our service department didn’t have the time to work on customer cars.

That’s what they told themselves, but it was probably the wrong choice. A business that has loyal customers should offer them service and maintenance, as long as it can be done profitably and according to the ethical standards you hold. A lot of the reluctance was because they didn’t have systems in place to track service tickets, staff trained to communicate with a service customer, or knowledge about how to run a different kind of business from auto sales.