Kindergarten: Business 101

My name is Bill Keller, and I am the CEO of Stanion Wholesale Electric Co. and a member of the dinosaur generation. Nevertheless, I am introducing a new feature to our website, a blog. This is my first attempt at writing for our blog, but we intend this to be the first of many posts on our website. We hope that you will enjoy the blogs that we post, and we invite your comments and questions. My children and grandchildren may run circles around me with respect to technology, but none of them have yet written a blog.
Robert Fulghum, an American minister and author, first published his book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, in 1986. His book points out that much of what we should know about life was or should have been learned by us in kindergarten. In our years of life after we finish our time in kindergarten, there are certainly many things we learn that guide us; but there is a lot of accuracy in the title of Fulghum’s book.


Many of us make a living in the business world, and one can spend many hours and thousands of dollars getting one or more college degrees in the study of business. Those who are highly educated in business studies often believe that a person cannot be a successful business person without a great deal of formal business education, especially at a prestigious business college; but I wonder if Robert Fulghum’s ideas about learning might be applicable to the business world.


I started my business career when I was 28 years old, and I had seven years of college education and three years of practicing law under my belt at the time. However, I had never really received any formal business education. My parents taught me how to work and taught me about the value of hard work, but they did not give me any formal business training. Almost all of my business training has been on-the-job training at Stanion Wholesale Electric Co., and I have learned a lot in those many years. I have learned from the successes and mistakes of myself and others, and I have taken opportunities to study various people from whom I knew that I could learn valuable lessons about business.


However, after spending many years of learning business by working at it, I have come to understand, more-and-more, that many of the most important business principles that make our company successful are very basic, simple principles that I learned or should have learned long before I started my business career. One of the best examples of this is the concept of business relationships in a competitive, free-market business environment. Wholesale distributors like our company sell products and services to a limited customer base, and we buy from a limited number of suppliers. Unlike a retail business which may sell to everyone, we are very dependent on repeat business from a limited customer base. This means that it is very important for us to establish strong and lasting business relationships with our customers and our suppliers.


What I quickly came to understand about those relationships is something that I learned or should have learned in kindergarten. One of the most important, yet very basic, concepts about successful relationships is that they need to be win – win relationships, even in a competitive, free-market business world. We talk a lot about this concept within our company. We want to have a relationship with our customers where we try to help them win and where they do win in their dealings with us, and we want our customers to want us to win and to work with us in a way that we do win in our dealings with them. We want the same type of reciprocal, winning relationship with our suppliers. Competitive, free-market capitalism is not a zero-sum game. All of the parties in a business relationship should strive to make sure that the relationship is a win for all parties.


I do not mean to denigrate the value of a good business education. We should all recognize that we never know all that there is to know and that we can always learn about new and valuable ideas and principles. Business concepts change with time, along with almost everything else in the world. But, some of the most basic concepts have probably been known to us since kindergarten.