syriaBy and large there are more Americans concerned with Miley Cyrus right now than Syria and I think you would be hard pressed to find two people in the same room who even know where Syria is. However, it’s starting to hit the news stories and some pretty interesting polls are coming out. The latest from Reuters is that only 9% of Americans think that intervention in Syria is a good idea. This makes this potential war the least popular military engagement in history (yep, about 4 times more unpopular than Vietnam.) According to the people this idea is a bigger fiasco than New Coke was…

We don’t usually get political here at the manufacturing plant. We simply roll our sleeves up and make the best barricade tape, stake flags, flagging tape and other marking products that we can make. However, reading the news this morning I couldn’t help but think that our politicians know nothing about running a business. In reality, that’s what our country is…a really big business. The politicians are the CEOs, sales staff, plant managers, assembly workers and the marketing department (although the media sometimes takes that job on.) We the American people are the customers paying to be served. Here’s the problem though…when politicians on both sides of the aisle are pushing for military action that the American people overwhelmingly do not want this is simply bad customer service. No amount of marketing can fix this.

A golden rule of business and one we take very seriously here at Presco is “Find out the needs and desires of your customers and then exceed their expectations.” Doesn’t that sound great? Isn’t that the way people should do business? Wouldn’t you like to be served by people and companies who adopted that mantra?

Imagine if here at Presco we surveyed our customers and they said, “We do not want yellow 3 mil barricade tape.” Do you think for a minute we would say, “Sure, you do. You’ll come around. We’ll just go make a ton of it and then force you to buy it.” We would be out of business in a month! Instead we are constantly surveying our valued distributors, seeking information from them, analyzing this information and then delivering in an exceptional way to them.

Can you imagine if before our political leadership started making decisions they actually surveyed their “customers?”

President Obama: “I was initially thinking about invading Syria and bombing people but I read the latest Reuters poll and quite obviously America is against this so I will not follow this course of action. Let me be clear, I am here to serve the American people.”

John Boehner: “I would like the support the President’s request for military action in Syria but I serve the American people and they obviously do not want this to happen. Therefore, as always, I side with the people.”

Wow! Can you imagine? Partisan divides would crumble, faith in our government would sky rocket and politicians would be respected again. Amazing.

Dear Politicians….please start running our country like Americans run their businesses. Listen to your “customers” and exceed their expectations.