Don’t ever cheat

Can an entrepreneur be principled? Can he be principled if he faces crippling financial pressure? Can he honor commitments? Can he keep the faith?

Being principled need not be just a pipe dream. Good guys don’t have to finish last. We set up TEOCO to prove that you don’t have to be an asshole to succeed in business; you can succeed without selling your soul to the devil.

Soon after we acquired Vero Systems we realized that Vero had sold a product to a customer that was not quite finished. It was embarrassing, but we made no attempt to hide this fact. In my very first meeting with the customer’s representative I truthfully told him: “I’m sorry, but we are in no position to deliver the product that we promised.” I even offered to pay back the customer everything that they had paid Vero.

We’ve been playing this game at TEOCO for over 15 years now – and winning. We run our business with integrity and honesty.

Of course there’s a price to pay: you can sometimes lose lucrative deals. But our chosen path is to be principled, and we are happy to walk away. As my friend Myron will tell you, it’s never been TEOCO’s way to do what is expedient or to look for loopholes.

Happily, there is a heart-warming upside: we also win a lot of deals because people like to do business with other honorable people. William Communications once told me that they liked working with TEOCO because we shared similar values – and, many years later, Cox Communications too echoed the same sentiment.

In fact, a bright young student once surprised me with his outrageous hypothesis: he told me "TEOCO is gaining a strategic advantage by being honorable" and asked how we would react if other entrepreneurs "copied" our winning model. I replied that we would be delighted because it would prove that TEOCO's model of principled entrepreneurship works -- and nothing could please me more!