Fred DeLuca Quotes

At the end of the day, the differential, I believe, on the airline space has got to be about the product and the service that you provide. And again, I can't express that enough. That comes from people. It is a people business, and my primary focus is to get our 84,000-plus people back aligned, back engaged, and back focused on our customer.

The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.

We're very much in the people business in that there are two important groups you have to work with: customers and employees.

You have to treat your employees like your customers. When you treat them right they will treat your outside customers right.

If you fire people, you fire customers.

Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.

We would rather have our employees running our business.

One, we committed to put about 650 people in the field to focus totally on customer satisfaction.

Everyone talks about building a relationship with your customer. I think you build one with your employees first.

If you believe, as I do, that your employees truly are your most valuable asset, you will do whatever you can to help them do their jobs as well as possible.

You have to realize that the customer really is king. People who go into more established businesses probably have to be careful not to be casual about that. When you have a brand-new business, and nobody knows who you are, you know you have to work really hard for your customers.

Chick-fil-A is what it is today because of its people, purpose and product.

If your employees are disengaged, and they don't take care of your customers, it doesn't matter how good your strategy is - your customers will still go somewhere else.

When leaders throughout an organization take an active, genuine interest in the people they manage, when they invest real time to understand employees at a fundamental level, they create a climate for greater morale, loyalty, and, yes, growth.

People are the core of every business. Businesses are based on relationships, and relationships are based on people. I would go to an average restaurant run by amazing people over an outstanding restaurant run by awful people.

I'm a big believer that if you're happy and your employees are happy, your customers are going to be happy. If you're unhappy and your employees are unhappy, there's no way your customers are going to be happy.

When you're managing a large number of people, you learn that incentives matter tremendously. You really want people to be rewarded for doing the right thing for the customers and the organization.

I strongly believe that you can't win in the marketplace unless you win first in the workplace. If you don't have a winning culture inside, it's hard to compete in the very tough world outside.

Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible.

As a CEO, you get sucked into dealing with all the tasks of being a CEO. There's a big meeting, a big discussion, and you get into all the big issues, which is your job. But what CEOs often lose sight of is that it's all about the people who work for you. For every 1,000 decisions, 999 were being made when I was not in the room.

Stay externally focused - on your customers - and focus internally when you have to hire.

The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.

The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers.

People are definitely a company's greatest asset. It doesn't make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.

Quality has always been the overriding factor for us. But you also have to have happy people working for you.