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Lesson #1: “Personal relationships are always the key to good business”

Article Overview: “I guess we keep on trying to look after the people that look after us. If we don't look after one another, we can't win. Now, you don't retain customers unless you have a combination of what I call the TIL principle – trust, integrity and loyalty,” says Fox. “I look at a lot of the people I initially employed. And the aspect of loyalty was 100 per cent. Maybe the ability was 90 per cent, but I'd rather have that than a reverse position of it.”

Lesson #1: “Personal relationships are always the key to good business”

"I guess we keep on trying to look after the people that look after us. If we don't look after one another, we can't win. Now, you don't retain customers unless you have a combination of what I call the TIL principle - trust, integrity and loyalty," says Fox. "I look at a lot of the people I initially employed. And the aspect of loyalty was 100 per cent. Maybe the ability was 90 per cent, but I'd rather have that than a reverse position of it."

Ask Fox why he has been so successful in his life and the answer is clear: he has gotten to where he is because of the people around him, and the people who have been around him since his humble beginnings carting coke and coal from the back of his used truck.

"It's a people business," he says. To this day, Fox can still tell you the name of his very first bank manager, along with many of his early customers. Some may call it savvy networking, but for Fox, it comes down to plain and simple friendship. "Personal relationships are always the key to good business. You can buy networking; you can't buy friendships."

Among those he considers his good friends are also Sunthorn Arunanondchai, chairman of Tesco Lotus in Thailand - a good friend for over 40 years - and Bill Kelty, a prominent trade union activist in Australia - someone who normally would sit on the other side of the fence from Fox. Indeed, one of Fox's hallmarks has been his ability to create relatively good working relationships within the unionized trucking industry. Thanks to his trucking origins, he is much more consultative with the transport unions than some of his competitors.

"I've had friends that have gone to jail and I've stuck by them. I've gone and visited them in jail," says Fox. "What are friends for? Friends are there for the tough times, not the good times. That's the time you've got to be about and say ‘Well I'm your friend. What can I do? Is there anything I can do to help?' And I will do that when he comes back to town."

Fox is also a fiercely loyal family man, having groomed his children to take over the business from the time they were young.

"I think family to stay together have got to play together. They've got to have mutual respect," he says. "They've got to be able to overcome the problems that they have by interfacing from time to time. No family gets all the way through with smooth water and you've just got to systematically keep them all involved in, in what you're doing."

What inspired this loyalty among family and friends for Fox?

"I was brought up in a tribal situation where we all ate out of the same pot and put the money in the same pot - the same thing with my kids," he says. "They've all been brought up that each and every one has an obligation to all members of the family and they have their own direct family and then they've got their extended family and they've all got to be prepared to care and share."

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Article Tags: fox, good business, integrity, lesson 1, loyalty, personal relationships, principle



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