How to Run a Company For the Next 500 - 1,000+ Years
I looked up the oldest companies in the world, and to my surprise, there are quite a few that are several hundreds of years old – lots in Japan for some reason.
Here are some from North America that you most likely have heard of:
👉 The Hudson’s Bay Company (1670)
👉 Jim Beam (1795)
👉 JPMorgan Chase (1799)
👉 DuPont (1802)
👉 Colgate (1806)
👉 Citigroup (1812)
👉 Remington Ammunition (1816)
👉 HarperCollins Publishers (1817)
👉 Brooks Brothers (1818)
👉 Macy’s (1843)
In other parts of the world, many companies are way older than these.
It got me thinking…
What companies that exist today will still be around 500 – 1,000 years from now?
Isn’t that wild to think about?
Many companies will be bought/sold, merged/acquired, failed/shut down…
But surely some will remain, right?
The next question I had was – how do you make a company last 500 – 1,000 years?
A few answers came to mind.
1. Being Brand-Centric
Brand building is about aligning your values with your customers.
This can be in the form of:
👉 Storytelling
👉 Sponsoring athletes
👉 Promoting messages and delivering on those promises
👉 Supporting a cause
👉 Being authentic to a culture or subculture
👉 Using certain types of materials
👉 Superior craftsmanship
👉 Design aesthetic
👉 Standing for certain things and denouncing other things
👉 Aligning with certain people…
2. Being Customer Centric
Being customer-centric means putting the customer at the center of your business’s focus, decisions, and actions. It involves understanding your customers’ needs, preferences, and behaviors deeply, and using that understanding to create products, services, and experiences that meet or exceed those needs. Customer-centric businesses prioritize building strong relationships with their customers, seeking feedback, and continuously improving to better serve their customers.
There are two ways to run a business: you either create a product or service that solves an existing problem or pain for your customer, or create a product or service and convince your customer they need it. As long as you continue to do that, you should remain in business for a long time.
Times change, people change, culture changes, needs change, but I think these two will remain stable regardless of time.
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