I get a lot of requests for the lists of Fred Harvey business practices I use in my lectures. Here are my favorite words of business wisdom from the founding family of the American service industry—who created and ran the first national chain of restaurants, hotels, retail stores, in fact the first national chain of anything, starting in the late 1800s. The way Fred Harvey, his son Ford, and their heirs ran this visionary company from the 1870s through the mid-20th Century is still very relevant today. Their multi-million-dollar family business revolutionized the way we eat, drink and travel—as well as the way we see our customers, our employees, our suppliers and ourselves as professionals.

This advice comes from writing Ford Harvey did in the 1920s to distribute to his employees. A longer version can be found in my book Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civlizing the Wild West—One Meal at a Time (Random House), which the Wall Street Journal selected as one of the Top Ten Books of the Year.

1. Never buy a cheap thing: Everything you buy, you in turn sell. If you buy the best, your customer gets the best.
2. The best price is always the fair price: You may be the first on the market in the morning, but the buyer who is always seeking his supplies at a price under the market will fail to secure preferential consideration.
3. Concentrate your business in as few hands as possible: When you have formed the right associations, “stick” unless convinced your confidence is misplaced, and in that case be careful to see that you hitch up right the next time.
4. Loyalty is double barreled—if you want it, you must be loyal.
5. Plow your profits under: At every point, our growth has been clearly in proportion to our willingness to be moderate in our immediate profit-taking for the sake of the fullest possible satisfaction of the customer. We have not always been so moderate as we might, but always we have paid more for the fun than it was worth. Now, anything above the normal in profits in any section of the business is taken at once as a danger signal and calls for investigation. Generally, we have found, it means that somebody has been cutting costs for a profit showing—without enough regard for profits in the long run.
6. Be committed to complete customer satisfaction: In every venture from the Topeka lunchroom on down, we have been assailed and assailed again with the most plausible reasons for doing things less well. Sticking to our commitment in spite of all sorts of inducements to depart from it has really counted for us.
7. Hold constantly to a level of theoretical perfection: Of course we are not unfailingly successful in having our policies carried out. Of course some of our people fail to hold to our standards, some more often than others. But trying to attain perfection creates a process of natural selection that helps management with its purpose. If, unthinkably, I should direct our meat buyer to purchase second grade beef hereafter, I honestly believe that he would disregard the order. It is the same with all of our department heads and our buyers. Any one of our responsible executives under such circumstances would simply conclude that I had said something that I really did not mean, or that I had suffered a temporary aberration from which I would soon recover.
8. Catch employees young, or at least fairly inexperienced in your kind of business. We find we have a better chance with them that way than if we get them already trained by someone else.
9. Always promote from within your own ranks:We are firm about this. And it is not without a good deal of regret that we sometimes pass up the opportunity to add to our staff a particularly competent individual who has proved himself elsewhere. Our people recognize the opportunities that come to them because we will not hire a man for a responsible job if we can possibly fill it from within.
10. Gradually and steadily expand, so that we may make opportunities for the competent youngster who comes up from the ranks. If we did not expand, they might leave us.
11. Always please the cranks: Anything which suits a finicky customer is bound to be more than satisfactory to the great run of folks who take what is handed them without complaint. The unreasonable customer, by setting the standards to which we hold, has insured our pleasing the reasonable customers who would be satisfied with less. And the finicky customer is by disposition a talker. Take away any grounds for complaint, deprive him of his grievances, and he goes about the world praising you just as ardently as he would otherwise decry you.
12. Never take yourself too damn seriously.

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