By Matthew DeRose – CEO, Nomad Group

In hip‑hop, “Money over everything” might be a flex. In business, it’s a fast lane to mediocrity.

While companies sweat quarterly targets and burn rate, the only asset that compounds is customer trust and too often, it takes a back seat. Leaders who flip that script outperform: Harvard Business Review found that brands topping customer‑loyalty charts grow revenue 2.5× faster and deliver 2–5× greater shareholder returns over a decade.

Translation: if your model isn’t customer‑first, what exactly are you building?

The Profit Mirage

Short‑term “wins” like cutting service budgets or swapping quality ingredients show up as fatter margins—for a quarter. Then churn spikes, referrals dry up, and reputation tanks. Savings morph into silent, long‑tail losses.

Culture of cuts = culture of loss.

Your Books Are Lying to You

Modern accounting is a 100‑year‑old invention built for factories, not flywheels. It tracks the easy stuff—revenue, cost, profit—while ignoring the hard stuff that actually sustains growth: loyalty, experience, advocacy. That gap lets teams gut customer value in the name of “efficiency” with zero real‑time alarms.

Enter Customer‑Based Corporate Valuation (CBCV)

CBCV starts where the money truly comes from: the customer. Four levers power its forecast:

1. Acquisition – how many new customers you win
2. Retention – how long they stay
3. Frequency – how often they buy
4. Spend – how much they shell out per purchase

Model these, and revenue durability stops being a guess and becomes a roadmap.

Org Design: The Silent Killer

Most companies don’t implode from bad strategy—they bleed out via silos.

• Marketing optimizes CAC.
• Product chases feature velocity.
• Ops slashes costs.

Everyone hits their dashboard—yet the customer journey still fractures. Group bias rewards local maxima over global success.

Fix: Center every team on a single truth—If the customer wins, everyone wins.

Building a Customer‑First Org

• Incentives → Loyalty: Tie bonuses to Net Revenue Retention (NRR), not just bookings.
• Dashboards → Outcomes: Surface churn risk and customer health alongside P&L.
• Product → Impact: Measure shipped features by customer success metrics, not launch count.
• Culture → Touchpoints: From founder to intern, reinforce that every interaction is brand equity in motion.

Founder’s Playbook: Think in Decades

Your moat is trust, not CAC arbitrage. Trust grows via consistent, remarkable experiences – from onboarding to renewal. Treat CX as a profit center – because it is.

Takeaway

You don’t have to choose between profits and doing right by your customers. Zoom out. Redesign metrics. Rally teams around value creation instead of extraction. Because money matters – but put it before the customer, and you’ll end up with neither.