Bob Pritchett is an author, speaker, and CEO

A friend is working on a business plan that involves selling a product she wouldn’t use. It’s a good plan, with great potential, but it seemed like she not only wouldn’t use the product, but that she didn’t respect many of the people who would.

Listening prompted me to ask if she thought she could be successful in a business where she had contempt for her customers.
It seemed like an interesting but not particularly important question. Lots of businesses seem to do just fine financially while exhibiting contempt for their customers. I just thought it wouldn’t be as much fun.

Weeks later we met again and she told me that she’d been thinking a lot about that question, and was revising her plan. It got me thinking about our customers.

Every once in a while the hard-core business guy inside me gets a little jealous of businesses with larger markets or wealthier customers or whatever. A stupid, “the grass is greener” moment.

Meeting or hearing from our customers always zaps that jealousy. (Or, rather, converts it into guilt and shame.) Because our customers are people I can’t help but hold in the highest respect: pastors, teachers, students, and others who are investing so much of their lives in Bible study, ministry, and teaching others. At every encounter I am humbled by our customers’ passion and enthusiasm for the Word and by their generosity and encouragement.

This week on the Bible Study Bus Road Trip a customer overheard a young man saying that he wanted to purchase a copy of Logos Bible Software, but couldn’t afford it yet. The customer pulled out his credit card and bought it for the stranger.

Today another customer sent me an email describing how the Lord brought him through a crisis of faith with a period of intense Bible study: “It is 3 years since that crisis of faith, and this little posting will never express how grateful I am to you and the team at Logos for putting this product together….Logos has impacted my life in a way that I can not really put into words…”

I can be foolish in many ways, but I am wise enough to know that Logos Bible Software is just a tool. It is just one of many ways the Lord works through His Word. He doesn’t need me, or Logos Bible Software. So it’s a privilege that He does use us, and an incredible blessing that “the business guy inside me” has been given a job, and a living, in a business that’s fun and encouraging and serving customers I could not respect more.

I have a friend who sells a mass-market service to hundreds of thousands of customers. I have another friend whose business sells primarily to billionaires. But I don’t know any business person whose customers would double a $500 purchase to give a copy to a stranger, or who gets letters about how their product was instrumental in a spiritual renewal.

I am so grateful to work on the greenest of all business grass.

Today I wrote some code: five lines and some comments. One of our developers needed to do surgery on the paragraph-wrapping code in our text display engine. Every line of every book goes through this function on its way to the screen. Since I wrote it in 1993 it has grown to accommodate new features, languages, and technologies…and it’s a bit of a mess.

The fact that it’s a mess is why I don’t write code anymore. But since it hasn’t had to change for years, and since more than 7,000 books are known to work correctly with it, it has been left alone.

Today the developer needed to make a change to accommodate improved table support. He wisely asked me for insight before changing this important function. I took over the keyboard, tried to understand what I was thinking a decade ago, and then made the minor changes myself. And then I said to the developer, “I’m sorry you had to work with this.” He responded, “Are you apologizing for today, or for all the years since I took this code over?”

Ouch. But it still felt good to touch the code again.

When we show Logos Bible Software we often hear people say “I can’t believe anyone interested in Bible study wouldn’t want Logos after this presentation!”

I agree. The problem is getting people to watch the presentation.

Our Bible Study Bus Road Trip is underway, and this year we’re focused on reaching new users. We’re working hard to get big attendance, but only a third of those who RSVP actually show up.

That’s enough to be worth it, and I’m not complaining. I appreciate the people who come. It just reminds me again that building a great tool is never enough. You have to get people to look at it.

Which is why we made the Bible Study Bus bright green. You can’t help looking at it.