In some businesses, goodwill is their greatest
single asset. Many companies have been purchased for
huge sums primarily to acquire the goodwill associated
with their famous names or the popular brand names of
their products.
Individuals, of course, acquire goodwill, too,
and it can have great monetary value. But the purpose
of this chapter is to consider goodwill as your personal
SUCCESS INSURANCE and, in this context, goodwill is
not purchased but must be created by what you say, write
or do.
Remember those three words: "say, write or
do" because they will be the basis of a simple test which
will guide you in creating the personal SUCCESS IN-
SURANCE of goodwill.
First, to assure you of the importance and
value of this test, I want to relate my own experience
with it. Having retired at :fifty, after a business career
which included being president of eight corporations, I
have devoted some of my retirement to analyzing the
causes of my successes and failures, to provide some :first-
hand material to be included in a compact library of
Success Books which I am writing.
My post-analysis revealed that what I did right
and what I did wrong, in almost every instance, was sub-
stantially determined by whether I succeeded or failed to
meet the requirements of this simple test; although, unfor-
tunately, I did not know about this test, as such, at the
time. I wish I had.