Successful businesses don’t just communicate with prospects and customers to just get a sale or expect their employees to take little respect from them for a hard day of work.  Today, making your company indispensable through compassion is a vital key to making your business not only profitable but lasting.

It’s a terrific way to add value, enhance your brand and position against your competition. Here are four relationship-building strategies that will help you transform your company into a valuable resource:

1. Humility – A humble leader is secure enough to recognize his or her weaknesses and to seek the input and talents of others. By being receptive to outside ideas and assistance, creative leaders open up new avenues for the organization and for their employees.

2. Gentleness – Gentleness is acting and speaking in a way which is considerate and kind to others. Gentleness is moving wisely,  holding carefully, speaking quietly and thinking kindly. You are practicing gentleness when you make it safe for people to be around you, As a leader of a business, this is highly effective with business relations.

3. Patience – We have all heard that “patience is a virtue” – that if you are to be a good person, you must work hard to exercise patience. Business owners and leader that are unable to practice patience will also find their careers and business’s short-lived.  Patience demands that you take a deep breath and let go of your own impatience to help solve a problem.   Don’t be in a hurry.  Respect and embrace the process and have a little patience.

4. Love – At first glance, ‘Love’ might not be a word that we associate with business. If you search just a little bit, however, you’ll find that ‘Love’ is at the heart of the most successful business brands. Take Apple for example, I love apple products. I don’t just like them, I love them. And that’s my feeling for the brand.  There is nothing more personal than someone having a need and coming to you and you being the person who actually solves that need for them. I can’t think of anything more personal and vulnerable than that.

Also at our core as business owners, love is what drives us all: a feeling of connection to a mission or idea that is so strong that it inspires us to take risks and put ourselves on the line, and gives us the courage to create something from the ground up. That takes a lot of love.