Success Quote by Mark Cuban

"It is so much easier to be nice, to be respectful, to put yourself in your customers' shoes and try to understand how you might help them before they ask for help, than it is to try to mend a broken customer relationship"

Mark Cuban, Businessman

About this Quote

Mark Cuban is selling courtesy as a competitive advantage, but he’s really indicting the lazy mythology of “move fast and break things.” The line reads like common sense until you catch the structure: he contrasts proactive respect with the humiliating, expensive labor of repair. “Before they ask for help” is the tell. This isn’t about being pleasant in the abstract; it’s about anticipating friction, designing service around it, and treating customer pain as a predictable cost you can either pay upfront (through attention) or pay later (through crisis management).

The subtext is hard-nosed: niceness is cheaper than cleanup. Cuban wraps a business lesson in moral language - “nice,” “respectful,” “in their shoes” - because those words land in a culture where companies routinely talk about “community” while optimizing for churn. He’s implying that a “broken customer relationship” isn’t an accident. It’s usually the outcome of systems that make it difficult to get answers, easy to feel dismissed, and impossible to feel seen. Repair, then, isn’t just one apology email; it’s rebuilding trust against a memory of being treated as a ticket number.

Context matters: Cuban’s brand is the blunt billionaire who still venerates hustle and service, a retail-era instinct updated for an online world where one bad experience becomes public content. The quote works because it’s both pep talk and warning: you can’t out-market a reputation for indifference, and the cheapest PR is preventing the story from happening.

Quote Details

Topic	Customer Service
Source	Verified source: Mark Cuban: Three Tips for Startups (Mark Cuban, 2011) Text match: 99.77% Provider: Cross-Reference Evidence: “It is so much easier to be nice, to be respectful, to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and try to understand how you might help them before they ask for help, than it is to try to mend a broken customer relationship,” Cuban says.. This quote appears in an Entrepreneur.com article by Jason Fell dated Mar 15, 2011, presented as a direct quotation from Mark Cuban in the context of his customer-service advice (“Treat your customers like they own you, because they do.”). I could verify this as a primary-ish publication (a mainstream interview/article quoting Cuban directly), but I did not find an earlier (pre–Mar 15, 2011) primary source (e.g., video/audio transcript, MarkCuban/BlogMaverick post, book manuscript page) that clearly predates it. Many quote-aggregation sites repost the line without a traceable earlier provenance. So: earliest verifiable publication located = Mar 15, 2011 on Entrepreneur.com, but it may still have been spoken/written earlier and first published elsewhere. Other candidates (1) Competing for Customers (Jeb Dasteel, Amir Hartman, Craig LeGr..., 2016) compilation99.9% ... It is so much easier to be nice , to be respectful , to put yourself in your customers ' shoes and try to underst...
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