I’ve always thought that was the highest sign of a successful business. We dealt for a while with a small contact manufacturer whose owner said the very same thing. I hope they kept it going.

We treated customers as partners, our sales efforts were as much consulting to analyze our potential customer's needs (often we knew more about networking than the customer did, so we did a lot of education.) We honored the old wisdom that "the first sale is hard and expensive, profit comes from the second and subsequent sales." Most companies never had a customer come up to them during a trade show and hand them a large check as a form of "thank you". We weren't "most companies" and we did get such "thank you" gifts.

Business need not be rapacious, customers can be friends, and employees can be valued.