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There's no doubt that customer service is essential. Gartner, a marketing research firm, found that by 2016, 89 percent of the companies it surveyed expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience. Just four years ago, the survey showed that only 36 percent of respondents had that plan.

If you're serious about your future success and the growth of your business, you have to focus just as much on service as on sales. Here are a few companies boosting growth by investing in customer delight to help inspire you to greatness:

 JetBlue
An airline might seem like the last company you'd expect to be focusing on the customer experience, but JetBlue proves that it's the way you handle those concerns that'll make or break you. The company has a strong social-media focus in its customer-service plan, making it a priority to respond not only to customers who mention the company in their tweets, but also those who mention the airline in general. This allows them to respond to all feedback before it becomes a major issue.

Rackspace
Customer service is just as important in tech companies as it is in face-to-face businesses. Rackspace is another example of a company that has won multiple awards for its excellent customer service. To start, the company trains every employee it hires to put customers first from day one, typically by conducting role-playing exercises ahead of time to improve customer assistance before issues arise. This customer-centric culture is known as "Fanatical Support" both inside and outside the company.

Drybar
Founders Michael Landau and Alli Webb were horrified at how bad customer service had become in retail establishments in general. As a result, they focused on hiring friendly and caring stylists and staff, going so far as to specifically avoid hiring "divas," who, despite their skills, bring a toxic attitude to the workplace. The Drybar customer experience is carefully planned to allow clients to feel like they're the stars in their own movies. For 45 minutes, customers relax and get pampered, drinking a cocktail as their hair is styled.

Ace Hardware
As larger, low-margin stores push many small-scale retailers out of business, Ace Hardware has remained strong. The reason, its leaders say, is that employees are trained to not just be nice, but helpful. Staff go through extensive training not just about the products and services sold in stores, but also about types of customers they'll encounter and how to help each one.

Southwest Airlines
One of the best ways to invest in customer delight is to take great care of your employees -- a fact that's not lost on Southwest Airlines. The company not only gets named as having the best customer service in the airline industry, but also as being one of the best places to work. The great employee benefits and fun employee activities boost morale, which translates to great customer service.

The really incredible thing about so many of the examples highlighted above is that they're incredibly inexpensive to implement. If you're looking to boost growth in your company, invest in delighting customers -- you'll save on marketing while also lifting your bottom line.

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It's more difficult for minority-owned (not to mention woman-owned) firms to raise venture capital than non-minority-owned firms. Only 1 percent of venture-backed firms are founded by African-Americans, and only 13 percent of all venture-backed firms are founded by any ethnic minority, according to CB Insights. Minority-owned firms are less likely to receive loans, and they receive lower loan amounts and smaller equity investments, and pay higher interest rates than non-minority-owned firms, according to the Department of Commerce.

Could the Internet and crowdfunding, which have helped level the playing field for so many other aspects of life and the economy, do the same for investment?

Online crowdfunding is skyrocketing, from just $2.7 billion in 2012, forecasted to be $34 billion in 2015. There are different kinds of online crowdfunding, however, and not every kind qualifies as a real source of investment capital.

The best chance for crowdfunding to transform investing lies in a lesser-known but rapidly growing slice of the crowdfunding pie known as equity crowdfunding. In equity crowdfunding, just like regular equity investments, entrepreneurs sell shares of their business to private shareholders, shares that can potentially be sold later at a much higher price per share. That's how you attract real investment capital, and that's why some already predict that equity crowdfunding will eclipse venture capital funding as the leading source of startup capital by 2020.

Now imagine that in 2020, the new leading source of startup capital is one in which there is a level playing field for minority-owned firms. Based on the experience of at least one equity crowdfunding platform, it's quite possible that will be the case. In an internal sample of 5,000 companies using EquityNet, the world's largest equity crowdfunding platform, 32 percent were minority-owned, including 9 percent owned by African-Americans. What's more, minority-owned firms surveyed on EquityNet, which is based in Fayetteville, Arkansas, were achieving the same funding success rate (20 percent) and seeking similar amounts of capital on average (around $1 million) compared to non-minority-owned firms on EquityNet.

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