Couple of months ago, I watched an older conference speech by Warren Buffett – the famous investment billionaire – as I was searching for some value investing advice. While the man provides simple yet tremendous money investing wisdom in every sentence he is also great to learn from in other areas.

Here is what Buffett told his audience during his speech:

Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire , you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. If you hire somebody without integrity, you really want them to be dumb and lazy.

This is brilliant yet simple to understand!

When we choose people that we want to work with – partners, employee, contractor, vendor – we should not only be looking for how smart and hard working they are. We should also, or as the very first thing, be looking for honesty and overall traits of high integrity because this is the area in which your business could take a huge blow and never recover from.

If someone within your organization, or as outside help, messes up in the other two qualities occasionally it is always repairable. However, once your business get’s labeled as “low integrity” or outright “dishonest” then you are in some long-term trouble.