Doing Less Costs You More

One of my daily reads is Seth Godin's blog. He has a lot of good things to say, and I know that others, including Leslie Burns Dell'Acqua reads him daily as well, and she too highlighted his message for the day about mediocrity. I'll take a similar tact.

When you are not paying attention to the details, you could well cost your business a lot of money, and certainly a diminished reputation. Today, Seth wrote - The sad lie of mediocrity - "The sad lie of mediocrity is the mistaken belief that partial effort yields partial results. In fact, the results are usually totally out of proportion to the incremental effort."

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Here are a few examples:

1) Recently, a colleague of mine wrote to someone, and addressed them as "Mrs." The problem is, she is a he.

2) An estimate went to a client with a DC and a NYC office. The address error to someone paying attention was something like below:

John Smith Big Corporate Client 1234 Madison Ave, 5th Floor Washington DC 10017

John Smith Big Corporate Client 1234 Madison Ave, 5th Floor New York NY 10017

Because a large majority of our clients are DC based, the software we use auto-fills in Washington DC for that client, but someone wasn't paying attention when that estimate went out.

Paying attention to details, smiling when you're talking to clients, being upbeat and positive during those interactions, saying things like "let me figure out a way to make that happen..." instead of "I don't know if that's possible", and so many other variations on that theme are what differentiates you from your competition. Don't say "the problem we might run into with doing it that way...". Instead, try "we'll have a bit of a challenge in trying to make things work that way...", which suggests you are up for the challenge, and are thinking of ways to solve the problem.

Excellent customer service is key. Customer dis-service, distain, or mediocrity when cast in their direction is a disaster. You just might not realize it until it's too late.

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