Before I talk about how to do this, I want to make sure we are on the same page. When I talk about excellence, the human instinct (mine included) is to think about our best day.
We want to think about what it’s like when everything goes right. We think about how smart our staff can be or how fast our tools are. We equate our excellence with our skill level.
But your customers are not asking how skilled you are. The question your customers are asking is, “Can I trust you?” If I give you my time and money, can I trust you to deliver what I need every time?
One of the best illustrations of the power of this principle is McDonald’s food. I have claimed that its french fries are cold. If I’m being honest, though, that isn’t always true. On rare occasions, I have walked into a McDonald’s when the fries were coming out of the fryer, and those fries were good.
The problem is not that I have never had great fries at McDonald’s. The problem is that I have also gotten them after the fries have been sitting under the warming lamp for 30 minutes.
The truth is that being inconsistently excellent will earn you the same amount of trust as being consistently bad.
Read Wozniak’s entire advice column from the latest edition of Business Report. Send comments to editor@businessreport.com.
