One thing you hear often, especially in the corporate environment is always about “going that extra mile.” Its always about how to bring excellence into your daily work by doing that extra bit more. What if you only do your standard 9-5, does this mean your not doing that little bit extra? Perhaps your just a little bit more efficient than everyone else? However, lets avoid that discussion. My question to you is what could you possibly do to simply do that 1% more? What would the results of that be?
Lets dig a little deeper. Rather than simply saying, what could you do to do just that 1% more. Lets visualize it. I love running and one of my habits that I have developed over the years is that when I begin reaching the end stage of my run, rather than taking the shortest and most obvious route to our house, I loop around and take a longer route which on average adds on roughly 0.5km to my run. I do the exact same when mountain biking, adding that little bit extra.
Nonetheless, you may think that 0.5km is obviously not significant on its own, no? Consider the following:
- If I add that to the end of a short sprint, say a 5km run, I have just run 10% more than I would have and
- If I am running an average of 75km a week and I add another 10% on top of that, Im adding an additional 7,5km that I run extra. More than I would otherwise.
My point here is that adding that little bit extra (all those 0.5km’s) end up being just that bit more that we often don’t recognize. I can guarantee you that, adding those extra 500m to every run have an exponential effect on both my running ability and my fitness.
So the question I want to ask you with this post is how are you putting that little bit extra into your startup, work or personal life? Here are a few examples of some things you could be doing:
- Respond to customer email’s within minutes of receiving them.
- Under promise on certain aspects and over-deliver. Do something that your customers don’t expect of you.
- Send a “thank you” note.
- Give away some cool freebie’s
That short list are just some things that come to my mind and none of those actually require a major investment in time, energy or money on your porat. Imagine the kind of customer loyalty you could build over time if you did these things often?
So, I’ll ask you again: where & how are you doing that little bit extra?