So before we were talking about, you know, eliminating or identifying and eliminating the grit in your customer experience and eliminating the annoyances they irritations that some people have actually a problem with that we're thinking about, well, what does that actually mean? And how do we actually do that? I think there's some lessons that we can learn from things like Pro Cycling, particularly the Team GB and Dave Brailsford approach, where they have this thing where they say, look, I want to talk about we want to 10% improvement now, or 15% improvement in this. But in reality, that's quite hard. But actually, what they figured out is they figured out that actually, if you can identify 1% improvement in like 10, or 15 areas, which is pretty reasonable, then those 1% improvements can add up to a lot. And it becomes you get into this to this idea that you're getting to this continuous improvement and you look at your whole your business holistically in terms of all the little things that you could do to improve that and help you one Deep learning the basics, but also can help you stand out from the crowd.

So what I want to do is I want to give you some examples of some businesses that have done some little things that make their experience stand out. So the first example I want is based on a personal story, and I was I went a number of years ago to a wedding in Cairo for a friend of mine. And now I'm Scottish. I don't do hot weather particularly well. And so this was the well The wedding was taking place in July and so I flew in the evening and it was hot. It was proper hot.

And so I was tired. I was sweaty, I was properly bedraggled. So I arrived at the hotel and hotel was the four seasons. And what they did was was a really simple thing, but it just made all the difference. And so when I pulled up in the cab, I got out the bellhop was there. He said, Can I take your bag and have it sent up to your room?

He says, yep, finances like so can I take your name just so I can make sure I can match up the tag for the bag there. So we know which one to send it to us. Yeah, sure, no problem. So he took my bag. And then he said, so if you'd like to go up the stairs to write the top of stairs down the end of the quarter, and the reception is just there. Fantastic.

So if I go to other steps down the corridor, and as I'm approaching the desk, the receptionist pushes a form towards me with a patented Welcome, Mr. SWISCO. If you just sign there, we'll have you straight up to your room. Now, that's not normal. Because normally you get to a receptionist desk, and you have to fill out all these forms and give them a card and this and everything else. But just those little things, which actually, what it meant was that the guy at the front door, picked up the phone call reception and said Mr. Switch was on his way, have everything ready. Now, that happened to me a number of years ago, but I still talk about it now.

Because I still don't see people doing simple things like that even now, but all those little things that make a huge difference. So the next example comes from a company whose I guess there's probably got one of well, they're my favorite. They're my company that has the, I guess the favorite name of any company I've ever come across. And they're called Big Ass fans. Now. Nope.

No guesses, or no, no, but no prizes for guessing what they what they make they make big ass fans, right? One of the things that they do with hikers is really interesting. And it's something that is becoming increasingly common work is that they are they created this thing called a customer success team. Now, it wasn't called that when they first started, but it's what they're called. They're calling it now. And what they did is they hired somebody, they tried to co hire somebody to say, I want you to go and speak to all our customers to figure out all the little things that annoy or irritate them, and come back and tell us and we'll fix them.

And the distinction that the the CEO made was, he said, Look, I might pay your salary, but you weren't Are our customers. And then what what happened on the back of that is actually, by going off and speaking to the customers identifying all identifying all the little things that they did to annoy or irritate their customers and then fix them. That allowed them to grow, grow their business by a factor of, I think it's six almost throw about $35 million in 2009 to two by 170 $5 million in 2014 2015. If that's not evidence enough about what it means to fix the little things, I don't know what is. So the final example I wanted to share with you is from a just a small, local IT services company that I've done some work with in the past. And the reason I share this example is because it's different and it's not a big firm and it's you know, it's not a big brand name, but it shows that all these different principles can apply to both large and small businesses.

The challenge with this business is that they've grown organically over the years, their customers loved them, and they stuck around for a while for ages. But one of the things that they used to struggle with is that they struggled, actually attracting new customers. And they also struggle to get referrals from their existing customers. So when we looked into it, what we realized is that the folks at this firm, they were spending a lot of time doing the dude doing the work for the customers, but actually not spending a lot of time with the customers understanding how things were going in their business, and how they were developing and what the challenges were And is there anything else that they could they could do to one improve their service and or, you know, do more for them? So one of the things we worked with, with the director of the business was to say, Well, look, you know, you've got all your guys and girls doing all the work, but you're actually not out there spending time with your customers, you know, just understanding their businesses and see what else they're up to.

So we figured out that he should spend sort of Friday afternoons either calling customers or going around and taking them out for coffee just to spend some time with them. And what was fascinating was in doing that, just by this, that small action of going out and proactively trying to arrange time to go and speak to them and go and hang out with them, that that one they grew their understanding of the clients, businesses, their clients, they became more front of mind for the clients. They ended up referring them more, but they also ended up asking them to do more work for them. The fascinating thing is I've just by doing that one simple thing that grew their business by 150% in the course of over the course of nine months.