Exceed.

Ari Weinzweig on going the extra mile ...

Extra miles, barely noticeable to the casual observer, can make the difference between keeping a customer or losing them, enriching our community or exhausting it, and even staying in business or going under. They are, I believe, a beautiful way to illustrate French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's statement: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” The point of creating an extra-mile-centric culture is not about what you and I might be able to accomplish on our own. It’s about what the collective can make happen when nearly everyone in the organization gets on board with the idea. As Timothy Snyder says, “If 10,000 little groups do 5,000 little things, that will make a tremendous difference.”

Some extra miles can be systematized. Will Guidara writes: “Identify moments that recur in your business, and build a tool kit your team can deploy without much effort.” The Roadhouse has just such a book, and databases and idea banks with other extra miles abound around the ZCoB. Here, we long ago agreed to use what we call the “:05/:55 Rule.” In order to exceed guest expectations, we actually unlock our doors, and are ready to go, five minutes before our posted opening time, and lock them five minutes after our closing time. Small thing, but really, why not?