It’s the Little Things That Matter

In business development in particular, it’s the little things that matter, always. The other person is constantly looking for signals, or clues above and beyond what you’re claiming to learn what you’re really like. This was nicely articulated by someone I was on a call with this morning, who presented it as “seeming vs. being.” I had two examples of that in the past week that vividly demonstrated this.

First, the bad. On vacation, we rented a big beach house in Virginia for a group of about twenty people. The house was enormous, but one thing that was kind of disappointing, particularly considering the cost, was the constant tone-deaf signals that the owner wanted to extract as much money as possible from his guests, while spending as little as possible. There was almost no landscaping around the house. The front porch had no real sidewalk. The grill was balky, and would take a lot of tinkering to make work. And parts of the exterior of the building itself were filthy. It obviously hadn’t been washed in a long, long time. Behold:

Now, as they say, let’s compare and contrast. It’s harvest season, which means that especially here in Northern California — not far from the Central Valley — there is all kinds of produce everywhere. I was in Whole Foods picking up some corn for dinner tonight, and I noticed something. Several ears of corn can and often do overpower a standard supermarket plastic produce bag, so they had set out these — special bags specifically designed for ears of corn:

The former detail made me feel slightly ripped off, and disinclined (again, slightly) to rent that house again. The latter is a little reminder that the people who run Whole Foods are paying attention, that they’re thinking about what their customers need and want, and that I will return there.

Details matter. They really do.