here’s how i look at it:
a good window cleaner’s b+ work= a+ results from a customer’s perspective.
it’s the law of diminishing returns at work here. ie, let’s say it takes you 5 minutes to clean a window to [I]your[/I] b- standard. it takes you 5.5 minutes to clean the same window to [I]your[/I] b+ standards. that’s a 10% increase in time to go from 80% perfect to 89% perfect. pretty good return on investment.
now let’s say it takes you 7.5 minutes to go from your b+ work to your a+ work. that’s an additional 25% increase in time to go from 89% perfect to 99% perfect. much tougher to swallow that return on investment.
now factor in what [I]your customer[/I] perceives as a+ work. it’s really probably [I]your[/I] b+ work. So to the customer (even the picky one) a+ to them is really only 90% of what you can achieve. that slides the scale even further. when you start thinking in those terms, you begin to see what your insistence on perfection is really costing you.
i learned this recently and have experience to back it up. you can probably dial back your attention to detail by just a few percentage points, save yourself [B]significant[/B] time, and still totally blow your customers away.
since i took up this more reasonable and balanced perspective, production has gone up measurably. and yet we’ve had zero callbacks, zero complaints, and have lost zero clients. in fact, people are raving as much if not more than ever about our work.
