Be Your Best

Todd Gifford - Success Coach

Have you ever been in a situation, whether it be a work project, personal or work task, trip, etc… where you do everything you should do for it to go perfect….except for one little thing?

The most recent example of this for me was a trip that my family took over my kids’ spring break.  Worked on planning the trip for weeks, researching the lowest cost hotel, lowest cost airfare, arranging transportation options, best place to get discounts on food and stuff to do, and on and on.  You know the drill.  I mean I was into it.  I had everything mapped out and covered — feelin’ good.  “But just one little thing” I failed to do was understand that we were flying into the wrong airport.  Unfortunately, I figured this out while we were in the air with my family heading to our destination.  You may ask ‘how could you not know what airport you were flying to?’ and that is a fair question.  Well, I had it in my mind there was only 1 International Airport in Orlando.  Nope.  There are 2.

While enjoying a smooth flight with my wife and kids, a lady sitting by us asked us if we were going to visit the Disney area by chance.  We all said yes.  She said ‘I am sure you realize the airport we are headed to is not the Orlando airport that is near the area where everyone flies into, and I just found this out myself a couple of days ago”.  Of course I am thinking to myself, while I am starting to sweat bullets, tell her: ‘oh yea, I know that.’  But my natural reaction was “what do you mean — is there more than one Orlando International Airport?”  Well, the ‘well-planned trip’ went from fun to panic, because we were arriving at about 11 pm, and now we have no transportation to get to our destination over 1 hour away.  I botched it.  Had everything covered except for this one small detail: wrong airport.  Stupid.

I am sure you all of have had situations where just the smallest little thing transformed your whole experience into a bad experience.  Everything is right except for that ‘one little thing’.  But that one little ‘thing’ overrides everything else and drives your overall feeling.  It might have been a situation where you were at a restaurant and everything was great except the waiter or waitress disappeared and forgot to bring you the bill so you could leave.  Maybe it was at a hotel, where your request for an extra pillow got a response like ‘we don’t have extra pillows’.  What are seemingly these little minor things can just devastate the experience for us.  More importantly, these little things are so basic to the equation.  Just like my oversight of which airport I booked our tickets to fly into (of course trying to get the lowest price—does not mean the best “value”), these little things are basic and fundamental to the outcome.  I spent way more time on stuff that basically had no bearing on our experience, yet I missed a basic little thing that had a major impact on the experience and outcome.

It just reminds me of how important it is to not overlook the little things in any endeavor.  Getting everything right but missing that one little thing can really cause problems.  It’s not always ‘fair’ how tough it can be to have to do everything right — but that is the way it is.  When you are serving and providing value to clients as Dee Electronics does, you have to do everything right, including the little things.  And we work super hard at Dee in doing that.  We do not want to ever make excuses like “but just this one little mistake”.  That little problem can affect the entire experience and benefit we provide to our clients.

I want you to know that we take everything we do very seriously, and we want to make sure everything is done correctly and the way you want it, even the little things.  Should you see something that you don’t like or you want to change, please let us know.  Same goes for something you want us to provide but we are not currently.  Although we work hard every day to provide exceptional hassle-free service and trusted responsiveness and reliability, occasionally we could overlook something.  We want to know about it because there is nothing ‘too little’ to ensure it is done right.  Trust me, I know from experience!

Take Care,
Todd Gifford