Well, maybe not smack around.  But it did involve shaking my finger and saying things like, “Stop it.”

It all had to do with what I’ve written posts about in the past: giving your employees the authority to grow your business.

I was in a meeting with the client, who owns three retail stores in a large city.  During our afternoon meeting with the management team, I inquired as to how the employee authority program we set up is going.

One of the managers brought up a situation in the store she manages, discussing a family who shops there regularly.  The family has a unique situation in that the father recently returned from service in Afghanistan, where he was injured and is now undergoing extensive rehabilitation.

“The family is really great,” the manager told me.  “I really admire the mom, keeping it all together.  Some days she looks so frazzled.  We thought maybe we could do something for them, so I came up with the idea of a gift certificate to a nice restaurant so that she wouldn’t have to cook for one night.”

“Great idea,” I replied.  “So, how did it go?”

“We didn’t do it.”

“You didn’t do it?  Why not?”

At this point, the manager innocently glanced over at the boss.  “Well, we talked about it and asked Mr. BossMan what he thought.  He didn’t really care for the idea, so we didn’t do it.”

Here is where the finger shaking started.

An employee authority program will NEVER work unless the employee has complete authority.

Have a great idea to make a customer feel good?  Does it fit within the monthly budget prescribed for customer feel-good marketing?  DO IT.

Don’t think it to death.  And above all, DON’T ASK THE BOSS FOR PERMISSION.

JUST. DO. IT.

It is the BossMan’s responsibility to “cut the cord” with management and staff on customer satisfaction marketing.  Any boss worth his/her weight has to constantly drill employees on how great they are, and how much trust there is to do the right thing for customers.

This is a marketing idea that costs little and can be budgeted using marketing dollars.  It requires little from BossMan other than reminding employees that they have the authority to solve problems or make a customer’s day a little happier.

You see employee authority programs in use all around you.  Starbucks.  Zappo’s.  Ritz Carlton Hotels. Yes, they’re big companies.  How do you think they got that way?

Seriously.  Think about it.  THEN DO IT.

There’s heavy competition, though – today, literally hundreds of pool care companies (many of them one-man operations) exist in the valley. Anyone with a basic knowledge of water chemistry and pool equipment can make a decent living.

So, how can a company set itself apart? By choosing One Little Thing that will make a big impact. Jason at Evolution Pools realized that early on, and his business is growing by leaps and bounds.

When you call Evolution Pool Repair, you’re assured of talking directly with Jason, the owner. Leave a message, and he’ll call you back within two hours. He sets the appointment, gives you a window of time for the service call, and then calls again to confirm the night before the appointment.

That’s nice and all, but then he unloads his One Little Thing: he narrows the window of time in which he’ll make his appearance.

For example, the first time we hired Jason, he told me he’d be by sometime between 9a.m. and noon. The night before the appointment, he called and informed me it would actually be between 10:30 and noon. And he delivered. He always does.

His One Little Thing is to operate at maximum efficiency; he has developed his own personal system of time tracking so that he can narrow down the appointment time and beat the negative stereotype of “the repair guy who never shows up when he says he will.”

With that One Little Thing, Jason gave me 90 minutes of my life back and strengthened the trust I have in his services. Having originally found him through our home warranty company, we now call him for all of our pool needs, whether the equipment is covered under warranty or not. Jason has made hundreds (or is that thousands?) of dollars from our account alone, simply because of his consideration for the customer’s time. I’ve also referred a number of neighbors.

Jason has made his business boom, without spending a penny on advertising.

You don’t need circus tents and balloons to make an impact on a customer, and if you’re a one-man operation, you can’t always overachieve the way One Hour Heating and Air Conditioning does. But you can still make your mark by choosing One Little Thing, refining your system, and delivering on your promise every time.

What One Little Thing can you do that will have customers telling your story to everyone they know?

“It didn’t happen every time for every movie. Ruthless People was a good movie, but we didn’t get a good release or marketing. They completely blew the opening.”
- David Zucker

When I first wrote this post, Husband was at the piano working on a tune that bubbled up from the recesses of his right brain.  Too irresistible to ignore, he sat down one morning after breakfast and started playing.  It was a beautiful, haunting melody with the lush harmonies Husband is so well known for, making it heartbreakingly bittersweet.

He often builds entire compositions around thoughts like this.  We were discussing it over lunch one day, when he said, “You know, this reminds me of something I wish I’d told Holly a few weeks ago when she was here for dinner.  I should have told her, ‘opening gestures.’”

He was referring to a conversation we’d had in which we were comparing the speaking styles of presenters we often see at conferences and conventions.  Obviously, some are better than others.  As we tried to dissect the style of a number of different authors and speakers, Holly wondered about the “common element” - what was the one thing they all had in common, no matter how varied the topic?

Opening Gestures:

the element with which every great composer, author and artist is familiar.  No matter how great the creation, the opening gesture is what grabs a person by the nape of the neck and shoots an electric charge down their spine. It is the director of attention; it sets the tone for everything that will follow.

As Husband would tell you (and has told others numerous times through his lectures), “Everyone has to deal with opening gestures in one way or another.  Whether it’s  meeting someone for the first time, tweaking someone’s interest,  engaging their attention or provoking some thought.  Politicians do it, clergy do it, teachers do it. We do it all the time.  How to begin a term paper, a letter of introduction, an application for graduate school or for a job.”

When husband gives this lecture, he cites great opening gestures of all kinds.  Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5; Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man;  The Who’s Baba O’Riley.

Opening lines of books set the stage for greatness:

“A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs a deep green.  The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.”
-John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
- Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice — not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”
- John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
- J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

“I was trapped in a house with a lawyer, a bare-breasted woman and a dead man. The rattlesnake in the paper bag only complicated matters.”
- Earl Emerson, Fat Tuesday

“It was a pleasure to burn.”
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Grand opening gestures surround you.  Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water.  John Portman’s lobby of the New York Marriott Marquis.  The paintings of Picasso and Caravaggio.

The blow-your-hair-back, going-a-hundred-while-standing-still design of the Ferrari Daytona.

And of course the mother of all opening gestures – the Big Bang.

Great brands calculate and create opening gestures that stem from a passion for the business.  Starbucks did it with the European cafe storefront.  Krispy Kreme did it with warm doughnuts plucked right off the conveyor belt.  Google does it by customizing their homepage logo to honor a holiday, historic event or person.  Apple did it with the iPod using sleek minimalist design – who would have thought pure white could be so colorful?

These brands also realize that they have hundreds of opening gestures to contend with everyday, since customers arrive via different avenues and with different mindsets.  Just to tick off a few miniature opening gestures, you have:

• store location
• signage
• parking lot
• physical entrance
• store atmosphere (lighting, cleanliness, smell, etc.)
• greeting by staff members
• how the phone is answered
• delivery & content of outgoing voicemail message
• headlines in ads
• homepage on the website

I’m sure you can think of a few more.  This may even be the first time you’re thinking about it at all.

What are your opening gestures?

Are they remarkable enough to get the attention of customers?  Take five minutes to jot down a list of your opening gestures, then give them a rating from 1 to 10.  How’s it going?  What could be improved?  Are you brave enough to have some of your customers rate your opening gestures?  It could be an eye opener.

Improve your opening gestures and you’ll improve your bottom line.  Ah, the ka-ching of the cash register… now that’s music to the ears.

This morning, she presented me with a handful of freshly inked business cards and asked that I recommend her service to my neighbors and friends.

I told her that I couldn’t.

It’s not that she doesn’t do a great job – the woman is a cleaning machine.  After a visit from her, every inch of my house sparkles with a Disneyesque twinkle, and I just feel better about life in general.

So why wouldn’t I recommend her to my friends?

Because it would ruin my credibility.

My cleaning lady is undependable, inconsistent at best.

• Cleaning appointments are missed.
• Communication about why is almost non-existent (and no, it’s not a language barrier issue).
• Responsibility is not a high priority.

While I work around these quirks (for now), I couldn’t expect my friends to have the same level of tolerance.

I’d never recommend her to anyone, because her inability to deliver reflects on my credibility as a person with sound judgment.

When businesses strategize about generating word-of-mouth marketing, they stop at the point of figuring out something remarkable to offer. They forget the most important part – how they’re going to offer it on a consistent, dependable basis.

And for women, who are wired for connection and are three times as likely to talk about your product or service, dependability is the key to word-of-mouth.

She’s staking her reputation on what you have to deliver.

God help you if she sends someone your way and you screw it up.

In the last three weeks, I’ve been personally embarrassed by well-meaning recommendations that I made.

A restaurant.

A web designer.

A marketing consultant.

All still good at what they do, but completely unreliable in the dependability department.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but inconsistency will kill the business every time.

Are you too focused on the sparkle and not enough on consistency?