The Little Things

Sometimes it takes a massive effort to find a competitive advantage; huge amounts of money, years of hard work in developing customers and relationships, scientific innovation or creative thinking. And sometimes it's a simple as working out what will make things easier for your customer without significantly increasing the company's costs -- in other words, how to provide added value to the consumer without incurring additional expenses. Familiar examples would be things like the in-room coffee service you find in business hotels like this one -- the ready-to-use coffee package costs the hotel chain very little, but it's worth a lot to some travelers to be able to brew themselves a cup of coffee in their room late at night or early in the morning. It's also another perk to list on your facility description...

We encountered a new example of this today when we went to the FedEx/Kinko's near the hotel to make some copies of a receipt for a mail-in rebate. I'll spare you my rant about mail-in rebates and how any company that sets a time limit (it's usually 30 days) in which you have to mail in the receipts should be boycotted. My actual point here is that if you are using the self-serve copiers at a FedEx/Kinko's, you're probably not going to have any of the standard office supplies or equipment with you either. Thus, if you need to remove a staple from the documents you're trying to copy, draw a straight line, write something down, paperclip something, or staple your documents back together, you're probably going to be out of luck. Which means you will either go and ask one of the FedEx/Kinko's employees if you can borrow a staple remover, stapler, ruler, pen, glue stick, or whatever else you need but don't have with you, or else just avoid going out to make a copy in the first place. It's going to make life difficult for the employees in the copy center and/or discourage customers, both of which would cost the company money...

To defeat this problem, the FedEx/Kinko's people set up a small plastic caddy near each of the self-service copiers, containing all of these office equipment mentioned above. If you need to unstaple a document, make a note on it, copy it, and then staple it back together, you just use the stuff provided for that purpose. In fact, if any of you have ever done business in a FedEx/Kinko's, you've probably done just that, possibly without ever noticing that the items you needed were provided for you. Of course, the company does have to deal with the possibility of people breaking, walking off with, or intentionally stealing their office equipment and supplies. They appear to have dealt with this by purchasing the cheapest possible models of each item that still work (the cheapest stapler, the cheapest pen, and so on) in quantities so large that the unit price must be laughably small. Having trained on the supply system at UCLA, I can tell you from personal experience that you would not believe how cheap some of this stuff is if you buy it in sufficiently huge quantities...

Now, I realize that this isn't exactly rocket science; the basic idea seems almost too obvious to comment on in the first place. Except for the fact that I've been in a number of competing copy centers over the years, and none of them seem to have figured out this concept. What makes the FedEx/Kinko's strategy so exceptional is that between the value added they are providing their customers and the staff time they are saving, it hardly matters how much of this equipment gets broken or stolen; a complete set (including the caddy) for a copier station would cost less to replace than half an hour of an associate's time -- and it's unlikely a whole set would go missing at once...

When we consider the things our own companies could do to become more profitable, most people will focus on ways to add value at little additional cost, and completely neglect the concept of lowering costs, especially in terms of saving staff time spent on non-essential tasks. Most people tend to develop a set of costs (material, labor, operations, etc.) and then just adhere to those numbers without further thought. Even when they do consider cost-cutting measures, most people will focus on lower material costs, lower utility costs, lower salaries, and other direct benefits to the company. Measures that make life (and their jobs) easier for the employees, which inherently improves their work environment and improves productivity, are generally ignored. In fact, in many companies, management seems to have an adversarial or even resentful attitude toward their workers. But when you take a closer look at the leading companies in almost any industry, you will find that they make every effort to improve working conditions, increase morale, and give the work force every possible advantage...

I don't think this is a coincidence...

It has often be remarked that you can't get the big things right if you don't get the little things right first. I would suggest that sometimes the big things are, in fact, the little things...