Define What It Means to Win…

In a conversation this morning, sitting with a friend who is days away from launching a new restaurant business, the question came up, “A year from now, how would you define winning?”

Put another way, what does success look like?

It would be easy to measure winning based on traditional KPIs like traffic through the space, food and drinks served, labor costs, COGs, and sales revenue… and these are all important metrics to be paying attention to. This is an industry where “number of guests served, per-server, per-hour” and “per-person average” are common data points that define success.

That said, this entrepreneur brought a different definition of winning to the table. “Winning, for us, means delivering an amazing experience to customers, our team, and our neighborhood.”

You can get a sandwich and a drink anywhere.

Amazing experiences, on the other hand, are more challenging to create.

Sharing this table conversation with leaders from multiple businesses across multiple industries, this initial question led to a lively back-and-forth. Answering the question was different for everyone, but as we dug a bit deeper, we realized all of our definitions of what winning looks like all came back to experience. From a commercial contractor and a recruiting professional to an insurance advisor, a wealth advisor, and an agency owner, we all agreed that the experiences we create are what customers are investing in.

The product or service you deliver is only as valuable as the experience that your customers receive when they’re receiving that product or service.

Our team spent time together today discussing what winning looks like at OrangeBall through the lens of the experience we deliver. We refer to this as “Bringing Bounce,” providing moments of delight for our clients.

More specifically, and from a tactical perspective, this means focusing on:

• Being responsive
• Doing what we say
• Bringing great, not good enough
• Exceeding expectations
• Showing up with positivity
• Polishing the forks (pay attention to the details)

Even as our team explored elevating the experiences we deliver through our products and services, we were reminded that growth adds pressure and stress to delivering these experiences. Growing pains are real and something we need to be aware of as growth is happening.

Call-to-Action
Ask yourself, “A year from now, how would we define winning?” Spend some time defining the experience you want to create and how that should feel to your customers.