5 Places to Find the Small Things That Matter in Your Business
Prefer to listen rather than read? Listen to the podcast episode covering this same topic here → Quietly Disruptive Podcast
In the last post we talked about why the small things are the disruption, why the tiny unseen details that nobody asked you to do are often the things that make the biggest difference. Today I want to get practical, because knowing it matters is one thing but pinpointing where those small things live in your business and knowing what to do with them is another.
Performative Detail vs Genuine Care
Before we get into the five places, I want to make an important distinction because I think this is where a lot of founders go wrong. There is a difference between performative detail and genuine care. Performative detail is when you add a branded sticker to your packaging because you saw another founder do it on Instagram and it looked good and you thought right, I need one of those. There is nothing wrong with a branded sticker, but if the reason you are doing it is because someone else did, it is decoration, not care. Genuine care is when you think about what your client or customer experiences at each point of their journey with you and you ask yourself does this feel like me, does this feel like what I would want to receive. The difference between the two is intention. One is about looking the part. The other is about being the part.
The First Impression
What happens when someone finds you for the very first time? It could be your LinkedIn profile, your website, your Instagram, even a reply to a comment. Whatever that first moment of contact is, what does it feel like? Is it warm, is it personal, does it feel like you? Or does it feel like a template that could belong to anybody? When somebody connects with me on LinkedIn I send them a genuine message where I have looked at what they do and found something specific to say about it. The number of times people reply saying nobody ever does that tells you everything about how rare that five minutes of care actually is.
The Gap Between Yes and Delivery
This is probably the most neglected space in most businesses. Someone has said yes, they have signed up, they have paid, they have committed. And then what? In a lot of businesses the answer is silence. The client is waiting, not quite sure what happens next, feeling uncertain about whether they have made the right decision. That gap is a goldmine for the small things. A message, a welcome, something that says I am so glad you are here, here is what happens next, can completely change how someone feels about working with you before the work has even started.
The Way You Open and Close Everything
Not the content itself but the things at the edges. The way you start your emails, your sign off, a P.S. line. This is where personality either lives or dies. If someone opens their email with I hope this email finds you well, I already know the rest is going to sound like every other email in my inbox because that opening tells me nothing about the person who wrote it. It is filler, it is wallpaper, it is the equivalent of beige paint on every wall. But if someone opens with something specific, something that tells me who they are or what they have been thinking about, suddenly I am leaning in because that opening feels like a person talking to me rather than a template talking at me.
The Follow Up
This is the one that separates founders who build relationships from founders who build transactions. After the work is done, after the product is delivered, after the call ends, what happens? Most founders move straight on to the next thing. But the founders who check in a month later, who remember something mentioned in passing, who send a note saying I was thinking about what you said about X, how did it go, those are the founders people talk about. Those are the ones who get the referrals without asking. And it costs nothing except five minutes and the genuine care to remember.
The Thing That Only You Would Do
This is my favourite and it is the one that cannot be taught or copied. It is the detail that comes from who you are as a person, not from a best practice list. For me it is the way I use LinkedIn as a conversation starter rather than a broadcasting platform. I post and then go and find the people I want to talk to. That is not something I learned from a marketing course, it is just how I am wired. For another founder it might be the handwritten note tucked into every order, written at the kitchen table while the kettle boils. For another it might be the voice note they send to every new subscriber instead of an automated welcome email. None of these came from a list of ten things to add to your customer experience. They came from the founder asking themselves what would I do here if nobody was watching and there were no rules.
The Test: Would Someone Know It Was You?
If you removed your name and your logo from every touchpoint in your business, every email, every message, every piece of content, would someone still know it was you? If the answer is that it could have come from anyone, that is where the small things are missing and that is where the opportunity is. Your clients are not choosing between you and another founder based on who has the better website. They are choosing based on who made them feel something, and that feeling almost always comes from the small things that nobody else thought to do. Pick one touchpoint this week, look at it honestly, ask whether it feels like you, and if it does not, make it yours. The small things compound. One thoughtful reply becomes a relationship. One personal follow up becomes a referral. One detail that nobody asked for becomes the reason someone remembers you six months later.
About the Author: Becky Benfield Humberstone partners with Quietly Disruptive founders to build businesses that change their corner of the world, on their terms. If you started your business because you believed things could be done differently, and you're ready to make that vision real, she gets it. Based in the UK and working globally via Zoom and in person, she's done this work herself, more than once.
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