The old saying goes ‘Retail is detail.’ While the two words conveniently rhyme, the truth is no matter what the field, getting above-average results—and certainly reaching the upper echelons of the field—demands that everyone on the team, from the leader at the top to the front-line people who make it happen, must have a keen eye for detail.

Noticing important details and taking corrective action immediately must be systemised, trained, and practiced. That’s what success takes. There is no easy path to greatness. You just have to be better than the rest, and a key part of that is having a culture for taking care of details.

British cyclist and broadcaster Mark Beaumont gave a masterclass in this a few years ago at our annual conference when he described what went into his world record-shattering cycle around the world in 80 days. I’ll paraphrase, but one of the things that Mark said, almost in passing, when I was interviewing him at the end was: “It’s easy to act in a crisis. You HAVE to act because things are wrong in a big way and there are immediate consequences. What is far more difficult to do is to take action when things are only a little bit wrong. It’s easy to ignore and say, ‘well, it’s not that bad.’ The best-performing teams and leaders act when things are only a little bit wrong.”

These are choices you face every day. The staff member that is a few minutes late. The system that isn’t quite followed properly.

While I recommend you pick your battles and try not to overwhelm your team with what they’ll likely perceive as negative feedback, you have to send a message that we are a business that notices and takes care of details. It’s easier to ignore this stuff. I mean, who gets a kick out of pointing out what’s not working to a staff member who will, with the best will in the world, find it hard to take? But if you don’t do it, you send the message that details don’t matter. That’s not acceptable to me. I’ll act when things are only a little bit wrong even if it makes me and the team grumpy for a few minutes. There is no option C. Details either matter in your business or they don’t.

Missed details can really screw you up. They can mess up your business in big ways and prevent you from ever reaching your potential. When we opened my first practice, Seen, nearly 20 years ago, I learned about the need to pay attention to details early on. The practice was located off a main square, down at the bottom of a long arcade. So there was plenty of footfall in the square, but you couldn’t see our shop from the square, so people wouldn’t come in or even realise that ‘there is a cool opticians down there.’ This took us six long months to figure out and get our act together enough to buy an A-board sign. Magically, people started coming in after we put the sign out. We’d ask, “How did you find out about us?” and they’d reply, “I saw your sign.” INCREDIBLE! This little detail called ‘good signage’ was obviously important because it bought us customers.

Lesson learned—or so I thought. But no. More details were involved. I had to check every day that the signs were out because if I wasn’t paying attention, there were days when the staff forgot to put the sign out. Half a day or a whole day would go by before anyone realised that the signs weren’t out. And then other days the sign would be out, but it would be in the wrong place. It would be tucked too far into the arcade where it wasn’t visible. Or it would be facing the wrong way. The sign had a big arrow on it, and staff would occasionally have the sign directing people AWAY from the shop. Maybe I have mental scars about signage. I guess working seven days a week and not making a penny from your practice for three years will do that to a person.

To this day, I’ll give immediate feedback to my team on details like signs being in the wrong position because details matter, God damn it! Yes, it makes them grumpy. I try to be nice about it. I try to convey that this is not a ‘Conor’s personal preference thing’; this is a ‘law-of-the-universe, accurate-thinking, dealing-with-reality thing.’ I’m just pointing out what reality is. Missed details have big consequences and will screw up your business. This is an important lesson for your team to get. Know that things will always go wrong. That’s fine. What’s not fine is ignoring those things. Your job and your team’s job is to spot what’s a little bit wrong and fix it pronto. That is the kind of culture to build in your practice.