By David Capece, Managing Partner

In life, we are presented with thousands of decision every day.  A trip to the mall or Amazon.com, and you are presented with thousands of clothing options.  Turn on the radio or go to iTunes, and you can search for thousands of songs.  Looking for food, there are countless options for dinner.  It seems there is an oversupply of options, which often leads to lowest common denominator thinking.  McDonald’s does great because you can eat for $1.  For other restauranteers, if they are providing the standard and ordinary, it will be difficult to gain pricing power.  Sure, they can charge more than McDonald’s because of incremental quality, but what about justifying a significant premium?  The opportunity is in the details.

Seth Godin recently wrote a great post (excerpt below) in which he talks about the importance of details.  Indeed, it is more affordable to use regular products, such as the regular eggs that Seth Godin refers to.  However, savvy owners will figure out which upgrades matter to consumers, and they will take the time or spend the money, to make them happen.  Next time you are at the mall, consider which clothes appeal to you: details in color, materials, threading, and design are visible.  When you are listening to music, think about the songs you like.  Cold Play and Black Eyed Peas have a unique sound through the integration of instruments and sounds that are uncommon.  And the restaurant that infuses spices, uses fresh foods, and goes the extra mile towards healthy and animal friendly policies gets the thumbs up.

Think about your business.  Where can you go the extra mile to differentiate your product with higher quality details that go above the ordinary.  For further inspiration, read Seth Godin’s original post “Quality, scale and the Regular Kind” as posted on Seth Godin’s Blog.

When we talk about quality, it’s easy to get confused.  That’s because there are two kinds of quality being discussed. The most common way it’s talked about in business is “meeting specifications.” An item has quality if it’s built the way it was designed to be built.

There’s another sort of quality, though. This is the quality of, “is it worth doing?”. The quality of specialness and humanity, of passion and remarkability.

Hence the conflict. The first sort of quality is easy to mandate, reasonably easy to scale and it fits into a spreadsheet very nicely. I wonder if we’re getting past that.

Consider two eggs:

If I go the local diner, I can get a high quality diner egg, over easy. The egg is a standard manufactured egg, created in quantity by drugged chickens in prison. It retails (raw) for about 14 cents. The egg is cooked on a griddle the way it always is, a grill neither spotless nor filthy, covered with a sheen of slightly old oil. It’s cooked on one side until set, flipped for a few seconds, put on a plate, given a shake of iodized salt and served, usually with a piece of generic white bread toast.

This is the regular kind. The kind most people grew up with. Easy to produce on demand, reliable and expected.

If I make an egg at home, I’ll use a free range egg from the farmer’s market, which I’ll happily pay 39 cents for. This egg tastes like an egg, and the extra money pays for a local farmer and a (slightly) happier chicken. I’d cook it in a very hot cast iron skillet with really tasty olive oil, and I’d leave it in longer until it gets crisp around the edges, then I’d put some David’s salt on it (which, due to its pointy edges, in fact does taste better). All told, it costs about thirty one cents more altogether.

This is the undependable kind. You might not be able to get the eggs. Cleaning the pan is more work too. But this is a remarkable egg, an egg worth talking about, an egg worth crossing the street for, an egg worth writing about.

If you can do this to an egg for thirty cents, imagine what happens when you bring the same approach to quality to your job.

Photo by Kasey Albano from Stock.Xchng