Ignoring special snowflakes in business

At Easy Time Clock, the growth we’ve experienced in the past few years has been largely due to focusing on the right things. We started ignoring what we like to call “special snowflake” circumstances, and instead focused on improving the experience for everyone. 

Back in the first decade of our company, the previous management ran things very differently. Their mindset was to answer “yes” when asked for any request or feature. 

Want five decimal places? You’ve got it! Want that button to be pink. Can do! 

While that did help how that specific customer viewed their company, it wasn’t a good thing over the long term. 

Let’s say you change the decimal places to five somewhere. What about when the next customer calls and wants six? Or what if they want that pink button to be blue? 

It wasn’t long before we decided that we couldn’t cater to one customer at a time. Instead, we started focusing on improving the overall experience for everyone. 

Here’s a great example. When we took over in 2016, we were getting about 160 calls a day. 

Over the next few years, my team created online help documents and videos. Let’s say someone wants to know how to set up PTO in their account. There are documents and videos that do that. 

By taking that information and making it available online, we dropped down to 30 calls a day on average. And it turns out it was great for SEO as well. Google loves all that information being available! 

We’ve taken the system and fixed the problems that needed to be fixed. We’ve also made it more user-friendly. By focusing on those things that would help all of our customers, we’ve more than tripled our business in the four years since we took over.