Stand Out by Showing Up: The Case for Being Extra ✨

In a world that often settles for "good enough," what does it mean to go the extra mile? This episode dives into why being "extra" is not just a personality trait but a valuable approach in business. I'll explore how adding value beyond the bare minimum can set you apart, especially when others are raising their prices without raising the quality of their service. 

Links where I can be found: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2023/01/30/updates-housekeeping/

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I am the author of the forthcoming book, Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld, where I explore Dag's leadership style and his personal journey in greater depth. For updates, please go here: https://sara-causey.kit.com/2d8b7742dd.

You can also follow my author journey on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/saracauseyauthor.

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Summary keywords:

cost of living, rate increases, customer dissatisfaction, value for money, exceeding expectations, emotional resonance, client experience, practical steps, self-respect, quality work, customer retention, market differentiation, service quality, business strategy, customer feedback

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. And now here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I want to talk about why it's good to be extra as a consumer, as a customer myself, This topic has most definitely been on my mind recently. I know that a lot of vendors, a lot of service providers, have raised their rates over the past couple of years, just trying to deal with inflation and the insane increase in cost of living, just trying to get by, not living extravagantly, but just surviving being at least somewhat comfortable takes so much more than it did pre so I understand why people are doing what they're doing. The problem is when you raise your rates and say, well, it's cost of living, well, it's inflation, and then you don't do anything beyond saying, Oh, well, to justify that rate increase, it turns your customers off. And there are some individuals who will wash out, and they will blame the economy. They will blame inflation. They will blame whatever, pick, whichever administration, outgoing, incoming, whatever. It doesn't even matter. Red, Blue, donkey, elephant. They will pick whomever they don't like, and they will say it was that person's fault. It was the government's fault. It's the inflation's fault. It was the senile old man, it was the Orange Man, whatever. And some of the people who are doing that blame game, really, the person they ought to be blaming is themselves. I'm just going to pause for a minute so that you can sit with that, because I know that's going to make some people mad. I know that's going to be off putting, and I get it, but we have to face facts. If you're doing some kind of massive rate increase and then you're acting basic, you're giving people lackluster outcomes and then wondering why nobody wants to do business with you. That's you. That's not the economy, that's not the Orange Man. That's not senile old man. That's you. Now, the great news about that is you can take control of the situation. You don't have to stay stuck, and that's why I wanted to make this episode today about, well, in a sea of basic Why don't you be extra it's like how Warren Buffett used to say, when everybody else is getting greedy, that's the time you should worry. When everybody else is worrying and acting like Chicken Little that's the time for you to get greedy. That's the time for you to make your power moves, your money moves. And so I think looking at it from my perspective, as someone who hires freelancers, both for my staffing and recruiting business, as well as for this personal passion project I have going on about dag man, I have seen some stuff, wow, wow. We will we Wow. I have seen some stuff. There are people that I would hire again and work with in a heartbeat that have been so good. The work that they've turned in has been amazing, and they have understood the assignment. There are other people I've dealt with over the past couple of years who have just been rank. They wanted top dollar, and then they just gave me poopoo results. And I'm like, how do people sleep at night doing that like, what? What do you tell yourself to just stick your hand unmercifully in somebody else's pocket and take their money and then you don't even do anything significant for them? I like I don't get it because I'm not wired that way. And I'm not trying to say that as a humble brag. That's just me. Even my enemies, people who do not like me will tell you that I'm a workhorse. So I just don't, like, I don't get it. I don't get people that are just like, Yeah, sure. I'll over promise and under deliver and give you all this hot air and hopium and take your money, but then I'm not gonna actually do anything for it. I don't get that. But I'm telling you, there are truckloads of people out there on the market right now. You don't necessarily have to attract those people in, don't get me wrong, but if you cross paths with one of them, it's definitely going to make you mad. You're going to feel ripped off. And so I think, as a business owner and a burgeoning off. I'm like, you know, one way to stick out from the crowd is to be extra right now, sort of like being a piece of gold in a sea of old, scrappy junk metal, or being a diamond in a sea of old, broken pieces of glass strewn out across a parking lot, you will stand out from the crowd right now just by suiting up, showing up and taking your work seriously. I get that that may sound oversimplified, but I'm telling you as a consumer, as a customer, people who show up and do the work that they've agreed to do, and they do it well, and you can tell that they gave a damn huge right now. So let's go through a few points. Number one, the value of being extra. Think about what it means to you and your business, or your service, your product, whatever your offering is, your book, even if you're an author, your paintings, if you're if you're a painter, your sculptures, if you're a sculptor, whatever, think about what it means to be extra to you, and in a great sense, not in the sense of, I'm going to work myself to the bone. I'm going to go way over and above and beyond. I'm going to take a loss on this project. I'm going to be exhausted and crappy. I'm not talking about going that far in the other direction. Think about what it means to be extra in a really great, healthy sense of the word. You gotta go beyond the bare minimum if you're gonna provide something remarkable, if you want five star feedback, if you want bonuses, if you want people to say, You know what, I'm gonna recommend this person if I have a need like this again, I will rehire this person. I will send them business from other individuals doing the bare minimum and acting like you really don't give an F. That's not cute anymore, guys, it's really not. two. We want to think about inflation and cost of living versus value. Believe me, I wholeheartedly acknowledge the current climate that we're in, and I have not been shy in pulling the curtain back for you and telling you that my year, this year, 2024 has sucked. This has been a more difficult year for me than 2020 when the was in full swing. I do feel that we've been in a silent depression. I know that the unemployment statistics we've been given have been full of hot air and Bs, they go back and quietly, wink wink, quietly, revise the numbers when they think nobody is looking so all this junk, I'm trying to be, you know, peep at G to PG here, all this junk that we've heard about, oh, 3.5% unemployment rate turning and burning, doing great. You already know, I've been a broken record speaking out against that, telling my truth, telling what I've seen day in and day out in the job market on the real this year has sucked. So I completely acknowledge that people are feeling pinched, and some people are raising their prices because they're trying to hold on, they're trying to address inflation, they're trying to keep their kids fed, to keep the lights on, to keep clothing on their backs, to keep a car in the driveway. I get it my question to you, if you're a freelancer, if you're a business owner, if you are putting anything on the market, a product, a service, whatever it is, here's my question, are you also making an analogous leap in terms of your value. Are you raising prices just to raise prices, and then you're giving giving a lackluster, poopoo result to your customer? If so, you're going to piss them off, like if nobody has broken it down to you in such simple terms, allow me, when people pay more money. They want some kind of value for the bucks, because your customer is pinched too. It's not just you and your family suffering right now. So that person that scraped together the money, God knows what they had to do to get that money to give to you, and you're taking a dump on it. Think about that. You need to have some kind of compensatory value for what you're charging. Point number three expectations. Do you exceed them? Do you meet them barely, or are you under par? So many people right now are cutting corners, taking shortcuts and just tooting it out again. I'm trying to be G to PG here, but that's what it seems like. So let's, let's think about it also in terms of our timeline. We're in q4 The holiday season is rapidly approaching. You. Like, typically the day that this episode drops. So I'm going to release this episode tomorrow, which will be Thursday, November the 21st that's typically when Thanksgiving would be, for whatever reason, it's coming late this year, it's not going to be till next week, and obviously I won't be releasing an episode next week for Thanksgiving. But we're in the downhill slide of 2024, so many people check out. They're mentally they're in holiday mode. They're thinking about, where are we going to go for Thanksgiving? Where are we going to go for Christmas? What are we going to do for New Year's? They're not stunting you. Okay? You are not their priority anyway. And if somebody has a need, and they're like, look, I have this money to spend. This is like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, look, I've got money to spend in this place. If you've got somebody coming in to your store or approaching you about your service, and they're like, I have money to spend even during q4 when it seems like so many people are in a state of torpor, I'm ready to do this business deal, and then you give them a crappy experience, or you act like, well, I just don't give a damn. That person's not coming back to you. You're going to burn them. So at a time when a lot of people are zoned out, they're tuned out, be engaged, show up for it. Let's, let's this. This year has been the poops, okay, but why don't we try to finish strong? Why don't we try to do something meaningful with the next few weeks, instead of taking those shortcuts, instead of cutting corners, instead of acting like I'm burned out and I really don't give an F like, what if you were the person who showed up that could make a huge difference in your business, just just doing that right there, being present and awake and aware while everybody else is half asleep. Point number four, you want to think about your client experience and the emotional resonance. One of the modules that I have had in my coaching program since the very beginning is that human beings are emotional creatures. Me, you your boss, your friends, your spouse, your children, your prospects, your current clients, your enemies, everybody is an emotional creature. Vulcans may have existed in Star Trek, but they don't exist here. And thank God for that, because if we had a human being that was pure logic, pure rationality, I would imagine that person would be quite a sociopath. Emotions are not necessarily negative things. Sometimes in business, what you're doing is you're creating an experience and you are making the space, making the stage for your client to feel a certain way. And I will, I will tell a story here. I'll use a tangible example, because people remember stories, and they engage with stories much better than with someone giving a lecture. I have been in the process of getting my my tools and my marketing materials together for dad's biography, because I have no delusions of grandeur. If you build it, they will come well, no, they won't. People are not going to just randomly engage with a book on Amazon about a man they've never even heard of. I'm going to have to go out there and stir up interest and get on my soapbox, which I'm more than willing to do, to make people aware of what an amazing, beautiful human being, Dag was, and in my eyes, still is. So I had to get some photographs made, and that was quite a comedy of errors, because, as you know, yours truly is an introvert, an INFJ, if you like the Myers, Briggs scale. I don't like having my picture taken. I don't enjoy it. I don't find it fun. I'm like, Oh God no. And I on a daily basis, you know, I usually have hat hair. I've gone on a t shirt and some old jeans or some old sweats, like when you live and work on a working farm and ranch, you don't go around in a state of camera ready. You don't walk around like some Hollywood glamazon, because for one thing, it's highly impractical. You need to be able to get stuff done around the farm, and that's not super conducive to having long fingernails and hair extensions and 10 pounds of makeup. So I go to the first person, and I had a session paid good money for it. I'm not going to tell you how much, but it was not cheap. I. And the actual photo shoot experience itself was perfectly fine. The person was congenial and warm and encouraging, had a good personality. There was no issues with the photo shoot part of the experience that I had. However, a week later, when I received the photographs back from this person, they looked terrible. They weren't on brand. Things just didn't gel. The color schemes didn't work. If that photographer actually did any retouching and airbrushing, I didn't see it. It looked to me like the kind of photographs that somebody would take with a with a cell phone, like, if you had a really nice, high end cell phone and you had a few filters on it, and you just went out and you took a handful of nice pictures that you wanted to post, like on social media personally, like your personal social media stuff, that's what The photos look like. And I'm going How the f did that happen This person had lights, they had equipment. They had what looked to me to be a legitimate camera. They most certainly were not in this studio space taking photos with a cell phone. So how did the photographs wind up looking so cheap? That's that's what did it for me, those photographs looked cheap. They weren't on brand. The color schemes sucked and were garish and clownish. And I'm like, How How did this happen? How did this happen? How did this happen? All right, so I had a few hours to lick my wounds and to be like, this sucks. I got ripped off. I can't believe this happened. Where did the miscommunication occur? And I thought about what Barbara Corcoran always says she can tell which entrepreneurs are going to succeed and which ones are going to fail, ultimately, by how long they spend feeling sorry for themselves, because setbacks and mishaps are always going to happen. And if somebody lays up at the house eating a pint of ice cream and crying all day, and then that crying jag turns into I feel sorry for myself for weeks or months. They're not gonna make it. You have to be resilient. You have to pick yourself up, even when it feels like you got ripped off, even when it feels like you got a raw deal. You have to get up, shake the dust off and figure out a way forward, which is what I did. I'm like, okay, so this first experience sucked, and that that's what it was. I want you to notice what I just said, unscripted, what I just said. This experience sucked, because let's think about it. And photography is such a good a good illumination for this point, you have the photo shoot experience. But then the real the real fun comes when you open that folder and you look at those pictures. There are women who have posed for, you know, quote, unquote, adult magazines who say they did it because they wanted the photograph. They wanted to have that moment in time with the airbrushing and the posing and the lighting, to be able to look at their body and say, Damn, I was smoking hot. So the photography is an experience, and it's about how it makes you feel, and getting the photo shoot right, and making the person feel welcome and happy during the photo shoot, that's fantastic, but then you still have to finish the experience by giving them photographs where they go. Yes, I feel beautiful. This is on brand. I like the background. I like the clothing choices. I like the color schemes. It's this, you want to have that moment. It's this, this. I love it. And so when somebody gives you half of the experience, and then you get to the point that's supposed to be the icing on the cake. You know, I love carrot cake. I will typically eat that on my birthday. And it's like, okay, the beautiful, luscious carrot cake with all those warm, autumnal spices and then that gorgeous cream cheese frosting, it would be like if somebody handed you a carrot cake with some old musty, fusty carrots, and it didn't have the spices, and it didn't have the cream cheese frosting, you'd be like, What is this? I don't want this. This looks like some kind of carrot biscuit I would feed to my horses. I'm not going to eat this. So think about what I'm telling you. If you give your client an experience that's half assed, where you get to the finish line and you drop the ball. They remember the way that you made them feel. They're going to have that experience of like, oh, well, I got I wanted a carrot cake with delicious. Cream cheese frosting, and instead, I got a carrot cake that looks like a hockey puck that doesn't have any spice or frosting on it. And I'm not happy. You want to think about that now, my story has a happy ending, because I found somebody else, and it educated me on how to ask better questions and how to better vet creatives, like for photographers. Here's a here's something that I learned, don't just look at a finished portfolio, because, you know, and I'm not accusing any one particular person of anything. I want to be clear about that. I'm speaking in generalities here. There are some people that will use AI. There are people that will use false photographs and claim that they took that photograph of a real human being, and it's bull. So you want to be careful. You want to not just look at the person's finished product. You want to say, show me the raw photo and then show me the retouched version a good photographer, a good editor, whomever it is you're working with, they should be willing and able to do that. If they're not, that's a red flag, in my opinion, and you want to proceed with caution, because almost anybody nowadays with technology, with AI, they can pull together a portfolio that looks awesome. But then, if you say, Okay, well, show me the raw photo, and then show me the finished product. Show me how the client looked coming in, versus how the client looked when you did the assignment, when you finished everything for them that will help to separate the wheat from the chaff. But bringing it back to my point, it's about the experience. It's about the emotion that you gave to that other person. Of course, you want to solve their problem, but if you're solving their problem in the most lackluster and unapproachable way, they're probably not coming back. In fact, I have seen clients over the years. You know, I've been in staffing for 1213, years now, and I have seen clients over the years that they would keep going back to a recruiter who, frankly, wasn't very good, who really didn't solve their problems very well, who didn't put in personnel that stayed for any length of time. I have seen clients go back and back and back to the same old people because they liked them. So I want you to think about that. When you're out here raising your rates and cutting your corners and acting like a turd, you need to think about the emotional resonance. Point number five that I want to make, there are some practical steps that you can take to being extra and it can sometimes be simple things, because I know times are tight. I know money is tough. It could be something as simple as a handwritten thank you note, learning your customers preferences, really listening to them, giving them a little bit of oil of conversation if that's something that they like, giving them a little bit more time, a little bit more attention than they expected, just just that little bit can help. My sixth and final point on this is self respect. There's also a tremendous value in being extra for yourself. It's not just about how you show up for clients or for prospects. It's also about feeling good about yourself and the quality of your work, so that when you lay your head on the pillow at night, you're like, you know what I did, what I was supposed to do today, I feel good about what I did. And then, even if the customer is not satisfied, you know that you couldn't have done any better. You're not sitting there thinking, was I lazy? Was I unmotivated? Did I give them poopoo on a stick and expect them to treat it like cotton candy? Because deep down, we know when we've been lousy to someone else, and nobody wants to go to bed at night and be like, You know what? I was really lousy today. I really did not give a flying flip, and I didn't treat people very well. That's not a good place to be in. When you put your heart into your work. It shows, it shows, if you're doing something just to do it, and it's a slog, and you really couldn't care less, people will pick up on that. So consider that if you're raising your rates without raising your value, without carefully monitoring what you're actually bringing to the table. For people, it's going to leave them with a bitter taste. So instead, think about a positive, lasting impression that you can make, and always remember that human beings are emotional creatures, if you're. Giving them an experience that's only halfway you're giving them an experience that's lousy from the beginning, they're not coming back. Stay safe, stay sane. If you live in the United States, and next week is Thanksgiving for you, I hope you have a wonderful and safe holiday with your family, and I will see you in the next episode.

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