Delivering Excellence

By Dana

Recently I found myself driving behind an 18-wheeler on the Chesterfield Parkway. When it turned onto the parking lot of a large pharmaceutical company, I noticed the slogan painted in huge letters along the trailer:

Delivering excellence in dry ice.

It's been awhile since I took high school chemistry, which is the last time I recall using dry ice with any regularity. And so the concept stopped me for a moment: Can dry ice be excellent? How do you rank dry ice, anyway?

There are many manufacturers of dry ice and virtually no end to its uses (according to the Wikipedia and one of my favorite websites, HowStuffWorks.com). Food service, laboratories, asphalt, and a myriad of flash-freezing possibilities ... Seems to me that the carbon dioxide is either solid, or it isn't -- so that clearly can't be the source of excellence. This company, therefore, has to be touting its on-time delivery, its ease of ordering, its commitment to customer service, its competitive pricing, and other intangibles that make up excellence for its customers. I'll assume it's doing something very well, to have this particular large company on its client list. They've raised a fairly commonplace product to something exceptional. And isn't that what most of us hope to do?

Few small businesses are offering completely unique products. We have many competitors, and that number may expand exponentially with the shopping power of the Internet. No longer can an auto dealer, for example, worry about only the dealer down the street, because people no longer have to shop locally for their cars, thanks to EBay Motors and the web presence of virtually every dealer in business today. The same dynamic operates on Business Audio Plus: we aren't limited to St. Louis-based customers, of course, but neither do we deal with only St. Louis-based competition.

Whether your company manufactures floor mats or furniture, paper products or pet food, steel tubing or circuit boards, figuring out how to be excellent at it needs to be the central part of your mission statement. That's what helps you land the big clients, and more importantly, that's what keeps your customers coming back.