3 Things

Running on empty is not discipline, even if it might look like it. You sit down at your desk, lock in, and work for eight hours straight. You get up feeling like a shrimp. It might feel like a win, but you are, unfortunately, still a mammal. You feel worse, you do worse work, and you do not notice because the part of you that would notice is the part that is tired. You stop having good ideas and start going through the motions.

Charging your battery should never be a reward for finishing. It is part of how the work gets done.

Everything feels urgent now: “Run, don’t walk.” “Limited spots, last chance.” Somewhere along the way grind culture became the default speed of the day, and it came with a rule attached: every second has to be optimized. Time spent just existing, being a human, starts to feel like time wasted.

So walk.

When you think about what matters most for your business, where do you start? Is it numbers, employees, marketing, deliverables? If so, it may be time to pause and think about your customers, the main characters of your story. Not your logo, not your services, not your five-year-plan, but the people walking through your door or visiting your website, deciding whether to trust you with their time and money. They should be at the center of everything you do, because the moment your business stops being about them and starts being about you, it suffers.

Being involved in your community is one of the best ways to show people that you care. We recently took part in a community event here in the Proctor District, the first Wine Walk, which brought hundreds of new visitors to the neighborhood. We’re a marketing company, not a retail store, so foot traffic is not an everyday occurrence for us. But for the Wine Walk, we opened our doors, provided nibbles for our guests, set out patio seating, and chatted.

We didn’t hand out business cards, people asked for them. Why? Because people don’t commit to a business they’ve only seen in an ad. They commit to businesses they feel connected to personally. For example, a retail shop might be discouraged if sales feel low because the Wine Walk crowd isn’t their typical shopper. But they’d likely have more luck offering inexpensive impulse items suited to a browsing crowd, or a $5-off coupon for their next visit. Applying the same principle, a restaurant might offer free samples; an insurance company could offer a quick home safety checklist; and a veterinarian could set up a nail trim station or a spot for pet photos. All of these examples open the door to a future relationship.

Showing up is the start. Excellence is what happens after, but you can’t get there without keeping your customer’s story front and center. That means answering the phone the way you’d want it answered. It means delivering on what you promised, every time, not just when someone’s watching. A nail trim station, a home safety checklist, a coupon for next time, all of it works because it puts the person in front of you first. The moment any of it starts feeling like a business trying to meet its quota instead of a genuine connection, your business suffers. Strive for excellence in everything you do, keep your customer at the center of every decision, and you won’t need to convince anyone to trust you. They already will.

I think about the little things a lot. The little things are what made Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm work. They’re why a good meme lands. Some tiny, universal thing we all recognize. Most of the time the little things are just funny, or mildly annoying, and they don’t add up to much.

But this is a marketing blog, and in marketing the little things aren’t so little. Two of them crossed my path recently and made me go hmmmm.

The first: I got an invoice from a service where tipping isn’t customary, and there on the invoice was the option to leave one. Some people like to tip when it isn’t expected. I have a friend who’s always handing cash to the plumber or the cable tech, and I think it’s great that he does. But that’s a thing he chooses to do. It isn’t asked of him. When the ask is built right into the invoice, it lands differently. Now I’m deciding whether saying no makes me look ungrateful, or like I’m rating the work as less than great. I’m sure none of that was the intent. The option was probably added as a convenience. But it turned a perfectly fine interaction into a slightly awkward one. And every interaction with your brand is marketing.

And it’s not just me. Tipping fatigue has a name now, a couple of them actually: “tipflation” and “guilt tipping.” Roughly two-thirds of people say they’re worn out by being asked to tip everywhere, and about the same share feel the squeeze when a screen or an invoice nudges them to tip where they didn’t expect to. So that little flicker of awkwardness I felt isn’t rare. It’s the rule.