Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

My wife and I are very avid scuba divers. We’ve each done more than a couple of thousand dives and we actually met scuba diving in Australia. 

We love to go to the nation called the Maldives. A whole range of islands where they have beautiful resorts and wonderful humans, warm hearted people.

The resort that we like to go to is called LUX* South Ari Atoll, and they have an area there called Cafe LUX* with baristas who know how to make your coffee, not just normal looking coffee. 

Now they actually roast the beans on site. So the flavor is outstanding. But it’s the perception point of what the coffee looks like when it comes to you where they really stand out. One morning I went to get a coffee before scuba diving and they brought me this. 

Oh. The next day, I thought I’d get the same thing. No, no, no. I got this, and on another day, during our most recent stay, we came back in the afternoon. I wanted to get a cappuccino, I thought. But the fellow who was working at Cafe LUX* was new. He’d not yet learned how to work with the chocolate powder to make such beautiful illustrations on my coffee. But he looked at me and he could tell that I had just come off the scuba diving boat and he said, “Just give me a minute.” And he went in the back and he came out and gave me this. 

You don’t have to be the world’s best practitioner in order to have the world’s best attitude of wanting to create a better experience for someone else, and within the skill set that you have, step up and create a better experience for someone else. 

By the way, if you are really good at what you do, and you know that you’re state of the art and you want to demonstrate how to take it even further, let me show you, for example, what they brought to two young boys in the afternoon who wanted a hot chocolate, and if what you see is a cat chasing fish, you’re not wrong. If what you see is chocolate powder and milk foam, you’re also not incorrect.

But if what you see is the result of a service provider who use the tools that they had to create a better experience, then you’re looking at this the way I look at this, and that’s the way I want you to look at your job and your role in your life commercially and personally and within the community and neighbourhood in which you live.

Now, there’s something infectious about stepping up your service, which is that when you start doing it, other people want to show that they can do it too. So, for example, the housekeeping department at this wonderful place called LUX* South Ari Atoll, they said, just let us show you what we can do, and a few weeks ago, after not traveling for many years, well, it felt like many years my wife and I finally went back to our home away from home and on the bed, look what we found waiting for us. “Welcome back home, Jen and Ron.” 

Now, that didn’t take forever for somebody to put on our bed, but what a moment. Here’s a perfect example of a very satisfied customer sharing with other people around the world. Now, by the way, the creativity never stops. We came back from one of our dives and found this, which is pretty amazing. 

But if you have a finance background, you might be looking at this and saying, “Wait a minute, that’s a lot of towels.” You’re not wrong, because the fact is every one of those towels is going to have to go through the laundry. So then actually it’s nice to do it, but you shouldn’t do that kind of thing every day and you only need to do it once in a while anyway. Well, how about the evening when we came back from dinner and there were no towels on the bed, but somebody had taken the time with a simple leaf from one of the palm trees and sliced it into thin green strips and laid this out on the bed. We came home to our room that night and had this emotional experience. 

It was initiated by the fact that a service provider cared, was concerned and committed to our well-being, and took action to create value that not only did we enjoy then, but I’m enjoying sharing it with you right now.