Twentieth-century American author, philosopher, and editor Ruth Nanda Anshen writes,
Man is in the process of developing a new consciousness which, in spite of his apparent spiritual and moral captivity, can eventually lift the human race above and beyond the fear, ignorance, and isolation which beset it today. … Man has entered a new era of evolutionary history, one in which rapid change is a dominant consequence. … He must now better appreciate this fact and then develop the wisdom to direct the process toward his fulfillment rather than toward his destruction. As he learns to apply his understanding of the physical world for practical purposes, he is, in reality, extending his innate capacity and augmenting his ability and his need to communicate as well as his ability to think and to create.
Some of the ways to approach the challenge Dr. Anshen poses are broad: visioning, community building, and fostering democracy can all contribute. It can also be the revolution of dignity in the workplace that I’ve been writing about and working diligently to help make a reality over the past few years. Spiritual practices like mindfulness contribute significantly, though in my experience it takes a good while for them to truly take root in our way of being in the world. There are, however, other approaches that can begin on a smaller scale. One of those ways, something we’ve quietly been practicing here in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) for decades now, could be part of the solution. It’s what we regularly refer to around here as “going the extra mile.”
Last week, I wrote a lot about consensus decision-making. As I shared, it has played a huge part in making the ZCoB what it is. For consensus to really work requires a values-aligned group, a lot of training, and extensive practice over a long period of time. This week, I’m coming at things from the opposite end of the organizational behavior continuum: while consensus can take a while, extra miles can be done in a matter of minutes. Consensus requires a collective; extra miles can be initiated by one proactive person. A new staff member with a bit of coaching can, within an hour or two of starting their first shift, start doing meaningful extra miles that can make the day of customers and coworkers. Over time, in a culture where extra miles are an everyday activity, the “new consciousness” to which Anshen alludes can indeed be initiated, and the extension of our “innate capacities” and our “ability to think and create” can be enhanced. Extra miles may seem simple, but their impact, I believe, can be far bigger than most casual observers might imagine.
Ruth Nanda Anshen talked about her desire “to extrapolate an idea in relation to life.” I’d like to do that here for extra miles. Here’s a little of what I write in Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service:
Going the extra mile at Zingerman’s means doing more than the guest has asked for—actually exceeding their expectations. Going the extra mile makes our customers leave their interactions with us thinking, “Wow! That was really nice.” And, we know from experience, it makes an enormous difference in the quality of the customer’s experience.
There are countless “little” things we can do in the food business to go the extra mile for our customers. At Zingerman’s they might include:
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Giving a taste of a new item to a regular customer.
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Sending an article to a client about their field of work.
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Calling a customer back a few days after they received their order to follow up on the effectiveness of the work we did for them.
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Adding a little sample of something extra to an order going out.
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Sending a handwritten thank you note or email to a customer.
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Carrying a customer’s bag to their car!
To someone who’s not paying close attention, an extra mile like those listed above could, I imagine, seem really insignificant. In the scheme of the world’s issues or the context of someone spending a few hundred dollars on Zingerman’s food, what difference would a taste of a new cheese or a handwritten thank you note really matter? I take the opposite tack—while the work involved in most extra miles we do here in the ZCoB is generally small, their impact can be enormous. Ultimately, I think these extra miles bring that little something extra to our service. It’s the stuff that sets us apart from our countless competitors and what keeps our customers coming back for more positive Zingerman’s experiences. They are the “extra” that elevates the ordinary, the unexpected that makes people marvel, the special something that actualizes awe.
The extra mile, as I’ve experienced over all these years now, is almost never the main point of a guest’s interaction with us. Customers don’t come to us expecting one, and they aren’t mad at us when they don’t get one. It is often the smallest part of all the work that goes into getting you, our guest, whatever we got you. And yet, more often than not, the extra mile is exactly the thing that people remember much longer than anything else. They loved the sandwich, but what they remember even more is the brownie we gave them to bring to their brother in the hospital. You will have your own examples and experiences in your line of work, but I have heard similarly consequential stories from folks in pretty much every walk of business life.
Extra miles are one of the best ways I know to actualize the service section in our 2032 Vision, which includes the commitment to enact,
Small considerations, small courtesies, and small kindnesses, habitually practiced, day in and day out, build the experience of great service in our many different business contexts. We make meaningful differences in people’s lives, one interaction at a time. … We are well known for our staff’s empathy and attention to detail when helping people. We engage with each person, open-minded, ready to serve them as they would like, and honoring their uniqueness.
To be clear, great extra miles do not have to be massive, big-budget extravaganzas. Even if resources are tight, as they so often are, there are still thousands of creative extra miles that can be done with no real tangible cost at all. A handwritten thank-you note a year after we catered someone’s wedding, an email to ask after a client’s child who’s been ill, a taste of a new bread, an unrequested glass of water for a guest who is waiting outside on a hot day. They seem small, but the spiritual impact is usually anything but. As historian Timothy Snyder says, “Small things can have huge impacts … the little things like that which make a society go.”
Extra miles aren’t per se what Snyder was writing about—his focus, like mine a few weeks ago, was democracy—but I believe the point is the same. A world in which we judge our personal growth and success by the quantity and quality of the extra miles we do would be a kinder, gentler, more dignity-based, and more generous world to be a part of.
The impact of a single extra mile can be mind-blowing—a return on investment that far exceeds even the best work one can do on Wall Street. Sure, some extra miles show no sign of short-term return. But we don’t do them with the expectation of getting something back. We go the extra mile because it’s aligned with our values, it is a small act of meaningful dignity, kindness, and generosity that makes the world a bit better of a place to be. And yes, because in the big picture we believe that the more we go the extra mile, the better things will work out for all involved. Customers, the ZCoB, our coworkers, and our community are all culturally, emotionally, and spiritually enriched by the doing of them.
That said, extra miles do often reap big returns. We have countless numbers of customers who still share stories of ways we went the extra mile for them 10 or 15 years ago. Many tell these stories the same way grandparents smile and share fond memories of their grandchildren. This sort of positive personal message is worth more than thousands and thousands of dollars of marketing. I got to know writer, speaker, punk-music loving, anarchist author of the great book Punx CX, Adrian Swinscoe, through an extra mile Jenny Tubbs from Zingerman’s Press did in February of 2020 to make it more manageable for him to get the Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading books to the UK. Four and a half years later, Adrian and I are friends, have recorded podcasts together, shared writing, and learned a lot from each other’s work.
Just the other day, I was sitting outside in the sun writing when a guest pulled her car up next to the curb and came over to talk. She wanted me to know that she was moving to Chicago. She stopped not only to say thank you for the many years of great food she enjoyed during her time in Ann Arbor, but also to share one particular story. Eighteen years ago, she was stressing big time about defending her dissertation, and we gifted her a coffee cake to bring to her presentation! It couldn’t hurt to have a sweet treat on the table, we’d told her, while talking through such serious subject matter. All these years later, her career is thriving, and she just got a new job in Chicago. She wanted to say how much she still remembers that coffee cake and how much it meant! To restate, this small unsolicited act of kindness was done with no expectation of return, and yet she is clearly still thinking about it almost 20 years later. She was almost tearing up while she told me. Her small, impromptu, street-side sharing of this beautiful story reminded me again of what Adrian Swinscoe says regularly: “The little things matter as much, if not more, than the bigger things.”
To be clear, I’m not suggesting we made up the idea of doing this. The value of going the extra mile has been advanced around for ages. Napoleon Hill was writing about it as an essential business and life skill nearly half a century before we opened the Deli. Born in a one-room cabin in rural Virginia in 1883, Hill famously went on to become one of the best-known “self-help” writers and speakers in modern American history. In his 1937 classic, Think and Grow Rich, Hill writes,
One of the most important principles of success is developing the habit of going the extra mile. … You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for.
Back when we opened the Deli, I don’t think I’d ever heard of Napoleon Hill. I’d been studying Russian history and anarchism, and Hill was half a world away from either. Best I can recall, what almost every one of the 700 people who now work here will know as “going the extra mile” wasn’t a strategy we learned from anyone else. It just seemed, intuitively, like a better way to do business. It wasn’t transactional. For us, in our own new business owners’ naivete, it was existential. For me and Paul, it couldn’t really have been more clear—doing really cool and kind little unexpected things for people you care about (yes, customers, but also coworkers, friends, and community members) without any particular expectation of getting anything back in return, felt like a better way to work. We believed strongly—both back and then still today, in 2024—that no matter what might happen after doing any particular extra mile in the moment, good things would gradually come from them. I don’t think we thought about it all that much. It just seemed like the right thing to do!
Many years ago, back in the late ’80s, we agreed on a “recipe for Great Service.” It was, best I can recall, written out with the constructive engagement of Maggie Bayless who would later become the managing partner at ZingTrain. We were mostly motivated to get Maggie’s help by the increasing frustration we felt when new staff members didn’t “get it” when it came to customer service. Maggie gently reminded us that what Paul and I were seeing so clearly, was essentially invisible and almost, in many cases, even unimaginable to most of the people we were hiring. If new staff members weren’t doing what we wanted, the problem, she gently pointed out, wasn’t with them—it almost certainly emanated from our lack of clarity and inadequate training. (Which was remedied rapidly when we started ZingTrain together in 1994.)
From that work, we came up with two recipes: what came to be called 3 Steps to Great Service and our 5 Steps to Handling Customer Complaints. (It was originally 4 Steps to Handling Customer Complaints, but not being originalists, we added a 5th step about 25 years ago when we decided by consensus of the Partners Group to commit to documenting complaints across the ZCoB, to more effectively track trends and follow up more quickly.) Here are the three service steps:
1. Figure out what your customer wants.
2. Get it for them accurately, politely, and enthusiastically.
3. Go the extra mile for the customer.
If you want the full recipes with a wealth of operational detail, by all means, grab a copy or two of the service book (we have it translated into Spanish, too, by Heine Esperon at Babel Linguistics Inc.) or join us for one of the many ZingTrain sessions (short ones online, in-depth ones here in person for two days, or at your organization for a customized customer service session). We use the 3 Steps with guests, and also between us as coworkers. They actually work at home as well. They are effective, I know from having taught them and seen them implemented, in every walk of life—from food service to flight schools, from high tech to health care.
The extra mile is so embedded in our organizational culture that we have, as per Padraig O’Tuama’s terrific suggestion about the word community, turned it into a verb. In what we’ve come to know here as “Zinglish,” one would say:
Past tense: “I extra miled the man in the Michigan T-shirt.”
Present tense: “I’m extra miling them right now.”
Future tense: “I’m going to extra mile them in a minute.”
In theory, we have committed to going the extra mile for every single guest interaction. In practice, I know that we all (me included) can and need to do better. We don’t get this right every time. That said, looking at it more positively, I have no idea how many millions of individual extra miles have been done here over our four-plus decades of doing business. I think it’s safe to say, it’s a lot! Given that the circumference of the planet is about 25,000 miles … my math tells me we might have gone around the Earth more than a few times over the last 42 and a half years!
We are not, I’m happy to say, the only ones who take this approach. Going the extra mile is really just one more manifestation of what we know as Natural Law #7: “Successful businesses do the things that others know they should do … but generally don’t.” (For more on the Natural Laws, see Secret #1 in Building a Great Business.) Nearly every great organization—whether it’s in professional sports, public schools, or food service—will have some version of this approach.
Though he doesn’t use the same phraseology we do here, Will Guidara is a leading practitioner and promoter of the concept. He and I got to know each other through the work of the Independent Restaurant Coalition during the pandemic. Restaurateur and former owner of Eleven Madison Park in New York City (he sold it in 2019), Will does a wonderful job of making the case for the concept. What we have been calling extra miles for decades now, Will refers to in the title of his recently published book, Unreasonable Hospitality. In it, Will writes,
Unreasonable hospitality means providing thoughtful, high-touch gestures for every one of their guests. … Gifts are a way to tell your guests you saw, heard, and recognized them–that you cared enough to listen, and to do something with what you heard. The right gift can help you extend your hospitality all the way into someone’s life. It becomes a legend they will continue to tell others.
Cynics often ask me questions like, “Won’t out-of-control staff members do too much of an extra mile sometimes?” The answer is, now and again, “Yes.” As Natural Law #9 makes clear, success means you get better problems. Most businesses choose to make rules that restrict staff from taking the initiative to do “extra things” for customers, or from handling customer complaints through to conclusion. What problem do they get? While mainstream business people can make the case that they have protected their financial bottom lines in the moment, and kept their customer service work “under control,” I will suggest that they have actually made things worse.
You’ve probably experienced the consequences of that all-too-common approach as a customer. Well-meaning staff people who have been trained to simply play it safe—business owners opt to disempower their employees, leaving both customers and crew feeling frustrated, let down, and left, much to their mutual dismay, disappointed and disengaged. Through no fault of their own, staff end up feeling helpless to do what they know needs to be done. One former ZCoBber shared with me that in his old job, he knew what he should do for customers, but if he did it, he would have been fired. Companies may talk a good game, telling trainees how important customers are, but when businesses don’t allow staff members to take creative action, they are, my punk rock writer friend Adrian Swinscoe might smile and remind us, actualizing the classic song by the Clash: “Train in Vain.”
Here at Zingerman’s, from the get-go, we opted for the opposite problem. Yes, we knew that, inevitably, we would end up with a handful of situations in which a well-meaning staff member would “give away too much.” But those, we believed, would be a tiny minority. We were more than willing to take that problem while watching our colleagues use their creative intelligence to make one-of-a-kind, magical, and memorable service experiences happen every day.
We believed from the beginning, and still do today, that everyone would benefit—guests, coworkers, the company, and the community. All these years later, that belief is more deeply held here than ever. To this day we ask ourselves—me and everyone who works here—to mindfully go the extra mile for our guests, and, for that matter, also for each other. You have the list above to get you thinking, but there are hundreds and hundreds of ways to do this. Some, it’s true, can cost a bit of cash, but most cost next to nothing and many of the best ones are free. Walking a guest to their car on an icy winter evening. Calling a catering customer a few weeks before their big event to tell them how excited you are about it, and checking to see if there’s anything they need at the moment. Inside the organization, it could be as small as a handwritten thank-you note mailed to a coworker’s house, emptying the trash in another department, or sending an article to a colleague because you know it relates to their passion for making pottery.
When we began asking—and, more meaningfully I think, authorizing—everyone who worked here to go the extra mile, all day every day, our main drive was to enhance guest (and later, coworker) experiences. What I didn’t take that much into account is the enormous impact it has on the staff members who go the extra mile. Small things done well open mental doors. Done regularly over extended time periods, through neuroplasticity, they change our brains. In an organization where going the extra mile is taught, defined, practiced, recognized, and rewarded, where staff are authorized and encouraged to go out of their way to do extra things to delight their customers without having to call a manager over every few minutes to get permission, there are a whole host of important upsides. I will write much more about this next week, but for now, I’ll just say that staff members regularly going the extra mile increases dignity, empathy, hope, purpose, positive beliefs, the spirit of generosity, community, democracy, and then some! The benefits, in this context, are as big for the business and the people in it as they are for the customer who has been, as we say around here, extra-miled.
While we have a widely shared and well-documented service recipe that calls for going the extra mile, learning how to do it well is a craft, not a cut-and-dry SOP; extra miling is the kind of thing that one works at mastering for decades, not a science that can be understood and repeated over and over again without variation. To effectively extra mile a guest, one needs to really tune into who they are, how they’re feeling, where they were earlier in the day, and where they are in their life. What’s wonderful for one customer could be a total letdown for another. Extra miling is what we commit to doing, but what exactly the right extra mile is for a particular situation is always specific to the place and the time. All of which means that doing it well requires craft, judgment, reading the room and the guest, empathy, and balancing cost with impact.
Extra miles, barely noticeable to the casual observer, can make the difference between keeping a customer or losing them, enriching our community or exhausting it, and even staying in business or going under. They are, I believe, a beautiful way to illustrate French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s statement: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” The point of creating an extra-mile-centric culture is not about what you and I might be able to accomplish on our own. It’s about what the collective can make happen when nearly everyone in the organization gets on board with the idea. As Timothy Snyder says, “If 10,000 little groups do 5,000 little things, that will make a tremendous difference.”
Some extra miles can be systematized. Will Guidara writes: “Identify moments that recur in your business, and build a tool kit your team can deploy without much effort.” The Roadhouse has just such a book, and databases and idea banks with other extra miles abound around the ZCoB. Here, we long ago agreed to use what we call the “:05/:55 Rule.” In order to exceed guest expectations, we actually unlock our doors, and are ready to go, five minutes before our posted opening time, and lock them five minutes after our closing time. Small thing, but really, why not? Extra miles can also be recorded and used in the future as training tools. A good database of extra miles is an awesome resource to have—it shows newcomers to the organization the amazing customer service work of those who have gone before them. As songwriter P.F. Sloan (who wrote the classic song “Eve of Destruction”) once said, “It’s living art captured for all time.”
The idea of going the extra mile is, I’ve long believed, the most challenging part of our service recipe. I’m not suggesting that the rest of the work we do isn’t difficult—there’s nothing easy about all the effort that goes into baking artisan bread, getting thousands of Mail Order boxes out the door accurately and on time, leading a complex Food Tour in a foreign country, or pulling a proper shot of espresso. But in all of those cases, we are reminded to do our work directly—the guest is asking us for it. The extra mile, I believe, is more challenging because, by definition, we have to think of it!
Adrian Swinscoe says that “stories move us.” With that in mind, I’ll close with this beautiful tale that just came in last week. It is, literally, a tale of the whale. In this case, The Blue Whale Café, a wholesale customer of ours at the Bakehouse. Owner Christy Keledas wrote to the Bakehouse last week to share this exceptional story. This small bit of extra mile work, we could say, is an example of extra miling done, par excellence! It sums up this whole extra mile experience. The cost was basically zero; the care and creativity were off the charts.
Hi Zing friends! I just wanted to share an experience I’ve had with one of your team members who is the finest example of extraordinary customer service. Several weeks ago, someone started drawing cute whale tails on our bags of bread which I pick up on Monday mornings. It always made me smile knowing someone took the extra time and care to sketch something so adorable! The artist is Alex. I do not know his last name. All I know is he always greets me with the friendliest welcome and hustles to get me on my way. I mentioned to Alex how much I love the drawings and have saved every one of them. (My plan is to do something creative, perhaps a wall of them) This past Monday, Alex had a thoughtful surprise for me when I came for the bread. He had designed a “Blue Whale Cafe” sticker just for us!!! Zingerman’s is an extraordinary brand, and just know that Alex makes your company shine even brighter!
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