The best things in my life, are little.
Little is simple.
Pure.
More concentrated and flavoursome.
I understand little better than I understand big.
I prefer life that way.
The little bread maker in our village, Wendy, makes a couple of dozen cheesy loaves each week.
I buy one.
The little honey farm near my house sells honey that’s actually honey.
I like a little flat white in handleless cup from a little independent coffeeshop.
Single malt whisky from a little independent distiller.
Mature cheese from a little cheese maker whose name I know.
Grants cake shop in Corbridge.
Smiles.
They’re all little.
Focused and real.
And… nicer.
When a business is little, the business cycle is little, so shelf life extending bullshit is absent.
And the supply chain is generally happier when whoever made the thing is little.
Because fewer people get treated like shit when one human looks another in the eye.
Generally, the bigger things get, the shitter things get.
When a business gets big, business phones are answered by recorded messages.
When is this OK?
Never.
Not because messages are too long, because the bigger business values their time more than your time.
Not because the message is designed to nudge you out of the way of their business and your money as efficiently as possible.
A recorded message is never, ever OK in business because it is the perfect example of how media becomes message.
“Paul, as MD you have to decide.”
“Decide what?”
“Customers call. Prospects call. They want help. They want to feel valued and heard.”
“So you want to know if I’m going to put our best people on the phones to make the caller feel valued and heard, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Put nobody on the phones. Absolutely fucking nobody. Record something, once, that filters out who we don’t want, and gets the money of those we do want – fast. If the call takes ages, fine. Use a phone number that costs them, not us. And make it horribly convoluted for existing customers to leave. OK?”
“Oh. OK. Thanks.”
I mostly avoid big.
And it’s good advice to avoid big pretending to be little, too.
There’s a lot of that on Instagram.
The brand positioned as the focussed seller of just one, considered, crafted, science-backed, dog-transforming dog toy.
The brand that is then, post purchase, revealed to be the hard-to-contact PlasticBastard & Co., a city-sized-factory five thousand miles away, firing out shoddily made whatnots to the gullible and the disappointed.
The best things in my life, are little.
Little is simple.
Pure.
More concentrated and flavoursome.
I understand little better than I understand big.
I prefer life that way.