There once was a coffee shop where people could come and pay a little more than it cost in other places for a truly great cup of coffee made just the way they liked it by people who really knew how to make it just right (they wore black aprons displaying the title "Coffee Master" and they completed the Coffee Master course, which educates employees in coffee tasting, growing regions, roasting, and purchasing). And they trained their employees to deliver that great coffee with great service, great style and a kind of special attitude. They named the company Starbucks.
And there once was a car company that had a tradition in the company called "kaizen" which meant "continuous improvement". And they built a reputation as a company that made cars that were very well built, with practically zero flaws and which lasted a long time with no problems. Dependable, trustworthy quality was what everyone knew about that company's cars. The company was called Toyota.
But then something happened.
Starbucks decided that they had to be everywhere and outsell everyone and they started to open stores all over the place – hundreds and hundreds of them. A newsletter called the Onion sarcastically wrote that Starbucks just opened a Starbucks inside a Starbucks rest room! And they got spread pretty thin. They hired lots and lots of new counter employees to work at the hundreds of new stores. The new employees were not trained and experienced like the old ones and they did not know how to make that wonderful coffee like you couldn't find anywhere else. And they didn't have that special pride and attitude that the older ones had. The quality and the service dropped off and people quickly figured out that they could get just as good coffee in other places, like Dunkin' Donuts. And sales dropped and hundreds of stores had to close.
Toyota decided to get huge. They greatly increased their manufacturing capacity and dealer network. And they outsold all other car manufacturers. But they forgot what got them there. They got sloppy and serious flaws started to show up in their cars. And they hid those flaws and didn't respond to them promptly. And they got caught. And now everyone knows about the brake, accelerator and steering problems Toyota is having and Toyota's reputation has been destroyed.
What's the moral of all this? It's this:
A company has to decide and understand what its mission is. Is it to be the busiest and most convenient, to have very low or even the lowest price, to give the customer an average or even less than average product and grow like crazy and have the most customers of anyone?
Or it is to focus on delivering superb quality to customers who are seeking exactly that, with wonderful service that is hard or even impossible to find anywhere else and charge what it takes to deliver that time after time, dependably and flawlessly to that smaller base of customers?
Starbucks and Toyota chose to deliver quality and superb service to a group of customers who treasured that but they wanted to grow and grow and grow. So they had to compete with the coffee shops and car manufacturers who cared way less about quality and way more about having their shops and cars on every corner at a medium or low price.
And they found out that you can't have it both ways.
So what's the lesson for Smart Dental Patients? Here it is:
You gotta choose what kind of dental office you want to deliver your care. What kind of environment do you want? Fast, cheap and open 6 days a week? Or personal, thorough, committed to excellence, dedicated to personal attention and delivering superb care by superbly trained people for a fair fee?
You can't have both. Even though you want it.
We know who we are here in Dr. Steve Ross' office. And our patients know why they chose us to create and guard their dental health.
We won’t make the Starbucks-Toyota mistake. We promise.
