It’s the Soft Stuff that Matters Most

Sometimes while mowing my lawn I drift off into some crazy internal philosophical discussions. Today’s started out with equal parts nonsense and rationality, but ended up being something significant and share-worthy. Here it is…

Every business has “hard” stuff that they need to deal with in order to keep afloat. It’s the quantifiable bits - income, overhead, utilization, profit margins, etc. etc. It’s the stuff that you can put in a spreadsheet or make a chart about in order to get a good understanding of the business realities of whatever it is that you do. It’s the same basic set of stuff whether you’re mowing lawns for a living or running a multinational widget manufacturing conglomerate.

A stripped down business formula might look something like this:

SUCCESS=SUM{total customers + (frequency of mowings^{customers with irrigation systems})}^{increase in customer base} - SUM{mowers + other equipment + fuel + maintenance + transportation + hired help + marketing costs}

As long as that number to the left of the equal sign stays positive you’re probably doing okay. The widget guys have a lot more math to do, but that’s their problem. I never was much of a math guy. But you get the idea.

So here’s the thing. What happens when you take into account all of the “soft” stuff? Things like Culture, Ethics, Aesthetic, Attitude, Talent, Reputation, etc. These are the things make the difference between getting by and doing great. There are plenty of folks out there in the world “doing what Substance does” when you look at just the hard stuff. But I think it’s the soft stuff that really makes some companies stand out from the rest. We talk about Doing Better all the time, which in and of itself is soft and highly subjective, but it’s the sum of the soft stuff that makes words (or aspirations) like “Better” all the more quantifiable.

And the best part? When the soft stuff is working, the hard stuff almost takes care of itself.