It feels good to get back to catering large events again! There seems to be an energetic buzz of excitement as people are ready to celebrate and be together. After a year of ups, downs, trying new things, and keeping up with constant changes, our team is pumped to be creating exceptional experiences for our clients and their guests again in person. With that being said, we are also knocking off the rust as we get back into the natural cadence of what our typical schedule once was.

Over the past weekend we had a handful of mistakes on our events: missing equipment, forgotten food items and a wrong address. Fortunately, our team is awesome and as we ramp back up, we have the luxury of being able to compensate for these mishaps. All of our events were successful, but as we get busier, our room for error diminishes greatly. The mistakes were uncharacteristic of our team and could have been prevented with a little more focus on some important details. As I look back at our success, so much of it can be tied to our team understanding what details matter and focusing on them with incredible discipline.

I have great respect and admiration for former UCLA men’s basketball coach, John Wooden. During his tenure, he won 10 national championships (twice as many as an other coach in history) and had a winning percentage higher than 80%. He was also the first person to be elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach. He was notorious for his “Wooden-isms” that he would share with his players like; “Be quick but don’t hurry” , “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts”, and, “Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.” He also famously attributed his success to his attention to details - one of which was teaching players the proper way to put on their socks and how to tie their shoes to avoid blisters. He knew that blisters would impact his players ability to practice and play in games, therefore reducing their chance for victory. He once said:

“I believe in the attention to, and perfection of, tiny details that might commonly be overlooked. They may seem trivial or even laughable to those who don’t understand, but they aren’t. They are fundamental to your progress in basketball, business and life. They are the difference between champions and near champions.”

It was a good reminder for our team that if we don’t pay attention to the small details that matter, they will eventually come back to bite us and get in the way of us being able to create those exceptional experiences on our events. When there are things in our control that we can do to prevent future issues, it’s our responsibility to take the extra the time to do those things right the first time. I know it’s not always easy to do, but it is exactly what separates great companies from ones that overlook those very details, because they believe there are more important things to worry about.