Jet Blue Founder, David Neeleman, said this on Guy Raz’s How I Built This podcast. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

First, if you’re not listening to Guy Raz’s How I Built This podcast, you should be. Every episode features a long-format interview with the founder of a successful business. Guy does a great job of unearthing the struggles, pivot points, decisions, mistakes, and victories that brought the business to where it is today. I’ve put a link at the bottom of this post, but please don’t click it until you’ve read this.

Back to David Neeleman’s quote. During his interview, Neeleman recounted the things that are beyond the control of an airline CEO – weather, regulations, fuel prices – and more. I’m guessing that right now, you can build a similar list for your industry. Things that can keep you up at night if you let them. As the owner of a consulting firm, I have my own list.

So the question is, “What do you do about them?” The short answer is nothing – they’re beyond your control. But, even though this really isn’t the topic of this post, I have to give you a couple of tools for your tool belt before we get to the core content. For things like this, you have to develop strategies for mitigation and maximization. Using the airline example, you deploy weather detection and avoidance technology, you lobby legislators for regulations that are helpful or at least not harmful, you purchase fuel futures or engage in other tactics that allow you to limit your exposure to fuel price changes. I couldn’t help but think about the chapter in Jim Collin’s book Great by Choice on “return on luck.” He and his researchers found that organizations, at large, experience the same number of luck events (i.e., things out to their control) – both good and bad. Great companies navigated them successfully – capitalizing on opportunity and mitigating threat. Average companies did not.

So, knowing you’re mitigating the things out of your control, what do you do with the things in your control? Neeleman’s encouragement is to “be flawless.” Here are five things totally in your control that can revolutionize your business.

Develop your employees – Employees can be an appreciating value-add or a depreciating drain in your organization. You are the determining factor. Create an employee development program that leverages the self-interest of your employees against the wants and needs of your organization. Make it a win-win. If you want an employee development framework that does that, click here.

Make your marketing communication customer-centric – Let’s be brutally honest. Potential customers don’t care about your founding, history, years in business, or contribution to the community. They want to know that you understand their problems and know how to solve them. You can satisfy their hunger for a tasty pizza, bring order to their chaotic operations problem, or once-and-for-all fix their leaky roof.

Nail customer onboarding – Happy customers come from crystal clear expectations. Begin onboarding during the sales process and continue through the close and delivery – what will the timeline be, how much will it cost, what happens first, what happens after that, what does success look like, what do they do if something goes south, what are their responsibilities? Read the customer onboarding chapter from my book here.

Develop bulletproof processes – The most rudimentary discipline (the one that enables scaling, guarantees consistent customer experience, and safeguards quality) is creating processes. Documenting the methodology for carrying out value creation activities and ensuring that methodology is followed every time creates customer loyalty. Continually honing those processes creates employee engagement and improves efficiency and effectiveness.

Change your metrics to track to leading indicators – Organizations often track things over which they have no control, then make operational decisions based on those metrics. I’m not saying to stop tracking those things. I’m saying to start tracking upstream levers (over which you have complete control) that contribute to those downstream metrics. This allows you to hold team members accountable for things they can do and to also determine if you have correctly identified the link between a production activity and a downstream result.

There are five chances to be flawless. Shoot me more ideas on where to be flawless at mchirveno@clearvision.consulting.

Listen to “How I Built This” at https://home.wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this