“Good enough never is,” says Fields. “Set your standards so high that even the flaws are considered excellent.”
Fields coined that phrase on a visit to one of her early stores. It was a surprise visit that none of the staff had been prepared for. Fields walked into the store to see a long line of customers waiting to purchase a huge batch of cookies that she immediately knew had been over baked. Fields was upset; she did not want those cookies to be sold, or for those customers to associate her name with over baked cookies. After all, Fields took great pride in her recipes.
But, instead of blaming the staff at that store, Fields turned the focus back on herself. “Maybe I had not taught the manger everything he needed to know to make the best cookies in the world,” she says. With that, Fields approached the manager to figure out what was going on. “What do you think of these cookies?” Fields asked him. “He responded by saying, ‘Oh, Debbi, they’re good enough.” Fields was upset and immediately threw out all of the cookies. “Good enough?” she said. “Good enough never is.”
Fields now had a long line of hungry customers waiting to buy cookies that had just been tossed in the garbage. She went over to them and explained, one by one, what had happened. “We’ve over baked these cookies,” she said, “and I want them to be perfect and whatever you are standing in line for, I will absolutely give them to you free plus I’ll match for free if you will come back.”
But why was Fields such a perfectionist when it came to her cookies? Why was she so adamant that her cookies were the best they could be? Fields knew that she was up against some fierce competition. “There is always competition,” says Fields. “Whatever you do, there will be competition, and you have to decide how you’re going to play. For me, I had to be the very best.” Fields knew that if her cookies were not the best, she might as well have stopped then and there, followed her parents’ advice, and given up. But that was something she was not prepared to do.
Fields made sure her cookies were fresh by implementing a two-hour sell time. After that, they became “cookie orphans” that were given away to charity. She also packed them as full as they could be with her secret ingredients. “I added so many chocolate chips to the batter that I knew I had added enough when they would no longer fit in,” she says. “I had achieved chocolate nirvana. The same thing was true of butter. I took the product and added so much butter, to the point where the cookies started to spread out like pancakes.”
Had she taken it too far? Perhaps, but if she had not, somebody else would have. “You’ve got to strive to be the best in whatever you do,” says Fields.
Lesson #4: Good Enough Never Is
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