Andrew on Amsterdam

Okay so let's talk Amsterdam. On my trip the third spot we visited was Amsterdam. Amsterdam's really kinda dear to my heart to my father's side, he's Dutch. They live about half an hour outside of Amsterdam in this tiny little village. We visited where it was and look, it was just amazing. I really love Amsterdam.

I kinda stayed away from probably the more typical stuff that you'd experience in Amsterdam given that I had the wife and kids with me. But, one thing we did was a food tour whilst we were there And the second last place we visited on this food tour was a cookie shop. Now that doesn't sound that riveting, I walked into it and had a cookie. That's great, how did that teach you anything about the trip?

So let me tell you about his cookie shop. It sells one cookie. And only one cookie, it doesn't do anything else besides that one cookie. And it had a line out of that shop of about 10 to 15 people lining up outside. It was incredible, I couldn't believe it. We were lucky we were on the food tour so we got like, so they just gave us the cookies and we didn't have to wait but, what this taught me was this, besides the fact that this cookie was the best cookie that I've ever had in my entire life. You see if you just do something absolutely amazing people are going to come in droves for it.

Now, there's a lot of talk in the accounting industry about diversifying and being able to do this and that, a whole bunch of different stuff. But, if you can't do one thing really, really well you're just going to do a bunch of things relatively average and people are eventually going to move and change. I know, I've lost clients in the past because they were looking for a particular accountant that worked with a particular industry and whilst were able to service that industry relatively well they felt that we weren't the specialists there, we weren't the best for them. And as a result we focused on what we do as a service offering.

So, what are we doing to be the best possible option there? That we will have people lining up outside our office to experience it and to kinda do that and how do we make sure it is the best? So I'm not necessarily talking niche-y. I mean you can niche if you want and do that one thing. But I think the lesson it taught me is, whatever you do make sure you do it as best as you possibly can. Don't half arse it. Don't come in and go, "Ah it's just a nice little addition that we can do for our clients, but we don't really know how to do it but who cares, they won't find out." Be the best at it. Be amazing. And people will line up for you. Cheers.

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