How the "marginal gains" that led Team GB to cycling gold will also help you win in business

Credit: Getty Images

Last month, on the final day of the Olympic track cycling competition, Team GB Performance Director Dave Brailsford explained the "marginal gains" strategy that had proven to be the secret to Team GB's success.
​
He said, "The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together." (BBC News)

He explained one of the first things he taught the team was how to wash their hands. They were all instructed to spend an extra 5 seconds washing their hands every time they did this, and he estimated that those 5 seconds per hand-wash, over the course of 4 years, gave them an extra 5 days of training by reducing infections. Those 5 extra days of training might have given the team a gain of a few microseconds on the track. And at Olympic level, those microseconds can make all the difference.

I couldn't help but think of the parallels of this in marketing.
​

Success in business is, more often than not, less about monumental changes and more about the summation of lots of small adjustments across the whole business (not just in marketing), which together add up to a big improvement.

---

This article contains ideas derived from the first edition of 'Watertight Marketing' by Bryony Thomas. It was written with permission and under licence during my time as a Certified Practitioner 2014-2019. The original intellectual property remains with Watertight Marketing Ltd. For more information visit watertightmarketing.com

Please note I am no longer part of the Watertight Marketing network and so I now use other methodologies instead of this one to achieve the same great results for my clients.