Here’s something I believe to my bones: the 1%s make up about 30% of a business. Not the big, dramatic overhauls — the small, human things everyone means to get to and never quite does. And whether you run a salon on the high street, a gym, an online shop, or all three, it’s the same truth.

It’s whether you look up and smile when someone walks in, and offer them a tea or a coffee. It’s whether you notice when a regular hasn’t been in for a fortnight — and actually reach out to check they’re okay, like a person who cares, not a business chasing a sale. It’s a page that loads two seconds too slow, an email that reads like a robot wrote it, a “thank you” that never comes.

On their own, each one costs you a sliver. Stacked up, they quietly decide whether people feel looked after or forgotten — and that’s what decides whether they come back, and whether they tell their friends. Because none of them feels like a crisis, almost nobody fixes them.

That’s the exciting part. The 1%s are the cheapest, kindest, fastest wins you’ll ever make — no big budget, no rebuild, just caring about the small moments most businesses rush straight past. Get a handful right and your whole business feels different: warmer, smoother, more loved. So here they are, grouped by your customer’s journey — from the moment they’re trying to find you, right through to whether they ever come back. For each one: what it is, why it’s quietly costing you, and exactly how to fix it. And honestly? Helping people get these right is my favourite thing in the world.

1. Being easy to find — and easy to trust

Before anything else can happen, people have to find you — and in the half-second after they do, decide you’re worth their time. Most businesses leak customers right here without ever knowing it, because the people they lost never made a sound. They just went somewhere else.

Your Google Business Profile — your real front door

For almost any local business, your Google Business Profile is your shopfront now. It’s the first thing people see when they search your name or “[your thing] near me” — the photos, the hours, the reviews, the little map pin. Yet so many are half-finished: no photos, wrong opening hours, an old phone number, reviews sitting unanswered. Claim it, fill in every field, add proper photos (inside, outside, your work, your team), keep your hours bang up to date, and reply to every review — good and bad. It’s free, it takes an afternoon, and it’s one of the highest-return hours you’ll ever spend.

Titles that earn the click

If you’re online, the title and description Google shows for your pages are your shop window in the search results. “Home – My Business” tells a person nothing and gives them no reason to pick you over the nine other results on the page. Write each one like a tiny advert: say who you help and what they get. It’s a five-minute change per page that can quietly lift how many people click through to you — without spending a penny more on getting found.

Pages that make people wait

Online, speed is politeness. Every extra second a page takes to load, a chunk of people quietly give up and leave — and you never see them. Big, un-resized images are the usual culprit. Shrink and compress your images, clear out plugins and scripts you don’t use, and test your site on your phone on mobile data, not just your fast office wifi. If you get impatient waiting for it, so does everyone else — they just don’t tell you, they leave.

Actually answering what people ask

People type their worries and questions into Google all day long. If your site answers them plainly — what it costs, how it works, whether you do X — you get found by exactly the people looking for you, and you’ve started being helpful before you’ve even met. Most businesses answer the same handful of questions by email twenty times a week and never once put the answers on their website. Write them down once, put them where people can find them, and let them work for you around the clock.

Reviews, where people can actually see them

Nobody wants to be the first person to trust you. Reviews are how a stranger decides you’re safe — and the single most persuasive thing on your whole site or profile. If you’ve got happy customers (you do), their words should be front and centre: on your Google profile, on your home page, next to your prices. If they’re hidden on a page nobody visits, they’re doing none of the work they could be. And if you’re not collecting them at all — that’s the very first fix.

2. The welcome

This is the one most people underrate, and it’s the one I love the most. The first moment — the hello — sets the tone for everything that follows. It costs nothing. It just takes noticing.

Look up. Smile. Offer them a cuppa.

When someone walks into your salon, your gym, your shop — do you look up, catch their eye, and genuinely smile? Do you offer them a tea or a coffee while they wait? It sounds almost too small to matter. It’s the opposite. A warm, human welcome is the difference between someone feeling like a valued guest and feeling like an interruption — and people decide, in those first few seconds, whether they’ve picked somewhere that cares. Nobody ever left a review saying “they made me feel like a nuisance,” but plenty quietly never came back because of it. Make the welcome a thing you do on purpose, every single time, and tell your team it matters as much as the work itself — because it does.

Make it instantly clear what you do and how you help

Online, your “welcome” is the first screen people see. In five seconds, can a stranger tell what you do, who it’s for, and what to do next? If they have to hunt, scroll, or guess, most won’t bother — they’ll just leave. One clear line that says who you help and what they get, with one obvious next step, does more than any amount of clever design. Confused people never buy; they just quietly close the tab.

Reply like a human — and quickly

Whether it’s a message on your site, a DM, or an email, the reply people get is part of your welcome. A cold, copy-pasted auto-response — or worse, silence for three days — tells people exactly how much they matter. You don’t need to be glued to your phone; you need to reply warmly, like yourself, and faster than they expect. Speed especially: the business that answers first usually wins, simply because it showed up while the person still cared. A quick, friendly “Hi — great to hear from you, leave it with me and I’ll come back to you properly by this afternoon” beats a perfect reply that lands next week.

Never leave someone feeling invisible

The quickest way to lose someone — in a shop or on a website — is to make them feel unseen. In person, that’s acknowledging someone the moment they arrive even if you’re busy (“I’ll be right with you” works wonders). Online, it’s a page that leaves people lost with nowhere obvious to go. People will forgive a wait. They won’t forgive feeling ignored.

3. Making it easy — and lovely — to say yes

Someone’s found you, they like the feel of you, they’re interested. This is where the money quietly leaks away — not because people didn’t want to buy, but because you accidentally made it that bit too hard, or that bit too awkward.

Take away the friction

Every extra step, every extra form field, every fiddly bit of checkout loses you people who were ready to pay. Online, ask for the least you possibly can and make buying or booking feel effortless — no forced account creation, no ten-field forms, no surprises at the end. In person, it’s the same instinct: don’t make people queue when they don’t need to, don’t make booking a faff. Every hoop you remove is money you keep.

Say what it costs

Hidden prices don’t make people call to find out — they make most people assume they can’t afford you and quietly move on. “Contact us for pricing” is a wall. Even a “from” price, a range, or a clear example gives people the confidence to take the next step. Clarity is kindness, and it’s good business: you spend less time on enquiries that were never going to land, and the right people lean in.

Show them it’s safe to say yes

Right at the point of deciding, people get a little wobble of doubt. That’s where trust signals earn their keep: a review or two next to the buy button, a clear guarantee, a “cancel anytime,” a friendly face and a real name. You’re simply answering the quiet question in their head — “am I going to regret this?” — before they have to ask it.

Answer the worries before they’re asked

Every sale has a few recurring wobbles — how long it takes, what if it’s not right, do you do my thing, what happens next. If you answer them right there, plainly, you remove the reasons people stall. A short, honest FAQ does this beautifully online; in person, it’s simply a team that cheerfully heads off the common worries without being asked. Doubt kills more sales than price ever does.

Help, don’t push

There’s a world of difference between a warm “a lot of people pair that with this — want me to pop it in?” and a pushy upsell that makes someone feel squeezed. The first feels like being looked after. The second makes people buy once and never return. Recommend like you would to a friend, genuinely, in their interest — and people feel it.

4. Looking after people once they’re yours

Here’s the bit nearly everyone forgets — and it’s the most powerful of the lot. It’s far cheaper and far nicer to look after someone who already loves you than to go and find a stranger. This is where decent businesses become ones people genuinely love.

Notice when someone drifts away — and reach out like you care

This is my favourite 1% of them all. When a gym member hasn’t been in for a fortnight, or a regular customer hasn’t ordered in a while — do you notice? And do you do anything about it? Not a salesy “WE WANT YOU BACK, 20% OFF” blast. A genuine, human note: “Hey — we’ve not seen you in a little while and just wanted to check you’re okay. Anything we can help with?” In a gym, that might be a staff member quietly wandering over to a member who’s been struggling, to ask how they’re getting on and whether they need a hand. Online, it’s one caring, personal email — no offer attached — just making sure a person who used to be part of things still feels thought of. People remember that for years. It brings them back not because you discounted, but because you cared.

Say thank you like you mean it

The moment right after someone buys is pure goodwill — and most businesses waste it on a cold “Order #4471 confirmed.” A warm thank-you, in a real human voice, that tells people what happens next and that you’re glad they chose you, costs nothing and is remembered. In person it’s a genuine “thank you, it was lovely to see you — see you soon.” Online it’s a thank-you page and email that feel like a person wrote them. Little moment, big feeling.

Ask your happy people to spread the word

Your happiest customers would gladly leave a review or recommend you — most just never get asked. So ask, at the moment they’re happiest: right after a great result, a lovely appointment, a smooth delivery. Make it effortless (a direct link, a quick card, a friendly nudge). A steady trickle of genuine reviews and word-of-mouth is the cheapest, most trusted marketing there is — and it starts with simply asking.

Remember people

“The usual?” is a tiny phrase that makes someone feel like they belong. Remembering a name, a preference, a last conversation — it’s the warmth that big, faceless competitors can never copy, and it’s where small businesses win. A few notes in a client book or your system turn a transaction into a relationship. People don’t stay loyal to the cheapest; they stay loyal to the place that makes them feel known.

Follow up on the ones who nearly said yes

Someone who enquired and went quiet, or filled a basket and didn’t check out, isn’t a lost cause — they’re often just busy, or had one small wobble. A gentle, friendly follow-up — “just checking you got everything you needed?” — wins back far more than you’d think, and it’s warm, not pushy, when it’s done like a human. Most businesses never follow up even once. Doing it kindly, even just the once, quietly recovers money that was already yours.

5. The quiet habit that makes all of this possible

Here’s the thread running through everything above: you can only look after people if you’re paying attention. You can’t reach out to the gym member who’s drifted away if you’re not keeping track of who comes in. You can’t send the caring “everything okay?” note if you’ve no idea who’s gone quiet. You can’t say “the usual?” if nobody wrote it down.

It doesn’t need to be complicated. A simple client book. Collecting email addresses at the counter or the checkout (and actually keeping them somewhere you own). Knowing who your regulars are and roughly when you’d expect to see them. That’s the quiet system underneath every warm, personal thing a great business does — and it’s what turns “nice people” into a business that genuinely looks after its own.

Where to start

Don’t try to fix all of these at once — that’s the fastest way to do none of them. Pick three that made you wince a little reading this, and sort those this week. Then three more next week. That’s how the 1%s add up: quietly, steadily, until one day your business just feels better to deal with — and the numbers follow, because people can feel when they’re cared for.

Want to keep this close? Pop your email in below and I’ll send you the link, so it’s always a click away when you need a nudge. And if you’d rather not do it alone — if you’d like someone to find the leaks in your business and help you plug them, or just do it for you — that’s exactly what I’m here for. Have a look at the ways we can work together, or get in touch and tell me about your business. I’d genuinely love to help.