PushPress Operating Tenant #8: High Standards of Excellence
The Painful Paradox: Why Customers Push You Toward the "Good Enough" Trap That Eventually Kills Their Trust In Your Business.
Estimated Read Time: 3 minutes
TLDR: At PushPress, we learned the hard way that "good enough" features become permanent problems. Excellence isn't just a fluffy ideal – it's what saved our business from death by a thousand "beta" features. Every aspect of our product now passes rigorous standards because we've seen how cutting corners destroys value. Gym owners fall into these same traps and often build half-baked features that never get full investment or adoption.
Recap: We Dropped Core Values for Operating Tenets
At PushPress, we recently ditched Core Values because we needed principles that would guide real actions, not just feel-good statements. As we've grown from scrappy startup to serving hundreds of gyms, we needed a framework that would help us execute better.
Today's Tenet: High Standards of Excellence
What "High Standards of Excellence" Really Means
Here's our definition:
"We demand excellence, rejecting mediocrity and constantly pushing for better. We balance speed with quality, ensuring that great work is the norm, not the exception. We learn fast from failures — holding ourselves to high standards while embracing mistakes as opportunities to improve."
Excellence Isn't About Being Perfect
This isn't about paralyzing perfectionism that prevents shipping. It's about being intentional.
When we build something, we commit to making it excellent – if not immediately, then through deliberate iteration. With every client demanding different features, we must choose carefully what to build.
And once we choose? We build that feature to a level that is at market par or better, every time.
The "Beta" Trap That Nearly Killed PushPress
Let's be honest about our earlier days.
We felt crushing pressure to solve every client problem immediately.
We'd rush half-baked features into production. We'd slap "beta" labels on them. We'd promise ourselves we'd come back and fix them later.
Spoiler alert: We rarely never did.
Before we knew it, PushPress was drowning in "beta" features that had been live for years. Some for nearly a decade.
Each compromise seemed like a temporary solution. Together? They created a permanent mess.
The Breaking Point
The wake-up call was brutal.
Our support team was drowning in tickets about half-finished features. Our development roadmap was clogged with fixing old problems instead of building new value. Our churn conversations increasingly mentioned "unreliable" and "inconsistent."
We faced a critical decision: continue the cycle of rushed solutions or establish ruthless standards.
We chose the latter. It wasn't easy.
The Flywheel of Excellence (or Mediocrity)
Here's what nobody tells you about excellence: mediocrity creates a brutal headwind flywheel. Every "good enough" solution generates three new problems. You spend all your time fixing issues, patching holes, and explaining shortcomings.
Meanwhile, excellence creates a powerful tailwind. Yes, it requires bigger upfront investment. But once features truly meet standards, they need minimal maintenance.
This frees up massive resources to build the next impactful thing, which creates even more momentum. We wasted years pedaling against our headwind before we flipped the flywheel.
Excellence isn't just nice to have. It's the whole game.
The Excellence Revolution
Here's what changed:
We stopped launching anything that wasn't fully complete and at market parity as a baseline
We have invested in layers in automated testing, QA controls, and performance expectations that every feature must pass
We have begun rebuilding and retiring features that do not meet our standards
We will reshape how we communicate these changes and timelines with our customers.
We will not build everything, everywhere, all at once and purposefully pick things we can invest the time required to adhere to these standards.
The immediate result? Complaints actually increased. Clients have not stopped wanting what they want, when they want it (now).
The long-term result? We’ve recovered our NPS from an all time low in December 2023 back to a level we can feel proud of again (and we expect that NPS to continue to climb in the future months and years)
What This Means For Your Gym
The parallels between our business and yours are striking.
Look around your gym - are there any programs or initiatives that have not lived up to your expectations over the years?
A coach who never lived up to their potential
That kids program that fizzled after the first volleyball season
That olympic lifting area that never got the full build out
Your Saturday 11am “yoga” class that no one goes to
Our most successful gym partners apply the same excellence principles we learned:
They define exactly what great looks like
They have clear standards for achieving that level of great
They invest to get all the way to great
They measure to ensure their investments are making the mark they thought it would
They refuse to accept mediocrity in any area they choose to invest into
How This Tenet Works With Our Other Operating Principles
Business operating tenets are purposefully created to act as force multipliers and guardrails against each other. If you don’t build them as such - totalitarian mindset can take over.
We all know too much of a good thing can be just as much of a problem as a complete void….
High Standards of Excellence works hand-in-hand with our "Take Ownership & Dig Deep" tenet. Without ownership, excellence becomes someone else's problem.
It also serves as a crucial guardrail against "Urgency & Impact-Driven" preventing us from sacrificing quality for speed.
The Bottom Line
After powering thousands of gyms, we've seen what separates thriving businesses from struggling ones.
Fancy features and complex programming are great but only if they’re held to a standard.
At PushPress, we learned that excellence isn't just about pride. It's about building something that truly delivers value. When we uphold our standards, your business benefits directly.
That's why we'll never go back to the "permabeta" mentality – and why the gyms that think the same way continue to outperform their competitors.
What "beta" feature in your gym will you finally perfect today?
Tomorrow: "Operating Tenet #9: Embrace Adaptability & Agility"