Episode 356: Never Send a Document in Arial

it creates and embeds a mindset and again, a culture and a belief that we don't just do things at random. Yes, we want the documents to be beautiful. It actually makes it a better experience, quite frankly, because people say, like, hey, this is actually a joy to read this document.

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So you may have heard me mention these things called maxims, and we at Blueprint have these different Blueprint OS maxims. It's things, little pithy statements, things that we believe, and they're beyond core values. Core values, talked about that before on the, on the podcast, and I believe core values and maxims and some other things begin to kind of shape the culture that you want to have. I'll maybe do a podcast on beyond just core values and maxims, but specifically I want to talk about one of our maxims today called never send a document in Arial. Now, depending on the word processor that you use, if you use Word, if you use Google Docs, I love Google Documents, if you use Notion or whatever that is, there's gonna be a default font. And the default font for pretty much always using Google Docs is gonna be Arial. And so this idea behind this maxim, never send a document in Arial, is both practical in nature, but there's also an element of a mindset. And the reason is, is because we have a standard way that we want all of our documents to look that we share. We want them to all look the same. And after this, if you want to be able to get access to our document, I'll share with you how you can do that. But it really doesn't matter. I mean, we use a specific color for our fonts. If it's a Heading 1, we use a font. If it's Heading 2, we use a certain font. Heading 3, Heading 4— there's a way we want all of our documents to look, feel, and be structured. Okay, first of all, why is that? Well, one is because if I'm creating a document, or the different people on the team are creating the document, if you don't have a standard way that you want the documents to look and feel, they're going to be like Frankenstein documents. They're going to be kind of all over the place and people are using colors at random and different headings at random because it's what looks good to them as opposed to a standard way of doing business. And that's really one of the biggest points behind this maxim, which is never send a document in Arial. It's because we want all of the documents, and this is the practical aspect of it, we want all of our documents to look and feel the same. The bigger thing though is if we care about what the font is that we use in our documents, then it creates this culture. It creates this way of doing things that we do things by design, not by default. If we care so much about what color the fonts are that we use in our documents, how much are we going to care about all of the other things that ultimately affect clients? Now, you may say, well, I think that's ridiculous. I think that's ridiculous because that's not gonna help me sell a single new customer. A customer doesn't care what our internal documents look like. And to that, I would agree with you, but that kind of misses the point. The bigger point is if it impacts internal documentation, ultimately it's gonna make its way to how we do things and how we build our systems and how we build our processes in the organization. Ultimately, that does end up making its way to be forward-facing with our customers and with our clients. It's kind of where Steve Jobs has famously talked about where he wanted the inside of the iPhone to look and feel as beautiful because they would know even though we would never see the inside of the iPhone. And I think about our systems and our processes and our playbooks that we build to be similar to that. It creates and embeds a mindset and again, a culture and a belief that we don't just do things at random. Yes, we want the documents to be beautiful. It actually makes it a better experience, quite frankly, because people say like, hey, this is actually a joy to read this document. Recently, we went back to some of the documents I mean, even in the past year or so, our use of emojis, you may say, well, that's even more ridiculous, but I'm telling you, it makes the documents stand out. They are practically easier to read, easier to understand. We use headings because it allows you to navigate the document on the left-hand side. Again, you can do this in Google Docs, you can do it in Word documents. Yes, practically it does help. That and you begin to see that all of our documents look the same, the look and feel is the same. It's just no different than if you go to Starbucks and one Starbucks decides to use one color, they use pink, and one Starbucks uses purple, and one Starbucks uses blue. They would never allow that to happen. And so I think that, that's the similar thing that we're trying to get in our small businesses. But I think again, bigger than that is the mindset. Yes, practically we want the documents to look a certain way, the look and feel of them to be beautiful. But more than anything is it starts to get your team that says, hey, we care as much about the fonts and the sizes and the colors of our documents. How much more are we going to care about our sales process? How we talk to prospects, how we nurture them through the process, how we onboard new customers in our organization, how we take care of them and deliver a first-class experience with our customers. The new customer gifts that we sent? How much more care are we going to give to those type of details before paying attention to something as what could feel initially as menial as the font size, color, and the font choice? Now, again, to be fair, it doesn't matter what font you use. It does matter that they're all the same. But again, for me, I don't like to do things by default. I'd rather do them by design. If you'd like access to our template just for you, instead of having to guess what fonts to use, etc., you can go to blueprintos.com/assets, and on there is our tool called Playbook for creating playbooks. And then you'll see literally the Google template that we use that anytime we're coming up with a new document, we go into that one, we go to File, make a copy of it, and then we create that new document off of that template so we're not having to constantly remember what the different fonts are, sizes, et cetera, heading choices that we have. Anyway, hope this served you well. Till next episode, lead well.

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