Entrepreneurial advantage by the aggregation of marginal gains

Britain is one of the powerhouses of the sport of cycling. At the 2012 Olympics, Team Great Britain Cycling won 8 gold medals. At #Rio2016…

Britain is one of the powerhouses of the sport of cycling. At the 2012 Olympics, Team Great Britain Cycling won 8 gold medals. At #Rio2016 they took home 6 golds and topped the table in the discipline with a total medal count of 12 — twice as many as their nearest rival.

Team GB wasn’t always at the top of the sport. In fact, until the late 1990’s they were uncompetitive. They won no Olympic gold medals between 1924 and 1988, and only won one in 1992.

What changed? How did they go from being a non-competitor to the top of the sport?

There wasn’t one single significant breakthrough that led to a change in the medal count and, for the first time, Tour de France victories. Instead, they started looking at every single little element of how they trained, travelled and competed to see if they could squeeze out a little performance at each step.

“The aggregation of marginal gains.”

Before races, Team GB spray down their tires with alcohol to make them slightly tackier at the start. The cyclists travel to competitions with their pillows from home to eliminate the risk of a stiff neck. They are all obsessive about hand washing and hygiene to try to ensure that they don’t get sick.

Stacked on top of each other, these unnoticeable improvements to performance which don’t make individual differences to the final race result, added up to create big gaps between them and their competitors.

The team is so fanatical about squeezing out every drop of performance, British Cycling created the title Head of Marginal Gains.

A year before the start of the 2012 Olympic games the head of marginal gains’ team noticed that there was only an hour break between the semi-finals and the finals of the women’s team pursuit event, so they set out to develop new ways to maximise rider recovery in just 60 minutes. Their planning for this short recovery gap was so effective that Team GB was the only country that went faster in the women’s team pursuit finals than in the semi-finals. A ride that resulted in gold and a new world record.

Entrepreneurial advantage by the aggregation of marginal gains.

Entrepreneurs can learn a lot from Team GB Cycling. Instead of looking for single breakthroughs that can give us an obvious competitive advantage, we should focus on the little things that will help our businesses become marginally more efficient, minimally more frugal, slightly more client focused, and that help us make fractionally faster and smarter decisions.

These tiny little improvements — like getting enough sleep every night to help us with memory and decision making, like using hand sanitizer to limit sick days, and like ensuring that everyone has the same font in their email footers to give the startup a consistent look — will add up. Combined they will create a noticeable gap between your business and your competitors.

This post is inspired by Faster, Higher, Stronger by Mark McClusky.