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The growth strategy most Professional Services and FinTech businesses are sitting on without even knowing it
In Atomic Habits, James Clear tells a story about British Cycling that begins with a team nobody wanted to sponsor and ends up being one of the most useful things a law firm, a fintech business, a consultancy or a financial services company — or any business where trust and expertise are the product — can read about brand and growth.
Author
SANDBOX
Read Time
5 mins
A team nobody wanted to be seen with
In 2003, British Cycling was so underwhelming that the top bike manufacturers in Europe refused to supply them, on the grounds that being seen with the Brits might damage their reputation. In 110 years, no British cyclist had won the Tour de France. The Olympic record was a single gold medal across nearly a century of trying. By any reasonable measure, things needed to change. Preferably before another century passed.
What happened next, Clear writes, had very little to do with finding dramatically better cyclists.
The philosophy that changed everything
Dave Brailsford arrived as Performance Director with a philosophy he called the ‘aggregation of marginal gains’ — the belief that if you improved every single element contributing to performance by 1%, the cumulative effect would be extraordinary.
The nutrition and training programmes were the obvious starting points. But Brailsford kept going. The team tested which pillow produced the best sleep and took it to every hotel. They identified the most effective handwashing technique to reduce infection risk among riders. They painted the inside of the team truck white, so that dust on the bikes — previously invisible against a dark surface — could be spotted and removed before it caused problems. Clear notes that most observers considered these changes laughably minor at the time.
Three years later, a British cyclist won the Tour de France for the first time in history. Nine years later, they had won it five times and claimed 70% of the gold medals at the 2012 Olympics. Not bad for a team nobody want to be associated with.
Clear uses the story to make a point about habits and daily behaviour. But the principle underneath it travels considerably further than that.
Brailsford found those gains by refusing to separate the important elements from the peripheral ones. Because in his view, there were no peripheral ones. The pillow and the bicycle were part of the same system, all of it contributing to the same outcome. When everything works together with the same level of intention, the overall result becomes something that individual brilliance alone could never produce.
Why this matters commercially
The most commercially successful professional services and fintech businesses apply exactly this thinking to their brand, their marketing, and their content. Their campaign creative and their email signatures feel like they came from the same place. Their website and their pitch decks speak in the same voice. Their thought leadership and their proposals carry the same level of care. Every point of contact a client has with the business tells the same story — that these are people who pay attention, who hold themselves to a standard, and who can be trusted to bring the same thoughtfulness to a client’s work as they bring to their own.
Businesses leading in client experience grow revenue 80% faster than competitors, and research into professional services found that 49% of clients who receive a consistently excellent experience across every interaction return, compared to 39% of those who rate only the outcome highly.
How it feels to work with a business — the quality of its thinking, the consistency of its voice, the care in its communications — matters as much commercially as the quality of the work itself. The growth opportunity that represents is one most businesses already have access to. They have simply been applying different standards to different parts of it.
The audit worth doing this week
The most useful thing any professional services of fintech business can do is map every point of contact a prospect or client has with them. The website, the proposal(s), the onboarding process, the LinkedIn page, the emails, the invoices — look at them as a set rather than individually. Do they feel like they came from the same place? Do they tell the same story? Do they hold themselves to the same standard?
When the answer is “Yes” across the board, clients stop experiencing a business as a collection of separate interactions and start experiencing it as a single, coherent thing they can trust. That trust compounds, and before long starts to sound a little like “A colleague recommended you” or “We wouldn’t really consider anyone else”.
Brailsford predicted the Tour de France would take five years. It took three. The gap between prediction and reality was the compounding effect of a hundred things, all pointing in the same direction. Most businesses are sitting on exactly the same kind of gap. The good news is that closing it requires considerably less Lycra.
Book a free 30 minute consultation with SANDBOX — a fresh pair of eyes on your brand, your marketing, and everything pulling in between.
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