When creating anything, you’ve got to get the basics in place first. Once you’ve done, that you can build on it. This sounds trite, but this quote from Fast Company’s series on Customer Service illustrates the issue perfectly

When Jeanne Bliss, a 25-year veteran of the customer-experience wars and the author of Chief Customer Officer, worked at Lands’ End at the beginning of her career, she realized, “You’ve got to do reliability first: 24-hour delivery and answering the phone on the second ring 99.9% of the time. Then you’ve earned the right to do more.” Get the package there on time, and you can add a holiday poem to the box–which is what Lands’ End did. Then, because kids often have as much fun with the box as they do with their gift, the company included instructions for turning the cartons into cows, sheep, or horses.

Suddenly, getting a mail-order package is an experience, from the inside out. But Lands’ End (and UPS) had to deliver first, and play games second. It knew it would take more than a genius to fix a Christmas present that showed up on December 28.

The challenge here is that getting the basics right is really hard and you’re never done. You have to keep working at it and obsessively act to improve it. In addition, as a small company, you’ve also got to innovate. Balancing these two needs isn’t easy and even when you start doing it right, and growing, you’ve got to make sure your scale doesn’t prevent you from delivering on your core promise. The good news? If you start off doing this right, you’ll earn enough goodwill to screw up once or twice. You’ll still have to get it right, but you’ll have some more time.