“Why ‘Good Enough’ Is the Enemy of Every Brand Worth Remembering”
Three decades of building experiences the world lines up for taught me the same lesson every time.
I've spent more than thirty years building brands people don't just visit — they line up for them. SeaWorld. Warner Bros. Six Flags. Chuck E. Cheese. Now Topgolf.
Every one of those companies looks different on paper. Different industries. Different customers. Different eras. But every one of them, when I look back, taught me the same lesson.
The best experiences in the world are never designed by people who aim for good enough.
That's not a slogan. It's the operating principle behind every meaningful thing I've watched a team build — and behind every failure I've watched a company walk into.
Let me tell you why I believe it, and why I think it matters more today than it ever has.
The moment a good day becomes an unforgettable one
Early in my career, I worked on the front lines of family destinations — SeaWorld, Sesame Place — where you can see, in real time, the difference between a good day out and an unforgettable one.
The difference is almost never the marketing. It's rarely even the product itself.
It's the fifty small choices a team makes when nobody is watching. The employee who bends down to talk to a five-year-old at eye level. The line design that makes the wait feel shorter than it is. The park team that decides to keep a ride open one more hour on a busy Saturday because the last twenty families came a long way.
Those decisions don't live on a spreadsheet. They happen because someone, somewhere in the company, refused to accept "good enough."
And when they don't happen — when a team quietly settles for "acceptable" — you can feel it. The guest can, too.
Why superlatives are the only language guests remember
At Warner Bros. and DC Comics, I spent years in the world of intellectual property, a business where the difference between a brand people love and a brand people forget can come down to a single choice.
Nobody remembers the pretty-good campaign. Nobody talks about the perfectly adequate partnership. What people remember — what gets shared, discussed, and passed down — is what feels iconic.
That's why I believe leaders have to talk to their teams in superlatives.
Not because we always achieve them. We don't. Most attempts to build something extraordinary fall short of the mark.
But a team that falls short of extraordinary usually produces something better than a team that aimed for adequate. If you set the standard so high that even missing produces something exceptional, you build a culture that pulls its own weight — one where people don't need to be told to care.
That's the whole game.
Clarity is the leader's first job
I've led teams as small as ten people and as large as seventeen thousand. The biggest lesson from that range isn't about strategy. It's about clarity.
Ambiguity is the enemy of great execution. When teams don't know what winning looks like, they invent their own definition of it. Sometimes that lines up with what the company needs. Often, it doesn't.
The first job of a leader — before the plan, before the budget, before the strategy off-site — is to make the mission unmistakably clear.
What are we doing?
Why are we doing it?
What does winning look like?
If you can't answer those three questions in a sentence, your team can't either.
I've watched brilliant companies stall not because they lacked talent or capital, but because too many people in the building were running toward slightly different finish lines.
The through-line
Parks. IP. Licensing. Restaurants. Venues. Different eras, different guests, different economics.
The through-line, for me, has been the same every time: an obsession with how people actually experience a brand, and a refusal to settle for anything that merely meets expectations.
Meeting expectations is the floor. It's what people pay for. It's not what they remember.
What they remember — what makes them line up, tell their friends, and come back with their own kids someday — is the moment a brand does something that made someone in a room upstairs uncomfortable with the plan. Something that felt like too much. Something a lawyer, a finance team, or a middle manager quietly tried to talk the team out of.
That's what gets remembered.
That's what builds a company people don't just visit — but line up for.
Every day at Topgolf, I try to remind our team of that. Not because it's a nice thing to say. Because it's the only thing I've ever watched work.
David McKillips is Chief Executive Officer of Topgolf International. Over three decades, he has held senior leadership roles at SeaWorld, Warner Bros. / DC Comics, Six Flags Entertainment, CEC Entertainment (Chuck E. Cheese), and Topgolf.
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