Good customer service is all about going the extra mile for clients. But sometimes, that single mile turns into 10 or 20, and a well-meaning effort results in blisters and an unpleasant lesson.

That was the case several years ago when my company acted as the general contractor for an international conference scheduled to take place in a 25,000-square-foot ballroom. Though the space was already carpeted, our client wanted a different look, so part of the setup involved laying 25,000 square feet of rolled carpet over the permanent rug underneath. Standard protocol would be to roll out Visqueen between the layers, because self-adhesive plastic material would keep the top surface from shifting when people walked on it. But the carpet we were going to cover had such a low profile that we decided to skip the Visqueen.

The floor covering looked nice and flat after we rolled it out, but when service workers started walking on it to set up food stations and such, it started to creep just like it wasn't supposed to, and ripples were forming all over the room. It was two hours before an opening reception for 2,000 people, and pulling up and reinstalling 25,000 square feet of floor covering isn't exactly a small job. But we couldn't leave it as it was, because not only did it look horrible, but it also created tripping hazards all over the room that would probably keep us in personal injury court until my future grandchildren grew up. We needed a solution for our rippling problem, and fast.

We had no alternative but to manually push the ripples out of the carpet, so we called a half dozen carpet installers from the venue back into the ballroom. Crew members used carpet kickers – tools that help grab onto carpeting when stretching and smoothing it – and their feet to push and nudge every wrinkle flat, and they got it done just in time for the flood of a couple thousand bodies into the space.

Thankfully, with so many people standing on top of it, the carpet didn't "walk" enough to become a hazard during the event, though it definitely didn't look like our best work once everyone left the room. But people were going to be using that space for the next two days, and aside from going around and nailing the carpet to the floor, there wasn't anything we could do except to turn our carpet kickers into a full-time crew.

Dutifully, with blisters on their toes and probably a few curse words in their hearts, the carpet layers went back into the room every four hours for two more days and kicked and smoothed all 125-by-200 feet of that ballroom over and over. Those poor labor guys must have kicked 250,000 square feet of carpet during that event, and on the last day, one of the workers handed me a bill for his Adidas sneakers, which had disintegrated to the point that his toes were poking out.

The only good part of the entire experience was that the client was wowed by our customer service. I also learned that when push comes to shove – literally – there is no substitute for steel-toed shoes.