Marginal Gains: The 1% Principle That Built British Cycling (And Can Build Your Team)

In 2003, British Cycling hired Dave Brailsford as performance director. At the time, British cycling was mediocre at best. No British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France. Within a decade, Team Sky (now Ineos Grenadiers) had won the Tour multiple times, and British cyclists dominated the Olympics. The secret wasn’t one big change — it was the aggregation of marginal gains.

The Marginal Gains Philosophy

Brailsford’s approach was simple in concept: find every area where improvement was possible and make each one 1% better. They redesigned the bikes, the helmets, the nutrition plans. They tested different massage gels to find the one that helped recovery fastest. They even painted the inside of the team truck white so they could spot dust that might affect the bikes. Individually, none of these changes would win a race. Together, they created an unbeatable system.

This isn’t just a sports story. It’s a business strategy.

Marginal Gains in Business Teams

Most businesses look for silver bullets. A new CRM that will fix the sales process. A restructuring that will solve all communication problems. A star hire who will single-handedly transform the team. But silver bullets rarely work. What works is the relentless pursuit of small improvements across every function.

In a business team context, marginal gains look like this:

Hiring process: You don’t need to reinvent hiring. But can you improve your job descriptions by 5%? Can you add one structured question to every interview that gives you better signal? Can you shorten your time-to-offer by a few days? Each improvement is small. Together, they dramatically improve the quality of every hire.

Onboarding: Can your new hires be productive one week faster? Can you reduce the number of “who do I ask about this?” moments in the first month? Can you create one more touchpoint between the new hire and their manager in the first 90 days? Small improvements in onboarding compound into significant retention gains.

Meeting cadence: Can your weekly team meeting be 10 minutes shorter and twice as focused? Can you eliminate one recurring meeting that doesn’t drive decisions? Can you add a two-minute check-in at the start of each 1:1 that surfaces problems earlier? Better meetings compound into better execution.

Feedback loops: Can you shorten the time between someone doing great work and being recognised for it? Can you make it easier for team members to share constructive feedback with each other? Can you review performance weekly instead of annually? Faster feedback loops compound into faster improvement.

Why Most Companies Don’t Do This

The marginal gains approach requires patience and discipline — two things most founders struggle with. It’s not glamorous. There’s no single moment where everything changes. Instead, it’s a daily commitment to being slightly better than yesterday, across every dimension of how your team operates.

It also requires measurement. You can’t improve what you don’t track. This doesn’t mean drowning in dashboards — it means identifying the handful of metrics that matter most for each function and reviewing them with enough frequency to spot trends before they become problems.

The Compounding Effect

The magic of marginal gains is compounding. If you improve 1% every day, you’re not 365% better after a year — you’re 37 times better. That’s the mathematics of compounding, and it’s as true for team performance as it is for investment returns.

In the Dream Team Framework, marginal gains is the first of five principles because it sets the tone for everything else. It says: we don’t need a revolution. We need a system of continuous, disciplined improvement. That’s how championship teams are built — one small gain at a time.