Express Your Contribution Through Your Business (Ron Kaufman)

Welcome to Making It! This weekly show explores the lives and stories of entrepreneurs as they share their unique perspectives on their success and the path to making it. 

Episode summary: Ron Kaufman, the co-founder of Uplifting Service, has made it his mission to help leaders and organizations build service cultures that deliver real, authentic value in communities for employees and customers. 

Early on, he embarked on a mission to uplift the quality and spirit of service everywhere in the world. As the philosopher innovator he is, he has spent his entire career trying to make it fun to build service quality and excellence. 

When the Singapore government asked him to develop a service quality boot camp to teach the adult working population how to be more responsive, more collaborative, more proactive, and more creative, he felt like a kid in a candy store. And he immediately started inventing. However, as he says in this episode of Making It, you have to bring authenticity to your business to make it in today's changing world.

“For some of us, making it will be being able to make a contribution to improving the world and addressing serious issues in some walk of life.” 

“It's not okay to have shallow definitions like ‘the customer is always right’....”

– Ron Kaufman

Guest bio: People often ask Ron Kaufman, Customer Experience Educator, Service Culture Expert, and keynote speaker, where he gets his intense passion for the topic of uplifting service. “I get my passion for uplifting service from you” is the constant answer.  It delights him to see people succeed by contributing to the lives of others.

Ron, co-founder of Uplifting Service, is on a mission to uplift the quality and spirit of service everywhere in the world. He specializes in building uplifting service cultures with leaders in the world’s largest and most respected organizations. In 2018, 2019, and 2020, Global Gurus ranked Ron as the #1 customer service guru in the world.

For 40 years, he’s been on a mission to improve the world. The vision sustaining him is a world in which everyone is empowered and inspired to excel in service. To realize this vision, he’s worked with businesses in every industry and with schools, governments, and associations in 62 countries, becoming one of the most sought-after educators and customer service consultants in the world in the process.

He is on a mission to transform the quality of service delivered by the organizations he works with. That work has led him to become the consultant who changed the Republic of Singapore. The Singapore government asked him to develop a service quality boot camp to teach the adult working population how to be more collaborative, more proactive, and more creative.

Ron is a regular columnist at Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of the New York Times bestseller Uplifting Service and 14 other books on service, business, and inspiration. He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.

Resources or websites mentioned in this episode:

1. Mirasee
2. Ron Kaufman’s website
3. Ron’s  LinkedIn
4. Ron’s  Twitter
5. Ron’s Instagram
6. Ron’s book, “Uplifting Service”
7. Ron’s Youtube channel, “Ron Kaufman”

Credits:

• Guest – Ron Kaufman
• Associate producer: Danny Bermant
• Producer: Cynthia Lamb
• Assembled by: Geoff Govertsen
• Executive producer: Danny Iny 
• Audio Post Supervisor: Evan Miles, Christopher Martin 
• Audio Post Production by Post Office Sound
• Music soundscape: Chad Michael Snavely 

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Music and SFX credits: 

• Track Title: Sweet Loving Waltz

Artist Name(s): Sounds Like Sander

Writer Name: S.L.J. Kalmeijer

Publisher Name: A SOUNDSTRIPE PRODUCTION

• Track Title: The Sunniest Kids

Artist Name(s): Rhythm Scott

Writer Name: Scott Roush

Publisher Name: A SOUNDSTRIPE PRODUCTION

• Track Title: The Sweetest Thing

Artist Name(s): Brent Wood

Writer Name: Philip Barnes

Publisher Name: BOSS SOUNDSTRIPE PRODUCTIONS

• Track Title: The Changing Tides

Artist Name(s): Brent Wood

Writer Name: Philip Barnes

Publisher Name: A SOUNDSTRIPE PRODUCTION

Episode transcript:

     I'm Ron Kaufman and you're listening to Making It! I run a business called Ron Kaufman; Serve, Care, Love. We help leaders teams and organizations all over the world improve their service performance and build the kind of service cultures that deliver real value in communities for employees and for customers year after year.

     I went to a high school in Westport, Connecticut that happened to be the second high school in the world to learn the rules of the game called Ultimate Frisbee. That's when that global sport was just getting started. And if you meet me in person you'll find that I'm quite short and I wasn't gonna play on the football, baseball or basketball team, but the frisbee team that was getting started was willing to have me and I jumped in and learned how to play and then I spent two years studying during my college years in Europe a...