Navigating the Customer Experience

Christopher Wallace is the Co-Founder and President of InnerView, which is a marketing consulting firm that helps companies effectively transfer their brand strategy to their customer-facing employees and partners. Chris builds upon previous success as an entrepreneur in the sales consulting and coaching space, as well as his more than 15 years of sales, marketing and corporate leadership. Chris’ primary professional focus is to help companies better align the strategies of the board room with the daily execution at the front lines. Beyond his work with clients, Chris is able to apply his passions as a teacher and author. He has taught as an adjunct MBA professor at Temple’s Fox School of Business and has been published in outlets such as Harvard Business Review and Chief Marketer and is a contributor to publications including Inc.com and Forbes.com. Chris received a B.A. in Public Relations from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School and his MBA from Temple University. He lives in Villanova, PA with his family.

Questions

• Could you share with us how you ended up in this particular field? Marketing and brand recognition and brand consulting.
• What are some of the key indicators are facets that business owner would need to consider in order to pretty much pioneer, hold or navigate how the shaping of their brand is going to be perceived by others.
• What is brand dilution?
• Could you explain to us why is it that you believe that many companies fall into the dilution and are they disillusioned or are they diluted in thinking that there's a communication breakdown or is it that a team members who are actually serving the customers are not clear on what it is that they're supposed to be delivering?
• Could you give us one or two metrics that organizations could look at even if they're a small business with just say two or three people employed to them versus an organization with two or 300 people and employed to them?
• Could you share with us how you stay motivated every day as a marketer, as an entrepreneur, as a teacher?
• Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
• Could you share with us what books have had the biggest impact on you?
• We have a lot of listeners who are business owners and managers who feel they have great products and services, but they lack the constantly motivated human capital. If you were sitting across the table from that person, what's the one piece of advice that you would give them to have a successful business?
• What's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about - either something that you are working on to develop yourself or your people?
• Where can our listeners find you online?
• What's one quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, they like to kind of revert to this quote or saying it kind of helps them to refocus to re-strategize and just remember what they're working towards. Do you have one of those?

Highlights

• Christopher shared that just like anybody's story, it's a long and winding path, but he’s a salesperson by DNA, not by career, by DNA. It sort of runs in the family and after a career in sales or having a career in sales with a number of big, recognizable brands, he found himself at a crossroads and had the opportunity to essentially work with one of the companies that he had been employed by for a number of years and sort of flipped over into a contract and consulting role. And was sort of an overnight entrepreneur, an accidental entrepreneur as he likes to call it. But what he was asked to do was to take some new products and new services that the company he used to work for was launching to their frontline teams, launching into the market, bringing to market to their customers and really help get their frontline sales teams, their customer service representatives, in a number of different teams really up to speed on what these things were. But it was a lot less training and a lot more just dialogue, how to talk about it, how to position it, how to relay the value and sort of that opportunity being at that crossroads led to this career in really helping organizations to understand how to align the things that they want to bring to market their products and their services with the people who have to talk about them.

• Christopher stated that it doesn't matter if an organization is big or small; your brand is your promise. What is your promise? That's really what it comes down to. What is the promise that you're making to your customers? What value do you bring to them? What makes you stand out? That's the brand story that we're talking about. Occasionally, the word brand can scare people, it sounds like a big concept, and it sounds like something for the Nike's of the world or the Coca-Cola's of the world. But the reality is people have personal brands, smaller organizations have brands and that brand simply comes back down to the what your promise is to the customer regardless of who your customer is and any organization needs to take the time to really sit down and figure out what that promise is before you go out and start advertising it or whatever the case may be. You have to understand really what it is and internalize it first.

• Christopher shared that brand dilution is and thinking about the topic of the show and customer experience, brand dilution is the difference between what you tell your customers you're going to do and what the customer actually experiences. It's really the breakdown in that promise, the breakdown in that message and they did a research study earlier this year with 250 marketing and customer experience executives and what they found was, he would say astonishingly, but it's not really that astonishing. Two thirds of marketers believe that their brands’ messaged, through their key brand story is breaking down between their office and the people to front lines. So, they believe that there's a misaligned message inside their company. People are telling, however, many different versions of that story, of that brand promise. And if the organization promises one thing through their advertising and their marketing and they experienced something different when they show up, that's a big problem for most brands. So, that's really what we talk about with the dilution, it's that gap between what is promised through external marketing and what the customer actually experiences.

Yanique shared - It's interesting that you say that it's a breakdown because marketing and advertising costs a whole lot of money and organizations have extensive budgets dedicated to marketing and advertising their businesses every single year. Whether as you said, they're large, medium or even small organizations, you will allocate quite a percentage of your income or reserves or capital to ensure that the business marketed and advertised.

• Christopher shared that he thinks it's both. And the research that they did, the study they published earlier this year with a market research firm called Focus Vision at a consumer insights company called Focus Vision. What they found was it’s really twofold. The organization is attempting to sort of spread this story via the main methods they use are email and product training, those were the top two things that rose to the top of the list each time and how they asked them, they were really communicating and engaging their people. And ultimately when they looked at the data, that wasn't driving results, that wasn't driving alignment, it was a set of other tactics that were really driving the companies who were good at this to be successful and just sending things out via email or doing a product training that's not going to drive the customer experience that you want, it's not getting through, it's not cutting through the noise. So, he thinks that on one hand you have the organization who's probably not doing as much as they should to get it downstream and get the message out to their front lines and then you have the people, the front line to use the phrase disillusion, he doesn’t think they're disillusioned. He just thinks that their organizations have failed to equip them in an interesting and compelling way. And he thinks that people at the front lines, whether you're on the phone, in the retail store, whatever that looks like, you need to be engaged in a new way, you've got a lot of things being thrown at you and if the organization is not treating you as a consumer of the information and just treating you like kind of a link in the chain, then that dilution is bound to be there.

Yanique stated that basically you're kind of reinforcing the fact that customer experience starts from within.

Christopher agreed and mentioned that their slogan is, “Win From Within.” So, they're big believers that the customer experience needs tremendous attention, it needs tremendous investment and it's an investment that pays off in a big way.

Yanique asked - Do you have any statistics, I know you said you used Focus Vision was the name of the company that does insight intelligence. Do you have any research that pretty much supports the ratio of how much companies invest to market and advertise per year versus how much they invest in training and development and customer experience training?

Christopher shared that they don't specifically on that, but he can tell you this, when they asked the executives in their study, what they thought the value of a consistent brand message was. So, they asked specifically for those people that thought that their organization was pretty well aligned in their brand message throughout their company, what was that worth to their organization? 62% of those people valued it at more $10 Million Dollars annually. So, nearly two thirds put an actual revenue tag, a revenue price tag on an align brand story at more than $10 Million Dollars a year. So, they look at that and say, “Organizations don't realize necessarily how much money is slipping through the cracks.” One interaction here, one interaction there but when we asked these folks point blank, they said, “Well yeah, actually the success of our marketing plan, the success of our brand really does depend on winning one conversation at a time.” And when you start to add up with the losses, it was more than $10 Million Dollars, that was the category they selected, was more than $10 Million Dollars annually. Who knows how much it could actually be for the organizations they studied, it could be 10 to 20, it could be $50 Million Dollars or more depending on the size of the organization.

Yanique stated that not because they're not measuring it doesn't mean that there isn't something slipping through the cracks.

Christopher agreed and shared that he thinks that it's one of those things where he’s sure Yanique knows and from the guests that she’s had on measuring it. Measuring it he thinks is perceived to be hard, measuring the impact of customer experiences perceived to be hard. He doesn't think it's that hard, every engagement that they do, they focus on very tangible revenue based metrics around just improving the quality of the interaction between the frontline team member that what they call a brand representative and the customer. If you improve their ability to tell your brand story, you are going to earn more business and if you just measure it the right way and you look at the right metrics, it's not that hard to quantify.

• Christopher shared that metrics; it really depends on the type of business. Conversion is sort of the mother of all metrics that we work with. So, when you think about even as a small business, small business owner or an entrepreneur, looking at your pipeline, regardless of what you sell and really determining what percentage of those deals, what percentage of those opportunities you're able to convert into a sale, and really getting that to be a metric that you track over time. This is all about, like he said, winning one conversation at a time. If you win one more deal here, one more deal there, he knows for him as an entrepreneur that matters but if you think about these larger organizations, and that's really who they work with mostly is these larger organizations. One conversation here, one conversation across, in some cases tens of thousands of representatives or retail employees, that adds up really quickly and it adds up to a lot of money. So, he would say conversion is really the number one metric to be tracking.

Yanique asked - Do you think there's one question that you think all companies should ask their customers about their experience?

Christopher stated that that's a tough question. He knows the one that they pay a lot of money to ask, “How how likely are you to recommend this product or service to a friend or family?”That’s the NPS. They worked closely with some NPS customers as Fred Reichheld would call it, “The Ultimate Question” that's the title of his book. But in terms of asking, it's so hard to say that one question can actually capture it. He’s going to answer a question with a question. He’s going to say that when they talk to organizations, there's a question that they ask their executives. They asked the question, “How confident are you that the people who represent your brand can tell this story the way that you built it?”And that's sort of their measure of trying to figure out if they have alignment issues with their brand internally. How confident are you that the people who represent your brand can tell this story the way that you built it? And if you're talking to a product owner or a brand owner or somebody in consumer marketing, the answer to that is it's kind of a moment of truth question for them and they rarely hear that there's a lot of confidence. So, he would say to any business owner, if you have other people out representing you, other than just yourself, ask yourself that question. How confident are you that the people representing you can do it the way that you want it done every single time?

Yanique shared that that's a very good question, bills a lot of introspect for you to really think about the individual or the company or the set of people that are representing you and the platform that they are representing you on and are they really telling the story that how you built it to be told.

• When asked how he stays motivated, Christopher shared that he’s thought about this a lot so he feels like he has a good answer to this question, at least he knows the answer. The motivation for him and he'll tell a quick story. When he was getting his MBA, he had a project that was being done toward the end of the program that was all about; you had to do a map out, a strategy for your career. You had to treat yourself as the client and you had to map out a strategy for your career and the leader of that class, the professor asked him what he wanted to do what, what his strategy was and he said he wanted to manage people and he said, well, where or how or how many? And I said, he doesn't know, just as many as he can. And so, his answer is he thinks about the team that he’s constructed, the team that he’s built, and what motivates him is the chance to add somebody else to their team, it's really that simple. He’s offering somebody the opportunity to come and work with them, bringing them into the fold for the family that they're building here is really, really motivating to him. That's what he works for every day and when he sell, he look at it as an opportunity to develop a new client and work with a prospect, any new client that he can bring on is a potential chance for him to add more people to his team, so, that's what motivates him every day.

• Christopher shared that he’s going to give his CRM a plug. They have Zoho, Zoho CRM Plus, is their CRM and it's a wide ranging platform for those aren't familiar with Zoho. It’s a great software package, you can do a lot with it beyond CRM things like some sales automation, some marketing automation, but they use that tool and not being a process oriented person himself, he’s really become attached to going in, updating the CRM, working the pipeline, running the reports, things like that. So, adding some discipline around that has made it a pretty indispensable tool.

• When asked about books that has had the biggest impact, Christopher stated that he would say the one that he thinks really motivated him the most to really build around what they're doing as a career and really commit to it was when he read To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel Pink. For the listeners who aren't familiar, Daniel Pink is part of the new age authors that's really, really talking about a lot of similar things to like the Malcolm Gladwell's of the world does, Simon Sinek's sort of a new age management thinker and his premise and to sell is human, is everybody is selling in some way, shape or form. And whether it's as an entrepreneur or in your personal life, you're selling all day long and just about every role and really embracing that and figuring out how to tap into the ability that everybody has, to the need that everybody has to be able to influence and reach those around them. He thought it was a very straightforward, easy to digest concept, but one that many, many people in our line of work resist the idea that they're in sales and they try to help, make them a little bit more comfortable with it. That book is a great way to do it.

• Christopher shared that he would say the number one thing and the number one piece of advice that they give to prospects, to listeners, they have their own podcast as well is the best thing you can do if you want to get somebody to do something, the best thing you can do is start by listening to them and you think about sales for those of you who are good salespeople and have gotten some training and consultative selling, everything's about learning, it's about asking questions, it's about identifying needs, it's not about talking. So, he would say it's a simple answer, but the best thing you can do if you want to motivate somebody is start by asking them questions, ask them what they think, ask them what they care about, ask them their viewpoint because if you can understand them, you can find the ways to connect with that individual and get them to really line up behind your mission, behind the tasks that you want them to do.

Yanique reiterated – So, listen to the person that you're speaking to whether it's your team member or your employee and after listening, you need to ask really good questions to understand what they want and where they're coming from because those things will help you to be more developed in figuring out what is motivating them, which nine out of 10 times is not only financial.

Christopher 100% agreed and stated that there is such a huge misconception that people are, as they say, coin operated. You put in another quarter and people will do what you want them to do. But the reality is, the intrinsic motivation is much higher. When people talk about engagement and engaging employees and things like that, he doesn't think most people know what that actually means. Engagement is that people feel part of something, it's that they feel like they're part of the process, they're part of the mission, they just want to feel like the work that they're doing is impacting something bigger and they want to feel like it's happening with them, not to them. And the best way to build that relationship and that trust is start by asking them things and asking their point of view and genuinely being curious to hear the answer. It can't be, it can't be an outcome in mind, and it has to be with true curiosity.

• Christopher shared that he gets excited about a lot of things that they are doing. He would say that probably the thing that gets him most excited day to day is they are really trying to define the experience. You talk about customer experience, they're a boutique consulting company but they have spent a lot of time as a team talking about what experience they want to deliver for their clients and he and his partner have challenged their team to really look at that and internalize what it is that they want them to say, how they want them to feel and really find ways to deliver that experience and really think outside of the norm. Really think of new ways to do that. And they're developing a new set of sort of criteria for how they interact with their clients. That is probably, he would say that as an entrepreneur the most energizing conversation he has ever had was when they sat down. They had a team offsite earlier this year and they asked the team to think through how they wanted the customer to feel, what they wanted them to say. And then the ideas that came out of that for showing their clients how much they appreciate them, that's going to really take shape toward the end of this year and into next year. And he just can't wait to see that come together because it's all about them being genuine and treating their clients in a way that feels like them and he can't wait to see that come together.

• Christopher shared listeners can find him at –

www.innerviewgroup.com

         LinkedIn @christopherewallace

• Christopher shared that there's a quote that motivates him. So, he’s a big music lover and there's a band that a little bit obscure, probably not the most mainstream band in the world, but there's a quote in one of their songs that says, “It's all been luck until now.”And he really internalized that quote, anytime he looks at successes or challenges that he face as an entrepreneur, as an individual, he really goes back to that idea of treat everything as if you just got lucky to this point because it motivates him to keep working hard. So, it's all been luck until now, maybe the luck will run out and you'll have to rely on your hard work and your skills, so he sort of treat every day as if every day previous to that was luck and now it's time for him to focus on continuing to work hard, so, that motivates him every day.

Links

• To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel Pink

If you have ever wondered how there are so many brands that customers can’t live without? And if you’ve ever wondered how it’s possible to make price irrelevant? John DiJulius will show you how to do both. He is the authority on World-Class customer experience. He is an international consultant, keynote speaker, and bet-selling author of five customer service books. His newest book, The Relationship Economy – Building Stronger Customer Connections in The Digital Age (Greenleaf Books October 2019) could not be timelier in the world we are living in. John has worked with companies such as The Ritz-Carlton, Lexus, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Nestlé, Marriott Hotels, PwC, Celebrity Cruises, Anytime Fitness, Progressive Insurance, Harley-Davidson, Chick-fil-A, and so many more.

John isn’t just talking about it, he lives it, as a very successful entrepreneur. He is the founder of three businesses: The DiJulius Group, an international customer service consulting firm, John Robert’s Spa, a chain of upscale salons in Northeast Ohio which has repeatedly been named one of the top 20 salons in America, and Believe in Dreams, a non profit that helps make dreams come true for deserving children.

John will demonstrate how you can make customer service your single biggest competitive advantage, become the brand customers cannot live without and make price irrelevant!

Questions

• Your newest book, The Relationship Economy, focusing on building stronger connections. With so much things happening digitally, how are we really going to be able to tap into that connectivity with our clients?
• Could maybe just tell us two things that have really stood out to you over the years that really makes that connection human, that you don't feel like you're another transaction or just another button that's being pressed to have something completed.
• You touched on empathy and compassion; how do you teach someone empathy?
• Share with us maybe three actionable takeaways that our business owners and listeners of this podcast could take away from the book or even just your years of experience in the different businesses that you have formulated and been successful in that if they went ahead and employed those three tactics tomorrow, they would start to see some results.
• You've done a lot of research; you've written a lot of customer experience books. I want us to talk a little bit about the future. We are now at 20 years into the 21st century. So, next year we're going into 2020, where do you see customer service in another five years?
• What’s one thing that’s going on in your life right now that you’re really excited about – either something you’re working on to develop yourself or your people?
• Where can our listeners find you online?
• During times of adversity or challenge, is there a quote or saying that you like to draw on that kind of helps to keep you refocus or gets you back centered to be on that journey to accomplish your goal?

Highlights

• John stated that he doesn’t think we have a choice, there's a seismic shift happening in the world today. And for all the benefits and conveniences technology has brought us, it's come at a significant cost and that cost is human relationships, human interactions, which is so vital to customer loyalty, employee satisfaction, and just overall happiness. Today's illiterate are those who have an inability to make a meaningful connection with others. The pendulum has swung so far over to high tech, low touch that all of us are starving to be someone, a person with goals and pain points and all those things. And it's the companies that are creating the emotional connections that are reaping the rewards.

Yanique stated - I'm glad you touched on emotional connections because I personally, all the research that we've done for customer service in our business, we found that customers have two needs and those two needs are their emotional needs and their intellectual needs. And so, emotions speak to their heart and how you make them feel and intellectual speaks to their mind, what did they understand from that experience with you?

• John stated that first, technology is not the enemy, it's not the devil. He loves technology and using technology to eliminate the human experience is the enemy, he'll give you an example. There's a wireless company in Canada that is forcing its customers to use their self-service channels to the point that if you need to call in and speak to someone for support or a billing question, they charge your account CAD $10.00. So, that's the opposite and that's not going over too well with their customer base. So, that's where you're using technology to eliminate the human experience. What we have to do is, the leaders need to understand the lack of social skills our society has today is the problem of businesses to solve and we need to marry the digital with the human experience and there's ways to do that. First off, we got to use technology for repetitive tasks, the basic tasks to enable employees to focus on what is most important and that's building that relationship, that's the result in higher customer loyalty, retention, lifetime value, and honestly job satisfaction. So, he'll give you one example, Apple is a brand he can't live without, he loves the product and he loves going into the brick and mortar still. He needed some repair work done on his laptop and it was great, he went online and in probably less than 45 seconds, scheduled an appointment at a time that was convenient for him with a genius, that was the technological advantage and quick and easy. He didn't have to call up and wait on hold and go through that maze and then he showed up and they took him right away and they're great to work with. So, the human interaction, which was vital, and he got to ask critical questions about what's wrong, what he needs to do, what he needs to do differently? Most of us, you take our computers away and we could be out of business.

Yanique mentioned - in your book, I'm just going to quote one of your sentences. It says, “Chick-fil-A is the most polite chain in the restaurant business of the chain surveyed that company's employees were most likely to say, please and thank you and to smile at customers.” And I know it's very, very simple saying please and thank you and in Jamaica we call it, “You must have manners, because manners will take you a very far away.” Can you just share with us how is it that we're going to get that social shift? Because I find the generation coming up now, they’re may be not as polite and as courteous as maybe our parents and our grandparents gone by.

John stated that he doesn’t think at any fault to their own, today we are relationship disadvantaged and it is trickled to all generations. But yes, millennials and Z have it the worst and there's five reasons why we're relationship disadvantage. We're in the midst of the digital age which has caused a rapid decline in people skills. We have high tech, no touch experiences, 40% of employees are working for someone younger than them, they have a boss that's younger than them and very few companies have relationship building training which is needed. It's a critical piece today, we can't skip this generation, the next one will be worst. And again, at no fault of their own, he truly believes the greatest skill any of us could work at every day and teach our family, our kids, our employees, ourselves is the ability to build an instant rapport with others, whether that be an acquaintance, stranger, customer, coworker, friend or someone you've never met in the elevator before. So, there's the art of relationship building and there's five keys, pieces to that and of the five, four of them can be taught and improved. Now obviously, if you can find any of these four or five living in an employee candidate, great, you’ll only move quicker. There is one though that you can't teach. So, the art of building relationships, the first one must be authentic, people have great BS detectors today, must have insatiable curiosity that can be taught and that's something that he has been taught for the last 30 years, must have incredible empathy, compassion and empathy and seeing it from the other person's point of view, must love people and then finally must be a great listener. And some of these may sound obvious but they're not obvious to the new generation and even us, people from the previous generations, we don't do it as well as we used to because we're all have been sucked into the device age and our people skills are eroding. So, of those five, the only one he'd say that can't be taught, that you have to find in your interview processes is must love people. He doesn't think you can train someone to love people, he thinks that has to be a genuine and all the training in world probably isn't going to move the needle too much.

• John stated that there's a reason for a lack of empathy and again, he doesn't think any of this is the employee's fault, but you think about customer facing employees, first off, they don't know what world-class is. Most of us didn't grow up staying at five-star resorts, flying first class, getting a Mercedes Benz when we turned 16, yet the moment we got our first jobs, we were expected to give world-class experience and it's just not practical. If you don't know what it is, how can you deliver it? Most customer facing employees are not the customer, a lot of times they could be young, they could be 18 to 26 serving customers, clients, patients, tenants, whatever you may call them between 40 and 55 and at 25, don't understand what it's like to be a 48 year old female or male professional and work 24 hours isn’t enough time in a day, 36 hours isn’t enough time of the day, it doesn't mean we change who we hire, but we have to make sure we train them to understand what it's like. Employees aren't looking at it from the customer's perspective because the companies aren’t, the companies too often are thinking about what's easiest for us and not thinking about in that training their employees to think about from the customer's perspective. And then the last two reasons why we have a lack of empathy is we compare ourselves too often to the rest of our industry and that's a huge mistake, we'll say, “Oh my God, we're the best salon or travel company or whatever it may be in our industry.” And let's pretend for a moment that's true, he doubts it is but let's pretend, let's go to his salons. The fantasy island right now, let's say we were the best salons, head and shoulders above anyone in Cleveland and we're not, but let's say we are, well, if you're our client and you come in today, you then don't go down the street to compare us to our nearest competitor, you don't need a salon for a few weeks or a few months, so how good we are relative to our competition's really irrelevant to you. Now from here, you're going to the doctor's office, you're going to meet a girlfriend for lunch, you might go shopping, whatever that may be. And that's what you're comparing, saying, your next five experiences that day or that week saying, “God, I wish they treated me as well as my salon.” or you're saying the opposite. And then the final thing that causes a lack of empathy is, we all become numb, you're my 1 o'clock podcast or he has a keynote in Vegas tomorrow, or his 5:30 appointment, or hospitals might refer to their customers as 201B, which is a room and a bed. And we're all guilty of that and we’ve got be careful, we’ve got remember who we're dealing with and how important that is to them and their success and their ease of pain. So, teaching employees, ourselves what it's like to be the customer, what pain they're going through, how we can come to the rescue and make their day by being present and showing genuine hospitality, making an emotional connection and bringing our brilliance.

Yanique agreed and to add to that, with all of that trying to understand or trying to display or show someone how to exercise empathy. Then there's a flip side of the social media part of it with the generation that we're dealing with now and generally speaking, I think it affects everyone, even myself. So, a part of your book says, “There is social isolation due to a lack of real contact on connectedness with other people and this is strongest among younger people who use technology the most. So, people are craving human connection, but nonetheless find it easier and simpler to turn to a device than to have a normal conversation.” And I have a 13-year-old and I've actually taken her off of social media. She no longer has an Instagram or a Snapchat account because I find it's too distracting and I don't think they are emotionally intelligent to manage their conversations on this platform and this is my personal view as a parent. And so, when you have employees in an organization that they don't get it, “Why are you asking me to put my phone down? Like, I can't function without my phone if I'm working.” How do you get them to that point where they recognize that work is work and unless the device is being used as a tool to aid you in completing your job, it needs to be put down.

John shared that there's some really valuable information in his book, obviously for businesses, but also, he has had his three boys read parts of it and as long as the parts of their reading aren't coming from me and they're from studies that they'll believe it. Some of the things he'll share, so we're all in the midst of the touchscreen age and that is not a generational specific, we've got grandparents on social media and we’ve got five-year-old’s given an iPad and that's kind of their babysitter to keep them occupied for the next few hours. And as a result, we have less face to face interactions and a rapid decline in social skills and they say a lack of social relationships, which we're all suffering from today is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, it's the same cause and effect. And a result of heavy users of digital devices of any age and he’s guilty of it too, it's called digital dementia and they do brain scans, people who overuse digital devices and these brain scans look similar to patients who've sustained brain injury. Those are the things he wants his kids to read. Social isolation is not a millennial problem only, yes, why millennials say they have significantly less friends, 30% say they have no best friends, very scary things, but all generations are feeling it and the happiest people are the ones with the most meaningful relationships and they live longer. And so, we’ve got to train our employees, both personally and professionally, how as a customer they hate this, “I want you to know my name, I want you to know that I've been here before. I want you to know my order. I placed the same order three times a week, don't make me tell you what credit card I want to use.” He has no loyalty to an app, you don't build that loyalty to an app, but he does to people, it's hard to fire people that you know, and you’ve got to teach them the benefits personally and professionally and it's also the benefits, the companies that build the best relationships, build it internally with their employees and have less turnover.

Yanique agreed - It starts from within. So, as I was listening to a while ago a little light bulb went off in my head and I said, you know, I think one of the also serious characteristics that we're missing is people don't really listen and sometimes you're having a conversation with someone. So, you're talking to them and they're not listening to you and they're listening with the intention to respond, not with the intention of understanding where you're coming from. And I guess that ties also back into understanding and showing empathy because if you're not really listening to what the person is saying to you, paying attention to the emotion in what they're saying, paying attention to how this terrible situation impacted them. So, you can actually respond in a way that shows that you were listening and that you actually care, then you can potentially get them even more upset.

John agreed – He stated that one of his favorite parts of the book and it's a section about hving insatiable curiosity that you're dying to learn about others and not only about subjects that interest you, but subjects that you're unfamiliar with and it was very painful doing research on this book because of so many things that he was bad at and didn't realize how bad he was until he read this. John stated that 30 years ago there was only two subjects he wanted to talk about, business and sports. And if someone couldn't carry on a conversation about either one of those, he wanted nothing to do with them, he didn't want to go out socially for dinner with a couple if the husband couldn't carry on either of those which he’s embarrassed to say. Stephen Covey says, “People don't listen with the intent of understanding, they listen to with the intent of replying.” Scientists studied the human brain and said, they found that it takes the brain a minimum of 0.6 seconds to formulate a response to something said to it. And then they studied hundreds, thousands of conversations and found the average gap between people talking was 0.2 seconds. One third the time the brain will allow, we're responding and why? Because to your point, I have my answer ready minutes ago, I'm just waiting for the other person to come up for breath. So, what do we need to do? We need to realize that the greatest gift we can give anyone, an employee, a customer, our family when we get home is that gift of our attention. And so, he loves to ask people, “Who here is good at building rapport with a total stranger?” And most people raised their hands instantly and he said, “Well, you've got to prove it to me just because you spent 15 minutes, 30 minutes at a coffee shop, at a networking party, wherever talking to someone, doesn't mean you built a rapport. You might've been talking about yourself for that length of time.” And our biggest obstacle is we're all genetically coded to be preoccupied and, “It's my flight that was delayed. It's my son that got in trouble at school yesterday. It's my client that’s upset with us.” And so, to resist that urge, he always say, you have to be able to tell him two or more things after any length of conversation of their Ford “F O R D,” if you could tell him two or more things of the other person's Ford, you not only built a relationship, you own the relationship cause in each and every person, their Ford is their hot buttons. So, F stands for family, are they married? Do they have kids? How old are their kids? O stands for occupation, What do they do? How long they've been doing it? What's their title? R, Recreation, What does she like to do with her time off? She does hot yoga three days a week. She's a runner. He coaches little league. And then the D stands for Dreams, What's on their bucket list? What's their encore career? What's their dream vacation? When you focus suddenly on people's Ford, it gets you to not talk about yourself and you really, really build that emotional connection.

Yanique agreed that's a good point because as you said, not talk about yourself from Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It was book was published so many years ago, but in the book, it says, the number one thing that people love to do talk about the most is themselves. It's a powerful book and if you really want to become a better communicator, a better listener, it's definitely a great place to start, it's a good foundation, it really opens up your eyes and makes you aware of maybe some of the things that you were not aware of or were taking for granted for you to just be more conscious and intentional in your interactions so that you can become a better communicator.

• John stated that let's go to how to be a great listener. This sounds so trivial, like everyone thinks you're a great listener but until he did the research, he realized he had a lot of work. They talk about fierce attention, giving someone your fierce attention and one of the comments is if you a question and then don't ask two to three follow up questions, odds aren't, you weren't listening. So, there should be a four to one ratio of questions asked versus the answered and some myths about listening is you should be a sponge where you're just listening and every so often you say, “Uh huh. Uh huh.” And they say that's not a good listener, a listener is more of a trampoline who's amplifying your energy and asking clarifying questions to get you to go deeper in your thought process. And so, it's just taking the soft skills that we think is common sense and isn’t and helping yourself and your existing and future generation employees, how to build better relationships that will benefit them in all areas of their life and that's what's key. His employees are so loyal because of what they teach them that's going to help them at home and in all areas of their life, it's not just about helping us make more money.

• John shared Customer Service Growth and Development is not going to stop, the digital revolution is going to continue and there's a lot of benefits to that. What consumers are buying today….they're buying two things, the first one is they're buying time, the more our personal income goes up, typically it means the discretionary time we have goes down because that means we're working harder. And so, it used to be a do it yourself world, now it's do it for me. And so many businesses that can speed up and save him time. He gives a great example. John stated that he has a carwash that he has a membership to and it's a silly thing that when he goes there, they also sell gas and he never get gas from there. He always needs gas, but he never gets gas because the car wash is like 15 minutes, which seems like forever. And then he’s always late or close to, he needs to get to his next appointment. And then, later on that day, on his way home, he'll have to stop and get gas which is so unproductive that he stopped twice. So, what they're doing is they're adding gas tanks to where they wash the cars and now, they could do this at the same time, it doesn't take him more than 15 minutes to get out of there and he says yes, every time. So, they bought him some time, or they're given him, he bought himself time. So, it's very important to make things faster and easier for people and then the second thing consumers are buying more than ever today is experiences and they do not care what they spend on time and experiences and if you can give them exceptional experiences. So, let's look at some companies that are making price irrelevant. You have these movie theaters are opening up where you can recline and there's a tray and you can order a bottle of wine, it's a dining experience. So, he bought time, so now they don't have to go to movie and then later at dinner, they can go to movie and a dinner in a reclining chair and a bottle of wine. You don't care about how much that cost, that's a great experience. Have you seen the new Starbucks restaurants? the reserve roastery? So, you got to check them out? Look them up. It's called the Willy Wonka of a coffee and they're huge, they're mammoth and just the way they make the coffee and the beans are flying around over your head. The average cup of coffee there is $12.00 and if you’re so bold, they have a $50.00 cup of coffee that you can order. These are places that are bringing theatre and romance back to the brick and mortar and if you can do that, if you can do that, people are willing to spend, making price irrelevant and experiences and time.

Yanique reiterated – If you can capitalize on how the experience goes for the customer regardless of the business type and you can cut down on time and make things more flexible and convenient, it will make price irrelevant and it will make your brand an unforgettable brand in your customers mind.

John stated that the primary currency is the emotional connection that we create with our customers, employees and vendors and when you do that, you start becoming the brand customers can’t live without and you make price irrelevant.

• John shared that the book he’s reading this week is, Yes, Your Teen is Crazy!: Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind by Michael J. Bradley that’s what he’s working on today and the new book “The Relationship Economy: Building Stronger Customer Connections in the Digital Age” that just launched, it hit #1 Amazon which is making him even busier right now than normal which is fun, it’s great, it’s exciting. Just traveling around the world giving these presentations and interviews, so those are two things. Raising his 3 boys and just keeping up with demands for the relationship economy.

• John shared listeners can find him at –

www.thedijuliusgroup.com

Email: [email protected]

Facebook – John DiJulius

Twitter - @JohnDiJullis

LinkedIn @John DiJulius

• John shared that the quote is all over his house and it’s all over his business and it is, “I want to live an extraordinary life, so countless others do.” And so, that’s just not a mantra. The reason he wants to live an extraordinary life is not so that he can have more money, more cars, more vacations, more houses, it’s because of the ripple effect it has on his family, his employees, his clients. And so, it really keeps him grounded when things go wrong or from how he takes care of himself, what he’s feeding his brain, what he’s feeding his body, who he’s hanging out with, who’s influencing him, what he’s listening to. He firmly believes it’s our responsibility and obligation to sow the seeds of our potential and the potential that we don’t reach not only cheats us, but it cheats all the people that are dependent. An easy example to relate to, let’s say he eats junk food at lunch and he didn’t get a work out in today, when he gets home and he gets home he’s tired and just want to collapse in the couch and maybe have a beer and one of his sons wants him to play catch or help him with his homework and he’s just too tired or he’s too crabby. What did that just do to that and you take that to a million different interactions and obligations to the point where you make a poor decision and it has a ripple effect and that’s okay.

Taking risks and making poor decisions will happen but what happens as a result is that you want to stick your head in the sand and say, “Whoo me” and feel sorry for yourself. And so, when you think, you have to live an extraordinary life, you can’t do that, you can’t feel sorry for yourself because there are so many people counting on you and you have to suck it up and you have to figure it out and you’re going to have to make it right. And people bought into his vision, your vision and they came to work for him and gave up opportunities elsewhere because of the vision he was telling them, and he can’t bail on them now just because it’s getting a little tough.

Links

• The Relationship Economy: Building Stronger Customer Connections in the Digital Age by John DiJulius
• Yes, Your Teen is Crazy!: Loving Your Kind Without Losing Your Mind by Michael J. Bradley

Sky Jarrett is an executive coach and pioneer of 21st century leadership. She has a passion for unlocking human excellence and specializes in using researched-based and neuroscience techniques to support leaders in improving their effectives and thriving in the digital age.

As a leadership and organization development consultant at one of the world’s largest consulting firms, Sky has 12+ years of specialized expertise in large-scale transformations helping organizations transform their culture, leaders, and performance from within.

Sky is also a certified instructor, advocate, and change agent for mindfulness and has been instrumental in bring mindfulness to Fortune 500 companies. She is committed to growing the reach of mindfulness across industries and geographies as a way of expanding the human capacity to deal with the relentless and fast-paced challenges of life in the 21st century.

Transcend, LLC is an organization aimed at supporting individuals, groups, and organizations in helping them transcend barriers to maximize their greatness and achieve extraordinary results. Combining unparalleled expertise in Leadership Excellence, Human & Organizational Development, Brain Science, Mindfulness, Positive Psychology, Performance Excellence, and Inclusive & Diversity principles, Transcend specializes in curating experiences, program, and talks designed to inspire and transform.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about your background?
• What are three to four characteristics or traits that you think a leader needs to have in order to really lead an organization that will be customer centric?
• In terms of as a leader, there is the old adage are saying that says, “Leaders are not born versus leaders can be created.” what are your thoughts on that?
• How do you stay motivated everyday?
• Could you share with us what's, what's the one online resource tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• Can you share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• Could you share with us maybe one thing that's going on in your life right now that you are really excited about - either something that you are working on to develop yourself or your people?
• Where can our listeners find you online?
• During times of adversity or times when you feel like you're faced with obstacles that you may have dotes that you are unable to overcome these obstacles. Do you have any quote or saying that during these times you will draw on it to kind of regain your strength and focus and momentum?

Highlights

• Sky shared that she will start with her background and work her way into mindfulness and how she got into that space. She shared that she and her siblings were very blessed to have a dad who really cared about their future and at the tender age of 9, he had them thinking about who they wanted to be when they grow up. So, he took each of them sat a stone, asked them what they were interested in doing, who they saw themselves becoming. At the time she thought she wanted to go into medicine and when he took her to the hospital to meet with a doctor just to talk about what that career path is like and what it's like to be a doctor, she learned that she’s afraid of blood. So, medicine would not be the path for her, but that led her down a journey to really discovering what and who she wanted to be, and psychology was really intriguing to her. What she found interesting was that we spend majority of our lives at work, for the average person 40 to 60 hours a week or more for some of us and how much quality of that experience really impacts the rest of our lives. And so, for her, really intrigued by that notion, she was compelled to want to make a difference, to somehow improve that life experience, that work life experience. And she felt that approaching it from the perspective of leadership and helping leader to be more effective and more conscious in how they impact their employees and the people that follow them, that she could scale her impact on people and their lives that way. So, she sort of went from wanting to help people from a medical perspective to really, at the end of the day seeking to improve people's life experiences at work and tackling that from a leadership perspective.

Yanique shared that the program is called Navigating the Customer Experience - And I remember in some of our pre conversations you are just trying to align to make sure that you know, what you had to offer would align very well with our audience. Now, leadership is a very big part of customer experience as you would know based on the work that you've done with all of these large organizations. And if the leadership is not mindful and basically not leading their teams in a way that is going to yield the greatest level of productivity in all the dimensions that your life needs leading in, not just in terms of work, but health and wealth and spirituality and emotionally then you're really not going to have a truly successful organization.

• Sky stated that she thinks of leadership not only as the person with the title, if you will, who is hereby appointed and hailed as the leader. But she thinks of leadership or someone as a leader, as someone who has made a conscious effort to take a leadership role in their own life. So, living their life by design, being intentional about how they live their life and for many of us, we see leadership as sort of a service, having a service orientation. Who are we leading? Who are we serving? Who are we influencing? And that can be in a work capacity or a personal capacity. And so, how she connects that dot from a customer centric perspective, if she thinks of herself as someone who is leading the trade and pioneering 21st century leadership and she thinks about the leaders who she wants to be serving. She has to take a customer centric perspective to really understanding who are those individuals, what are they struggling with, what are their challenges and what it is that she has to offer them that's unique to support their journey. So, number one is having that sort of awareness and having the where it all to think about the customer in that way, to have that customer centric view to begin with she believes is important. And to support that, Sky thinks having the capacity to sort of cultivating a capacity for empathy is very important so that we can put ourselves in the shoes of the people that we're serving, whether that is the end user of our product or service or the employees that we're serving and supporting as well. But cultivating a practice of empathy where we can put ourselves in their shoes, understand their perspective and serve them in that way to her she thinks is tremendously important.

Sky also mentioned, specific to having that customer centricity, she thinks more than just the awareness, but the capacity to sort of think from a systemic perspective, especially in now a 21st century. When you think about the impact of globalization, we're so much more connected now than we were before. And so, you hear the buzzword of thinking about the ecosystem and thinking about all the players, the market landscape is just so much different now than it was before. So, she thinks also having that capacity, obviously awareness more than the awareness, having the capacity to think on that many dimensions. In her world you talk about increased complexity, the more high you get as a leader, the more complexity you have to deal with, thinking about stakeholders and your customers on that many levels. And when you think about how you engage with those customers and the ecosystem that's involved in that engagement, it's not so much indirect, one-to-one, um, business to customer or customer to customer relationship anymore. It's so much more dynamic. So just having more of a capacity to navigate that complexity I think is really important. And a lot of the work that I do with leaders is to help them scale that capacity to build more capacity to deal with more of the complexity that I believe is inherent in the 21st century. So, she would say those are the three things for her. The awareness, cultivating a capacity for empathy and having the capacity to deal with more complexity, to be able to navigate that she thinks is really important.

• Sky shared that she boils leadership down to influence and how you're able to influence people, again, both in your personal life but also in business and while she thinks characteristics, there are certain personality traits that someone can have that makes it a lot easier for them or somewhat makes them more magnetizing. So, the typical characteristic people think about is, “Oh, they're so charismatic and they're such great people pleaser.”Sky thinks there are assumptions about what makes a leader effective, but she also does a lot of strengths-based work. So, looking at what makes an individual special from the perspective of what their strengths are and how they can maximize and leverage the power of that strength to make them a powerful leader. And there was a lot of research that was done to uncover, “Whoa, is there like a particular ingredient that leaders need to have to be successful?” And they looked at the CEOs across the globe and they found that not necessarily that leaders can approach leadership from the perspective of what makes them special and what makes them shine. You think about Bill Gates, he's not the most charismatic of them, but is he an effective leader? Yes. Is he an effective business businessman? Absolutely, no questions asked. He for her is an example of someone who really understands himself, is very in touch with the things that makes him special and has figured out how to apply his specific ingredients to do what he needs to do to be effective in a way that's authentic to him and to her, that's the most important thing, that element of authenticity.

Yanique agreed and stated - I liked the fact that you touched on authenticity. I think it's so important. I read a lot of Brené Brown's books and 've been following her for maybe about seven, eight years now. I did a workshop with her a couple of years ago that she did read Oprah on scrapbooking, kind of helping you to fine yourself and just talk about shame on the things that we take for granted in our lives that we think other people don't suffer from. We're all actually suffering from some of the very same things, just maybe different experiences. And one of the very strong characteristics or traits that I will speak about in our workshops that we do here in Jamaica is I personally believe that the most important role of a leader is to grow and develop people. Would you agree? And if so, why is it so important? And I guess you'd have touched on it when you mentioned capacity for the leader to ensure that he grows and develops the people around him or her.

Sky shared that this point is really near and dear to her heart. It's sort of the bread and butter of why she do the work that she does, is to help people to grow, to develop, to be their best self, to be their authentic self. And she thinks as leaders we have a responsibility to do that for the people that support us and the people that we support. And one of the things that she thinks is most important part of that journey is to give ourselves and each other the permission to be human because so many of us going to a work environment and we have this expectation of who we want to be at work, the image that we want to project at work as if we're living two different lives, we have a work life and we have a personal life, two different people going to show up for each of the life and we are one person. And the more whole we can be, the more authentic we can be is the more fulfilled we will be. There is a thing of living in congruence, that’s a psychological term where you're living this ideal version of yourself, but it's not who you feel you are meant to be or you're living out of obligation but you're not really connecting with who you are at your core and who you are in your true authenticity. And so, the more misaligned we are, the more misalignment we have between who we want to be and who we're actually showing up as is the more unhappy we are. And that can lead to burnout, it can lead to anxiety, depression, and for sure if not all of those things, you just won't be as happy living that life. So, for her, helping people to create that space, she thinks as leaders we have a responsibility to create that space of safety where people can show up as they are and close that gap of in congruence.

Yanique agreed. It’s awesome that your company is dedicated to transforming that particular area because a lot of organizations need that message, that reinforcement to recognize that their role is to help people really grow and align themselves to who they're truly, truly meant to be and sometimes that requires some soul searching because some of us are working in jobs 30, 40 years and we really don't know what we want. We kind of just on that treadmill going everyday, not really sitting down and questioning ourselves and giving ourselves truthful answers, what really, really makes us happy.

Sky shared that she calls it living by default versus living, but we're just living life by default, just whatever comes our way, we'll go at it versus being intentional about one, getting clear about what we want for our lives, what we want for ourselves, how we want to spend our time, the difference we want to make in this world. She had a moment she was robbed at gunpoint in Jamaica, December 2015. And the thing that she walked away with was thinking, “Okay, so this happened at three o'clock in the afternoon, broad daylight. The gunman knows that I saw his face.” So, really and truly, he had no reason to let her walk. And she walked away thinking, “What if he made a different choice? And he ended my life in that moment. So, what that I'd have lived. So what? What difference have I made in the world that would really warrant the life that I lived up until that point?” And many of us don't have those experiences to help us think about those types of questions. But if you think to live your life with the end in mind, rest assured you're going to be more inspired to be more intentional about how you live your life, the difference that your life makes, the impact that your life has made on this world. And really getting behind that and being more intentional about designing your life in such a way that you can live out the best version of your life, she strongly believes in it. Get off the damn treadmill and live by design, don't live by default.

• When asked about how she stays motivated everyday, Sky stated that she is committed to living her life by design and with the whole concept of not living. She thinks one of the most important things for her is being in alignment with her truth and having a solid understanding of who she wants to be and really having an intention around that. So, that allows her to wake up every day with clarity of who she is and who she wants to show up as every single day. Because when we don't have that clarity, it's so much easier for us to stray and get discouraged, we feel lost and confused and stuck and who is motivated when they're in that space. When you have clarity of who you want to be and you have this insatiable passion that you wake up everyday feeling like you can't wait to get out the bed, that's when you know that you've tapped into something really special. So, for her, it really helps for her to be motivated, to be in alignment, number one, number two, being committed to living life by design and she can literally wake up every day saying life is so good because she has made it that way, because she has chosen to make life good, that's why she can say life is good. Another more important part for her, or equally important part for her is the success of her clients. So, going back to that customer centricity, having conversations, take her individual coaching clients as an example, she met with one just this morning and she shared a victory with Sky, something that she wouldn't have achieved outside of the journey that she has been on, that Sky has been supporting her with and for her to unsolicited just shared with her, “Oh my gosh, you wouldn't believe what happened last week.” And for her to feel so good about that, they were on video and she could see the happiness and celebration in her face, in her eyes, and she was so excited, so proud of herself, so happy for this success that they were able to celebrate together, that keeps Sky going for sure, it keeps her motivated.

Yanique mentioned that Sky shared one of the oldest types of advertising for any business and it's really what all businesses should aspire for, true word of mouth advertising in terms of really being able to speak about the value and the greatness or impact that on an organization or an individual is able to help them overcome. Because the reality is all businesses go into business to make money, but usually they going to business to solve a problem. So, what problem are you solving for that individual or that company or that set of people and are you consistently doing it? Are you looking for opportunities to make it better each and every time? Are you flexible? Are you accessible? those are all the things that customers are looking for, ease of doing business, convenience. So, I think once you can ensure that you're doing that consistently and your customers can say it for you, not you saying it for yourself, then it speaks volumes to the impact that you have on people's lives.

Sky agreed and stated that here is the dilemma that we're all faced with, every single one of us living in this day and age is that life has changed, the pace of life is so much fast now then it has ever been and sadly is the slowest it will ever be. Listeners thinking about that, that manifests in each of our lives in a very different way. Like for her, it just feels like life is on a rapid seriously and she thinks it creates a very difficult space for many of us to kind of feel like we're keeping our head above water, constantly feeling like we're sinking, constantly feeling like we're falling behind, we may suffer from information overload because news is coming from every which direction, we have news coming out of our ears, we don't know which news platforms to keep up with and, “Did you hear about that? No, you're too lie. What's going on over there feeling?” feeling like we’re always out of the loop. FOMO is so real because there's so many different information platforms and we want to keep track of everything so we don't have FOMO and we keeping up with the Netflix and just keeping up with life in general and the responsibilities and how difficult it is to navigate life. And you think about things land like Airbnb and Uber and social media and how it's changing how we live life. So, to her a lot of people are bringing in 20th century lifestyle skills to the 21st century and it's not going to work. So, that for her is the problem that she’s helping people figure out how do I navigate this new way of living? How do I navigate this new way of living in business and in their personal lives so that people can, to your point, go through life with more of a feeling of ease, much less anxiety, much more fulfillment, being more effective in our personal lives and in our work life and have this general feeling of, “Man, I'm thriving, I am flourishing.” which is very difficult to achieve, more difficult now than ever before. And so, that's what she seeks to offer my clients and she does that in different capacities, both on an individual basis, but also in the corporate context. She works with teams to do that kind of work, so you talk about flexibility, accessibility, those are all things that she brings to the table, she doesn’t do cookie cutter solutions, she does very tailored solutions for her clients and really meet them where they need to be met.

• In regard to online resources, Sky shared that the two that comes to mind for her but the first one that came to mind was Acuity, which is the online scheduling platform because she has clients who she meets with on a weekly, monthly, biweekly basis. The scheduling, we live in a day and age where taking things off the to do list is one of those lifestyle strategies, the more you can take off your to do list or your thinking list, the better, the easier. So for her, giving them access and this is also one of those customer centricity tools or conveniences that she likes to offer her clients as well, where the scheduling is up to them and they're able to grab time on her calendar that is convenient for them, the day that works for them, the time that works for them based on the options that are available. So, it works for her because she gets to dictate what hours she wants to work, on what days and they get to pick and refuse availability based on what works best for them. So, that's one tool she doesn’t think she could live without. The second would be QuickBooks, it's how she manage her finances, her invoicing, all that good stuff.

• When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Sky shared that she would for sure say one is The Motivation Manifesto: 9 Declarations to Claim Your Personal Power by Brendon Burchard, this was like a wake-up call, this book was like, “Whose agenda are you living? Girl, reclaim your agenda. This is your life. Let's get it together.” that book was like really help things to snap into gear for her. But then you have all this motivation, you're like, yes, I want a better life for myself. But what exactly does that look like? And so, the second book that she felt really powerful was a book called The Calling and it was a book that really helped her to tap into that inner voice, tap into her authenticity and tap into what is she being called to do in this world really helped her to crystalized that. And funny enough, that journey took her back to what she had aspired to do when she was nine but you know how life has a way of just being distracting and society starts to dictate who you want to be and what you want to be when you grow up, and the more noise you hear is the more confused you become and the more you stray away from that which you're really meant to do. So, that book for her was a way to reconnect to who she really is and what that she really wants to do in this world.

• Sky stated that she has the honor, the pleasure, the benefit, the glory, any insert adjective to really support people primarily in the corporate setting and these people are paying “one begga money” to get these support services and she wanted to figure out a way that she could scale and provide the services and offerings to more people than just those within a corporate context. So, what she’s working on now is an online program which will provide the work that she does for these high paying clients to the average person who might not have the benefits or the luxury of a company paying for this service for them, but they can access it. And essentially what it is, and she’s really timing it around the new year, this is a time when so many of us come up with new year's resolutions, we’re really excited, we’re really pumped, we can see this version of ourselves, we do vision board workshops and we’re fully charged and ready to go and then by February, March all resolutions have a back burner and we are not living our best life. So, this program is really designed to address that problem, why is it that we start off with so much steam and we run out of steam second or third month of the year? And so, she’s certified in a program that was designed by a Harvard professor that looks at what is it that gets in the way, it’s like you’re on the starting block and they say, “On your mark, get set, let’s go and you take off and you just lick up into an invisible wall.” What are those invisible walls that keep getting in our way and how do we transcend those barriers to living our best lives. That's the program she’s launching, it will be an online program and she’s just really excited to make her work and make this work accessible to more people at this scale.

Sky shared that the program is expected to release at the end of November, so in advance of the new year so people can get their engines revving and they're ready to go by the beginning of the new year.

• Sky shared listeners can find her at –

www.transcendglobal.org

Instagram - @transcendllc

LinkedIn – Transcend, LLC

• Sky shared that her mantra is just a reminder that she has everything that she needs to live the life that she wants and if it's not coherent in her, it’s something just really reminded herself that everything is figure-out-able, she’s resourceful and she can figure it out. So, the quote for her is, “I have everything I need to live the life that I want.” and it's just a really uplifting thing and powering resourceful quote for her to help navigate any uncertainty.

Links

• The Motivation Manifesto: 9 Declarations to Claim Your Personal Power by Brendon Burchard
• The Calling

Suman Sarkar has more than 20 years of international consulting experience. He has a proven track record delivering innovative and strategic approaches to the supply chain and sourcing practices with outstanding results. As an author, he understands the power of creativity that will be unleashed if businesses can harness the talent they already have in-house. He's a partner with Three S Consulting and he holds a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from ITT Kharagpur, India and a Master's in Industrial Engineering from NITIE in Mumbai, India graduating at the top of his class from both schools. And he's also a holder of an MBA from UCLA in Strategy and Finance. The author of the very popular book, Customer-Driven Disruption: Five Strategies to Stay Ahead of the Curve.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about your background?
• Could you explain to us what do you mean by disruption? What is your definition of disruption and why do you make the analogy of it possibly being seen like a death sentence?
• In your book you spoke about generational shifts, are you able to give us some examples of how you think that has led to major changes in the market?
• Can you also share with us maybe some companies that you think are doing it right? Some of our listeners, if they're saying to themselves, what are some organizations that I could look at that I could benchmark maybe some of their best practices on principles that they're doing to stay ahead of what's happening and to ensure that they’re meeting their existing customer needs, but also trying to exceed those customer needs in the same process?
• Could you share with us what's one on online resource tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• Could you share maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• Could you share with us what’s one thing that’s going on in your life right now that you are really excited about – either something that you are working on to develop yourself or your people?
• Where can our listeners find you online?
• Is there one quote or saying that during times of adversity you will draw on this particular quote or saying and it helps you to refocus and just remind yourself of why you’re doing what you’re doing and where you’re going?

Highlights

• Suman stated that he grew up in India and there, he came from a very small town and he thinks the only reason I came out from that small town is because he was always interested in figuring out what the root cause of anything and that led him to engineering school. His teachers always used to mention this to him that, “Suman was probably not the fastest kid in the class, but he actually figures out what's the root cause of anything. And so, he essentially comes up with solutions that are great.” Now, he has kept that trade throughout his life, it kind of drove many of his bosses crazy because he took his time to figure things out, but whatever solutions he came up and his customers loved it, his clients loved it. Many of the things he has done are still being practiced, companies still use it. And that's one of the reasons why he has had the opportunity to work with large number of successful companies. One of the things he has learned over the years as he’s been working with these companies is that they are not distinct to be successful or remain successful and the primary root cause of that comes from the fact that companies are not focused on customers, they are focused on investors, they are not doing things that will endear them with the customers. And now, since customers are more informed as you know because of internet and computers, smartphones, they're more informed and they're more likely to change companies than ever before and the lack of focus on customers is really what's driving disruption and failure of many large companies. And what we are seeing is the start of a tsunami, not the tsunami itself and this book is a plea for corporates and startups and everybody else to focus when it comes to business, that that's customers. And the book gets into strategies around how you can meet those needs and what operational capabilities you need and then organizational structure and the details around them, but it gives a background on why he wrote this book.

• Suman shared that disruption is essentially a complete change in direction and what essentially happens is, there was a demand for organic and suddenly, the demand for organic milk vanishes and people are buying now coconut milk or almond milk. For a farmer that produces organic milk, it's a disruption to their business, it completely messes up their business because they have no idea how they can now survive or meet customer demand because this is a complete shift that they don't control, it's not only happening to the farmers, it's happening all around us. Retail, a lot of businesses going out of business, closing shop, they are going bankrupt. UCG in trouble and every industry, for example, packaged food industry going down the drain. Many packaged food companies are in trouble and the companies are changing their CEOs. The problem is not around one or few industries, it's all around us. The question is who is first and who is lost but it's happening all around. It's not only affecting the companies, if you take a step back and look at broader view and take it at a country level, you start to see the impact of customer changing needs on countries. For example, all oil demand is going down, the price is falling and it's already starting to disrupt many economies like Venezuela and other places, we are starting to see that disruption happen. Even Saudi's are now looking to diversify their economy. The changing customer needs could be a death sentence if you don't keep up with those leads but if a company does well in keeping up with those needs, they are very, very successful. For example, Aldi, those companies that are struggling with meeting customer needs, they're all introducing home delivery and sale-driving cars to get products to homes and all that. But Aldi has continued to focus high quality, affordable products and they have captured most of European grocery market, the discount grocers, the biggest grocers in Europe and they are starting to expand footprint in the U.S, they are going to be the third largest grocers in the U.S while grocery companies are focused on delivering to home, Aldi is focused on getting you the better, the best quality product at a very competitive price. And in his town where he lives, he sees a large number of people going to Aldi, where there's very few go to other grocers. And what it basically tells him is that the companies that are focused on customer needs are likely to be successful, the companies that are not focused on customer needs are likely to find it challenging and more so now because people are very, very well informed than ever before. And basically, that's what the disruption is all about. If you can figure out a way to meet the needs, then it works for you, if you are holding onto the past, it's a death sentence.

• Suman stated that he mentioned just before that there is a tsunami happening. And we're just seeing the first tsunami and the driver behind this tsunami or the disruption is really the generational changes, the millennials and gen Z's who are starting to become actually the millennials are becoming the largest buying group in the country, not only in the U.S actually, it's all around the world, while baby boomers are all retiring. Now, the needs of baby boomers are very different from millennials. Millennials are completely different than baby boomers in many ways wanting to be different. They don't buy beer and there are many things, they don't like ownership, they have a large educational debt, so many of them are very conscious about where they spend money and they are essentially looking for solutions that meet their need and they're ready to throw the old norms out of the window. His favorite is actually in Japan, Japan is a very conservative society, but their are millennials like U.S millennials are very different. For example, they don't drink as much, if you have not, if you've been in Japan, you would see that that used to be the norm in our new generation. They don't own cars; they don't like to drive, they don't own watches, they don't work long hours in offices. So yes, millennials are very different and if you want to address millennials, you have to completely rethink the strategies and that work with baby boomers and do very differently with millennials. Millennials are very health conscious. He just talked about package food industries, the reason they're having trouble is because they don't have healthy and fresh food options for a millennials, so, of course, millennials are not buying from them. The traditional grocery companies are challenged because millennials love fresher, locally grown, socially conscious and all that food and they find that primarily in the farmer's market. So, the farmer's market, which is where, the local farmers bring their produce to sell, not the stalls, but these are big markets just like the grocery stores. Millennials go there, it's really popular with them and they're the largest growing category in the country, fresh produce category. So yes, millennials are very different and because their needs are very different, it's a generational change that’s driving the disruption. Millennials are into personalization, and so there are two things that in his mind distinguishes millennials in terms of selling to them. One is clearly they don't have large disposable income because of the debt they carry and the second one is they like to express their individuality much more than any other generation and what happens with that is the whole concept of personalization coming in the play. So, if an apparel retailer doesn’t have stylists and provide advice on how to dress and all that, how to be unique, those retailers are having a hard time. That's why you see so many apparel retailers are actually struggling in the face of it. But retailers who offer some kind of personalization are successful. Look at Sephora. Sephora is doing very well with the younger generation because they provide cosmetics that attuned to skin tone and they use the information system, their database to figure out what's the skin tone of a person and they match the right product and they are doing very well. So, whoever has figured out even a little bit of personalization is doing well in today's world. And personalization is likely becoming bigger and bigger, completely different mindsets from the large companies to how they work. They're still making standardized products and trying to sell it to the masses. Even Apple does it, you get three varieties of Apple products and that's it. And they sell it big based on three cameras or whatever features it is, to sell it to millennials, you have to do things more personalized and you have to talk about how does it help you get the things that you want like photography or things like that, cameras probably don't make sense to them. So, it's probably a 180-degree change in thinking required from businesses and otherwise millennials will kind of disrupt them.

Yanique stated that Suman mentioned personalization and the fact that with the generational shift in terms of how baby boomers performed or bought or interfaced with businesses versus millennials and gen Zs. Now, a lot of companies are of the opinion that it's okay if they lose one or two customers because they can attract new ones. What are your thoughts on trying to just keep the ones that they have already happy?

Suman shared that this is also kind of a talked about in the book, focus on your current customers before you focus on new. Yanique pointed out a very traditional thinking in business. It's okay to lose in current customers which continue to fill the funnel and that is completely nonsensical because if you look at the research, research shows that current customers are likely to spend more and they are much, much more profitable than the newer customers. And you can look at industry after industry. For example, there was a great article on WSJ on Whole Foods, Whole Foods has grown, what's unique about it is they increased their customer base, but the profitability and sales per new customer has declined quite significantly. And that's true for most businesses, if you look at existing customers are likely to be more loyal and likely to spend more and be more profitable because you're not spending money to acquire them than a new customer. But companies actually do complete reverse way. If you have ever signed up for an internet service in the U.S, you would know the internet companies will give you a discount to the new customer, whereas they will try to increase prices for their existing customers, which is essentially encouraging them to switch or move away and this dislike or dishonesty towards the existing customers is a problem because that kind of creates a disconnect and once the customer moves away, try somebody else's product, they're not likely to come back. And there lies the challenge, keeping existing customers happy first should be the first focus before companies spent a lot of money on acquiring a new one. Having a hole in the bucket is not going to help you, the first thing you should do is to patch up the hole before you pull more water.

• Suman shared that there are many, many companies that do it right. Let's start with the first one, Amazon does a great job, so does many of the large eCommerce companies like Alibaba and others, they do a great job. He just spoke about Aldi, Aldi is a great example. Southwest is another example; Disney is another example. Chick-fil-A, he talked about how Chick-fil-A quality is great, even in the QSR. McDonald's can have a space they do very, very well. He talked about some of the international companies like Haier in China. Haier in China has done an amazing job of creating an organization that keeps involving the customers. In the very beginning of the book, Suman talks about an Indian company called, Patanjali, who have introduced this plant, heart-based chemical, consumable products in India and they have challenged the industry leader, Hindustan UniLever, in all categories, and they are now half the size of Unilever in India and they are competing to become the biggest consumer goods company in India. There are examples in every market to look at like the Zara in Europe, that is in a fast fashion world, but has done a great job of addressing customer needs. There are companies in every niche that does very good job and they're the companies who survive. And all you have to do is to walk around and see where the customers are lining up and buying stuff. Even Apple does a good job, but the problem lately has been Apple hasn't really figured out the changing needs and they have been trying to sell the same old product, but there are a large number of companies out there that do amazing job of being focused on customers and continuing to evolve themselves to meet the needs of the customers as they change.

• Suman shared that the one thing that he always uses, and he can't live without in his businesses is Wall Street Journal. His business is essentially driven on knowing what's happening in his market, in the industry, in general, and Wall Street Journal, it has been the greatest of the resources that he has, frankly. It gives him not only the perspective of the U.S but also shares information from all around the world. And it's timely and also, they do a good amount of data collection and research, so, he likes Wall Street Journal, they don't have a very political bias to it, of course, they have a little bit of political bias, but most of their articles of businesses is very good. And he finds that he spent quite a lot of time reading and understanding what they are sharing about the world and different companies and all that.

• Suman shared that he reads a lot of science fiction, so, as an engineering student, he spent a lot of time reading about robots and iRobots.

He shared that Isaac Asimov had a huge impact when he was a kid and he wrote a series of books about the future and how the future society will evolve, how technology will evolve, and we do see a lot of things he said is coming true. So, he has been a great, great influencer on him. The book he really like lately it's called, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by a group in the University of Chicago. They talk about how economics affects all parts of our society. When we think about economics, we think business, but really that drives everything, whether it's people who are in gangs, whether it's prostitution but they use the concept of economics all throughout the society and how it impacts every aspect of the society was amazing to him. He really liked that book; he was very interested in thinking outside the box and then thinking of the threads of societal problems and how do you go about solving them was very interesting.

• Suman shared that he’s actually working on a startup right now. It's called Pronto Home Delivery and they are in the process of launching this service in Tennessee. It's a completely new way of looking at how you can service customers particularly, there are segment of U.S customers who can't go to grocery stores or different stores to buy and all that. And they're trying to figure out how to do that in a very cost effective and in a very high quality and customer focused passion. And they are launching that service in a few days actually and he’s very excited about it. They had to develop the whole systems and then figuring out the process because it's a very difficult thing to master, the complexity is pretty high and then having to convince customers to use it is also going to be a challenge. So, if they can pull it off, he'll be very proud of it.

• Suman shared listeners can find him at –

www.prontohomedelivery.com

    www.three-s-consulting.com

    LinkedIn – Suman Sarkar

• Suman shared that there's one thing that he believes in and that says, “This too shall pass.” So, whether it's a good time or bad time, he looks at it and says, “Okay, this too shall pass.” One way or another. So, he never presumes or take for granted that the good times will last, or the bad times will last, we just live through it.

Links

• Customer-Driven Disruption: Five Strategies to Stay Ahead of the Curve by Suman Sarkar
• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Josh Kelly is the Co-Founder of RevuKangaroo, the world’s leading reputation management system, an automated SAAS business that has helped generate countless reviews for businesses on places like Google, Yelp, Facebook and more as well as growing actual revenue for clients, sometimes in the tens of millions of dollars.

Before devoting his work fulltime to RevuKangaroo, Josh had an extensive background in marketing, working at companies like Bonneville international, Parker and Sons, Dial (DMG) Inc and Clover Marketing.

He helped his own family business, a local heating, cooling, and plumbing company in Phoenix, grow from $7 million in revenue to over $100 million in just over 14 years and he has been featured on stages with the Zig Zigler Foundation, Dave Yoho and EGIA as well as major platforms like CBS, Fox, and NBC.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey?
• Could you share with us how you think customer experience is going to manifest an grow over the next 5 to 10 years versus where we’re coming from in the last 5 to 10 years.
• Could you share with us how do you stay motivated everyday?
• Can you share with us what isone online resource tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business or even your personal life?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you either in a professional capacity or a personal capacity?
• Could you share with us what’s one thing that’s going on in your life right now that you are really excited about – either something that you are working on to develop yourself or your people?
• Where can our listeners find you online?
• During times of adversity or challenge is there a quote or saying that you have that kind of helped you to refocus or just to get back on track so that you can feel energized towards what you’re working on?

Highlights

• Josh shared that it's kind of a weird story, like everyone thinks he did this purposely, but he didn't. He kind of tripped into reputation management truth as he has tripped into most jobs and most businesses he has owned literally, it was a problem he had with his own business; with clients he was already working with. He works in what he would consider a grudge industry for the most part meaning like a plumber, no one wants to do business with a plumber, no one's excited to see a plumber, you only see a plumber when something's gone wrong and there's water all over your floor. And it's not a positive experience no matter what no matter how great a job you do, you could save the day but you're still walking into a bad experience and because of that it's really hard to get good reviews. No one's excited to do business with you, no one's happy that they did business with you ultimately. So, it was an issue he had, it was an issue a lot of clients he worked with had and he tried to buy it, a system, he tried to hire consultants, he tried to hire software and he couldn't find anything that actually worked. So, he went to a partner of his who was a good back then who runs a large team. And he (Josh) essentially explained the issue, what's going on, he literally locked a whole bunch of business owners he knew and good friends within a room and they started spit balling ideas what it could look like, what it should look like and been running ever since.

Yanique shared, so, it's fair to say then that you ended up in this business because of a pain point that you were experiencing, and I mean I'm sure many of our listeners, this will connect with them. Generally speaking, people typically end up in an entrepreneurial position many times because of some pain or discomfort that they felt that they could definitely find a solution for and of course a solution for other people who were experiencing the same pain and discomfort.

Josh agreed, literally, in their business like the plumbing HPC company is his first business. They were working their butts off to get reviews and to be positive and they have won awards, they've been recognized by Congress, they won the BBB Torch Award for Ethics, they were doing amazing quality customer service and great work but they were getting like 10 to 12 reviews a month and they're turning hundreds of calls. Now he gets 10 to 12 reviews a day and all are positive, it's totally transformed the business because it doesn't really matter as weird as it sounds you can have amazing customer service, you can have an amazing product, you can have amazing system, you've got amazing software, and if no one knows about it, it doesn't really matter that much. So, they had to find a way to let people know about it and the best way to do that right now is reviews.

Yanique reiterated, so, you were saying that you ended up in the reputation management business and it's not very easy.

Josh agreed and stated that it's easy now that they have a system and they have software to follow it and they have really simplified procedures it's really almost fully automated. Now, they have ton of reviews and they literally get millions of reviews a month for clients, all positive, driving them out to third party sites like Google, Yelp, Facebook, depends what business that you're in and actually literally driving real revenue and real customers to you. So, now it's easy but it took a long time to get there, not like a month of development work, he’s talking years of development work and then years of refining and then talking to clients and figuring out, so it was not an easy path but now, if you join your RevuKangaroo, it's pretty turnkey. It's pretty simple, pretty fast and their average client grows about 18 percent in revenue with the first six months in the program specifically from them.

Yanique stated. So, this particular platform organizes your customers reviews of individual employees and pushes positive reviews to major websites and those websites include Google Plus, Yelp Facebook, Twitter and more. So, pretty much if I let's say I wanted to visit a restaurant that I'd never heard of before that maybe I was out and somebody said, “Oh, there's a new Mexican restaurant that opened up on X street,” and I decided to go on Google and I saw like a Google review, your platform allows that restaurant to be able to have people rate their restaurant to get a good Google percentage rate.

Josh agreed and stated that that's the way consumers work right now. So, if you're to go to a restaurant or a hotel or hire a service, the vast majority of people about 87% of people look you up online beforehand. That's the current statistics it's actually growing. And the first thing they look at is reviews, actually 87 percentage people that looked at your reviews. So, restaurants are a great example. If you've never been to a restaurant and you're trying to find a specific type of restaurant, most people are going to google it and or go on Yelp depending on where you're located in the world and look at the reviews. Now here's the problem with that system as a business if you just allowed it to happen. Customers are fickle, they just are, if you had a really great experience at a restaurant and the food was really good that's what you're supposed to do. So, it's actually pretty hard to get positive reviews, however, if you've made a mistake which happens, if someone had to wait or the spice level was off on that dish or whatever it is, any single dish that can happen. It's way easier to get negative reviews and it's just a hard thing, like you have to drive a lot of reviews for it to really make a difference too. If you're a restaurant and you've got 15 reviews that doesn't make him feel really comfortable, he’s sure you're the same way. So, it's a numbers game too. So, what they've essentially done is if you need reviews on Google what they're going to do is they create an online funnel for you on your website. They automatically email and text message all of your customers asking how your service was and they actually tie it just like you said to a team member. So, what he means by that, if you're a restaurant, they're actually going to write a review on your server or maybe a bartender and the reason they do that is it tends to skew a lot more positively and they get way more feedback. It's really hard to get a review on the ambiance of a restaurant or how nice the tablecloths are or whatever. It's much easier to get review on, Jennifer the server because you had a relationship, you talk to them, good or bad right. And they say, “Hey, how is your service with Jennifer from 1 to 5 stars?”If it was an amazing experience they automatically drive it out to those third party sites, they pre populate the stars, they make sure it's landing where they can actually drive business for you. They had a bad experience instead of right now them going out to Google and become a permanent mark on your business, they're instead going to collect that customer's information, find out exactly what happened, find out which team member it happened with and send it to the management team and say, “Hey, this customer had an issue with this team member, here's exactly what happened, why don’t we reached back out to them, make it right.”

So, you're getting a chance to recover that negative experience before it kind of firestorms and gets out of control.

Josh agreed, and here's what happens, let's say that customer you turn around and now has an amazing experience, if that one-star review is out on Google, good luck changing them. The truth is that customer totally turned around now loves your business, it happens all the time but that one-star reviews stays there and other people they're looking up your business, they don't get the context to that, they don't get to find out that you turned around amazing service or that was a one off or was a weird experience or that's not normal. All they see is a one-star and a bad description. So, it's really important that you take control of your online reviews because the truth is your online reputation is happening with or without you. The customer is in control and they should be, but he thinks you should have a say in it. If there was a bad experience, he would want to know about it and he wouldn't want it to be permanent, if he could fix that and turn it around then leave him a review then. And truthfully, if they had a really bad experience and then you followed up with them and the customer hates you even more because you did a really bad job of following up then that's understandable, then ok maybe this isn't a one off, maybe this is just a bad business. Then it's going to show up on Google anyway, but for so many businesses they do great business and they're great people with great products or services and you look them up online and it just doesn't show it and he doesn't think that's fair.

• Josh shared that he has been in entrepreneur more or less right after college. He has always been in the customer experience business. Anybody who tells you differently like they just don't understand. He guesses there's some commodities like if you're selling spoons, customer service is probably not, and customer experience is not as big a deal. He has never been in a commodity business where he’s selling widgets or spoons or toothpicks or whatever it is where it's just price conscious and nothing else matters. He has always been in service or product businesses where having a good product, having a good service, having great experiences is very important. As far as where it's going, he thinks they're a perfect example of exactly where it's going. There was a time where people spoke to each other face to face, you get to learn what businesses were good for referrals and you talked to your mother about company before you hire them, you called friends, that doesn't really happen anymore. What's happening is your customer experience is moving almost entirely digital, more and more and more there's businesses that are holding out from this and some will always hold out, a lot won’t. So, a good example would be like their customer service experience if you were to join RevuKangaroo, you are going to get a constant touch points always from them and it's an automated system they're reaching out to you by email, by text message but they're checking, it's a combination you can go too far where hey it's only automated and you're like a software company or everybody's dealt with those phone calls where you call in to a robot, he doesn't like that, that's bad. However, he does love the customer experience where you're calling in and they have the menu and that kind helps short cut what you're going to talk about depending on the business or everyone's had that service where you press 5, if we want if you want them to call you back when it's your turn. He thinks that improves the customer experience significantly, you're not sitting there waiting on hold annoyed as annoyed anyway. And that's like an automated system that's drastically improves the customer experience, it's all about automating what you can, handholding what makes sense and then bridging the gap between the two and really, it's also about setting expectations. So, a good example is like when you join RevuKangaroo or do business with Parker and Sons as the home service company or Clover Marketing or Pulse or any of those businesses he’s a part of. Let's say I know on day three for RevuKangaroo, people tend to ask where can I see reporting on email and text messages that are set up so, he knows that they've had a system of this, he knows it comes up often enough, so, day two at the end of the day he sends out an email with a video walking through exactly how they pull that and letting them know if they have any questions let him know, that's proactive customer experience and customer service. So, he thinks the automation side of it and the handholding needs to be combined and he thinks that's the way things are going and he’s actually really excited. Obviously, he’s in that business but even if he’s not, every business should be in that business.

Yanique shared, it's interesting you mentioned a little bit of digitization and a little bit of humanization and how I ended up in this business of doing podcasting was, I am a customer service trainer, that's what I do for a living. And so, I figured podcasting would be a great platform for me to reach more people and build more awareness around customer experience but one of the things I've found over the years is I really don't think people are going to want that fully digitized experience at some point. They still want to deal with another human being. I think technology is great and it does definitely help to accelerate the process to make things much easier, it definitely makes your life more convenient freeing your time to do the things that clearly brings you closer to your goals. But for some things especially when you're feeling a pain like as you said there is a plumbing situation or your cable breaks down or there is an issue with your kid at school, you will have to have some interaction with another human being. How do you see that manifesting with this whole digital revolution with chat bots and everybody trying to technologize their businesses? But at the same time as you mentioned still handholding and having that human element in the business that people still feel like they're not a transaction but they're a person.

Josh stated that he actually thinks this really kind of depends on your business and your industry. Like he said if you're selling spoons you could pretty much automate stuff. A school is a great example, like that's a personal thing, it's important. That would be in his opinion really horrible to digitalize, that's much more handholding than most others. You could make the argument, “Hey, you could put kids in school, and you make them watch videos and that's consistent.”But he doesn’t think anyone wants to do that. But some people think of business like that, and they shouldn't. He thinks digitizing and systemizing and automating is a beautiful, wonderful tool and he thinks more and more people should use it. He thinks it's like any new technology though, what's going to happen is people are going to overuse it at first, they're going to get excited about it, they're going to go too far which is kind of what people are starting to do now. And then once they go too far, they realize, “Hey, that was too much,”and they'll start dialing back. A good example is like smartphones, everybody loves and uses a smartphone almost across the world. Children are given smartphones now at a young age, he didn't have that technology when he was growing up of course. But now like it was essentially they gave them the phone and they have free access, now parents are very aware of what's happening on their kids phone or more so, they're more restricted, they have hours that they're allowed to be on their phones and they’re not, they're adjusting backwards right and realizing a natural balance, everything works in balance. So, he thinks short term, he thinks more and more businesses are going to move towards automation as a way to save money and then over time they'll move back from the automation some to improve their customer experience.

Yanique agreed and stated that everything should be done in balance because at the end of the day we're still human and connectivity is so important. As you mentioned earlier because I'm the mother of a 13 year old and you're right, you give them the phone and you give it to them with no restrictions, no boundaries are set when the phone was presented to them but then over time you recognize that the phone is not taking precedence over the things that will really help them to be more successful. So, now you have to put boundaries in and clearly Apple realized that because they created Screen Time where parents can no shut the phone down, shut down their accessibility to certain apps without even having to have that interaction with the child because they would be on an app or a playing a game and at 9 o'clock the phone shuts down, it's bedtime because failing that you can tell them to shut the phone off but unless you're going to stand over them physically, how do you know that when you close that bedroom door and going to your room to sleep that they're really shut the phone off and they're not playing that game. So, balance is very, very important.

• When asked how he stays motivated, Josh stated that it depends somewhat but he’s a little different than most people. A lot of people are motivated by money, there was a time, fairly recently, within the last few years; he has heard this like a thousand times, he’s sure you've heard it too. But if you chase money, you become its slave, if you let money chase you, it becomes your slave. He really didn't fully understand that until probably a couple, maybe three years ago. So, he’s not really driven by money really at all anymore, he’s driven by helping people. So, his biggest goals in life are really to help other people achieve things that they couldn't do without him, that's his Why. That could mean team members buying a house they never thought they could afford, taking that trip that they always wanted to, buying that new car that they always want and it could be clients sending their kids to college and being able to more comfortably afford it or be able to retire earlier, that could really depend a lot on who he’s talking to but what motivates him is changing the world is such a broad thing, what does that mean? He could change in the individual people's lives in a significant way every day. And that's what excites him and gets him up in the morning and it's why he does everything.

• Josh shared that his business, he’s a big fan of having a CRM, he uses HubSpot, he uses it every day. He’s ridiculous with it, he loves it. He doesn't think Hubspot is the end all be all. He thinks you just have to find a way to organize yourself, your team, your customers in a way that makes sense. So many times he sees businesses and they don't have a CRM and he instantaneously like, how much money and effort and everything you’re leaving on the table, always have a system set up. Some cool systems he uses regularly, Grammarlyis a big deal to him. There is some really cool YouTube stuff if you're posting YouTube. Hemingway Appis amazing if you write any scripts or copywriting, it's a really, really cool app. He would suggest everybody who writes. So, he writes a lot of copy, he writes scripting. He helps people build websites, design emails, text messages Hemingway app is such a cool app. There's a lot of technology he uses every day like he’s in a software business so, he’s probably over the top with software compare to most. But he's sure he could list all day if he wanted to, but he doesn't know if there's one that everyone should be using this. He doesn't think there's a silver bullet for anything in life. It depends on what you're looking for, where you're at, where your business is at, where your personal lives at. It really, really depends, the only one he does suggest everybody be doing is reading books and he doesn't actually read books, he hates reading but he’s done a business book a month since he was 15, he uses Audibleevery day.

• Josh shared that the first business book he has ever read, the first he considered is like self-help books pretty similar to business books or personality books he kind of lumped them all as business books because he thinks it applies. The very first book he has ever read is the classic of all classics How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, he literally lives his life to that book more or less. It's an amazing book. If you're looking for sales, he loves Jordan Belfort Way of the Wolf: Straight line selling: Master the art of persuasion, influence, and success, it's an incredible book, it talks about tonality anchoring, some really cool stuff that's helped him not only sell but speak from stage and connect better with people. Know Your Why: Finding and Fulfilling Your Calling in Life by Ken Costa,it's an incredible book. And then Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, that's a really interesting, cool book too for a business owner if you own a business or run the team, Extreme Ownership is a very cool book, it's a book written by Navy SEALs. If you read that or not it's pretty amazing.

• Josh shared that there's a lot he’s excited about and it just really depends. He’s not this gigantic goal person, he doesn't think that way, he thinks of goals like a ladder. So, he needs things he needs to reach up and be able to grab and pull himself up, he’s not this big audacious goal guy where he wants to conquer this gigantic thing, that's just not how he works, he just keep climbing and eventually he gets there. So, for him the thing he’s really excited about is just helping individual people, he talks to business owners literally every day, there's a chance when you call on RevuKangaroo you'll get his team for the most part but you can get him and he loves having conversations with people and sometimes when you get an outside perspective and you can see things more clearly and sometimes those 15-20 minute, hour conversations, he could change the whole business, he could change the whole perception. That's what really excites him, it's not like he has this brand-new software that they're building, yeah, they're building really amazing software that he’s excited about but that's like a way for him to help people. So, the helping people is what actually excites him.

Yanique mentioned which dovetails back into the things that motivate you when you mentioned it's all about helping your people to grow and develop and help them achieve their goals and if they're able to do that then you feel like you've been motivated and it kind of pushes you forward to go on to the next day.

• Josh shared listeners can find him at –

[email protected]

Facebook – Josh Kelly

LinkedIn – Josh Kelly

• Josh shared that there's not necessarily a quote and there's probably a series of quotes and depends what it is. For a business owner, he has a good friend named Ellen Royer, she's actually really, really amazing and a great speaker too who once told him that, “Businesses are like vehicles.”So when his business becomes overwhelming he thinks about that business are like vehicles and what that means is, a business you could sell, you could drive your vehicle, you could sell your vehicle, you can abandon your vehicle, you aren’t your vehicle. So, if that business fails, it doesn’t mean you are a failure it just means that business fail. So, putting some context and perception into that actually helps him a lot. It helps him that nothing that he does is an emergency, no one dies if they don’t get enough reviews today, that’s just not how it works. He’s not a doctor, he’s not working in an emergency room, things he does aren’t emergencies and when he puts that in context it helps him a lot both personally and professionally. Another one he uses all the time is, “I don’t sweat the small stuff,”and in context, it’s all small stuff.

Links

• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Way of the Wolf: Straight line selling: Master the art of persuasion, influence, and success by Jordan Belfort
• Know Your Why: Finding and Fulfilling Your Calling in Life by Ken Costa
• Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink

Nick Mehta is CEO of Gainsight, the Customer Success company. He works with a team of nearly 700 people who together have created the customer success category that's currently taking over the SAAS business model worldwide. Nick has been named one of the Top SAAS CEO’s by the Software report three years in a row, one of the Top CEO’s of 2018 by Comparably, he was a finalist for EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year, and holds one of highest Glassdoor approval ratings for CEO’s. On top of all that, he was recently rated the #1 CEO in the world (the award committee was just his mom, but the details are irrelevant). He also co-authored “Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue,” the authoritative book on this field. He is passionate about family, football, philosophy, physics, fashion, feminism, SAAS customer success and people have told him it’s impossible to combine all of those interests, but Nick has made it his life’s mission to try.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey?
• Could you just explain a little bit more about what Gainsight can do for their company? And you can just use an example, maybe you pick an organization and tell us if they had that type of company, as a client of Gainsight, what would that add value for their company?
• How do you see customer experience evolving in the next 5 to 10 years versus where we're coming for from in the last 5 to 10 years?
• Could you share with us how do you stay motivated everyday?
• Can you tell us if there isone online resource tool, website or app that you absolutely can’t live without in your business?
• Could you share with us some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• Could you share with us one thing that’s going on in your life right now that you are really excited about – either something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find you online?
• Do you have a quote or saying that you kind of revert to, to kind of help you to refocus and get back on that path to what you’re workings towards?

Highlights

• Nick shared that he is very excited to be in this journey and be with here today. He has been working in business for a few decades, so definitely dates him a little bit. His journey into kind of customer success actually started way back in his childhood, because he does have a memory when he was a kid, he grew up in the East Coast of the U.S in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and his dad was an entrepreneur, but this is back in the days of selling big computers and software that was running on people's servers and all that. He remembers him saying that, if you ever go into business, one of the things you need to do, this was when he was little kid is make sure you're either the person building the product or the person selling the product because once you sold the customer then your job is over, you can move onto the next one. And those two, building and selling are kind of what a lot of companies really focused on for a long time. And in his early part of his career, he worked at a large traditional enterprise software company, a great company but at that time the company was very much focused on building and selling and so the idea of the customer experience and customer success, it was certainly something people would talk about in speeches and you'll say nice things about but if we fast forward into 2008 when he took his first CEO job where he was running a cloud SAAS company. A company called Live Office and he didn't know anything of the new cloud worlds, so he came in with that old playbook of building and selling and just really focusing on sales and kind of customer success, customer experience honestly was more of a necessary evil. Came into this company and ended up with the power of subscription, allows all to come or go anytime they want, every month or every year. He actually as a CEO, his whole schedule changes where he needs to spend the most time on customer experience and customer success and so he got very passionate about it at his last company and actually he got quite curious that nobody's solved this problem. And obviously that inspired Gainsight with customer success, they've been doing this about six and a half years and it's been real joy to see many CEOs kind of wake up to the idea that on nowadays, when you think about the growth of your company and the core of your company, customer success and customer experience is right at that core.

• Nick stated that many folks that are listening probably have had experiences with customers where sometimes your clients are so happy and everything you're doing is great and other times they are not happy and sometimes they leave you or they say not nice things about you and review sites or social media. And so, the question is fundamentally how do we drive customers to be more happy, more successful, and then spend more money with you over time either by coming back to your business or buying more from you or recommending you to a friend. That's what we all aspire to. And the real question is, what's the difference between those ones that go great and the ones that don't, and he'd argue that a core difference is - “Are you waiting for a customer to come to you with their issues, with their problems or are you analyzing and anticipating their needs and are you proactive with that customer?”And in the old world of business, when we didn't have, online interactions and we didn't have a lot of data about our customers, it was hard to be proactive because frankly you couldn't guess what your customer was thinking when they weren't in your store. But nowadays with all this stuff, whether it's loyalty programmes or ecommerce sites or your customer relationship management systems, or maybe a mobile application they're using, there's so much more that you can be seeing about what your customers are doing so you can actually anticipate their needs. That's the core, can you anticipate their needs and be proactive with them. So, Gainsight is all about taking the data that you have about your customers and really anticipating where they are in their journey with you and doing as much as you can to be proactive so that they're likely to stay with you and spend more money over time.

• So, giving an example. Adobe is a big customer of Gainsight and many people on the call probably have used Adobe Photoshop before, which is like the world's leading photo editing software. And Adobe has hundreds of thousands of small businesses that use Adobe's Photoshop in a suite they call creative cloud. Creative cloud is a suite of solutions for designers to basically be able to build better products and experiences. And creative cloud is sold as a subscription, so you sign onto it and you pay a certain amount per year based on the number of people in your company and Adobe had a challenge. We'd said, okay, we sell them that subscription and then at the end of that term, they either stay with us or they go and how do we anticipate how they're doing and what more we should be doing for them. So, they created a team that is working with these customers, looking at the data about how often they're using their software and whether they have kind of gone through the training or not, things like that as kind of signals, think of them as like kind of a footprints of the customer's body language. And you're basically figuring out, okay, where are they in their journey? And then in some cases, do we need to intervene? Do we need to reach out to them and say,

…………“Hey, can I help you learn about the product?

………….Can I help you learn how to use this new feature?

…………Can I be more proactive with you?”

And so, Gainsight's all about helping our customers use data to be proactive with their customers, to basically help them be more satisfied but also spend more money over time. They do that in a lot of different ways, they can do that if you've got big customers and where you're like managing them in a more kind of a human fashion, they can also do that in a way where Gainsight can be kind of embedded inside your website or your experience kind of like nudging the customer to do the right things in a more digital way. “Humanizing the Digital Experience!”

• Nick shared that there's a few different things that have changed the expectation of customers and that's kind of continuing to drive evolution in their thinking. He thinks comes down to at the end of the day, what people experience in their lives as consumers and kind of that sets the bar for everything we all do. So, obviously when we use applications online, those applications are very personalized to our needs, they're automatically anticipating our needs, they're delightful to use and they have to watch out for privacy, which is obviously the modern issue but they really use data to the advantage both of the company as well as the customer, personalize what you see and what you do. And he thinks that's what we experienced when we work with the big tech companies, whether it's a Lyft or an Uber or it's an Airbnb or anyone else and that sets the bar for a while. “Everyone I work with should know what I need, they shouldn't be asking me, they shouldn't have to ask me how happy I am, they should know that. They shouldn't have to ask me for what products I bought, they should know that.”And so, that's one thing is kind of their expectation on the experience. The other thing is and nowadays when we buy new products and services, at the end of the day we're buying, we'd argue not a product or service, but an outcome.

Outcome meaning, “I have a goal, I'm trying to achieve something.” And you can think of car ride as an example. He’s not trying to buy a car, he’s not even trying to rent a car, he’s trying to get from place A to place B, that's the outcome. And Uber, Lyft, other companies helps him achieve that outcome. With Airbnb, he’s trying to have a great experience with his family on travel, Airbnb delivers that outcome. And so, he’s not thinking as much about booking a hotel or booking reservations, he’s thinking about getting this outcome. And so, that concept of the vendor, the company being responsible for both a very personalized experience as well as owning the outcome. And think of the old world with the car, you buy a car and you buy a physical car and at the end of the day, it's your job whether you driving it or not, whether you know how to get to place A to place B, whether you get lost, whether you take the right route, it's your job. But when you hire Uber, Lyft, anyone else, it's their job to own the outcome, they have to make sure you have a good experience, they have to be price competitive, but they own the outcome. So, the thing that's changed is vendors are expected of very personalized experiences and to truly own the outcome in this new world.

Yanique stated that that's a mighty revolution there that were experiencing.

Nick stated that it’s huge and he thinks it's actually hard because it's a totally different mindset. You used to say like, “Hey, I make this widow, I deliver this service.”But now it's like, “No, I deliver this outcome.”And it's a higher bar, it can be stressful sometimes, but also very rewarding if you do it right.

Yanique agreed. Because the flip side is if you're really doing what you're doing right, then it means that your customers will walk and speak great things about you and they're going to talk about their personalized experience, they're going to talk about from top to bottom and everything in between and a lot of times none of your marketing captures all of that.

Nick agreed and thinks that that's so much bigger now because that advocacy, that informal word of mouth and because of social digital, it's everything. He'd argue nowadays it's very unlikely that a customer's going to buy from you without having talked to somebody who's worked with you before, either informally or through a review site, like a Yelp or something else. So, your customers are your growth engine now in this new world.

• When asked how he stays motivated, Nick shared that number one is of course is a big pot of coffee, which is on his desk right now. There's no substitute for that. There's a few things that for them keeps them motivated he thinks are probably true for a lot of people. Number one is he does think that there's a lot of purpose in this philosophy of like humanizing business and really not thinking of your customers as a transaction, but thinking of them as a human being on the other end and how you can have a mutually beneficial relationship, a lot of companies do that with their customers. So, there's sort of two layers of that and that's definitely the purpose is very motivating. Now when you talk about our customers and like you said, we have to do all practice what we preach. What motivates him is a few things. Number one, on the constructive side, he loves hearing the feedback on what we can do better because to him, when a client tells you what you can do better versus be silent, they believe that you can be better. It's like anyone that gives you feedback, the thing that they're telling you as well, you can be better. It's actually sad if somebody doesn't give you feedback because they're saying implicitly you can't be better. He thinks that what's motivating, if you listened to it the right ways,is feedback is a gift that's saying that you have a chance to be better, you're not your best yet and he hopes that throughout his life he’s never at a point where he’s at my best because that means there's all this better to be come in the future. Now on the flip side, he thinks it's important to also recognize that the job of working with customers can be tiring and especially if you're in a call center or you're dealing with a lot of customers in some way, it can be tiring to only hear those constructive feedback. So, it's nice to also hear some of the good things that you're doing and that's why he encourages his team and customers to also spend time with customers, their clients that they are doing well because you don't want to get an artificial sample of the challenges. So, he thinks it's really coffee, it's some constructive criticism and it's compliments every now and then. Those three things can, can keep you motivated.

Yanique mentioned, customer service, I've picked up what you said a while ago in terms of it's really hard and how I even got into this whole podcasting thing is that I'm a customer service trainer and I figured, okay, podcasting is really becoming popular and so this is a good way for me to have a platform where I can reach more people and bring greater awareness to customer experience. And so, one of the things I say to my participants in the training is customer service is one of the hardest jobs that you can ever do because the biggest part of any organization is the people. And it's funny because yes, data is so important and we're driven by data nowadays and things are digital, but I just don't see us getting to that point in customer experience where people aren't going to want to deal with another human being. Even with the rise of digitization, what's your thoughts on that?

Nick agreed, there's these sorts of two trends that are happening that can be kind of at odds with each other, but he thinks they're synergistic. There's this obviously amazing data and automation version of the future where we don't have a role on the planet anymore or we're merged with the robots or whatever, maybe that'll be fun who knows. But he thinks that with any trend, there's a countertrend the end of the Yang and the Yang is that people actually value human connection maybe more than ever, perhaps because it's a little bit more sparse nowadays because he has young kids at home and his oldest is 13, and just as is well documented, you'll see how little time they spend with people face to face anymore and so there's this sort of pure digital experience, which is great, but it means that all the human experiences are so much more special. And so, to him what that means in the field that folks in this podcast are in is that job of humanizing the experience has never been more important. Now you start to leverage the data, leverage the automation, you don't have to do all the busy work anymore, but your ability to put a human being in front of that is he thinks it's still as important as ever and he thinks one of the things that's interesting is as you probably see in your work too, call centers, some of them are switching back to like, “We're going to put a human on that first ray.” The automated stuff is great and sometimes some of that automation is allowing us to have certain customers that we're going to just put a human being there so they can have that human experience and he thinks that that's never been more important. He also thinks that on the flip side, we need to acknowledge that for our workforce, because frankly, otherwise these jobs become super demoralizing and he thinks we have to acknowledge the humanity in our workforce and leverage that and really celebrate that, not just treat them. The expression he loves to try to eliminate is employees are our greatest assets, which is implying that their assets, which they're not, they're not on your balance sheet, they're human beings and so really kind of trying to humanize the relationship with employees, which he thinks in the last 30 years as a society predicament America, we've gotten wrong where we've sort of thought of the employees much more as just a cog in the system.

Yanique agrees. Without the employee, the business really cannot function because you need people for the business to function.

• Nick shared that for work, as much as it's sometimes gives him funny and annoying, because you get a lot of spam messages, LinkedIn is actually a really powerful tool because you're talking about human connection and all that. And he thinks it’s allowed a little bit more humanization in business. The reality is that we can kind of look each other up on LinkedIn, understand a little bit more context of who you are, who I am. We can have a better conversation that way, we can find common connections. LinkedIn actually tends to be as a businessperson, a great way to engage socially with your customers, they get a lot of engagement when they post on LinkedIn. So, LinkedIn is probably the one that on a work setting, is sort of invaluable. Of course, I couldn't live my life without my ride sharing apps I also use Uber and Lyft but for work, it's on LinkedIn.

• When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Nick shared that there's a great book called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fableand it's pretty interesting because he’s sometimes skeptical of business books, we both had that experience that they can be very high level, you can actually pick up a lot of the information in 5 minutes in a summary and so he gets a little bit skeptical of, “Okay, is this really going to be worth my time?” And so, with some trepidation read this book called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team recommended by a friend, is a very famous business book and it's about this kind of a parable about a management team and isn't able to connect, it doesn't really have trust, that's the foundational issue. And it's funny because you start reading this, “I'm the CEO, I run a 700-person company and I'm like, oh great, this is going to be cool cause I get to see a company totally different from mine.”And he started reading it, he’s like,“Oh my gosh, this is like us. It's not just us, it's not 100 percent us but there's so many parallels.”They had their management team read it and they all felt the same thing, they're like, wow, there's so much we can learn by looking at it, maybe a little bit of an exaggeration, but there's so many things that without trust in a team you can end up really struggling with. And so, that's the one that he thinks is for him, it really stuck with him.

Nick shared that he highly recommends it, it's a quick read, but definitely an eye because you realize how much more you can do. He thinks if you open your eyes to how you can create trust in your team. The second book he'd recommend, another one that was very influential from the business side, it's called The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answer, it's by a venture capitalist named Ben Horowitz, who is a CEO as well previously. And it's a great book because he realizes there's not any like book you can write about just being a CEO or being a leader that has transferable lessons because every situation is different. So instead, he talks about basically how everything is hard, and you have to sort of accept that and maybe there's some kind of therapy and he'll talk to you about the challenges. So, he talked about all these challenges in his company as it almost fell apart but ended up being very successful. So, those are two he thinks on the work side that he'd recommend. On the personal side, he will say, admitting something about himself, he’s big on vulnerability and he'll say that one of his many flaws is he has a massive fear of missing out. He’s always wondering what somebody else is doing right now at any given point, whether it's at work or otherwise and FOMO as people call it and there's a very funny book by Mindy Kaling who's a comedian in the U.S called Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)and it absolutely captures his sentiment at most times, which is, “Is everyone doing something fun and I'm not invited?”So, that's a little bit more into the window of who he is.

• When asked about something that is going on that he’s really excited about, Nick shared that he'll share both. At work, one of the things he really believe if you're a leader and he thinks especially if you're a CEO, but he thinks true for any kind of leader or the leader that the organization needs this year, whether it's a small business or it's a big company is different than the leader it needed last year because every year your business evolves, your strategy evolves, your goals evolve and Gainsight, every year has different goals and strategies. So, every year Gainsight, his company needs a new CEO and he hopes it can be him. So, he hopes that he gets the job again. Now, that's not a formal thing that they do at review every year, but he thinks about it himself, what kind of CEO does our company need now? And they are kind of going through some exciting new things. They've moved into kind of a multiproduct strategies, they have multiple things they do for their customers and they are about 700 people and so, there's a general question of how do you run a company that's almost like a portfolio products instead of just doing one thing or doing multiple things and so, that's something he’s working on is what does it take and how can he learn from other companies to make that transition, that's on the work side. And then on the personal side, he'll say with the three young kids, their daughter literally today just started high school. So, he’s learning what it's like to be the parent of a high schooler, their oldest is a high schooler and that's absolutely a big joy but also a little bit of melancholy at the time passing by.

• Nickshared listeners can find him at –

www.gainsight.com

    Twitter - @nrmehta

LinkedIn – Nick Mehta

• Nick shared that he loves the philosophy that many boxers have espoused of, “It's not about how many times you get knocked down, it’s about how many times you get up.”That concept of resilience is very powerful. So, he thinks that that is probably something that does motivate him and sort of like when you're in those times of challenge that later on you're going to look back on that challenge as one of the proudest moments when you overcame it. And actually, he was talking to another CEO, much, much bigger company, very successful CEO and he said, despite the fact that his company's very successful, the most fond memories he has in the history of the company are the times of challenge because you all kind of work together and hunker down. And so, he thinks that's one of the biggest things that motivates him. And then the other one, which is always remembering that these are the good times, like right now, these are the good times that later on in life we'll look back on and some times in the moment you don't appreciate that, but kind of doing that thought experiment of being 30 years older and hopefully still being around and you're looking at weeks and months, which sometimes can feel like a grind and remembering that those are going to be the things we look back on with fondness and really appreciating that.

Yanique re-confirms, so, basically gratitude to appreciate what you're going through and also just to be persistent and resilient in anything that you're doing and just never give up.

Links

• Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue by Nick Mehta and Dan Steinman
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
• Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling

Inthis episode Yanique Grant, I am speaking specifically about a topic that I think is relevant to helping leaders in an organization to help their team grow and develop. And it has to do with honing the skills and building the potential of your existing team members that you have working in your company.

Now potential is someone's capacity to develop their skills with effort and coaching over time. And that's just the point, how can we know where effort and coaching will take someone over a period of time if you don't actually take the time to invest and identify if your investment in this individual will be successful?Now the first step in helping to develop or helping to grow someone to identify their true potential is you have to help them identify the best version of themself. And so, conversations with your employees, one on one conversations where you help them to identify where their strengths and their weaknesses are and what their values are. You can help them write this down, so they have it as a focal point, this is like the foundation of how they are going to move from one step to the next. Then you need to ask them questions, like, “Is there something that they've ever really, really wanted to do and achieve and accomplish?”Such as, you know, if they had a great passion to dance or they had a great passion to speak a second language or they had a great passion to play a particular sport. So, you have to ask these questions to identify what is really in their heart. The next thing is you have to ask them, is there any thing that they think is preventing them from reaching to that milestone?So, do they think they need to be a more assertive person, do they feel like they lack confidence? You have to ask them these questions and read their body language, get them to a place where they feel very comfortable sharing this information with you because it means now, they have to be very vulnerable to share this information. So that's the first step. You want to get them to really identify where they fall in terms of setting themselves up for success.

Then after you get to that point, we have to now help them set goals. One of the things that we consistently promote or encourage persons who are in our workshops is the number one rule of a leader is to help people grow and develop. So, if the people grow and develop, then the organization would grow and develop because in every company, the organization is the people. It's not the tagline, it's not the logo, it's not the uniform, it's not the equipment, it's the people and without the people, the company cannot grow and develop.And so, you have to help them set goals. Setting goals is an important part of helping them to achieve success and not success in terms of your financial statement for the business, success in terms of what they view as success. Now, research shows that setting specific goals will help people to get what they want. So, you write it down, and this is where you're going to put in a step by step, strategy, day to day activities that you're going to employ to achieve the overarching goal so you write a list of everything you want to achieve, check over your list and seriously consider what you've written down is realistic.

Because sometimes we're so bold and audacious, the goals are amazing and you should reach for the stars or even beyond the stars! I completely support that, but we have to think realistic at the same time. So, let's say the goal is to lose weight, for example. There's no way that you will lose 50 pounds in two weeks, it's just, I mean, maybe you could lose it, but it wouldn't be the healthy way and it wouldn't cause the weight to stay off. So, in setting the goals, you want to ensure that the goals are realistic. When you're setting the goals, you also want to affirmatively or positively affirm in your mind and on paper how you want the goal to be manifested, “I want to be less worried about my appearance.” “I want to be confident about my appearance.”So clearly the former statement sounds a little rocky and you don't want to sound rocky. You want it to sound affirmed, you want to sound confident, you want to sound fulfilled that you believe in what you are saying. In setting the goals, you must also be specific and specific means you have to set down certain timelines. So realistically, “I'd like to lose 50 pounds in the next six months to a year.”So, you give yourself enough time because when you research weight loss, the healthy way to lose weight is one to two pounds a week. So, if we go with the one pound a week, and there are four weeks in a month, realistically you can lose, let's say a minimum of four pounds per month and there are 12 months in the year, so, that's 48 pounds for the year. However, you could accelerate it, there are cases where people lose up to 5 pounds per week, and if you're losing five pounds per week, then that's now 20 pounds per month. And that 20 now is multiplied by 12 months for the year. So, you want to be very specific, but also be realistic in helping your team to set their goals.

Now, you set the goal, but you can’t just set the goal and the goal is going to achieve itself, you have to put in the work. So, once you have confirmed your goal is achievable and it's realistic, now is when you have to get to work, so you have to commit to the process, focus on the process rather than the end point. You know what the desired result is, which is to be 50 pounds less than you are now, or to own that home or to own that motor vehicle or to rise to that managerial position, whatever it is that your goal is. Note in your mind though, and also on paper that your long term goals, they don't have to be set in stone word for word because in the process of you achieving this goal, things will change, people will change, even you may change and your goals may change as well and it's not an exact science, so you don't need to treat it like one, just allow yourself some room to grow. Create a checklist, so important, so you can know where you're going and this is what is going to help you stay on track on a day to day basis towards the goal ahead and do those things every day without fail because the biggest thing or the most important thing in goal achievement is consistency. So, it's small incremental steps that you do consistently, regardless of how you feel, regardless of what challenges you are being faced with, you're doing it all the time.

So, we move on to we start the journey now, we've set the goal, we have things written down, we have our checklist. Now, we have to put some inspiration in place, we have to align ourself with people who we know will help us to achieve the goal. And this is why as a leader, you have to help your employees. Maybe there's another employee in the organization or another leader in the organization that you could bring in and this person could help this team member that you're trying to grow to achieve that goal. It can be a person, it can be a landmark, we want to help people to find inspiration so that in challenging times or times when they feel overwhelmed there’s something that they can connect to. And that's why it's so important to have some inspiration. A lot of persons nowadays, they try to achieve their goals, they have a vision board and on the vision board they would have the things that they want to achieve. So, they're constantly being reminded of the path that they're on, they don't get deterred and you position vision board somewhere that you can see all the time. It could be a case where you have somebody in your home that you know is going to be the reminder for you or at your office who's going to be a reminder for you or it could be the case where you may be have a coach and that's what we are as leaders.

Leaders are coaches, we’re mentors were, we’re there to help people achieve their desires. So, you've set these long-term goals, but you also have to set some short-term goals and short-term goals are the things that you do on a daily basis, on a weekly basis. We have to be confident because believing that we can do it is really a big part of the psychology of whether or not you're going to be successful. And so, negative thoughts will slow down once you're fully confident, you're fully in control of your thoughts, you don't let anything deter you, you focus on what you want to achieve. You have to take care of yourself, dress well, ensure you look good, groom yourself, think positively. When you have a negative thought, rephrase it positively, don't compare yourself to others, everyone is running their own race, we're not in competition with anybody, we're all here to collaborate and compliment each other. So, try not to get into the habit of comparing yourself to others and we can fall into that very easily. Social media, unfortunately, this is some of the negatives of social media that you’ll watch and see what other people are doing and you'll start to compare and think about where you are in your life. But we're all in our own lane, we're running our own race, we're not trying to compete, we're trying to collaborate and compliment. So just change up your mindset and how it is that you view certain things.

The next thing is you have to accept changes as they happen because in working to achieve the goal, you will buck upon some obstacles and you have to focus on the things that you can influence, you have to remember that you are engaging in a process, so, it's not about the end results, it's the journey. You have to adapt to new circumstances by setting new goals, so, if a pothole comes up or a little obstacle or hurdle comes that you have to jump over, think about it as, yes, it might be a setback, but the set back is there for a reason and what are you going to do with that to make it better.

And always be open to learning new things, even as the coach or the mentor that is helping the employee to grow, you yourself have to be open to learning new things from that individual as well. I do believe it's a two way street for both persons involved, so we really have to be focused on ensuring that we support each other, in support, you want to let your family members know, your friends know what journey you're on so that they can help you. Remember the people in your life - your circle of your friends, your tribe, your circle of greatness. Those are the people who are going to help you, they're going to keep you accountable, they're going to help you to achieve the goal. So, you always want to ensure that you get support.

You have to trust your intuition or your gut, that little feeling that you get inside your stomach sometimes when you feel like, “Oh, this is the right thing to do.”Or that little feeling that you get sometimes when you’re in a situation and you say, “No, I don't feel like I should go there, I feel like everything is telling me that I shouldn't go there today.” “No, I shouldn't eat that, no I shouldn't eat it.”Follow your gut because 9 out of 10 times your gut is so correct. Journaling also helps you to trust your intuition. You want to keep a list of the items, the times that your intuition helped you, reference your journal when you're working through a problem because it will help you to refocus.

And through it all, never give up. Focus on the fact that it's a process. You're going to achieve many goals along the way. Stay committed to achieving your goals. Be that encourager, be that motivator, be that mentor, be that coach, be the inspiration in that person's life, that when they do achieve that overarching goal, whether it was to sing or to dance or to speak a second language or to move up in the organization, they look back and say, I could never have done it without that manager or that supervisor who was coaching me, always believed in me, never gave up on me, even on days when I never believed in myself, they were my biggest cheerleader.

And that's what I want to encourage you as leaders is everyone has potential, there's always potential and you have to believe that a person has potential and you have to encourage and motivate and inspire them to believe that they have the potential as well. We're all working towards the same goal to help each other be better, to help each other do better and the more we can really invest our time, time…..the most precious commodity that you could give to another human being is time.So, when you invest your time and energy into building the potential of another human being, it's priceless. There's no dollar figure that you can put on that. And I'm telling you that the person will value that time and energy that you've given to them to help them be greater and better and you would become great and better as a result. So, I encourage you to be a great motivator, be a great encourager and try to really seek the potential in others and build the potential in others because we all have potential to be great.

I believe that these things that we've shared today will help to create that culture in an organization. And remember, service starts from within. If you can build your team members potential from within then it's so easy for them to help to build potential and success in your clients and customers in the interactions that they have with them.

Again, if you'd like to follow us on Twitter, feel free it's navigating CXand please feel free to join our Facebook group, Navigating the Customer Experience Podcast.

Rochelle Gapere is an Attorney, Happiness Coach and Entrepreneur, known for bringing her charismatic personality and share joy for living to every experience and individual that she encounters. She has mastered the art of living life fully and passionately. The release of her first book, One Happy Thought at a Time: 30 Days to a Happier Youcements her lifelong practice of adding more happiness to this world by empowering others with the tools and techniques that help them lead happier, more fulfilling lives. Rochelle believes in living a life that is engaging at every level and utilizes practical techniques to teach audiences her unique approach to living a happy life.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey?
• What are some of the maybe three top things that you would share? Would a business owner and entrepreneur, whether in an online space or in a space where they actually have an environment where customers come in and interface with their employees as to how it is that they can use some of these disappointments to propel or pivot their business to the next level?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• How do we get our business owners to the point where they're a little bit more understanding to the fact that it's not just about the profits because the profits have to come from within first in terms of developing the people and if you profit with developing the people's minds and the goals that themselves want to achieve on an emotional, financial, physical level, then it will manifest into financial for the business in the long term.
• Could you share maybeone online resource tool, website or app that you couldn't absolutely live without in your business?
• Could you share with us maybe one or two books that I've had the biggest impact on you?
• Could you share with us one thing that’s going on in your life right now that you’re really excited about – either something that you’re working on to develop yourself or people?
• What’s one quote or saying that during times of adversity, you draw on this quote or saying to kind of rejuvenate or to just get back on track?

Highlights

• Rochelle stated that she would say she has always been a very happy person, as a child she wasvery free spirited, very optimistic and that followed her throughout her life to this point. She practiced law and she’s still practicing law, actually next Wednesday will make it 14 years since she graduated from law school. So, time definitely has flown and so her entire life she has always wanted to be an attorney. She went to school in Jamaica, she went to St. Andrew Prep. School and then she went to Campion College and she left Campion College and went to Nashville for Undergrad, Tennessee State University and then she came to Miami to law school in 2002. She went to the University of Miami School of Law. She remembers being a child and people asking what do you want to be when you grow up? And for her, she always knew she wanted to be an Attorney and even her yearbook, it's written in there, “Oh Rochelle is going to win cases by dancing for the judge or something crazy.”So, it's interesting that even as a 16-year-old student, she was very clear. And so, she always had laser focus on her goals and she knew that was it, nothing could pretty much hit her off course and it wasn't anything that her family told her she had to do, it truly was something that was a deep desire in her heart. When she got to law school in her first semester though. Just to interject a little bit, she graduated a semester early and when she graduated from college, she worked at her aunt's law firm, she was a partner at the law firm. So, it was just like the perfect pairing. She went there bright eyed, bushy tailed and so there was something about that energy in that big law firm setting that was very off putting to her. She would wear very colorful clothes and she was extremely up beat and very happy going to work in the day but the whole environment was just kind of melancholy, just sad. Of course, it was a big firm, they were doing really well, they had excellent cases, but the energy on a whole just was not really light, not what she would have thought this whole law firm experience would have been. And so, from there it shaped her mind that one, she didn't want to practice in big law, at least she went into law school knowing that and one specific really, really resonated with her and it stayed with her pretty much for the rest of her life actually. One afternoon, like a Thursday or Friday, it was a second-year associate and she was scheduled to go to Italy on a vacation with some friends and she was very, very excited, really looking forward to the vacation. And so, when she (Rochelle) was leaving work on a Thursday evening, because she didn't go in on Fridays, she told her to have an amazing trip, hope she has fun and it was her first vacation she was going to take as an associate in a big firm in two years and that's typical. So, on Monday she gets back to work and she's at her desk and Rochelle is like, “What are you doing here? I thought you're supposed to be going to Italy on this long-awaited vacation.”And she pretty much said on Thursday when she was about to work, one of the senior partners came in her office and said to her, “Oh, you need to work on this motion that needs to be submitted.”And she told him, “Yeah, but I have a prescheduled vacation I needed.”And he said, “Well, you could either choose to have your job or to go on this vacation.”And so that was something that stuck with her for a while and she wants a life, she wants work life balance, she knows she wants to have meaningful work, but for her happiness would mean having time to be able to go and be with her friends and family on a vacation. We have 365 days in a year, so for her it only made sense that if she’s going to be working hard, she also would need some balance. She went into law school with that at the forefront of her mind. First semester of law school she realized, “Oh, maybe I don't want to be an attorney, I like the knowledge of law. I'm not necessarily sure if I like the practice of law.”And at that time, she was 21 years old and had no other idea of anything she could possibly do. She wasn't going to drop it to law school, she’s a Jamaican, you start what you finish and not only start what you finish, you have to do it excellently. So, she was just like, “All right, well it's 3 years, I'm just going to do it or whatever.”So, her whole law career, up until this point has been very balanced where she practices, but she has always had a side hustle. So, she has curated and created a life, work life balance where she does law and she enjoy law and the practice of law. She loves the knowledge of it, but it isn't the thing that wakes her up in the morning where she’s justbursting with excitement to go and practice law or research legal matters or whatever. So, the happiness journey, it really is organic because it's who she is truly. She is asking the question why? There has to be a bigger purpose, a bigger purpose, a bigger purpose. And it was in 2016 and she really was getting a little bit, it wasn't anxious, but she was agitated a little bit, when you get to that space where this is just not enough, and she just needed more. And so, life is so incredible how sometimes the things, the doors that close are the doors that sometimes propel us to our purpose, which is what happened to her is that she was in a long-term relationship and she thought she was going to marry the person she was with and the relationship ended. And it was through that relationship ending and friends and family asking her how she was doing, and she told them, “Well, I am sad and I'm disappointed that the relationship ended because of course I'd been with the person for five years.”like up until that point, she had envision and pretty much created a future where he was an integral part of it and he would be an integral part of the actual work aspect of it. So, when that pretty much blew up in her face, it was one of those things where obviously she has had to press forward. And she got to a point where she was just like, “What now?”As she has come in contact with friends, they would ask her and she would tell them, “Well, one area of my life being bad doesn't mean my entire life is bad. I still have a career. I still have family and friends who love me, I still have my health most importantly.” And as she tells people that, they kept saying to her, “Wow, you have a very refreshing perspective. You probably should write a book.”So, she had an Aha moment and she was like, “Okay, maybe I should write a book about this.”And she loves books, she’s obsessed with learning, she still has a library card, she goes and pick up books every week, she reads voraciously, and she has always known she wanted to write a book, but she just didn't know about what. So, the Aha, the bell went off and so that's how she ended up writing the book. But in writing the book she realized she still wanted to dig deeper, why was it that she had this perspective that people kept telling her was refreshing, why wasn't it just something that comes second nature to people on a whole? Aren't we all on this earth wanting to be happy? Most of the things that we're doing, it's because we think it's going to add to our joy, whether it's buying a new car or going on a vacation or dating that person or whatever it is, buying the purse, that is what it is, that constant want or seeking happiness and fulfillment. So, she started studying the science of happiness to get deeper and in studying that science of happiness and just researching, she came across the School of Positive Psychology and she was a psychology major in Undergrad, but at that time, 1998 to 2001, the psychology was more based on, “Okay, what is wrong with you? How are we going to fix it?”But now, this school of psychology, which was birthed within the last 10 years, it's more of a “No, what's right with you? Let's figure out ways to even enhance it.”So, when she’s doing the research, she was just like, “Oh my God, I love it.”She could not stop learning. So, she went along, she got a Positive Psychology Certification through University of Pennsylvania and so from that point on, she has just been studying the science of happiness, she became a Happiness Coach.

Now, she coaches people, businesses how to add more happiness in their workspace, individuals how add more happiness in their day to day lives. She has written a book, she’s one of the cofounders of a woman empowerment summit they are called ‘Women Winning Now’where she speaks about happiness and teach audiences how to add happiness into their day to day life. But it truly is a closed door that got her here and so now she jokingly tells people when they tell her, “Oh my God, I'm going through the breakup.” or“I got fired”or the rejection or whatever. She says, “You are in the absolute best place you could be because now you get to create a life that you want, so you take the disappointments or you take the wisdom that you've gained and you now have this blank, clean slate and you could create from that space, which is what I did.”So, she is a walking billboard of how a plan that you have for yourself, the plan A sometimes may not bethe best plan and that you just have to be open to pivoting and just being open to learning some more. She is just using the rejection or the disappointment to propel you in a grateful, more amazing existence, which is truly her story.

Yanique stated, this is just truly amazing and it dovetails nicely into the whole podcast theme of navigating the customer experience because I find a lot of businesses, they have people who work with them, they have leaders in organizations, but at the same time they're not using the negatives or the disappointments as positives and pivoting them to a realm where they can really shine.

• Rochelle shared that she thinks of course it depends on the company culture, so, whoever is at the top, the energy trickles down. So, she thinks what has happened, and traditionally so is that people view work as just survival. So, for like somewhere between 55% to 80% of people, it's normal to see work as something to be endured, and not something to enjoy. So it's interesting because we spend the majority of our waking hours at work, so you'd think that you would want to create a company culture where work life balance would be something that you'd make a priority and not only that, we're dealing with human beings, so you have to think the people who work for you, they also are going through their own human experiences before they ever show up in the building. So, for one, of course it's the company culture that you're creating, and everybody definitely has different leadership styles, but there are companies now that realize the happier employees are, is the higher the work productivity. Google is one of those companies that's very, very forward thinking. They have implemented mindfulness programs because the more mindful you are, then you show up at work and you're able to focus on the matter at hand as opposed to coming to work and then you just have a whole million, trillion other things that you're focusing as opposed to what you're supposed to be doing in this space. So, for one, of course a company culture, for two, she thinks it all just keeps going back to the environment and the whole company culture. Have you ever shown up in a review, your performance evaluation and your supervisor or your boss have ever asked you, “Are you happy?”

Yanique answered, I don't think so. And I don't think in any of the organizations that I have worked with, they actually have that question in an appraisal.

Rochelle agreed. She is going to say what she defines happiness at work to be. So, it's a feeling of overall sense of enjoyment at work. Being able to gracefully handle setbacks, connecting amicably with colleagues, coworkers, clients and customers and knowing that your work matters to yourself, your organization and beyond.So, with that definition in mind, why wouldn't you want to know if the people who are working for you are happy and if they're fulfilled. And so sometimes people just want to know that you that they matter and that you care. And so, it's not that you're saying are you happy and then they are coming and telling you all their life story, it’s just, “Are you happy? I see you; I'm affirming you. What could we do in this environment to make it better?” And a lot of companies, they're just telling their employees want to do, they are not creating a safe space where people feel vulnerable to tell employers what could be better. It's a, “This is the way and you should just operate in our systems.”At the end, everybody has a vision for what it is the business that they're building. But listen, the people who are working for you they are the best parameters of telling you what is working because they are literally on the floor, they're on the ground, which is why that show Undercover Boss works so well because lot of times when you're sitting in an executive office or whatever, you are not necessarily connecting with the person who is really and truly handling your day to day operations. So, what you may think looks good on a manual doesn't necessarily translate to real productivity or an actual experience. So, you would literally have to get down and dirty and on the floor sometimes with your employees and find out what they're thinking. And so, one simple thing to implement to help this is that you could just have an anonymous suggestions box. So, you could just say, oh well, you may not know that, “Okay, you would give us a 35-minute lunch break but then the closest restaurant is 17 minutes.”So, you start building in those kinds of things and you are like, “Okay, this is why that's happening,” or all of a sudden, a couple of people have been showing up to work live, why are they showing up late? Oh, maybe because now what they are doing like construction on the highway that's really like, so now they have to build an extra time. These are just little questions because this is day to day, it's human dynamics. But if you're not asking the questions, how do you know? And so, it's communication and it's not just top down communication, it's also bottom up communication because you need to know what people are feeling. She’d say the communication aspect of it. And another thing is just implementing team building exercises. So, one thing that she does enjoy about her legal space that she works in, they make it a point to celebrate everything. And so, this month, she just got an email this morning they're doing Asian Pacific celebration. They celebrate black history month, Hispanic heritage month, there are always some little celebrations, whether it's ice cream day, it doesn't take anything out of a business to bring in three tubs of ice cream. Maybe everybody won't participate but guess what? When your employees are now seeing each other, not only as my coworker and they have an exchange, how is your mom doing or whatever, you feel more comfortable asking them. One, “Okay, do you have a template on this legal case that I need?”It breaks down the whole just competitive nature of any space and it makes it more familiar. So, that's also an aspect, but lots of times people are thinking, well, the one hour that we take to do this every month, they could be doing more, they could be answering phones. Actually, maybe not. Sometimes that one hour that they use increases the productivity more because now one, they feel more affirmed in the space, they feel like they matter, you did something nice to acknowledge them, it makes them want to be loyal, want to work harder for you. So little things like happiness workshops, building emotional resilience, you asked me, okay, “How is it that you translate the rejection or the failure into productivity?”People don't know what they don't know, they don't know. Rochelle stated that she’s a psychology major and she never even knew the school and positive psychology existed until she went seeking that thing two years ago. So, think about all the employees within your environment that literally just don't know. And so, a lot of us stop formative learning at around the age of 21 to 24 years old, let's say you graduated from Undergrad at 22 years old, 24 let's say you, as an attorney, you have this additional three. So, let's just say most of the formative learning, 25 that’s it, you stop learning if you're not forced to learn. So, all you're doing day to day is the exact thing that you have known before you showed up at this job.Why wouldn't you want to help people expand their minds, bring in different speakers?

Just the little things to challenge people, to open their mind, one hour of how to increase productivity chat today. One hour of building emotional resilience, one-hour of becoming a better communicator, but even employers, a lot of them don't even know that these things exist. So, they would not even see the importance because she’s very, very clear when she presents, when she talks about happiness, she’s always very clear that the things that she talks about are rooted in science, it's not just “wooo….woooo….woooo.”That's so fleeting. There's no subjectivity but no, there is tons and tons and thousands of research studies about happiness in the workplace. Employers need to be made aware that these services are available and really the importance of equipping themselves with the knowledge in order to help their employees become more productive. Because guess what? That's the point to work. People are at work for productivity, to make money, to get returns on investment, if you're not doing that, then you're are just having a hobby. You want to have an impact of course. So, there are certain deliverables that you know you need. So, if in being there are standard things that you could be doing to get the results that you need for your business. Why aren't you doing it?

Yanique stated, lots of powerful nuggets there. Keep happiness workshops, talk about the emotional resilience, having a culture where people feel comfortable and the feel at home at work. Very important to ensuring that you have a strong service culture. And a lot of what you touched on focused on the fact that at the end of the day when a customer has a bad experience is really symptom of something that's happening internally, which means that the staff is not happy, the energy flows from the top down, so probably the leaders themselves have no sense of direction in terms of their own happiness and if you don't know where you're going, then there's no way you're going to be able to lead other people.

• Rochelle shared that there are days when she doesn’t feel motivated. She’s human, so that's one of the things that she is very vulnerable and very clear about. She wakes up and she choose to act. So, sometimes you have to get past the emotion of things, but then there are days when she literally says, “No Ro, you need to just relax because you can't pour from an empty tank.”And she said earlier, work life balance. She is a better Rochelle when she gets adequate amounts of sleep. She is a better Rochelle when she is working out. So, motivation comes for her, comes from the fact that she’s actually doing work that she loves, work that she knows she was put on this earth to do, even when she’s tired, she could talk about happiness. She can teach people or motivate people about ways to infuse their life with more joy. She loves to inspire people to become the best versions of themselves. So, she truly believes that she’s operating in purpose, but it doesn't mean that every day is just wake up and bounce off the wall with energy days. It just means that she makes the choice because one thing that she’s keenly aware of is that our time is finite. And so, she doesn’t know if she’ll have tomorrow or if she'll have next week or the week after that. So, one thing that really keeps her going is that she lives everyday as if it's her last day because it very well could be her last day. And so, with that at the forefront of her mind, it helps her to one, not get bogged down in the small things that really are not edifying or not helping her become better. And then it also helps her get through and process negative emotion sooner. Cause she’s like, “Well, if I only have a finite amount of time, do I really want to spend my energy on this negative thing or this negative person or I'm I going to use my energy to be more solution focused or solution based.”So, it really is a mindset matter for her. So, she renews her mind like in the Bible it says, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”She literally tries to renew her mind every morning. One, she doesn't really dwell in the past because she can't change the past. And so that is what a lot of us do as humans, they're just scientific concept rumination where you will just get stuck and bogged down in this thinking and rumination coupled with regret causes us to just be crippled. And we'll just keep thinking, “Oh, I should have done this better.” “I should have done that better.”“If I could just change this.”But really you can't change it, all you have the power to do is changed your present. With that in mind, she’s like, “Okay, I'm going to use the lessons of yesterday and the past to propel me into a greater future and a greater presence.” For her, everything starts in your mind, if you conquer your mind and your thoughts, then it's just sets you back. It sets you back.So, for her, she’s huge on affirmations, she wakes up in the morning, she affirms herself, even when her energy's low, “Ro - You woke up this morning. That's a blessing. You can do it.” And by the time she kind of gets herself hyped up with her affirmations, she feels better and then she also uses different inspirational tools. She reads success magazine, there's an Instagram page that she loves before 5:00 am by Joe Duncan, he always has really good energy. So sometimes the inspiration may not come from her internally, but she knows the sources that she needs to go to get inspired. She’s keenly aware that she’s a human being and that everyday she’s not about to be on firing at 100% cause she’s not that. She gives herself space for that, there are days that she just decided today she’s just going to wake up and if all she did today was survive then that's enough and she celebrates that too. Every day doesn't have to be a winning day, some days she literally woke up, she made it through the today, here she is and she’s alive and some days it’s just sits in the bed and read a good book and have passive thoughts because you need silence in order to activate your creativity.If you're always doing something, then you don't just have the time to just let your mind be clear enough to be able to have creative thoughts.

Yanique agreed. As a leader in an organization, you also have to have some of these conversations with your team members whether it’s in group or one on one to kind of get them to that place because the reality is we're all socialized differently and it's clear your parents did a really great job in getting your mind to that point where you are able to just turn yourself around and you know exactly what to do to get to that point. But that's because you've been cultured that way, so it's very easy for you to connect that way. But in an organization where you have so many different personalities, let's say you're leading a team with 50 people. I was at church yesterday and Father said in church, statistics for Jamaica is one in every 40% of Jamaica he said, or one in every five people that you meet are suffering from some psychological disorder. It’s resounding, it would mean then that if you have an organization, it's quite possible that 5% to 10% of the people that work with you are having psychological issues. But do you know, and then mental health is not something that we're just feeling very comfortable to talk about.

• Rochelle then stated that this is where she mentioned earlier about the company culture and it's the feedback. So, this is a thing, when you said you stand in your truth, you liberate others to stand in their truth.She’s speaking generally, but let's say for a business specifically, your employees are going to react to the environment that you have cultivated for them. Which is why she said if you are saying in performance evaluations are you happy or you are also sending out email databases, let's say, you have your company email and small implementation, every month you may have a newsletter. All of a sudden someone reads that and they're like, “Okay, they care about this.”you're not going to hear someone saying, “Hey, do you have mental health issues?”But no, you have now made it okay to talk about these things because you have presented it in the newsletter or you put up a flyer in the lunch room that says that, so now people are assumed that and they're like, oh, they have this in the work room or you may have books in the office library that some are on whatever, like happiness or bipolar disorder or feelings of depression. People want to start seeing that in the environment. They're like, okay, we could talk about this thing and the mere of fact that they put this in here, it means that somebody is one, made aware, two, that we could maybe talk about it and three, that now it's in their conscious mind, but that's the problem is that nobody is really talking about it so, it’s just like if you're in a group full of your friends and you said, “Oh, you know, I went to therapy this week.”All of a sudden we were like, “You went to therapy? I didn't know you go to the therapy girl.”You will make it okay to go to therapy because you have liberated them, “If Yanique can go to therapy and Yanique looks like she has it all together, then I can go to therapy too.”And she says to people, if your tooth is hurting you, you go to the dentist. So, if you're not feeling mentally good and in a good place or you're having thoughts of suicide, seek the help, but you will only seek help that you know is available to you and she thinks that is one of the main things in Jamaica is that we are a society where we don't really talk about mental disease or mental illnesses, it's still very taboo, so, as a result, nobody feels safe to say and speak up because they will feel judged and stigmatized. Whereas now in America, it is very, very, very prevalent for you to talk about it and she'll even use the example, she took 7 weeks off of work, I went on a sabbatical and how that manifested. In 2016 when she went through her breakup, she decided, “Okay, what now?” 2017 she went to her boss and she (Rochelle) has always been a really good employee, high performer, very well-adjusted happy person. And she went to her and said, “I need to have a really honest conversation with you. I'm in a space where I don't know what's next. I feel confused. I feel totally like just underwhelmed. I just don't care about work, you know, it's just like I don't want to be here.”And so, she said to her, “Oh, um, maybe you should move to our DC office or our Irvine Office?”And she was just like, “Oh, I don't think that would help because I'm just going to take the same Rochelle to all these spaces. I truly need a 5 week.” And she went and asked for unpaid leave. She didn’t want to have to think about work. She just wanted to check out of her regular environment, go away somewhere and just be able to be one with her thoughts and just think about what she wanted to do next. And so, Rochelle uses that example all the time because she had a supervisor who was empathetic and understood what she meant by saying, “I needed a moment.”So, imagine if she went to her and she’s just like, “Oh, we don't care, get back to work.” But she felt safe and her workplace created an environment where she felt comfortable enough to go to her to say that. And she ended up getting 7 weeks paid vacation and in those 7 weeks she traveled all over Europe. She was based in Oxford with a friend who was a Dean at Oxford University. She was based there and then she traveled around, that's where she wrote her book and she came back to work feeling one, rejuvenated, refocused, renewed and so, everybody won't necessarily have the opportunity to do what she did but what we hope people have the opportunity to do is feel safe to say that to their boss. That's why she’s a firm believer of allowing employees to have a mental health day, it doesn't necessarily mean that all you have to be sick with chicken pox or the flu. No, you literally took the day off because you just needed to be off to whether you go to the therapist or whether you went to the beach just for a moment to read, re-gather yourself. And so, that's what she’s saying, the conversations just need to be had so people feel safe to be able to talk about it but it’s just little clues that you could start incorporating, the flyer in the break room, the asking are you happy in this performance evaluation, putting the books library at the office, sending out in the newsletter. Maybe just including a positive quote every month, asking employees to submit a positive quote, to be included in the newsletter so they feel like, “Okay, they want to make an effort at this.”Sothen people want to speak up.

Yanique agreed. So, we have to have more leaders who are open to being vulnerable and being empathetic and caring enough that you feel safe and you can share information with them. You were speaking a while ago, you reminded me of one of the people that I look up to so, so much. She helped me so much during a time in my life when I needed to get through some family issues. Brene’ Brown and I did a course with her. I can picture the two of you on stage, I think you should. I think you should try and partner with her to do something because I can see the two of you are clearly aligned, I get the same feeling, I get the same message, I get the same connectivity when I hear you speak and when I hear Brene’ speak.

Rochelle asked if Yanique had watch Brene’ Brown’s documentary The Call to Courage? People need to feel safe to just be themselves. And so, this is another thing she'll say is it starts honestly with you. When she goes to work, she doesn’t care about the energy that is in the office, she shows up as her happiest, best Rochelle self. She tells everybody good morning, she gives people compliments, people want positive feedback. She tells her coworkers, “I appreciate you.”She brings maybe a $5 Starbucks gift card every once in a while. It's just little things because happiness truly starts within yourself. If you are not happy internally, you will not be able to go to work and just miraculously be this happy employee. No, you have to be happy within yourself and then what you show up as it is what's coming out of you. So, she always, good morning, she talked to the Security Guards at work, every person wants to be seen and feel that they matter. And so, when your boss looks on you and says to you, “How was your weekend?”You feel good because it's not, “Where's the report? What did you do?”No, it literally is, how was your weekend? It took one second and it's your boss so you're not going to sit there and say, “Oh wow. I went to the club and then I got drunk.”No, you probably stop and say, “It was great. How was yours?”That's it. It just like a co-worker last week unfortunately her sister had a stroke and ended up passing. Should come back and it was so sad. And so, she came back to work, we had flowers on her desk, like succulents. So, she'd have to water it and nurturing, that literally didn't cost anything other than $10. But you could tell the gratitude on her face when she saw that we did that and signed a card for her. It's the same, it's little things, it's just being kind. Every person wants to be in an environment that's one, positive, two, where you just feel like you could go there and not feel judged or overworked or overstressed and people actually will work harder for you if you treat them well and it doesn't take a lot to treat people well. She'll use this as an example. Last week she had a rash on her arm randomly, had to go to the doctor on Wednesday and there was a case that she worked on that was time sensitive and she needed to bring it to work. But her boss said to her, “Oh, I know you're having this rash as long as you're okay, don't worry about the time sensitivity of this file.” She ended up going to work Thursday at 2:00 pm to drop it to off.

Rochelle made that extra effort because her boss treats her with respect, and she cares about her. When she saw her in the office on Tuesday, she actually saw my arm and she's like, “What's wrong with your arm?” So, it didn't take anything out of her (Rochelle) now on Thursday to go out of her way to go there with this rash still on her hand to drop off this time sensitive file. Before she left the office, she came by and she said to her, “I appreciate you for coming to do this because I know you didn't have to.” And that makes a difference. She will show up for her again and again and again and again because not only does she just look on her as a worker, she looks at her as an actual human being because we can all get a rash, we could all be sick, we could all have a sister who had a stroke.

Yanique agreed. And that's what you want. You want bosses are people who you work with who can connect with you on a human level, who care. And they don't just take for granted that because you're being paid, you have to do it. You don't have to, and you have a choice. And the fact that you made the effort and then she actually recognized the fact that you made the effort, you definitely appreciate the fact that she values you.

Rochelle stated, exactly and that's what she keeps saying. People just want to feel valued and they'll do more if you are just a kind person. It's small things, when you're in the office, stop pushing the closed door on the elevator, hold the door for somebody to come, just basic things. If you see somebody walked in with the box or the bags I the vows, the little 10 seconds that you will use to open the door for them. It's just the little things, it's not a big thing, but it all starts within you. So, each individual as you show up as your best self in the office, people will also want to show up as their best self.

• When asked about a tool that she couldn’t live without in her business, Rochelle stated Google. Google is every single thing. There is nothing you cannot find out on Google. Simple things as how do I put this new column on a Microsoft Excel Sheet, let's use that as an example. Google, there's a video to show you how to do it. There's an article and a video, whatever your learning style is, it's there for you. But you know what it is, we live in our society now where people don't really want to seek a lot of knowledge, they want you to tell them so it's like our curiosity is just going down, but we have more access to information than we ever had in history. There's no reason why you shouldn't be seeking answers, just like, okay, if your boss says, “Oh I need you to do this one thing.”you don't know how to do it, you don't have to be waiting, you need to be very self-motivated, be self-actualize, be able to find things for yourself. People don’t have to spoon feed you knowledge, go and look for it as simple as Google because guess what, Google will give you the research article, but it will also give you the easily digestible information too, and we all have smartphones. So, gone are the days where like, “Oh, I can only go on the laptop.” No, it's right there at your fingertips. So, for her, she would say Google is one of the things by far every single thing that you need to figure out, it’s there. Even her as a lawyer, she looks up stuff all the time just to get your pulse of what it is, like okay contracts on Blah Blah Blah. Oh, what happened in this circuit court? Easy. But obviously they are the legal databases that have the knowledge, but in Google she gets a wide variety of information, articles, news articles, interviews from people that talk to issues that matter to them. What she will also say that we have to start doing as individuals on a whole, stop seeking information from the same exact sources. So, for instances, open your mind, so if you are someone who watches CNN all the time, why not watch BBC? Or if you always read Huffington Post, why not just go to Fox News to see what they're talking about? So, what happens is that we become so insular sometimes and we just stick to what we know that you're not learning about anybody else or what other people are thinking. How are people doing your exact business in India? Have you thought about that? You could become more efficient. You don't know, let's just say there's really no new, new, new idea, so there’s somebody doing exactly what you're doing somewhere else in the world. But have you ever even taken the time to see what they're doing, what’s the digital agency doing in Russia right now, what’s the digital agency doing in Pakistan, they have a digital agency there. Have you ever thought to research what they are doing? Maybe you'll have a couple of Aha moments.

Yanique agreed. Even from a customer service perspective, customers don't benchmark their customer experience and much same businesses anymore. So, you have local companies in Jamaica who are being compared to Amazon even though they're not in the same space. But that's because people are having different types of experiences and they're expecting that, if that company can do it then why can't you?

Rochelle agreed and stated that the thing she will say, people are not open to criticism. This is the issue because people take criticism as a reflection of who they are, they get defensive. You could have a $20 bill and you could crush it, you could step on it, whatever, it's still a $20 bill, it doesn't change its value because you crushed it up or threw it against the wall or whatever. So, what a lot of employers could do, especially when you're in a customer service-based industry, you need to be asking your clients and your customers on a regular basis, what could we do better? She'd be open to what they sell. She’s not saying you're going to ask them every day or every week whatever, but you literally can just be like, you know what, April I'm going to have a What Could We Do Better Campaign twice a year. And then whoever you send it out or you ask them and nowadays you have Instagram, it's so easy. And you could easily say, “All right, well when I come in to Tastee or Sugar and Spice during 12:00 pm to 3:00 pm rush hour time, I would hope that you'd have minimum 4 cashiers because I need to get in and out.”But that's just simple. So, all you do is know that during that time you are going to do that, it's not hard, it's not rocket science but you don't know because you're not asking because now you're taking the criticism as an affront to you as an individual and becoming sensitive to the feedback, not realizing that feedback is literally what makes us better. And she has had to work on that because it's easy to be in your head thinking that,“Oh, I have it all figured out.” But guess what? You also only have your point of view and your view of the world. So, you could teach me certain things, you could say, “Rochelle, how have you ever thought about doing it that way?” And all of a sudden, her mind has now expanded, and she could do it that way.

And so, with customers, because you're dealing with people on a day to day basis, it is imperative, and it is so important that you ask what could I do better? Where could I improve? And you know what too, you'll start seeing trends, you'll see like 10, 12 people say the same exact thing and then you're like, oh whoa or you may even get really good ideas. It's interesting that recently she announced that she’s going to launch an online course called Happily Single and she has put it out there just randomly, haven’t given much of the course details or anything. She has had so many people one, send her direct messages about little things that they think she should include. She did her filming in two different sittings, so she took their feedback and she implemented some of that and then one random girl said, “Oh, do I smell another book coming?” And she’s just like ding, ding, ding, because she thinks she’s going to write a book about this. But she would never have received that feedback if she wasn't a person who always, when she communicates with the people, her audience, she always ask them, “What do you think I could do better?”or “What do you want to learn more about?”and she doesn’t take it as an affront because guess what? She’s not every single woman living in the world, nor is she every person seeking happiness in the world. So, she needs to know what people need to hear from her, to become successful.

Yanique agreed. So, feedback is very, very important and it's not even just from a customer experience perspective, it's just generally speaking. It's funny you mentioned that because I find a lot of businesses and even people generally when they do get criticism, they do get defensive and they get defensive in the weirdest ways. I remember a couple of years ago I went to a fast food chain and I found a cockroach in my box. And the first thing the cashier asked me when she opened the box was if the cockroach was dead or alive. I'm not sure how that question was even relevant because whether or not the cockroach was dead or alive, the point is that the cockroach was in the box. So, the questions that we ask, I'm assuming the question was probably going down the avenue of well maybe if a cockroach was alive, possibly he crawled in there at a different venue not at the venue that they had presented me with the box. But regardless, we do get defensive as people and I put myself into it as well. Sometimes you think, as you said, it's a personal attack against us as a person and if you really just try to take the emotion out of it and look objectively at what a person is saying and just look at the fact that maybe there is some merit in what they're saying and maybe that's something that you could change or do better.

Rochelle agreed and stated because how do you become better if you aren’t learning? And a part of learning, it's just like when you're a child, if you got a math problem wrong, then you knew it was an area you probably needed to study more. You didn't study the things that you got right all the time, you tried to also correct the things that you got wrong and it made you better, so the next time we took the math test, you got the question right.

• When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Rochelle stated that The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz, she will not talk stop talking about this book. The Four Agreements, it is tiny and it maybe short read, but it is the gift that keeps on giving because it's literally 4 topics and her favorite isDon't Take Things Personally, that's agreement number 2 and it goes right into what we just spoke about, about getting the feedback and not making that be a reflection of who you are. It's not a reflection of who you are, it's just information and so, The Four Agreements, it's one of the books she tells all her clients to read it, she tells every friend to read it. She kind of can’t stopped talking about this book. She has a mini version on her nightstand and then the original version on her nightstand also but it's such a good book. So, she would suggest that each person read that book. It's an older book now, it is Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. So that's one of those books that she really loves and her book One Happy Thought at a Time: 30 Days to a Happier You. But she loves about Outliers is that it's just the truth, it's not rocket science, what you practice and what you do over and over again, you become better at and you're just not going to cheat the system. You're just not going to cheat the system, every single successful person who is operating in a spirit of excellence they’ll tell you, they practice, and they practice more. So, let's even talk about Beyoncé, she recently released her Coachella performance on Netflix. She said she practiced for 8 months for a 2 day; 2 hours isn’t that wow. But people would just look on Beyoncé and be like, “Well, it's Beyoncé.”No, she is Beyoncé obviously because she has natural talent, but she is also Beyoncé because she’s putting in those 10,000 hours. So, Rochelle says to people, you have to do the work, you're not going to cheat the system, you have to do the work. Usain Bolt, he trained hard. Michael Jordan, he trained hard. Lebron James, he trained hard. You know what, at the end of the day things may not go your way and you get back up again, and you keep training hard and you keep working hard. And so, she would say you just have to put in the work, want to accomplish your goals, to accomplish your dreams. We all start at different starting points in life, so it's not saying that, oh, the person who started with the private school education and the access to tutors and all that, may not have more assets up front to mobilize but it just means that you may have to work a bit harder, but nothing is really out of your reach but you have to just try it. So many of us, we just get bogged down in trying to see the entire story and how we're going to make it work rather than just taking the first step. And so, she always says, small wins are still wins and those small wins build the momentum for the big wins. So, she tells clients, so you have a business idea just buy the domain name, you'd be surprised what that $9.99 investment on GoDaddy does for your self-esteem and for your confidence. But if you sit down, you're like, “All right, I have to writing the 20-page business plan, get the funding, build the website that Dah, Dah, Dah.”By the time we think about all the things that you have to do, you just are kind of demotivated, you kill your spirit, but if you just start operating, just putting one foot in front of the other, you'll be surprised and that's why she likes to talk about little tools to help you, which is why she said you'll be surprised what that flyer in the lunchroom does.

Are you happy? How could we make the workplace better? Here's the anonymous box, putting your feedback. We just want to hear from you. We value our employees, literally just having even a wall with some positive posts in there, positive quotes on the wall. You may have it in the bathroom stall. So, you walk in and you're like every day you may not feel like being here, but you show up every day, that quote, all of a sudden you see, you're like, okay, I got you. That's true. Every day I don't feel like being there, but I'm showing up, and you reading that, it just triggered something in your brain so it's not big, big things, it's just little things that ultimately that we just all have to start doing individually and then of course as a group that will help increase the customer experience and just ultimately enhance all our environments because a happier employee goes home as a happier parent, as a happier spouse.

• Rochelle stated that Women Winning Now, it is on June 9th in New York, they are so excited. It's a month away. And they're in the throes of planning and the thing about Women Winning Now, for those who don't know, it's a woman's empowerment summit and she love it because she became so much better after each one. So, they've had Miami, Toronto, London so far. And they have all sold out and what is beautiful about it is that women come in that room and you can tell the trepidation, and everybody comes in with different stories. Some women they want motivation to start a business, some people just want to know that they're just not even alone and so, by the end of the day, the transformation that literally takes place in that small amount of time, it's incredible and she always tell people, the best investment you could make is an investment in yourself. So, as much as she imparts knowledge into those ladies, every time she leaves any Women Winning Now, she’s a better Rochelle for having experienced the people, having heard their stories and having their knowledge imparted on her. So, she’s really, really excited about it. Her business partners Rachel and Nicole, all of them, their missions in life is to truly impact others and just make them see that they too are capable of creating the life that they imagine and that they dream of and not only are they able to do that, but to see that it just is a work in progress because we don't have it all figured out and she thinks that's one of the things that most of the women realize is that, “Oh, they're also trying to figure it out too.” Because as long as you're living, you're always growing, and so you'll always be figuring something out. So, if it's not okay now I'm a single woman, but then I'm going to transition hopefully one day into being a wife and a mom, I'll have to figure that out. So, it's beautiful being around other people, hearing their stories, she'd go back to the vulnerability aspect of things when you see other people as confused as you or trying to be great, you don't feel as alone anymore and you're like, “Whoa, she was me 2 years ago. I was, Rochelle went through the breakup, was trying to seek my purpose and here I am. Now, I'm clearer. It doesn't mean I know everything, but I'm a little bit clearer and so now, I share my wisdom.” So even if she could prevent another woman from getting as stuck as she was in that season, that's a huge benefit to her.

• Rochelleshared listeners can find her at –

Instagram - @rochelle.gapere

Twitter - @RochelleGapere

Facebook - @RochelleGapereHappinessCoach

Website - www.rochellegapere.com

• Rochelle shared that her quote is Romans 8:28, “I am a Believer.” That verse has literally sustained her, and she may even get a little teary eyed saying it, “All things really do work together for good, for those who love God and are called according to his purpose.” So, the good things of course, when they are good, it works for her good and she is able to really just appreciate that. But when it’s bad, that’s the hard part and just knowing and repeating that that yes, it may be bad right now, it may be bad in this moment but in the grand scheme of things Rochelle knows that God is using it for the betterment of her in fulfillment of her purpose and so, no matter what season she has ever been in her life, that bible verse it has sustained her. It really keeps her grounded and it just makes you know that no matter how disappointing today may be that tomorrow can always be better and that if she has the right perspective, she knows that it will all be blending together, the good, the bad, the not so good, as this incredible cake and she gets to choose the ingredients that she wants to put in that cake in terms of the memories she attached to the good things or the bad things and she knows it works together for her good and it just really keeps her going. So, even the bad things really, truly aren’t that bad.

Links

• The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
• One Happy Thought at a Time: 30 Days to a Happier You by Rochelle Gapere

Sandy Rogers is one of the most prolific minds on the topic of customer and employee loyalty. He will change the very way your organization views the topic and will help orient your company towards winning loyal customers and employees for life. Sandy Rogers is a leader of FranklinCovey’s Loyalty Practice, a FranklinCovey offering which helps organizations increase customer and employee loyalty. He was previously the senior vice president at Enterprise Rent-A-Car and during his 14 years there, Sandy managed the turnaround of the London, England, operation and led the teams that developed Enterprise’s marketing and fleet-services strategies, the advertising campaign “Pick Enterprise. We’ll Pick You Up,”and the system for measuring and improving customer service across all branches.

Before Enterprise, he worked in marketing at Apple and brand management at P&G. He has a bachelor's degree from Duke and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey?
• Could you tell us a little bit about this loyal to practice? What does it entail? If a company wanted to take on this venture in their organization, what are some of the things that would have to happen?
• I want you to talk to us about why it's so important to have a healthy internal customer service culture.
• Could you share with us, you've been in the customer experience realm for quite a bit of time, how do you feel about customer experience on a global level and where do you see it 5 or 10 years from today?
• What are some important considerations person who operates in the online space should consider to improve on their customer experience, especially seeing that they're lacking that human element?
• Could you share maybeone online resource tool, website or app that you couldn't absolutely live without in your business?
• Could you share with us some books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• What’s one thing that’s going on in your life right now that you’re really excited about – either something that you’re working on to develop yourself or people?
• Could you tell our listeners where they can find you online?
• What’s one quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge in your life, you tend to revert to that quote or saying to help you to refocus?

Highlights

• Sandy shared that he spent most of his career with Enterprise Rent-A-Car and he joined the company and one of his first challenges was to figure out how to help grow the business faster, in the position of leading marketing and they figured the best way to do that was to provide an experience that would get everybody to tell your friends about Enterprise, so they would come back and help the business grow. And they had no measure of customer service, they thought they were pretty good, across the 3000 branches, they had back then, but they had no metric and so they early on measured it, figured out that they're good overall, but there was huge variation across the chain. And over the next 10 years he and his team, the whole group in Enterprise figured out how to dramatically improve customer service and as a result of what they did, Fred Reichheld at Bain wrote up a book and introduced this whole idea of the Net Promoter Score. And so, at Enterprise he had a lot of different jobs, but when he retired about 10 years ago, Franklin Covey, he got in touch with him about launching a loyalty practice under their umbrella to help other companies build a culture like they had at Enterprise that was really focused on delighting customers to help the business grow faster.

• Sandy shared that they do two things. They first help organizations measure the loyalty of their customers today and learn specifically not only what they need to do to improve, but equally important, who on their team needs to improve. They have a real passion for the importance of people in taking an ordinary experience and making it extraordinary. So, you got to know who on your team is terrific and should be studied for best practices and who needs coaching. So, beyond the metrics, the second part of what they do in the Franklin Covey Loyalty Practice is provide training and a method that enabled teams to get better at earning the loyalty of their customers faster.

Yanique asked, if you could share with us what you think that difference is between satisfaction and loyalty and why is it so important?

Sandy shared that just thinking about our own experiences as consumers, we may be satisfied and said, “How was everything?” “Oh, it was fine. Yeah I was satisfied.” But the difference between that and the loyalty that every organization wants from its customers and its employees is huge. With loyalty, not only are customers giving you all of their business, but in addition, they are enthusiastically talking you up, singing your praises, recommending you to all their friends. You have the double impact of their business plus the business of all the people they talked to.

Yanique stated, so loyalty is something that all organizations should aim for?

Sandy stated that he thinks almost every organization that is serious wants loyalty, they want loyalty from their customers. And they've learned over the last 25 years working with hundreds of different organizations that the key to increasing customer loyalty begins with improving employee loyalty.

Yanique shared that she’s happy he touched on that. As a Customer Service Trainer, because that's how I got into having this podcast in the first place. Companies hire me to come in and train their staff in customer service, leadership development employee and team building. And I have found over the years and I've had it reinforced by so many guests that we've interviewed on the podcast that at the end of the day when your service is poor, it's usually a symptom of something that's deeper within the organization and it stems from the employees and of course leadership.

• Sandy shared that the customer experience rarely exceeds the employee experience. He actually agrees with Yanique’s thought that we've got to, as an organization, treat employees in a way that they will in turn take great care of our customers. And back to his Enterprise experience, Jack Taylor, the founder of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, which is the largest car rental company in North America and perhaps the world now when you combine Alamo and National, which they also own. He said it's really simple. When people walk out of one of the thousands of Enterprise branches, they should feel like, “Wow, that was one of the best experiences I've ever had.” And we realized that that's all about our people and how the people are treating those customers. So, when Jack would go with him to visit some of the branches that he was overseeing in London, England, he would ask the employees, he'd meet, “Are you having fun?”And he (Sandy) would say, “Jack, why are you asking them if they're having fun? Talk to them about their sales, about their customer service scores.”He called him and many other Sport, he says, “Sport, if they're not having fun, nothing else really matters.”And so, when we think about how do we create an environment where people are having fun - very simply, we believe it's putting them in a position to enrich the lives of other people. Not just the customers, but each other, the people they work with every day. And that's what they talk about in this book through these three core loyalty principles.

Yanique shared that the book focuses on three core loyalty principles and the book is going to be called, as Sandy mentioned prior to the interview, Leading Loyalty: Cracking the Code to Customer Devotion.

The book is going to focus on:

• How it is that you can infuse empathy, responsibility, and generosity into every interaction. Make those interactions warm and authentic.
• Ask the right questions
• Listen to learn
• Discover the real job to be done
• Take ownership of the customer's issue
• Follow up and strengthen the relationship
• Share insights openly and kindly
• Surprise people with unexpected extras and the bonus, Model, Teach and Reinforce these Essential Behaviors Through Weekly Team Huddles.

So, what I'm getting is the book is not only focused on teaching the three principles, but it also is providing the how to as to how you're going to maintain consistency, because that's the challenge in customer experience. So, you go a company and you have a great experience today, but you visit them next month when you travel, if we're to use Enterprise as an example, and the experience you had last month is nothing compared to the one you had this month. And so, how do they maintain being consistent in their behaviors regardless of the location that you've gone to, regardless of the employee that you're dealing with.

Sandy stated that that is such an important observation. Every company in the world has pockets of greatness, where you'll get good service. The difference between a good organization and a great customer service organization comes down to the consistency of great experiences across, every week and all their different locations and people in call centers, etc. And to drive that consistency, we believe you've got to do these two things. One, you've got to have good measures that are telling you every month who's doing a great job and who needs coaching. And second, what they talk about in the book Leading Loyalty is a process to make sure that people understand the principles essential to earning loyalty, to bring those to life each week. So, in the book they talk about having a 15-minute huddle each week with your team and first celebrate the people who are living the principle you talk about last week. Then learn the nuances of how to apply the next one over the following week and then making a commitment to each other to do these things and come back next week and talk about what was successful and what didn't work as well.

Yanique stated that it's definitely having more conversations and helping people to grow and develop because the more robust your team is, the more knowledgeable they are of their shortcomings and limitations, then the better they'll be able to work at improving on those interactions and not repeating the negative behaviors that will create negative experiences.

Sandy agreed and stated that just simply modeling the behavior you want is the first step, but then calling up. We don't need to wait a week to point out, “Gosh Yanique, I just want to tell you. I just saw how you interacted with that customer. That is absolutely fantastic. We just talked about how important empathy is and that was a perfect example.”So, we've got to celebrate every time we see the behaviors that we want to happen more consistently.

Yanique agreed and stated that when you do that, it makes people aware of what it is that is correct and they'll want to repeat that behavior because people love recognition, it's not just about the dollar in terms of getting more money, but it's also about how you made them feel in that experience.

Sandy stated, underline, underscore, it is not just what we measure that drives improvement, it's what gets celebrated. We want to leave our work each day and feeling like, “Wow, I had a good day. Why was that? Cause I made a difference. I was recognized for doing something great for one of my teammates or one of our customers.” And so, the more celebration the better.

• Sandy stated that in his own experience as a business and a consumer, sometimes it's absolutely dreadful and we all have those stories. And occasionally it's incredible. And when we think about those incredible experiences that each of us have as customers, we're all customers, it often comes down to the people and how they made us feel. Our behavior delivers the emotional experience essential for earning the fierce loyalty of other people. And so, they really talk about in the book Leading Loyalty that you've got to have a loyalty leader mindset. You've got to begin with this idea that “I am responsible”regardless of what your job is in the organization. You can be the CEO or you could be the assistant or the frontline person, you can choose to be a loyalty leader and adopt a loyalty leader mindset, which simply says, “I am going to earn the loyalty of everybody I encounter by having empathy for them, taking responsibility for what it is they're trying to get done and I'm going to be generous with them.”

Yanique agreed and stated, I had also asked, apart from how you feel about customer experience, where do you see it 5 to 10 years from today? Do you think it's going to change very much? There's so much technology that's being introduced now, there's chatbots, there's so much things that are replacing that human interaction, but I personally believe that at the end of the day, even though these things are there to aid in the client experience, I think still people want to deal with another human being. Do you think that will change much 5 to 10 years from now?

Sandy shared that he thinks increasingly we will see technology used in both positive and negative ways in our experience. If the people designing the technology are doing it with the loyalty principles in mind, if they had empathy for customers, technology is great. We've all learned how to do online banking, we've learned how to check ourselves in for flights, we've learned how to order things from Amazon and when those things are working well, it's terrific. But there are times when we need a human being. He had a problem one time with the Amazon and he actually got a human being and he was blown away by how well that they handled his problem and it gave him tremendous confidence that “Wow, not only did the people who design all of us have empathy for me, but when I do have a problem, there's a human being there that will care and will take responsibility for getting it sorted out.”

Sandy thinks it's going to be both over the next 10 years. It's going to be increased technology, but there will always be that human component that Yanique alluded to.

• Sandy shared that every person has a customer, whether they're inside or outside the organization and all of our work directly impacts their experience. The people behind the online customer experience need to ensure that it's fully aligned with the core loyalty principles. So, if he uses whatever brilliant app that has been designed as a customer do you walk away and feel like, “Wow, that was so easy. Whoever designed this is like, they’re a genius. This is so great,”and that comes from having empathy for them as the user. Now, if on the other hand, he’s typing in information that the company should already know, then he’s feeling like, “These people have no empathy for me. What's with that? I've been doing business with them for five years.” So that these principles of empathy, responsibility and generosity have to come through regardless of whether it's a human being interaction or we're using technology to connect with the organization.

• Sandy shared that the online tool that he couldn't live without is Google Maps, that's how he gets everywhere.

Yanique shared, this is the first time I've been doing these podcasts as the first guest I've had that said Google Maps.

Sandy stated that in the old days they'd say, “Oh, just go take a left here, drive three blocks, take a right here, take a left there.”  Now, he’ll just put in Google Maps.

Yanique agreed, Google Maps is amazing. And that's very true. I even use it here in Jamaica if I'm going out of town to somewhere that I'm not very familiar with and I'm just amazed at how well it works. It's really accurate to the point, “You've arrived at your destination on the right,” and when you look over, it's exactly where you're going. So, I totally agree.

• When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Sandy shared that the book he read back when it first came out, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. That book has just such an enduring value and to just keep revisiting, my children tease me about the seven habits and reminding me, “Oh dad, that doesn't sound very win-win.”You have to live the advice you're preaching to your children.

Yanique agreed, and we all need people in our corner, in our tribe to help keep us accountable because we're human and yes, we read these books and we do our best to try and live these behaviors and attitudes on a daily basis, but sometimes we mess up. That's the truth. So, if we have people in our corner that know what those things are and they can call us out on it, it makes us even more aware and just keeps us aligned.

Sandy shared that that's one of the things they teach in Leading Loyalty. There are three core loyalty principles. The third one is generosity. You got to have empathy for people, take responsibility for helping them and then be generous with them. And one of the ways that we're generous is we share our insights openly. So, if you see something as my coworker or my friend that would really help me, we have a huddle in the book, chapter nine, which describes how do you share insights with and think about millennials and generation z where we've got a lot of confidence about how to share feedback online, but we want to have just as much confidence doing it face to face, in person where we let people know, “Hey listen, I think you're terrific. Can I just share this thought with you?”And we haven't practiced this one that we're teaching in the book.

Yanique stated, a lot of what you've stated since we started this interview has to do with practice and I just want, know if you could emphasize for our listeners how important it is regardless of the industry that you are in or the profession or the roles that you practice on it. You engage in on a daily basis, but in order for you to really master a particular skill or talent, practice is required, that's what builds the consistency.

Sandy stated no question, practice what we learn as kids, practice makes perfect. And when people hear things like empathy, responsibility, generosity, they'll say, “Well, come on. I learned that stuff in kindergarten,” and his response is, “You did. We all did.”And hopefully it's ingrained in our psyche, but just because empathy, responsibility and generosity or common sense, unfortunately they're not common practice in so many of my interactions. And so, to practice and to reinforce, they say, have a huddle once a week, bring your team together for just 15 minutes and celebrate the people who are doing these things, teach them in detail and the nuance is “How can I really discover the real job to be done for somebody,”which is our responsible practice, for example. And then challenge everybody to go try it this week and come back and share. And so, they're creating space within the whirlwind of our busy lives to practice these things so that we get better and better.

• Sandy shared that he is really excited about all the feedback they're getting from different organizations running these huddles. Ah, I'll tell you a story. They recommend this huddle process, there's 11 different huddles, 11 chapters in the book, and they had this group of Auto Repair Shops and when they described the empathy, responsibility and generosity, they looked at him like, “Are you nuts? I mean come on. I mean this is, this, that, lovey, dovey, Covey's stuff.”These guys, they have been under the hood of cars, you really expect them to get together and talk about this stuff. They ran these huddles for six months and they had their customer service scores because they were providing metrics and both them and Sandy’s team were very pleasantly surprised by how dramatically they were able to improve their customer service. People get stuck in a rut, they want to get better at customer service, but they don't know how to do it. They get frustrated and for these Auto Repair Shops, they improve their scores by more than 10 points on average. The top three or four shops improved by 20 points. So, he gets excited about working on something that makes a difference.

Yanique stated, and so when the book is released, now people will have a how to process that they can have, a physical, Bible that they can work with that will help them to achieve those kinds of results.

Sandy stated that this is what's different between this book Leading Loyalty and all the other books on Loyalty, which are great by the way. He loves Fred Reichheld’s work on the Net Promoter Score, “The Ultimate Question,” most of the books up until now, talk about the theory of loyalty, about the economics, about what’s the return on investment is by improving. This book talks about a process, they give you the principles, the practices and a process to actually earn greater loyalty. And it's not just from your customers and employees that the principles apply to your personal life too, apply these things to your spouse, your kids, your family and friends.

Yanique agreed and stated, as a matter of fact, there is a principal, I think it's from The Eighth Habit. It's called the 90/10 principle that Covey speaks of and regardless of the workshop that I'm doing, whether it's a leadership workshop or it's an employee workshop, it's for low level employees versus in a C Suite employees, at the end of the day I always introduce the principal at the beginning of the workshop because I think it's so important and it ties back to your initial introduction when you spoke to the fact that in order for people to be loyal, there has to be some emotional engagement and connection there. So, if you're familiar with the principal, Covey says that, “90% of everything that happens to you, it's based on your response and your reaction and 10% you have no control over.”And I think as customer service, people, leaders, employees, frontline people, regardless of where you are in the company, if you remember that fundamental principle that customer comes in blazing, mad, steam coming through their ears saying things that are just unconscionable, you're like, “Oh my goodness, why is this customer saying this to me?” If you can think in your mind, just put yourself in a frame of mind where 10% is that customer, I have no control over their own behavior, what I control how I'm going to respond, I control what I'm going to say, I control the thoughts I'm going to have about this customer, it can really transform that whole interaction.

Sandy agreed and stated that that's taking personal responsibility. You get to choose your response; you carry around weather to use the Stephen Covey phrase. But that's such an important paradigm or mindset to adopt before that nasty customer comes in the door and yells at you for something that you really had nothing to do it. If we've got that mindset, we can say, “You know what, this is not about me.”And I can have empathy. I can say, “Oh my gosh, wow. That is incredibly frustrating, I would be really angry too, tell me more about this.” And just letting people talk about. Enterprise, one of the best ways to create a fiercely loyal customer is to find a problem and then just hear him out. Just say, “Tell me about what happened.” Offer a sincere apology, say, “Oh my gosh. I mean, I totally get that. It was incredibly frustrating,”and then ask in a very sincere way, “What can we do to make this right for you?” And you know, more than 90% of the time the customer will say, “Nothing,I mean wow. I thank you for listening.”A heartfelt apology.

Yanique shared, there are times, as you said, the customer just wants someone to listen, someone to pay attention, someone to not discount or discredit what they're saying by just moving onto the next thing but actually paying attention to this moment now that I'm sharing this experience with you.

Sandy loves that the Chinese character for listen, it contains the symbols for the ears, the eyes and the heart. So often we just use our ears but if we're not listening with our eyes, we're missing the emotion that's being expressed through that clenched fist. And if we're not listening to him with our heart, we're not sensing how upset this person really is. Using all three and so much, it's interesting the word listen and silent, they're the same letters.

Yanique also shared that then there's also the fact that God gave you two ears, but he only gave you one mouth. So, I'm thinking, maybe there is some reason behind that. And it could be that we really need to spend more time listening and less time talking and unfortunately in our society, people do the opposite. There's lots of talking and less listening.

• Sandyshared listeners can find him at –

Linkedin – Sandy Rogers

Facebook - @SandyRogersFC

• Sandy shared that his stepfather told him when he was in high school, “No risk it, no biscuit.” Whenever you're feeling comfortable in the shallow end of the pool and feel like you've got it under control, throw yourself in the deep end of the pool and keep going deeper because that’s the only way that we grow as people.

Links

• Leading Loyalty: Cracking the Code to Customer Devotion by Sandy Rogers
• 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

Nathan Hirsch is a serial entrepreneur and expert in remote hiring and eCommerce. He started his first eCommerce business out of his college dorm room and has sold over $30 million dollars online. He is now the co-founder and CEO of FreeeUp.com, a marketplace that connects businesses with pre-vetted virtual assistants, freelancers and agencies in eCommerce, digital marketing, and much more. He regularly appears on leading podcasts, such as Entrepreneur on Fire, and speaks at live events about online hiring tactics. 

Questions

• Couldyou share with us a little bit about your journey?
• Could you share with us maybe one to three top tips that has really helped you to choose the right people for these organizations that you recruit for and why do you think it's important to be consistent in these attitudes or behaviors that you look for in these individuals?
• Could you share with us how you stay motivated every day?
• What are some important considerations for an entrepreneur or an online business owner to be successful?
• In an online business when you're not having that interaction with someone face to face. What are some of the tools or things that you need to do differently in an online space when you're not seeing the person?
• Could you share with us what’s one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• Could you share with us some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• We have a lot of listeners who are business owners and managers who feel they have great products and services, but for some reason they lack the constantly motivated human capital, the people. If you are sitting across the table from some of those persons, what's the one piece of advice that you would give them to have a successful business?
• What’s one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about - either something that you're working on to develop yourself or your people?
• Where can our listeners find you online?
• What’s one quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge times, you revert to that quote?

Highlights

• Nathan shared that he started off as a broke college kid. His parents were both teachers and he always had the mentality that he would go to school, get a real job, retire and that was going to be his life. And when he was a little bit younger, his parents always made him have a full time job, all of his friends were outside playing during the summers and he was inside working and he was learning customer service and marketing and management and all the things that go into running a business. But he also learned that he just hated working for other people and he really wanted something better. So, when he got to college, he kind of looked at it as a ticking clock, he had four years to figure out how to start a business or he was going to get thrown into the real world, get a job, and never looked back. So, he started buying and selling people's textbooks, he uses that summer money and the money he made during his summer vacations to buy people's textbooks at the end of the semester and sell them at the beginning of next semester. So, he started a little business there, created a referral program, before he knew it, he had lines out the door of people trying to sell him their books to the point where he actually got a cease and desist letter from his college because he was taking up so much of their business. So, that was his first glimpse into being an entrepreneur. And this was back in 2008, Amazon was just becoming more than a bookstore, no one really knew what Amazon or eCommerce was. There were no gurus or courses or anything like that. So, he started to sell other products on Amazon, and he tried sporting equipment and video games and typical college guy stuff, and he just failed over and over and over. And it wasn't until he branched out of his comfort zone and found the baby product industry that his business really took off. So, if you could imagine him as a 20-year-old single college guy selling millions of dollars of baby products on Amazon, that was him. And he really scaled that business using remote freelancers, remote workers. He remembered meeting with his accountant and him asking him (Nathan) when he was going to hire his first person and he kind of shrugged him off and thinking, “Why would I do that? That's money out of my pocket. They're going to steal my ideas; they're going to hurt my business…”all of that. And he just kind of laughed in his face and said, “You're going to learn this lesson on your own.”

• So sure, enough and before for his first hire, he posted a job on Facebook and this guy applied and he barely interviewed him and he hired him and it worked out great and he's his business partner today, amazing hire hard worker, learned quickly. So, there he was thinking that hiring was easy, that you post a job and someone shows up and your life gets easier and he proceeded to make bad hires after bad hires using a lot of the different platforms out there, the up works and the fivers and he just wanted something better and faster. So, three years ago he had the idea to launch his own marketplace FreeeUp where they vet applicants before they get on the platform, they only let the top 1% on, they make them available to clients whenever they need them, with a no turnover guarantee, if they quit for any reason, they cover replacement costs and get them a new person right away. So, that's really the evolution of him working a summer job to go into college, starting his book business, started his Amazon business and then starting FreeeUp.

• Nathan stated that just to clarify, they're not recruiting, it's not like they tell them what they need, and they go find it. They’re building a network of virtual assistants, freelancers, agencies that are all the similar mold that they know will do a great job for their clients. And you're right, that vetting is so important. He learned a long time ago that when you've vet someone just for skill, a lot of time it blows up in your face. You hire someone with a five-star review or 10 years of experience and two months later you're like, “What happened? This was awful.”And so, what they realized is it's a combination of all three, you've got skill, you’ve got attitude and you’ve got communication. So, when you're dealing with skill, you don't need everyone to be a 10 out of 10, they can be a five out of 10 or three out of 10, what you care about is that they're honest about what they can and cannot do and they're priced accordingly. On the attitude side, they do one on one interviews, they look for people who are passionate, they do don't get aggressive the second that something doesn't go their way, people who can take feedback and handle it professionally. And then on the communication, obviously you want someone that speaks your language on a high level, but it's so much more than that, it's being able to get on the same page quickly and hitting deadlines and being able to respond within a business day and use whatever clients communication method that they care about. So, they really looked for that trifecta and it's very rare that you hire someone that has all three of those and then down the line, you're like, “Wow, that was a bad hire.” Usually if you get all three, it turns out pretty well and he only hires from his own platform, his internal team is all virtual assistants, freelancers that got through their vetting process, the same people that are available to his clients.

• Nathan stated that motivation for him, it's funny, with his Amazon business he kind of grew up in a place where his dad taught in the high school next to him. And he lived in East Longmeadow and his dad was in Longmeadow, so, he went to high school in Longmeadow and all those kids, their parents were doctors, lawyers, dentists, business owners and so money was always a motivation because he was never poor, but he was middle class and he was always hanging out with kids that had so much more than he did. So, at first, money was that motivator and as you get deeper in that entrepreneurship and the honeymoon period kind of ends as he calls it, you realize that money's not everything and the Amazon business he lost passion for because of that reason, he wasn't helping anyone, he was just helping himself and he was helping his manufacturers and maybe his team. And, with FreeeUp, what motivates him is he gets to help business owners from all around the world achieve their dreams and scale their business. And on the flip side, freelancers who are also business owners, he gets to help them scale and provide for their family and do what they enjoy doing instead of having to get a nine to five job, so, for him, that's motivating. He’s a hardworking person regardless, it's tough to say like what is that thing that drives him, but he really found that within FreeeUp just the fact that he gets to help so many people on a day to day basis, that keeps him going. Even on days like today where he’s a little sick and he’s got three podcasts scheduled.

• Nathan shared that his mentality is you can't compete with big businesses on everything, you can't. There are always going to have bigger marketing budgets, bigger software budgets and all of that. But what you can always compete is customer service and that's something that he’s always been passionate about and you can always compete with the big players on customer service, treating clients like gold and they kind of take the mentality that 99% of the freelancers do an amazing job on their platform. He spent very little time dealing with issues, but these are human, stuff happens, they're startup, things just happen when you're dealing with businesses, so, when things do happen, they jump in quickly, they don't make excuses, they take responsibility and they just make it right and then they move forward and they built a lot of really great relationships that way. They have lots of clients that come in and have a great experience right from the beginning and that's obviously what they shoot for but they've also had a client that came in and maybe that first hire didn't turn out the way they want and they were so impressed by how they handled it and how they made it right quickly that now they are lifelong client and they got them someone else and now they love that person. So, for him, that mentality that the customer isn't necessarily always right, but it's in your best interest to make the customer happy at the end of the day, if you have that mentality, you can go a long way no matter what business you're in.

Yanique shared - I'm glad you brought up the point that the customer is always right because the statement itself is really incorrect as I'm sure you would have figured out because customers are not always right, we are human beings and we do make mistakes. However, one of the things that we teach in customer service training is that as employees in an organization, it's not our responsibility to prove the customer wrong. I love the saying, “The customer is always right,”and it's a wonderful guided principle but I do think as business owners, managers, leaders, coaches in organizations, we have to get the employees to that understanding that it's just a principle and a guideline because there are times when the customer is incorrect either in what they see, what they do, how they manage a particular process. But our responsibility isn't to say, “Hey Mr. Customer, you are wrong.”It's more to guide them to the correct way of how they are going to achieve success.

• When asked about tips for having that interaction with persons in an online space, Nathan shared that it took him years to figure out how to work with people remote. It's a totally different mindset. Some quick tips are using stuff like emojis to actually portray how you're feeling on a day to day basis in different conversations because words get misinterpreted. People fire off emails, he’s guilty of that too and you don't realize how that gets interpreted to people on the other end. So, anything you can do to actually relate to people, not losing the small talk and being able to express how you're feeling and being directed and getting clarity all goes a long way. He likes to keep everything in writing and make it super clear, exactly how he’s feeling, what he likes, what he doesn’t like and that's how he has been able to build relationships. And the other side of it is when he dealt with people remote for the first time, he asked them, “Hey, how can I communicate better? Tell me about your best clients and the relationships you had. How did they talk to you? How did they communicate? How did they build the team?” And he learned from that and he took that information and he feels like most people; they don't go that extra mile to learn from the people that they're working with or to learn a new situation like working with someone remote.

• Nathan shared that he uses Skypeevery day, using it now for a lot of podcasts. He slowly moved to Zoom for a bunch of them. He group chat with all his different teams, with freelancers and agencies that he uses. That's how he communicates with his business partner. He does phone calls with clients. It's such a great free tool and it just kind of goes to show that you don't need the most expensive software in the world. He works with 40 people and thousands of freelancers and his business partner and he uses Skype to connect with all of them. He uses other programs like Trelloto keep track of projects, but his primary communication channel is Skype.

• Nathan shared that he loves the Jeff Bezos books, he loves the Zappos books. Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsiehbook is fantastic, but the book that really resonates with him is Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek, the reasons he mentioned before where if you're an entrepreneur, you've got to figure out why you do stuff, not just how you do it and how you make money. There has to be a purpose behind it, and if you don't find that purpose, he doesn’t care how successful you are, he doesn't care how good your business is, eventually you're going to lose passion for it and you're going to realize that you wish you did something that you cared about. So that book always resonates with him.

• Nathan stated that there's never been a better time to start a business. And he would never say an easier time because starting a business is not easy. But if you go back 20 years, you needed $100,000.00 or more to start a business. Now you can do it from your laptop with a few thousand dollars. So yes, obviously capital gives you a big advantage but he started his Amazon business with a few thousand dollars, he started FreeeUp with $5,000 so we're not talking huge amounts of money and there's so many opportunities out there to make money online without making a big investment. So, he would get out of the mentality that you need a lot of capital and he would focus on learning skills that actually help you start a business with very little besides your laptop and some strong internet.

Yanique stated - if they have people that work in their business that lack constant motivation, because you said what motivates you is you like what you're doing, you love what you're doing, that's what gets you up going every day. What if they don't know what they like or they're doing it just because they need to collect a paycheck, they have to pay bills. How are we going to get them to be constantly motivated so the business can grow?

Nathan shared that he’s in the mentality that you can't change people, here and there you can, but it's just not worth your effort on a big scale to go around trying to change people's mentality. Not that you shouldn't motivate people, you can meet with them, you can find out what does motivate them and that's where being a good leader is. He thinks this is where he and his business partner were for years, they were on different pages because he would find someone that was weak at something and try to turn it into their strength. And for him, he was trying to find people, what people's strengths were, and he was trying to get them to do that strength more, he wasn't trying to change people and the same thing with motivation. He can only spend so much time trying to motivate other people, if he realizes they're not motivated, he knows there's tons of people out there that are, and he'd rather work with those types of people. So, he doesn't have any quick fast hacks to make the light bulb go off it and motivate people, he can tell you that a lot of times it's not just money, it has to do with your leadership style and sharing goals and making them feel a part of something. But at the end of the day, he doesn't go around trying to change people or forcing people to do things and they don't want to do. He surrounds himself with people that want to be where he is and want to work with him.

Yanique reiterate - so then basically you're saying in summary, as a business owner, you have to quickly realize if your time and effort is worth to be invested in this employee and if after trying for so many times it's just not working, you'd probably need to channel that energy into someone else that would be able to yield you that success you're looking for.

Nathan agreed that it's not just employees, it could be freelancers, it could be agencies that you hire and he has an agency that runs his Instagram every month and they're running a business and if he can tell that they don't care about his account or maybe they care about someone else's more than his, then he’s going to find a different agency that will. So, it goes across the board that not just internal employees in your office, it could be virtual systems or freelancers that you're one of 10 clients or agencies too.

• Nathan shared that he has been traveling, so let's kind of back up. At the beginning of last year, he had been on a lot of podcasts and he really wanted to get into guest speaking and then by the end of last year he was pretty exhausted by getting into guest speaking. So here we are, that's not for me. But he still enjoys talking with people, he still enjoys kind of having that stage. So, this year he’s actually launching his own podcast called the Outsourcing and Scaling. He’s recording, he has probably about 10 episodes recorded as we talk right now and that'll be launching in the next week or so. So, it's kind of a passion project of his, he’s not sure exactly the business ROI on it, although he thinks they'll have some great guests and it'll lead to great connections. But it's something he has always wanted to do on some level, and he thinks podcasts is a perfect channel to do it.

Yanique shared that now is a great time to be launching a podcast because so many people utilize this platform as an opportunity to learn and grow in different realms and genres and just different topics. You can consume this content while doing so many other things and it's just an amazing time for you to break through into this area. So, I congratulate you and please share with us the podcast name, what platforms are you going to be available on so that at least we can, if when you're launching or one once you've launched, our guests that are listening to this podcast can definitely head on over to those platforms and have a listen in on your podcast as well.

Nathan shared that it's called Outsourcing and Scaling, it'd be available on iTunes, You Tube, and a lot of other channels as well. It will be an audio Podcast and the video will be on You Tube.

• Nathanshared listeners can find him at –

www.freeeup.com

FreeeUp Blog

Youtube – FreeeUp

Facebook - @nathan.hirsch

Twitter - @realNateHirsch

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• Nathan shared that when he was little, his mom always said, “Work hard, play hard.”So, he kind of take that in all parts of his life. When he’s playing sports, I'm going all out. When he’s hanging out with his friends or his girlfriend, he’s focused there. When he’s working, he’s going all out every single day and that's kind of the mentality that he has taken.

Links

• Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh
• Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek