Navigating the Customer Experience

This episode with Yanique Grant, she will be speaking a lot about Customer Experience and one of the brand that she absolutely love and adore. Today is going to be another solo episode; she will start it off a little differently by sharing a quote by one of her favorite people, Maya Angelo. Maya says, “I have learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel.” It so important in every interaction that we have whether it’s face to face, whether it’s over the telephone, whether it’s an internet base connection, that we really aim to ensure that when people finish interacting with us they feel good because sometimes they won’t remember exactly what you said verbatim, they probably will not remember all the specifics of what you did but they are going to remember how the experience or that interaction made them feel, so we should always aim to ensure that our customers feel good after interacting with us.

Highlights

You are probably wondering, “What is this brand that Yanique is speaking about?” The brand is Apple, for those of you who knows her personally, who listens to her podcast, you will know that she is an avid Apple user, owner of a MacBook Pro, owner of an Ipad, owner of an Iphone, loves Apple absolutely and you’ll always hear her say, “Once you go Mac, you just don’t go back.” She is going to speak about some of the things that Apple has done to really create that magic formula, what are they doing in their stores and how can you take out some of the things that they are doing and inject into your own business. It is said that Apple makes US$5,000.00 per square foot on their customer experience and that is really amazing, when you compare that to other brands, Apple is performing like the brand Tiffany, the jewelry place, so there is no reason Apple should have all the fun or all the revenue because you can do exactly what they are doing, you just need ensure that you are doing the right things at the right time. Anyone can emulate Apple success in retailing by using the same principles of great customer service and customer experience. The first tip that we are going look at that Apple really emulate in their business is:

They focus on Getting the first moments right with every customer. The first moments a customer spends with a business can disproportionately affect how the customer remembers the entire encounter. Because of the way human memory works, if you get off to a bad start with a customer, it’s hard to recover, while if you do a spectacular job in those first few minutes, it’s a lot easier to coast to the finish line. Apple therefore strives to make sure your first few moments in the store go well. There are two discrete elements to Apple’s success here: Most visibly, they post friendly, enthusiastic, knowledgeable greeters near the front doors, whom she as experienced herself whether it’s in Florida or Minnesota or New York or Chicago, every time she goes to an Apple Store, regardless of the location, she is greeted by someone who is friendly, they are enthusiastic and they are knowledgeable and they are right there at the first point of contact. The only task for the shepherd is to tell you where you need to go and help you avoid the potential disorientation and stress that could otherwise be induced by the bustling store environment because their store is always packed. To take this a step further (or backward), they encourage you, well before you get to the store, to assist in creating a successful entrance experience by pre-scheduling your visit via the Apple Store App and that is just amazing. If Apple succeeds in getting you to do this, it means that when you get to the Apple Store the greeter can even more easier to interact with to get you to where you want to go. That’s step number one that they are definitely doing differently from their competitors.

Apple also Respects their customers’ time. The Apple Store app and Apple online scheduling options not only help reduce the initial stress of arriving at the Apple Store, they ensure that a customer’s visit makes efficient, productive use of the customer’s time. If a customer wants help with diagnosing a flicker in their MacBook Pro screen and only has 45 minutes to spend on the errand, there’s a good chance they can make it in and out of the store within that time frame. Does your business respect your customers’ time? Customers today are busy people, often working unusual schedules, and they appreciate those businesses that treat their time with consideration.

The next big thing that Apple is doing is they are Hiring employees who have the right personality traits for customer service. In almost any electronics retail store, the people selected for employment are enthusiastic about technology, and the fanboys and fangirls who work at the Apple Store are no different. But Apple doesn’t think this is enough. They strive to hire prospective employees who are also good, empathetic listeners. The reality is that in this age of consumer skepticism, a business is not going to succeed by giving a hard sell. Providing great customer service, in fact, is as close to selling as the Apple Stores get. We are not sure how many of you are listening to this episode are familiar with the book, How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, that book is a book that Yanique believes that every business owner, every sales person, every customer service person, every person in life should read that book at least once or twice per year because the book focuses on so much on developing your personality, understanding people, ensuring that you have the right personality traits, ensuring that are being quality human being by listening effectively when you’re conversations with people. When they’re thinking about hiring, you need to think to yourself, “Are you systematically hiring the employees who are most likely to succeed with your customers?” It’s very important for you to really focus on that thought, that’s a question you need to ask yourself each time you hire a new employee for your business.

The next thing that Apple does is they Train and train again. It’s not enough to hire employees with potential. Success with customers requires top-notch customer service training. This should start at orientation and continue at intervals throughout the employee’s career with the company. To take just one Apple example, employees are trained, right at orientation, that a successful customer engagement depends on deploying Apple’s systematic process (APPLE stands for: Approach-Probe-Present-Listen-End), and they are trained in how to tailor this formula to the individual customer. An employee can’t be expected to wing it here; training and re-training are what’s called for. Does your business invest in customer service training annually, semi annually, quarterly, monthly? Are you looking for opportunities to constantly injecting these people with the DNA that they need to succeed in every customer service experience that they have over the phone, through your social media, face to face? Because if that’s not what you’re doing then you’re not going to succeed. It’s essential, from employee onboarding through periodic reinforcement to larger-scale training workshops. As a customer service speaker, trainer, and consultant herself, this is where she risk sounding self-serving, but she would stand behind the importance of methodical, repeated customer service training even if she had no dog in the fight here.

Another big thing that Apple does that sets them apart from their competition is they Streamline. One of the great innovations of the Apple Store is its innovative and unwavering devotion to streamlining: removing everything that could get in the way of a customer’s engagement with Apple’s products and its helpful employees. In an Apple store, there’s a notable absence of cash registers, paper receipts, or anything else to clutter up the experience. This isn’t just an aesthetic choice; it provides clarity of mind for customers and employees about the purpose of the Apple Store customer experience. So, once a purchase decision has been made, or a repair is determined to be required, there’s nothing in the way of making the purchase or repair happen: no forms in duplicate, no waiting in line for a single cash register. These people walk around with devices in their hand that kind of looks like an Ipad and they are able to cash you out exactly where you’re standing, exactly where you’re interacting with them. It is so hassle free, the question you need to ask yourself about your own business is are you streamlining your customer experience? Doing so is almost certain to pay off in improved customer satisfaction–and, if it makes purchases easier, in immediate financial results as well.

Even though the 5 concepts that we have given you here that Apple is using, let’s recap. One is Get the first moments right with every customer, second is to Respect your customers’ time, third is to Hire employees who have the right personality traits for customer service, forth is to Train and train again and fifth is to Streamline. If you follow these steps, even though they are very straightforward, implementing them in a way that works for your business is where your understanding of what makes your business unique must come into play. She is not trying to turn you into a cookie cutter replica of an Apple Store, or of any other successful business. The goal is to keep “you” you, but in a way that gets the non-you out of the way of delighting your customers. Apple actually invented almost none of these concepts; they borrowed them most visibly in fact from the hospitality methods of great 5 star hotels. But by putting them into play in a very Apple way, they now seem to be an organic part of the Apple brand. She encourages you to go forth in your businesses this week, this month, look at your team members, look at your recruitment processes, look at how you’re streamlining, are you training and training, are you being pound foolish and dollar wise? But you really need to ensure that you are making sure that your spend is quality because if you invest in the development of your organization through your people and through your processes and through how you streamline and how the experience goes for your customers, what does that journey look like for them, is it one that is seamless, is it one that is hassle free, is it one that delight them then guarantee that you’re going to see lots of dollar signs at the end of each experience that your customers have with you and the good thing is, they’ll go out and become evangelist of your business, so you can actually use some of that money that your using for marketing advertising and reinvest into making that delight a repeat experience for your customers.

Links

• How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Heineken Recruitment YouTube Video

Kenneth Bator is the founder of Bator Training and Consulting Inc; he has more than 15 years of experience in helping organizations create environments where employees actually want to come to work and customers want to keep coming back. As a facilitator for training and strategic planning sessions and an expert in brand concept, culture building and management, Kenneth has helped 100’s of organizations since 2001. In additional to his career working with managers and entrepreneurs, he has also served as an executive of 3 different institutions throughout the United States of America and has assisted many small to medium size businesses to reach new levels of effectiveness. Kenneth is the author of The Formula for Business Success = B+C+S, The Pocket Guide To Strategic Planning: The 90-Day Quick Fix For The Business Owner or Manager and The Strategic Planning Workbook and Guide For Financial Institutions, his articles has appeared in many trade publications including the Credit Union Journal, Lifestyle Entrepreneur, CU Business Magazine and ABA Bank Marketing. Born and raised in Chicago, he earned a Bachelor of Science in Finance and an MBA in Entrepreneurship from DePaul University as well as a Certificate in Integrated Marketing from The University of Chicago.

Question

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• As a management expert, how do you feel about customer service or customer experience on a global level?
• Your book The Formula for Business Success = B+C+S, B is the brand, C is the culture and S is the strategy. Why do you believe that all of these three things need to be cohesively aligned in order for a business to reap success?
• In your experience as it relates to the brand, the culture and the strategy, what role do you think leadership plays?
• What would be 3 characteristics you believe a leader should have in order to be successful in these 3 areas of brand, culture and strategy?
• What are some important considerations that you would recommend to business owner they take into account moving into the online space in order to be successful?
• What advice would you give an employee or business owner in a business about sustaining a service culture?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• If you were sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated human capital, what’s the one piece of advice would you give them to have a successful business, specifically as it relates to constantly motivated human capital?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Kenneth Bator shared that his journey started with basically getting let go of an executive job, he was the Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for a 4 Billion Dollar Financial Institution in the Chicago area and with a change in executive management came a change in a lot of positions and his was one of the first ones but he decided that instead of going back into corporate life to do what he really loved and enjoyed which is teaching and public speaking and writing and working one on one with a lot of different entrepreneurs and business owners and he loved every minute of it. In a sense, the founding principle that he lives by as well as mentor many college students on is really find out what you love, do what you love and find a way to make a living at that, otherwise, it’s going to be a real uphill climb. He didn’t realize how unhappy he was in the executive job until somebody did him a favor and let him go.

• Kenneth stated that to him Customer Service and Customer Experience are two different things. Customer service is part of the customer experience, you could have customer service and it can be poor service, which means that you’re providing no experience or a very poor experience. A lot of what he teaches centers on that experience itself and he believes it first starts with creating an experience for your employees, it is very difficult to have a positive interaction with your customers if you don’t have employees that really and truly want to be there.

Yanique agreed that customer experience is different because the experience forms everything that they go through; every channel that they are engaging with your business and also, it is before they come in to work with you, so a lot of customers are very informed before they come to your business, with the onset of the internet, they can do their own research, they can look for information on their own, they are 60%-75% informed about what your business offers before they even have an interaction with you or your employees.

Kenneth stated that the example that he usually use, he uses one from his banking day is that customer service is we are going to handle the customer transaction properly and efficiently maybe even wish him/her a nice day and shuffle him/her out of our bank. A customer experience is when we have a line at the teller line, we are going to have somebody come by and offer them water and coffee, we’re going to ask them if there is something we might be able to do for them in an office, we might ask them,”What was your transaction today and what were you trying to accomplish? Maybe there’s another way that we can help you.” That’s an experience, that’s a how do we create a positive environment for our customer rather than just putting them in a line and giving them service and taking care of a transaction.

• Kenneth shared that around the time he was let go in 2001, he started to really delve into a number of different books and even before he was let go and was an executive, he tried to be a sponge and really understand all the nuances of business to take things to the next level, so he’d read a book on reengineering and he’d go to a seminar on empowerment and he would listen to a tape on Six Sigma and he would always think, “How do we put all of this together? How do you apply this? But not just tactically but apply it where it’s in alignment with everything.” Slowly but surely he came up with this brand culture strategy concept in that, “We need to know what is the image we want to create out in the public, we need to know what experience we need to create both through and for the employees and we need to know how to drive more of the right business to our business, brand, culture and strategy.” What he found that was developing in his mind is that he would do work in one area for a client for instance, one client would call him and ask him to do a strategic plan for them and they would do a very in depth written plan but nothing would get executed because their culture, the people weren’t passionate and wouldn’t support it, so the culture was an issue there or somebody would hire him to help them with marketing and build a brand message and they would do an awesome job of that and they would drive more of the right people to their business with that brand and that strategy but maybe the culture wouldn’t provide the main point that the customer experience that was proper, therefore everything falls apart. The same thing goes when you have a great culture where you have a team that’s really engaged and want to work and you have a strategy that makes sense in terms of having the right profit margins and the right product but if you’re not getting your brand message out there properly, you’re like the best kept secret, you’re not getting the people there to work with your business, so if the B or the C or the S isn’t quite right, then your formula is not going to yield the success that your business should have.

• Kenneth shared that leadership in management are different things, he’s a big fan of Dr. Stephen Covey’s work and he talked a lot about that whether it was in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change or any of his other books. Management is about moving around things and categorizing items but leadership is truly working with people which is a much tougher job, so from a brand, culture and strategy stand point, it really does start with the leader, somebody that understands that we can’t have a positive customer experience without having a positive employee experience and we can’t gain profit from a positive customer experience unless we have the right brand messaging to drive more of those people to our experience. And also so from a strategy stand point, you need a leader who understands that you need to not only just have goals but to have all the tactics and objectives aligned where people understand and can continue to move the organization forward, so leadership is key, without the right leadership and he has seen it too many times even with a great team and a great passionate staff it’s very difficult to have a successful business.

• Kenneth shared that the 3 characteristics a leader should have and the first is one is self-awareness and he can speak for himself as he has a very big ego and a type A personality but being able to step back and being able to say, “I screwed that one up.” “I actually do need to back to my staff and have a little egg on my face and say that one is on me guys, I messed up and maybe I took it out on you as my employee or my staff or my right hand person. Number 1, I apologize, number 2, we’re going, number 3, if you see me do that again then call me on it.” Second is engagement which you can also call involvement, he sees a lot of leaders that maybe have good intentions but they want to do everything themselves, take advantage of the resources that you have you’d be surprised at the things your staff can do even if your running a little ma and pa grocery store, talk to the part-time cashier ask him/her, “What do you think we could do to drive more business to our store?” and you’d be surprised, you’d get some great ideas. The last one is being able to take an airplane view, and he’s guilty of this and this is way he has a consultant for his business because he’s close to it even though he can consult with other people’s businesses but take an airplane view and be able to see how everything is working from above. We get so busy in the tactical, we get so busy in the day to day, “Oh, I have to do the books today, I’ve got to do the inventory today, I’ve got to do employees reviews today.” and you’re bouncing around from one task to the other, the ability to take at least 15 minutes a day from an airplane view and look down is not only critical but also provides some really valuable prospective.

• Kenneth stated that he has a client that wants to take their business online, they are not getting rid of their brick and mortar but they want to engage with their customers online and one of the struggles that they have is that they do have a great culture and they do such a great job of engaging with their customers when they walk through the door, how do we transfer that into online? What they are working on is what does a personal engagement look like online for their customer? Sometimes it’s a matter of asking, “What do you want Mr. Customer?” especially if you have a long time client that you’ve been working with for a long time. What does online business with us look like? What is comfortable to you? For instance, this client is actually looking at ways through their app to actually say, “Hello, Yanique” of “Good morning, Yanique” and to make that online a little more personable. So that’s the big question to ask is, “How can I create a customer experience online that is going to be aligned with how I works with customers today?” It’s not the end all, be all silver bullet but if you start by asking those questions, then you’re automatically on the right track.

• Kenneth stated that for advice on sustaining a service culture and if you’re going to do one thing, implement service standards and don’t just implement service standards, implement service standards from the ground up and what he suggests is get everybody on your front lines, get everybody that works with customers most often and he sees it when a company does merge with another organization and now all of a sudden they have 5 or 6 people that are brand new coming from a completely different environment and they say, “Okay, what do we do with these folks?” if you already have service standards, then he suggests getting everybody in a room and say, “Alright, we are a new team, we are a new family now, these are the service standards that we have, let’s discuss if we need to make an changes, additions or take some these things off. For instance, if we have a service standard that we are going to answer the phone within 3 rings, if we have an operational reason why we can’t adhere to that, then we better take it off or change it or make it 5 rings because it’s written down, it’s a promise.” And if you don’t have service standards then its even better opportunity is to get everybody involved and simply do an exercise and say, “What does service mean to you? What does service look like here? What should service look like?” Kenneth has done those types of exercises dozens and dozens of times and every time he does that, they always get some amazing feedback. Sometimes they get some goofy stuff which is like, “Get more sleep” but sometimes they get some really interesting things which is, “We should be able to solve most problems within 72 hours and we usually do, why don’t we make that a standard and put it in writing that we will resolve all problems within 72 hours and if we can’t, we will call the customer or client within 72 hours to give them an update, let them know what we’re doing and what’s in line for them.” but when you do that and you create the service standards from the ground up and you get people involved then there is instant buy in, now there are service standards, they are your service standards, they are not just one more thing that’s being pushed down from management saying, “Here are your service standards that you need to adhere to everyday.” They are all involved in this and if you’re bring new people on, that’s a great opportunity to either create them or take a new look at the service standards so that you can create that buy in and get every body involve right from the start.

Yanique agreed that they are good points that you definitely need buy in, it needs to have a level of inclusivity that people feel like they are apart of the process because then they are more willing to adhere and to actually own the issue, they don’t feel like it’s information being handed down to them that they have to comply with and it makes the environment that much easier for you to work with because the team members feel like it’s their business and it really is. You spend 90% of time at work.

Kenneth stated that he has seen in some circumstances where if you’ve done this properly in terms of creating the service standards, that there’s even a self-management among the team where one front line worker will tell the other front line worker, “Hey, that’s not how we do things here.” It actually begins to take some of the onus off the leader to continually be that person that cracks the whip, it actually makes things in the best of circumstances run smoother without your involvement as a leader. When you can leave for days and the place runs just as well or better than when you’re there, then you know you’ve done something right.

• Kenneth shared that he’s no different from other people; some days motivation comes easy and other days it doesn’t. Motivation for him is that he loves what he does and he’s really passionate about this brand, culture and strategy alignment concept. On the days when he’s not motivated, sometimes you just have to acknowledge it. He thinks that as entrepreneurs, executives, business owners, a lot of times we just want to push through things and that’s not necessarily bad but sometimes we you just have to acknowledge it like, “Hey, I’m a little off today, I’m not as motivated, I’m not as focused, I’m not necessarily doing backflips over what I need to do today.” And just acknowledging that leads you to a question in your mind of, “What do I need? Maybe I need to go out for a run or maybe I need to have one more cup of coffee or maybe I just need to take a walk around the block.” Sometimes what he’ll do if the task is not coming to him, let switch to another task, maybe instead of working on this client’s strategic plan, let’s put that off until this afternoon and let’s work on a video this morning, let’s work on another project because sometimes that gets your mind going to where you’re little bit more motivated in the day.

• Kenneth shared that the tool he can’t live without in his business is LinkedIn, if they took away Facebook and Instagram and every other app that he has and only left him with one, he would say LinkedIn is his best resource. It’s his best resource for information, he reads a lot of articles from other thought leaders on LinkedIn. He always find really good education on there and he connects with a number of people, there are some clients that he LinkedIn message, they don’t even email because they are on that app. So LinkedIn is number 1.

• Kenneth shared Stephen Covey books has had a huge impact on him especially when he read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change in the early 2000’s, that number 1. He stated that 2 others that read recently that he has been recommending a lot, one is kind of a oldie but goodie and that’s The E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber, it’s a really good book on putting together systems and process which we need in every business and not taking away the people aspect. Another one that he read about a year ago that he really liked was All In Startup: Launching a New Idea When Everything Is on the Line by Diana Kander, it’s somewhat of a fictional narrative an entrepreneur who’s struggling but it makes it really fun to read because it is a story but there is a tip with each of the chapters which is really interesting.

• Kenneth stated that the one thing he would say is, “What’s the feedback from your people?” if you truly feel they are not motivated then you have to ask. Sometimes we think it’s rocket science but it isn’t, sometimes it’s just a matter of getting people in the room and asking them really leading questions with the sincerity to listen, “What do you think is going on here? How do you think that we could take our business to the next level?” sometimes that question is a great one because you have some people that have some burning ideas in them but they’re afraid to say it and if you’re not getting the answers by simply asking them face to face then you need to try another way, maybe it’s an anonymous survey or you bring in an expert to do focus groups or something like that because you need to get that feedback, you need to the “Why”. If you’re not seeing the motivated human capital out there amongst your team then you have to get to the “Why”, is it because of the salaries, is it because of the working conditions, is it because of possibly one bad apple on the team that may be a supervisor that is not doing the job properly. You can’t solve the problem until you get the “Why’s” so you have to ask the questions.

• Kenneth shared that the thing that he’s really excited about right now is in the process of putting together a couple of online classes based on the brand, culture, strategy concept that he put together. He have been wanting to do that for a long time because there are people that enjoy the book and there are people who enjoy seeing and hearing him speak but there are some folks that want to learn but don’t necessarily want to hire him has a consultant and he understands that so he’s excited about giving them an option of an online class where they can take that at their leisure and work the brand, culture strategy concept through their unique business. Kenneth stated that his hope is to have it out summer 2017, that might be a little aggressive but now that he have put it out there, then it would more likely to come out this summer.

• Kenneth shared that listeners can find him at -

www.btcinc.net

Kenneth Bator LinkedIn

Kenneth Bator Twitter

Kenneth Bator Facebook

• Kenneth shared that he has a quote that he sometimes revert to and it’s one that many people have heard before, it’s Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity which is, “Doing the same thing and expecting a different result.” That kind of pops into his head, it’s like a cartoon clown jumping out of a clown car sometimes where actually a voice comes in and saying, “Okay, are we just simply doing the same thing and expecting a different result?” or “Do we need to change at least a little what we’re doing today in order to actually move forward?”

Links

• The Formula for Business Success = B+C+S by Kenneth Bator
• The Pocket Guide To Strategic Planning: The 90-Day Quick Fix For The Business Owner or Manager by Kenneth Bator
• The Strategic Planning Workbook and Guide For Financial Institutions by Kenneth Bator
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen Covey
• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber

All In Startup: Launching a New Idea When Everything Is on the Line by Diana Kander

Angie Fisher founded and created Coaching Success Systems in 2011 as a way to provide busy business owners with the full range of resources they need to accomplish their goals. What began as a part-time position became a full-time thriving business by 2012 providing copywriting, graphic design, administrative and marketing assistance and more to several successful coaching entrepreneurs. Over the last 3 years, Angie has continued to grow a thriving business by creating a team of 15 talented support members. Coaching Success Systems provides valuable services to clients all over the world. As a mother of 3 children and an entrepreneur, Angie understands the importance of providing solutions that will help you reduce stress, grow your personal wealth, decrease overwhelm, stabilize your business during hectic times and find more free time to do what you enjoy. Angie’s passion for helping entrepreneurs succeed has led her to author several free reports you can find on her website at www.coachingsuccesssystems.com, each report can provide you with tips that you can implement today to save time, grow your business and spend more time with those that you care about and are close to.

Question

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• Can you tell us a little about what is it that you do and how is it that you make life simpler for other entrepreneurs?
• As a small business owner, what are your views on customer experience?
• What if a leader is not big on automation, what are some of the tips you help to get those entrepreneurs into a mindset that will allow them to transform their business?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What are some important considerations that you would recommend to business owner they take into account moving into the online space in order to be successful?
• For running a business at home, how do you balance that and what are some of the things you would recommend to an entrepreneur to take into consideration to be successful?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Angie Fisher stated that as an entrepreneur, that definitely had challenges but that’s okay because she feels like that’s why she is where she is today because of the challenges and the wins and all the triumphs. Definitely challenges throughout the 6 years she has been in business. She started the business as a part-time, not so much as a hobby but doing a little bit of extra income after she had her son and it quickly turned into a thriving business and she had to make some tough decisions as not only as an entrepreneur but a parent and still stay grounded to her “WHY”and she continues to develop that and continue to grow her business but to also keep her family in mind at the same time.

• Angie stated that they help entrepreneurs and even companies and business owners use delegation and use the power of delegation to get more done in their business, they also help them conquer technology and guide them so that they don’t have to know how to do everything in their business, they can stay in their zone of genius and where they are an expert at and do what they love and they take care of all of the rest. Angie and her team create foundational services so that entrepreneurs and companies can stay in that zone of genius and do what they want and they can take care of everything else to keep their business thriving.

• Angie stated that it is one of the main areas of a business, in any business customer service and customer experience is a part of the bread and butter, it’s what makes your business successful not only short term but long term, it can make or break a business and good word spreads well but bad experiences spread like wild fire, so it’s our obligation as business owners and entrepreneurs to make sure that there are measures in place initially and those measures are being monitored and checked and reviewed by your team or by someone other than yourself often to ensure that the customer experience is there and it’s what you want it to be, it’s not unnecessarily a cookie cutter, it’s you want the feel of and what you want your customers to experience when they are working with you or buying from you.

Yanique shared that as a business owner herself who lives in Jamaica, she finds that customer experience is driven or inspired by the person that’s leading the company, so leadership is very important.

Angie stated that leadership creates the whole moral of the company and that moral trickles down to the customer experience and the results of the business, so leaders need to really follow the 3 C’s, have communication, be consistent and have compassion and they also need to teach their staff or their team the same morals. It’s really important to not forget what it’s like to be on the other side of the desk, or the computer or the monitor or the cash register, wherever your customer is sitting, to not forget what that experience is like, so leaders need to understand and help their staff to know and remember that and that can’t go away it doesn’t matter what size your business is, there has to be someone in charge of remembering what that’s like and ensuring that that’s still powerful. Angie stated that the employees could have those values themselves, they could be a great communicator, they could be a consistent person, they could have compassion but the real power comes from the leader teaching the staff on how to implement that in the business, how to reflect that in the business, the tone, the voice, the service, the product, all of that plays into it and the leader really needs to guide those employees to help them understand that and they will look up to that leader because of how they are acting, they are a role model.

• Angie shared that she always suggests that when they are in that situation, when an entrepreneur or business owner feels that way, you start small. You always have to start somewhere and starting small and guiding them and letting them know and building trust with them that, “We can handle this and here’s a plan, short term and long term on how we can help and here’s the first step we’re going to take.” They take their hand and walk along the journey with them and start on a project they feel like they could delegate out and it’s not going to have a huge impact on their business or it’s not going to be customer facing. It is something they can be done behind the scenes and in a worst case scenario, if it’s completely messed up or if it doesn’t happen which I haven’t happen but an entrepreneur says, “What’s the worst thing that could happen today?” then their customers, their business is not directly affected by a small task that they are going to start doing for them and then once that task is done, they build more rapport and they continue to do more and more for them and the whole time they are still practicing communication and consistency and compassion. They do that within her team and make sure that their clients feel like they are taken care of and they can trust them to help them get started which sometimes can be difficult but it’s very promising because entrepreneurs are very open to delegation and very accepting once they have experienced it and get a taste in their mouth.

• Angie shared that there are a few things that keeps her motivated and we all need those motivators to keep some fire within us and she really loves what she does, she’s a leader and a teacher and an organizer at heart so this industry fits her well which gives her motivation. She knows at the end of the day that other entrepreneurs and companies are relying on her to help them with their challenges, challenges she faced on her own and help them work towards their life of success and goals so that’s what keeps her going because she knows she has sat in their chair before, she knows what it’s like to be scared, she knows what it’s like to be tired and to stay up late at night and to get up early in the morning and to sometimes have to tell your family no you can’t do something because you have to work, she knows what that feels like and she wants to take that away from them and tell them have more freedom in their business. That’s the big motivator for her and the last one would be her family and her kids because she wants to teach her kids by action not only by words and she feels like being an entrepreneur and being a role model to them is powerful and it shows them that they too can be entrepreneurs if they wish too later.

• Angie shared that what they should take into consideration is to remember that you are going to take care of the customers that you have now and be okay if they do not want to transition online as well. You have a different market online, you can have a different market online and you can stay and take care of your customers and have them experience the same service they have in your store, so remember that, not everybody is going to transition and agree with that and that’s okay. Also think of it a little bit differently when you move to online, it is a different space and how can you as a brick and mortar business relay the voice, the tone, the feel that business has, how can you relay that online, how can you have your new customers online experience the same thing they experience when they walk into your store, when they pay for their products, when they are greeted throughout the store, make sure that it is consistent and don’t lose that value.

Angie stated that she truly believes in consistency, if you aren’t consistent then there is lack of trust and lack of trust will get you no where. You will not have customers and you will have trouble growing your business when you don’t have the trust of your clients and so consistency goes a long way.

Yanique Grant shared that consistency is one of the founding characteristics of a business that offers quality customer experiences, if you look at the Zappos of the world and the Amazons of the world, they are consistent in their service delivery and if they are not consistent, their service recovery strategy is extremely successful in winning that customer back over at the first point of contact because they know how important it is to retain their existing customers.

Angie stated that a lot of entrepreneurs want to fish the sea, they want to get new leads and new clients but we always have to remember to take care of the clients we currently have and we already have them, they have already raised their hand and said, “I have bought from you or I want more from you” so we should pay attention them and it may be easier and cheaper to sell more to them than to go out and try to get a whole lot more leads of new clients. There is a balance there but be sure that you are paying attention to those that already love you.

• As an entrepreneur running a business from home as she struggled with it for a while, the balance of it was hard, she’s not saying that it’s perfect at this point, life changes, days are different, she is adapting and changing this process as her life, her family and her business grows. The tips that she would give is that you have to take time for yourself to build your business, it is going to take you putting sometime on the calendar or on the refrigerator, taking a highlighter and highlighting some time out and being clear that, “This is my time” and having an office with a door that shuts and not to be inconsiderate or rude to your family but that’s a sign that, “This is my time, this is my business time and I need this time to grow my business because this is important to me” and it won’t grow if you aren’t able to spend time on it. So shutting the door would be one of her big tips, it seems so simple and it kind of seems silly but it’s so important because you have kids coming, “Mom, where is this, mom, what are we having for dinner, what are having for lunch?” and you don’t have that barrier, so when you have that barrier, it really shows them a more serious measure and respect and boundaries. Also planning ahead, you want to be sure you have your to do list and this to do list should not have10 or 15 items on it, it needs to have 3-5 things that are your top priority, ”These are the things I need to get done in this period of time” and it’s not something that you plan right before you start work, when you are ready and kid free or you have your time to work, it’s literally sitting down at your computer and you start working, it’s no planning, it’s doing, implementing at that time. Plan ahead, if it’s the night before, if it’s the Sunday before the week, whatever that looks like, plan ahead and have a system in place and that kind of move her in the other systems and processes are truly going to save you a ton of time and if you’re not wired like that, what she would suggest is as your setting your business up, think about how if someone else was to do this job what would they need, so this might look like a checklist of what you’re doing and what needs to be done in your business and as you move forward and do more and more in your business, the checklists are going to grow and you just create them as you go and set them aside and have a process for yourself and before you know it, you’re going to have an operations manual and when it’s time to delegate, you’re going to be able to easily delegate because you have followed these checklists and someone else can do the same thing.

Yanique stated that this is applicable even if it’s you alone in the business in the first 6 months; you can put that structure in place so that when the opportunity comes for expansion and scaling, delegation is a much smoother process.

Angie agreed and shared that delegating early is the key but she also understands that that’s not possible sometimes, so being ready because when you bring a team into chaos which is most of the time a business that has experienced growth, it is chaos behind the scene because you are working hard to keep everything floating and nothing dropping and so you bring in a team or a virtual assistant or a coach into it to help you, they are coming into a little chaos and it makes it stressful for the business owner, it can make it stressful for the team and it makes it more difficult to move forward, it takes more investment of time. Setting up those things early and especially when you’re growing, you have a little bit of extra time, even if you have a family at home, you still have the time and it’s worth it to take the extra 15-30 minutes while you’re doing the task to make the checklist along the way.

• Angie shared that a Project Management System. She that it’s the life of her business, it is what helps it keep going, she and her time and her clients work out of it. They have a Project Management System where they communicate, that’s where tasks are set, that’s where passwords are saved because it’s a secure site, that’s where everything happens, it’s kind of the heart and brain of your body, that’s what a Project Management System is to her business. The project management system Angie and her team uses is com.

• Angie stated that she has 2 books that have impacted her. The Slight Edge: Secret to a Successful Life by Jeff Olson, it’s a book about taking small steps and actions each day to work towards your big goal and at the end of the day we have 2 choices, we can take the positive side and we can take the negative side and regardless of what side you choose, those are going to compound and those are going get you to a bigger goal negative or positive so it’s really important to remember that the small steps that you take each day are going get you somewhere and just to pay attention to where that somewhere is, what are you working towards. Her second book is Thank & Grow Rich: A 30-Day Experiment in Shameless Gratitude and Unabashed Joy by Pam Grout, it is a book about living a life full of gratitude and stepping back to be thankful for what you have now, you can still wish for more and want for more because we are human and we want that but it’s taking a look at being thankful for what you already have in front of you and what you’ve been given or what you have received that got you to where you are today, those are her 2 favorite books that have helped her throughout her life and business.

• Angie shared that the one thing that is working on right now is that she is building out a new service in her business and it is narrowing on My Zone of Genius. My Zone of Genius is being a leader and delegating and taking care of a lot of balls in the air and keeping everything in motion and setting up a system in process for that. She is beginning to offer a service to businesses, companies and online entrepreneurs to where she is setting up the systems and processes personally, she is guiding them and putting their business under a microscope to see where there are gaps and where things could be fixed, where they could gain more clients or have better client retention, have a better client experience, she is really excited to offer that in the coming weeks, the product will be launched on February 14, 2017 and being one to one with other companies and businesses.

• Angie shared that listeners can find her at -

www.coachingsuccesssystems.com

Angie Fisher Facebook

Angie Fisher Twitter

Angie Fisher YouTube

Angie Fisher Pinterest

Angie Fisher LinkedIn

Project Management Teamwork App

• Angie shared one of her own quote, which is, “Your knowledge and experience is enough.” She stated that a lot time people don’t feel like they are enough or that they know enough or that they have enough but you are enough and she also wants entrepreneurs to remember that because sometimes it can be a very lonely world.

Links

• The Slight Edge: Secret to a Successful Life by Jeff Olson
• Thank & Grow Rich: A 30-Day Experiment in Shameless Gratitude and Unabashed Joy by Pam Grout
• Project Management Teamwork App
• Coaching Success Systems

Listeners of This Episode #40 – Receive a Free Gift from Our Guest Angie Fisher

• Freebie Link for Listeners of this Episode from Angie Fisher

This episode with Yanique Grant will be the first solo episode after doing 38 interview based episodes and we will be sharing with you some tips, nuggets that we have collected over the last 38 weeks of releasing 38 amazing interview based episodes. We want to give a shout out to all of our guests locally and internationally that has come on board to support and share the wealth of knowledge that they have shared and we are amazingly inspired by each and every person that we have come in contact with as a result of starting this podcast

Highlights

Today Yanique will take about customer experience and are some of the different opportunities that exist for a business going forward in 2017, what are some considerations that they need to take into account. Whether or not a business plans for it, your brand provides a customer experience to your customers; customers collect experiences throughout their journeys with your brands, regardless of your effort investment or intent to deliver cohesive and satisfying experiences. It’s important that your brand and your advertising and your marketing that they are cohesively connected and they are all singing the same song, we’re all on the same page, singing the same verse at the same time, singing the same chorus at the same time because if not, that’s where the disconnect occurs. 

People base their decisions based on what they experience and hear about your brand, every experience you provide to your customer can provide encourage or discourage, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy and for those who are familiar with the book Customer Satisfaction Is Worthless, Customer Loyalty Is Priceless: How to Make Customers Love You, Keep Them Coming Back and Tell Everyone They Know by Jeffery Gitomer, you would know that if a customer leaves satisfied from your business, that does not guarantee that they are going to remain loyal to your business and so because of that, you have to consistently deliver on quality experiences, if you’re not, then it’s quite possible that the customer will switch and customers these days have choices. 

The Internet has given everyone the opportunity to do their research before they come into your business. They go online, they go to your website, they go to your Facebook page, they look at what other customers are saying about your business, if they ask their friends and family about your products, they read reviews, they are fully informed at least by 60%-75% statistics say, before they even interact with a member of your organization, so with all of this in mind, you have to consistently deliver on whatever it is you’re advertising that your company is going to deliver and that is seamlessly what your brand is all about. People like to have simple experiences, that’s the reality. Yanique stated that she loves to go to a business that when she walks in, she doesn’t need to try and figure out what the business is trying to offer, what should she do, where she should go, she knows exactly what to do and where to go. 

They have this index called The Global Brand Simplicity Index and in it, it talks about what simplicity is. Each year this company called Siegel and Gale, they survey thousands of consumers from around the world as it relates to evaluating hundreds of brands and how the brands deliver on their experiences. Simplicity by definition is freedom from complexity, intricacy or division into parts. This is the definition by www.dictionary.com and it is freedom from deceit or guile, sincerity, heartlessness, naturalness. People want to do business with companies that it’s very easy to transact business with them in all the channels that they provide service through whether it’s online, whether it’s face to face, over the telephone; it’s a seamless and a simple process, a simple experience. 

According to the 2017 Global Brand Simplicity Index, simple to the consumer in 2017 means being clear, it means being human and it means being useful. It's is powerful and if those are the 3 things that simplicity means, it means that in everything that a business does, they need to figure out, “Is this process clear, is this product delivery or service delivery human and are my consumers valuing this experience as being useful?” because if you’re not meeting 2 or 3 of those options, then you are loosing out on all of the money you are leaving out on the table for not creating that simple experience for customers, so we cannot implore enough why it’s important. It is so important as well for your brand or people that interact with your brand to recognize that you are real, a lot of companies say in their marketing advertising that, “We are offering quality service, our customer service is the best, we take care of you.” They use all of these endearing terms that when you listen to the advertisement whether it’s on TV or on the radio, you feel a sense of emotional connection, however, when you go to the business and have the interaction - it’s a completely different experience, so your brand is what people feel and say it is, not what your brand believes or says it is, "Perception is reality to the person that perceives it", this is a popular quote that she gives in all of her workshops all the time. A lot of people believe that service delivery or the service that they offer is based on what they feel it is and it’s not what you the company feels it is, it’s what the customers says it is, it is their feedback, it’s their perception that matters, that’s what determines whether or not you’re a great or a good company, so your brand is owned by the customer not you, it is created and fashioned in the minds of your customers and prospects. You are what they think you are or what they hear from others, sometimes people form a perception of a brand just based on what their husband says to them or what their girlfriend says to them or what their co-worker says to them, they have never interacted with the business before but they are basing their thoughts or giving feedback to other people based on what someone else said, with that in mind, you have to remember that your brand is what others say it is. What your brand does is more important than what it says, action speaks louder that words and because body language is 55% of the communication process, it’s so important that your leaders, team members, everyone is walking the talk, your brand will be ultimately evaluated by it’s customers and what it does for them, not what it says in the ads, emails or on its website, so again, if your marketing is not congruent with the actual experiences that your customers are having, then at the end of the day, it’s not what you believe your service experience is but is what your customers are actually experiencing. 

Brands that cannot retain customers, they just won’t win in this world that we are living in, if you are not able to really recognize that the customers that you have currently are your gold mind, those are the ones you need to be nurturing and ensuring that they’re satisfied, ensuring that they want to come back, so that they can go out there and be evangelists of your business, then you lose right there, as said before, it’s money you’re leaving on the table, so your brand, acquiring customers is a costly activity, it requires you to go out there and tell people what you’re about and spend money to woo someone that you really don’t have a relationship with, rather you could be nurturing and building up existing relationships and having those persons woo people you are trying to get because it would be an easier sell because that customer who you’re trying to get would be persuaded by someone who has had an experience with your business and the acquisition of that new customer would be based on what that existing customer shares with them. 

Brands that cannot motivate their customers, to share positive sentiments will ultimately diminish the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. The aim is to ensure that when your customers leave your business, they feel like they’ve just done business with the best company on earth, if you cannot absolutely say that, then it means that there is room for improvement. People trust each other more than they do brands and word of mouth is a powerful force for improving awareness and consideration, that’s why social media is so powerful, there are all these brands out there that basically, you can go online and you can read up about where you’re going and what kind of experience to anticipate, you can even get a rating and so if your customers are not speaking positively about your business, even if you have the most upgraded building, the best uniforms, the mission and visions on the wall, state of the art technology, state of the art equipment, machinery, if the experience is not congruent and people are not leaving feeling like they are valued and appreciated, then you are definitely going to experience a diminishing return in the long term. 

Your brand can’t be all things to all people, customers have different needs, expectations and values so the better your brand can understand and reflect these through focus, segments, personas and personalization, the more powerful the experiences it can deliver, you have to know who your customers are, what’s your marketing segmentation, who represents that 80% of your business, what 20% of your customers gives you 80% of your business and how can you have those 20% become evangelists of your business so that you can continue to increase on that percentage. It’s a work in progress but it’s possible, it’s all about making that experience very simple. 

You listen to your customers to understand them, marketers spend a lot of time and money studying what gets people to buy too often and sometimes they ignore what gets them to be satisfied, loyal and willing to tell others, listening is important in the whole customer experience process and the voice of the customer programs are essential to defining and measuring customer experience performance. When you hire someone like Yanique to train your team members or hire her company to do market research, it’s very hard to see a return on investment the following day and that’ what a lot of businesses fail to realize that customer experience is a very tangible measurement and because of that, it’s so important to continually be engaging and hearing from your customers because if you’re constantly getting positive feedback and recommendations that you get from customers are actually improving on them and customers can see that their feedback is not just being put in a box and no one is taking it into account but they are actually using it to make changes, then that’s when you see repeat business over and over.

Joseph Michelli is an Internationally sought after Speaker, Author and Organizational Consultant who transfers his knowledge of exceptional business practices in ways that develop joyful and productive workplaces with a focus on the total customer experience. His insights encourage leaders and front line workers to grow and invest passionately in all aspects of their lives. Dr. Michelli is a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, Neilsen Book Scan and New York Times number 1 bestselling author. His latest book is Driven to Delight: Delivering World- Class Customer Experience the Mercedes-Benz Way, some of his other titles include Leading the Starbucks Way: 5 Principles for Connecting with Your Customers, Your Products and Your People, The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire, Engage, and WOW, Prescription for Excellence: Leadership Lessons for Creating a World Class Customer Experience from UCLA Health System, The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary Into Extraordinary and The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, as well as When Fish Fly: Lessons for Creating a Vital and Energized Workplace from the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market. Joseph holds a certified speaking professional designation from The National Speakers Association and is a member of The Authors Guild; he received his Masters and Doctorate from the University of Southern California and he has won the Asian Brand Excellence Award as an Editorial Board Member for The Beryl Institute Patient Experience Journal (PXJ) and is on the Founder’s Council of Customer Experience One, he is also named one of the top 10 Thought Leaders in Customer Service by global gurus.

Question

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• Could you share with us from one of your favorite books, what are these 5 principles that seem to be a constant in most of the books that you’ve authored?
• What are some of the limitations that leaders may face? Do you think they are more internal or external? Why is it that leadership seems to be a big challenge for a lot of organizations, why are they not getting it right?
• How do you think a business owner or a leader should approach service recovery?
• What are some important considerations that you would recommend to a business owner they take into account moving into the online space in order to be successful?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• If you were sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated human capital, what’s the one piece of advice would you give them to have a successful business?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Joseph Michelli shared that he has been in this business of customer service which has transformed into customer experience enhancement for so long that he has had many great mentors and guides along the way and if anything, he has been excited to see how many people have started to appreciate that it’s not just the products they have that makes a difference in the market place but it’s really the way those products to marketing, he thinks that changes in the global economy have cost us all to realize that you can get a lot of very similar products very easily today but the service dimension is something that very few have mastered and it is a differentiator.

• Joseph stated that it starts with leadership, entrepreneur, a small business owner, a large company, having a leader who has the vision to realize that people are the most important aspect of business, that all business are personal, that you have to understand the wants, needs and desires of people in order to create, innovate and to deliver in ways to meet their wants, needs and desires. It’s an overarching commitment to utilizing both technology and the human capital within your organization to create memorable or crave able experience that people will talk about on social media. He thinks that there are dimensions of driving culture, a culture of service excellence as well as operational excellence, getting it right and making it right and obsessing about that and most of these brands are on a journey to decrease the amount of effort that customers have involved in getting their needs met, currently there are all these making sure and understanding that this is a long game, that this is about lasting significance not just short term sales or profitability for the next quarter, it’s really about understanding relationships and multi generations of consumers who are going to support your brand.

• Joseph shared that he thinks they see excellence within silos, they build organizations that have silos and they are not looking at the journey of the customer across the organization, so instead of looking down from the top of an organization and seeing your marketing silo and your sales silo and seeing your after sale silo, your customers look from a horizontal vantage point and they see the brand and they see it when they encounter it inconsideration of a product, they see it when they walk into a store or when they attempt to purchase something from the online store front, they see it when they make a return, they are seeing the same brand in a horizontal walk. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations reward people for success in each of the verticals silos as they look down on it from the top, so a lot of this gets to helping organizations create opportunities of handing the customer from one point of the journey to the next part of the journey seamlessly instead of just celebrating success within a silo.

Yanique shared that she found that the companies that really understand their journey also recognize that things are not going to go smooth all the time so service recovery is so important.

• Joseph stated that it’s one of the greatest differentiators, everybody do a good job until they get your money, as soon as they get your money, they treat you differently, some take you for granted and never speak to you again or when it’s time for renewal, try to get you constantly to buy something from them. Those who after the sale respond very ably to the consumer, the better, the first formal part of this is understanding that service recovery is an investment in future marketing so rather than seeing it as a lost leader, it is a part of your advertising strategy and saves you money from having to advertise and recover customers who are soiling or contaminating the market place with their negative reactions to your poor recovery. It’s a mind shift on what recovery is, it’s a fundamental opportunity to decrease future marketing costs and actually leverage that which is so valuable the customer you’ve already acquired in having them be a repeat purchaser, it is so much easier to get them to buy a second time than to get somebody to buy the first time and the cost associated with retaining a customer is so much less even if you have to invest money in a recovery moment than it would be to try to require a replacement customer.

Joseph stated that it is simple as Starbucks has a promise that, “If you don’t like your drink, we will replace it for you no questions asked.” Joseph gave an example, he stated that there was a prankster, a person who pranks corporate America, so he bought a Starbucks drink, he brought it home, it was a milk based drink, he put it in his garage, he left it there for a week and a half, he brought it back extremely rancid inside of a plastic bag and he brought it into a Starbucks and handed it to the Barista and saying, “Look, this drink does not meet my satisfaction.” They have been trained so well by this brand simply said, “Let me take this take this to our back dumpster and in the mean time, what drink might I prepare for you that you might like today?” It was that simple, many people would say, “come on, obviously this is not a freshly made drink that we are in any obligation to replace” In truth, this prankster went on to write a blog about the fact that he had hoped that they would fail their recovery promise and they did not do so and he was the one who got pranked and that advertising and that promotion and the fact that he’s telling the story today has far more value to the brand than the $4.00 they would have saved had they argued with the customer in suggesting that he was not entitled to the recovery.

Yanique stated that she lives in Jamaica and most of the stores already have a sign on the door that says, “No exchanges, no refunds” so you as a customer, once you enter or start to browse that store, you know, “If I purchase this, clearly it’s a final purchase, if I have an issue with it, I can’t take it back.” It’s truly amazing to know that the promise is that they are going to replace it for you no questions asked, that takes real guts, real courage.

Joseph stated that there will be those who abuse it and this would have been a case of abuse, clearly it went well beyond the perimeters but most people will not. There is a speaker in the USA who at the beginning of every presentation hands out a bowl of quarters and he says, “Please take all the quarters” and no one has taken all the quarters in any audience that he has ever put that out to and the message largely is, most people will self regulate, most people are business owners, most people have a sense of fairness, there will be those who abuse it but assuming the entire population is out to get you creates an animosity between yourself and the customer that’s hard to recover from and as a world traveler, he has been to countries in the Caribbean that are open and warm and he has been to ones that are locked down and he knows which ones he doesn’t want to go back to.

• Joseph stated that online is a very self service oriented deliverable, it’s a lot about speed, and it’s a lot about convenience so you clearly should maximize those dimensions. The more speedy and more automated this becomes, the more you need people around in case something goes wrong because he become lulled into the sense that everything is perfect and so if you’re going to have online, you also need to have some level of Call Centre or human response that can deal with any break downs that happens in the automated space and so you have to be very mindful that you’re going to move in and out of brick and mortar, in and out of call centre, in and out of online app deliverable and so it really is a multi channel mindset that you have to start thinking about and the customer can start in one spot, jump to the next and needs to be able to jump back to the next. If you go purely online and it’s difficult to get people to solve a problem or answer a question that you can’t get answered on a frequently answered questions page online then you end up with a lesser experience and you may end up churning customers so doing online development means you also have some talented human capital that bolts into this multi channel journey.

Speed and Convenience for todays customer - Joseph stated that we have to maximize the speed at every turn and we do have to manage customer expectations because there are certain expectations that have gotten ahead of customers and in order to have everything that fast you also give up some tradeoffs on artisanship and quality so it is an educational on tradeoffs that with speed comes some compromises and we are willing to make them in these regards because we know what’s best and in delivery of this particular product you know you need speed, we know you need speed, we are working to maximize that but you also need quality and if you compromise and buy something very hastily crafted in order to meet the speed, it probably won’t last long, so it’s baiting what is value and speed is a part of the value equation but there are other dimensions that you have to education. Sometimes we can do things while they are waiting for those 5 days for a product, we can educate them, and we can stay in relationship with them. The art of Disney if you go to Walt Disney World, you are in massive lines, it is not speedy at all to go through the experience but they often distract you, entertain you, transform you with other things happening while you’re in line and he thinks that’s the art sometimes, how else can they add value, “The product will be there in 5 days but in the mean time I want to give you 5 days of information about how maximize the use of your product as soon as it arrives so there isn’t such a learning curve.” So maybe there is a not speed to delivery but there’s a speed to use because he has done something in that delivery time that adds value.

Beta Brand – company that did not have a product but they provided their prospects with entertaining stories.

• Joseph stated that that particular journey with the owner was a co authored book with Johnny Yokoyama who created Pike Place Fish Market, he had the good fortune of working with him and he’s inspirational to him. He stated that Yanique and himself shared many of the same journeys, they go in and help leaders create better experiences to drive loyalty and engagement of their people and of their customers and that’s just a life giving journey that he’s on, to deal with the Johnny Yokoyama’s, to deal with the CEO’s of these corporations to help them lead these initiatives, to watch small business owners change the way they treat their people and the way their people treat the customers, it is so life giving that it’s easy to do what he does in life and because of that, it’s easy for him to stay motivated.

• Joseph shared that he is on the road all the time so most of the airline apps and almost all the hotel apps have incredible value to him. This morning he walked to his local Starbucks and he used his mobile order app, he was able to have enough time to sit down and enjoy his coffee because the coffee was waiting for him. Anything that makes his life easier is something he tends to continues to give real estate to his phone, otherwise he downloads a lot of apps and then they are gone 72 hours because he doesn’t use them, they look good but they don’t’ give his life ease or pleasure.

• Joseph shared that the book that has had the biggest impact is Man’s Search for Meaning By Viktor E. Frankl, it is the message of a Psychiatrist who survived the concentration camps in World War II, the beauty for him is that he inspires him to realize how great he can be and his classic section is where he’s talking about people who are near starvation, who gave up the food they have, a small portion of that to someone else who are worst and Frankl says, “there are not many people who did that but the fact that we can is inspiring to all of us” and that’s how he looks at the world, we can all serve better, we can all do more to be in service to one another and that’s the kind of books he tends to like to read.

• Joseph stated that right now they trying to figure out to create product, he thinks he is at a point in his career where he has written enough books, he has done enough consulting and he has been on the road a lot, so he is trying to figure out how to monetize and create a platform of training courses and things that keep him from having to go on planes so in 10 or 15 years he can spend more time with in the islands enjoying life while still creating value as best he can.

• Joseph stated that it starts with you, we can identify the generation Y and Z and the millennials, reality says, “If you’re not a hundred percent in every single day, why should anyone else in your organization be, you are the owner, you are the leader, you set the standard, what shows up in your business is probably in part a reflection of who you are.” It is harder today to find motivated people so it takes more discipline to select, you should be looking for them everywhere you find them, you should be offering them an opportunity to consider employment with you, stealing the best from the rest but ultimately it is how do you show up every day because that will show up in the life of the customer.

• Joseph shared listeners can find him at –

www.josephmichelli.com

Joseph Michelli Twitter

Joseph Michelli Facebook

Joseph Michelli LinkedIn

• Joseph stated that Peter Drucker once said, “We are not in business to create a profit, we are in business to create a customer, it is through customers that profits come.” So for him, Joseph is less worried about whether or no they are going to be profitable, he’s more worried about customers and if he takes care customers, the profits will follow.

Links

• Driven to Delight: Delivering World-Class Customer Experience the Mercedes-Benz Way by Joseph A. Michelli
• Leading the Starbucks Way: 5 Principles for Connecting with Your Customers, Your Products and Your People by Joseph A. Michelli
• The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire, Engage, and WOW by Joseph A. Michelli
• Prescription for Excellence: Leadership Lessons for Creating a World Class Customer Experience from UCLA Health System by Joseph A. Michelli
• The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary Into Extraordinary by Joseph A. Michelli
• The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company by Joseph A. Michelli
• When Fish Fly: Lessons for Creating a Vital and Energized Workplace from the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market by Joseph A. Michelli and John Yokoyama

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Isabel Hundt is the author of The Power of Faith-Driven Success: A Journey Toward Living Your Dream by 30 and certified vision and Transformation Coach and International Speaker. She’s a world visionary and an ambassador of Global Presence Leadership. She travels all over to share her enlightening message of tuning in to our true selves by understanding the connection between our heart and our brain. She is also teaching how to use our emotions as a powerful guide for success in all areas of our lives instead of experiencing emotions as a distraction. She’s a proud Christ follower, wife and a mother to son Jonah. Isabel enjoys kick boxing and body combat.

Question

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• How do you feel about customer experience in your own life, the things you’ve experience and what role do you think that plays in you being able to help people transform into their best selves?
• What are some everyday solutions that you believe can help improve customer experience?
• How do you feel about leadership in a business? What role do you think leadership plays in the whole customer experience process and the emotions around that as well?
• As a Visionary, as a Coach, what are some important considerations that you would recommend they take into account moving into the online space in order to be successful?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• If you were sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated human capital, what’s the one piece of advice would you give them to have a successful business?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Isabel Hundt shared that she that when she was young, she had a lot of out of body experiences, at some point she had a head trauma and when she had the head trauma, she was out of her body and she could watch herself and there are other times where she felt like she could leave her body which was weird and she always reacted weird to other people that were in pain. For example, she laughed when they were hurting and she know why, she would say, “oh my god, it’s so embarrassing, I shouldn’t be laughing, it’s not funny, they are hurting” and looking back she knows it was a coping mechanism for her to not take on their stuff but when she was 12 years old, she had a vision that she would be moving the United States of America, she is originally from Germany where she grew up and her family is there. She had the vision and that she would be speaking in front of a lot of people and she didn’t quite know how it was going to happen because she didn’t have any connections and she also got into psychology and sociology around the same time, she grew up in the so call DDR, East Germany and they grew up Christian and so her dad wasn’t allowed study because he participated in church activities so when the walls came down he was finally able to get his Degree and that was when she was about 12 years old and that time she studied with him which was fun and when she was 18 years old, she went to the USA for an exchange year which was interesting because she really sucked speaking the language, she didn’t know what, “you’re welcome” meant. She then had to go back and she didn’t feel at home anymore, something didn’t feel right, it was just off and her dad would always say, “one day we’re going to do something together, we’re going to work together” and of course when you’re 19 years old you’re like, “heck no, I’m independent now.” She studied economics and failed, they kicked her out after 2 years and she started to have really bad depressions and she didn’t care if there was a car coming or not, she was just done with the world, everything was noisy and loud. When they kicked her out of university, she had to figure out what she wanted to do next and she finally admitted that she probably should go into the social science field because that’s what she was always been interested in, so she did that and started over and somehow she got into a really bad relationship with an American guy but that’s how she really came over so she is kind of grateful to him but that ended too after she finished her studying and she still came over and worked as a nanny. In that process she got to know her now husband and because he didn’t want to get married right away, she almost got deported and that was interesting. She had to go to Canada which was quite the experience and all that up and down and she didn’t what she wanted to do, she never felt like she really trusted her intuition and that’s when through a friend of a friend she started to get into the coaching world and she participated in a training, “This was exactly what I need to do because I need to understand who I am. I don’t feel German, I don’t feel American, who am I?” and within that journey of becoming a certified coach, she also realize that she is an empath which means that she experience the world more intense, she can see through people, she sees color around people, it’s a lot of stuff that she takes in and never knew how to trust that intuition or to work with it and throughout the journey she got to where she is today.

• Isabel Hundt stated that she used to do a presentation at Ball State University about customer service and they would look at like she’s crazy because nobody really understands that the customer service starts with you and they believe that customer service is the foundation to success in whatever you offer in your business, customer service is nothing different than creating relationships and being open to the experience with the other person. The problem that she sees often with customer service is that we don’t not have that self awareness, that often we don’t understand is what we focus on we create more of, what is going on inside of us is being reflected on the outside, that’s what’s happening around us. For example, if somebody comes into work and already has a crappy day and you have someone call you and they need help or support, you would react differently to them than if you had a happy or great day and even though the other person’s reaction wasn’t any different, you just experience it differently so if we have that awareness of what’s going on. For example, you can simply acknowledge, “oh shut, I have a crappy day today, I don’t know what’s going on, I feel frustrated, I feel angry, I’m not sure why” but if we just simply acknowledge it, you don’t have to go through the whole process of analyzing but just acknowledge it, we are able to take that apart from what we experience in relationship type of setting and we can say, “okay, I hear them differently, it’s nothing personal what they’re saying, I don’t have to react to it, I can set my stuff aside to be available to them” and that’s why she thinks self awareness is the foundation to great customer service, yet customer service is the foundation to successful life and business.

Isabel stated that emotions aren’t just emotions; they are what we make them, who would determine that anger has a certain chemical reaction in your body, we define it and we can acknowledge, “oh, that’s what’s going on, it’s okay, I am okay, I just don’t have to act on it react to it by pushing it on someone else”

• Isabel shared that for one, it depends on the setting but if you have a small business and it’s just you, definitely having a ritual every day, if it’s in the morning or before whenever you start working and for her, it’s usually around lunch time because she has a 3 year old when he’s finally asleep. Before she really start getting into work or connecting with people, she sits down and either meditate in her case and sometimes just a reflection yourself is really important just to understand, “okay, what’s going on today, what do I have to work through today that could get in the way for me to create successful connections with people that I really want to be of service to?” that’s the one thing that she really stretch with everyone. When she teach that at universities, the staff always looks at her like, “yeah, can we have a little more business like instead of all the psychology behind it” they don’t really want to take that responsibility, so it’s a little tough. If you can be compassionate with yourself and understanding and acknowledging it, you are more likely to show more compassion to those who you serve, if they have a bad day, you’re not jumping on board, you can just say, “hey, do you having a bad day? I’m sorry if you do, it’s okay and I still see you” so feeling seen creates the connection, the connection again is the foundation of a successful business. So the most important if you remember anything from this conversation, self reflection is the first thing someone should do to have a successful business.

• Isabel agreed that leaders have their own emotions and depending on your mode, your energy can manifest into the physical space and that can have a positive or negative impact on the staff and then eventually spill over to the customers. She stated that she used to work in corporate America for a year and she didn’t like it because she was the Administrative Assistant and was responsible for all those people and sometimes she would sit there and listen to people talk to customers and would say to herself, “do you actually want to work with that customer or you don’t? Because right now it sounds like you don’t” and even with each other. She thinks that customer service starts with the group itself, if there is tension within the people that work for you, those tensions come across with the customer, so for everyone that is a leader who is leading a group of people needs to stretch on team building and team building is the focus on self that’s why really successful companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook as well as Amazon, they all have life coaches, so their employees, most of them have at least one session a month or they have free access to a life coach and there is more of team building going on as their foundation than the actual growth of the business. If your team feels valued and seen, automatically your business will grow too because they do whatever it takes to grow this business because that means they feel a part of a big team, a mission, something that’s really important and that as a leader of a company if you have employees, for one you need to do the work yourself, that’s something she has realized, they usually send their employees to her workshops and expect that they will change the environment they are working in but they don’t want to do the work and that’s what hurts most companies.

Isabel stated that most of her clients are online. She said that for one, it is more convenient with a child at home that young but it allows her to work with people from all over the world, from France, Sweden, and India and all over the USA and she found and it depends on where you live. She stated that where she lives people are very conservative so it takes a lot to break through that wall and outside of it people are more open to what she’s talking about and what she teach and coach on. She does work mostly online but when she speaks, then she is travelling.

• Isabel stated that if you want to take everything online, the most important for her is authenticity, if suddenly you come across online differently than in your physical store, that will distract from your brand and people get confuse and when people get confuse, they will not buy from you. Authenticity, really understanding what you want to bring across online, what you want people to understand about who you are and your business that you can also implement or that you have already implemented in your brick and mortar business. Especially if you have a store and you want to take it online she really believes in help from people that have a lot of knowledge like Web Designers, they understand how to use different colors that really reflect your personality and your work because callers also have frequency as well as emotions where they create emotions or support certain emotions so people have to be aware of what they use even there online, what do you want to bring across, how you want people to feel when they look at what you represent. That goes back to personal development, Who are you? What is your message? What do you want to bring across? How do you want to serve people? What do you want other people to take away from it? And you can’t really answer those questions unless you are really aware of who you are and your purpose.

Isabel share that sometimes we take My Why a little bit too easy, it’s not just, “my WHY is to support my family financially” it needs to serve for the greater good. She stated that her WHY is to create a deeper connection inner culturally to understand that even though your background is different or the way you grew up or the traditions are different, it doesn’t make you any different as a human being. Her big Why is to bring people together to really connect on such a deep level that we can understand that without each other we can’t do anything and even if we live a thousand miles away from each other, we still impact each other in the way we think, in the way we operate, it has a ripple effect, that’s her greater purpose, that’s greater vision that she has so if you start with the WHY and only say, “my WHY is supporting my family” that’s not enough, that keeps it too limited and you don’t think outside the box.

• Isabel stated that what keeps her motivated is one, her Why, the essence of what she do what she do, she can’t just let it go, there’s too much at stake to not to do her work and she would be responsible. She always remind herself that if she doesn’t do the work that she is call to do, she is responsible for the people she could have impacted or that she could have supported and served if she had stuck with it, so the moderation is to keep that vision in mind, “Who am I impacting and what are the consequences if I succeed?” that is her biggest motivation and music helps her too. Music changes your vibration energy which the frequency of your body either increases or decreases depending on what you listen to and when she feels really demotivated, she listens to inspiring music and it feels like she is able to conquer everything, she is a leader and once she gets to that she feels she can move forward and stay motivated.

• Isabel stated that she was thinking about that question and she couldn’t quite find an answer, she was looking though everything that she is using but what she could not live without is her Virtual Assistant or her Web Designer the two people, she knows that they are not a tool or something that she uses online but those are the two things that if she didn’t have them her business would not be where it’s at or where she wanted it to go. She stated that they take such a load off her shoulders, it’s incredible. She stated that if you have an online business she would recommend that you get a Virtual Assistant and have a Web Designer always on your side. If something happens, within 2 minutes they can check, “okay, I got it” without you having to try and figure it out or make it even worst. Isabel stated that the other online resources that are really helpful like Buffer or Hootsuite are important if you want to save time and one thing that she learnt is focus on a few social platforms, don’t try to get into everything and get on board with everything new. Focus on 2 or 3 things that you are comfortable with and do whatever it takes to get your name out on those social platforms.

• Isabel shared that the book she read over the last year that really impacted the way she thinks and the way she experience things is The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You by Karla McLaren, it’s more written for empathy so if you’re not really an empathy and don’t want to get too deep into it, don’t read it but if you’re really interested in it then it will definitely help in coping with a lot of things and understanding a lot of things.

• Isabel stated that the advice that she would give is the advice that she gives herself everyday and that is trust. If you are in alignment, if what you do, what you send out is in alignment with what you have on your heart, that dream that really fires you up every single day, you need to trust. You can’t go out and follow everyone strategy and try to make everything work and sign up for every program that you can find just to make something happen, you need to trust and with every decision you make, ask yourself, “is that in alignment with who I am?, does this really work for me? And is it in alignment with my greater purpose?” If it’s not trust that you don’t need it at this time or ever but really trust. Trust, reflect and listen from within, those are the small advice points that she always give that she always give to herself as well.

• Isabel stated that the one thing that she is really excited about is doing sessions that are called Releasing Trapped Emotions because those are really important for us to be able to move forward otherwise we will always ending up where we started. Those are the 2 things that she is really excited about but she is also excited about working on a Ted Talk and that’s something she is doing right now and she got a lot of support from people who have done it before, who have the connections so she is super excited and nervous. In the near future she wants to create a more specific course about emotions and how to identify them and work through them with getting all wrapped up in it and that’s something she going to be working on in the spring and those are the few things she is working on right now.

• Isabel shared listeners can find her at –

www.isabelhundt.com

Isabel Hundt Facebook

Isabel Hundt Istagram

Isabel Hundt LinkedIn

Isabel Hundt Twitter

Isabel Hundt YouTube

• Isabel shared that she usually reverts to Matthew 17:20 and usually people say that you can’t bring the Bible into your business but for her it’s faith and science. It says, “So Jesus said to them, “Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” And especially when we know the science part about it that we are able to just with the way we think, that we really can move mountains in that sense, just knowing that keeps her going. We are here, we are destined for something greater and we as a human world society, we have a responsibility to do better than what we’ve done so far.

Links

• The Power of Faith-Driven Success: A Journey Toward Living Your Dream by 30 by Isabel Hundt
• The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You by Karla McLaren

Louie La Vella’s clients are entertainment personalities, night clubs, concerts and festivals and he creates brand and marketing strategies to engage and connect with their audience. Working within the shark infested waters of the night life and music industry as a Marketing and Branding consultant, La Vella has been delivering high profit solutions to live entertainment events, musicians and venues for years. With over 20 years in the night life industry, an extensive development and production experience with national television projects, authors, speakers, event producers and coach. La Vella has produced and marketed over 30 live music concerts in the past few years. Winner of the Niagara Music Awards Promoter of the Year in 2012, The Junior Awards Canadian Music, Dance category committee. He has been called a “Mediapreneur”, combining a successful television executive producer and host role with being sought after marketing and branding consultant in the night life and in the music industry. In his television days, he had the opportunity to interview the likes of Lady Gaga, Richard Branson, Backstreet Boys and more.

Question

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• What has your customer experience been like in terms of being a service provider as well as being a customer yourself and receiving services from people you may have to interact with at the events?
• What are some every day solutions that you would recommend to a small business owner to help them improve their customer experience?
• Can you share one or two things with us that you’ve taken away from interviewing people that have celebrity statues that has really helped to mold your personality and make you a better business leader?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Louie La Vella shared that he start at about 17 or 18 years old as a Night Club Promoter working for other event companies and venues. He stated that everyone has that part time job when they are getting into college whether it’s retail, grocery store or even a bartender and his love was business, of course going out and having fun and parting at the bar and clubs was a huge interest for everybody usually in the college scene. He wanted to put those two together and see if he could make money from it and it was a fantastic start. He got to forge some great relationships with venue owners, managers, bands and deejays and of course learn the trade but he thought being a Night Club Promoter wasn’t exactly his career path, he knew the entertainment industry was going to be something he wanted to be in so he quickly learned to level up and have a long term goal of working on a global scale with festivals and musicians and celebrities; so it has been a 20 year journey to get where he is today but in between, he has seen all these different opportunities to increase his personal brand and always level up and growing from that first start as a night club promoter and very quickly into booking venues and running his own events and then getting on television and radio and now to this day, it has been a fun journey.

• Louie stated that as an entrepreneur, he has two arms to the business. One of them is B-2-B which is him getting clients and getting to work with musicians or record labels or festival owners and it is really showing them that he can connect and engage their audience to them because now a day’s everybody gets the same feeling of social media being such a big player in marketing, if not the player in marketing depending on your demographic but it’s very noisy and you have to do a lot of hustle, it was a little bit easier back in the day to just either pay radio for events or do print ads or flier or television and you have that marketing there. Now there is so much more involvement, you have to understand the user behavior of your audience and with that said the second arm of what he has to do is connecting them and even himself to the consumer audience, so that’s selling tickets, getting people to download music and that’s really understanding what the consumer wants to see on Social Media for them to engage, no longer that it works for us to just put a nice looking flier on Social Media and boots that post, you really need to come up with a campaign, some with music, you can’t just drop a track on Facebook and get couple of your friends to share it and hopefully your fan base runs with it. You need to create a strategy 4 weeks, 6 weeks and get them engaged, get them listening to the teaser or get them feeling what the event’s going to be about and eventually get to the ticket launch and then they’ve already bought into the message and you have them a little more excited and they are raving fan ready to support you. Now a day’s a lot of people get scared of that and they think, “that’s a lot of work” and it is and you trade a little bit of hustle for maybe writing cheques to traditional media for ad spend because the ad spent on social media is a lot less but it works well and that is the sandbox where everybody is playing so we really need to take that seriously and not just say back in the day it was easier, we don’t have time machines, we can’t go back in the day and go back to where we knew what we were doing and we were successful at it, things change consistently now and very quickly so we have to be on top of that.

Louie stated that talking about events whether its festivals or night club events or smaller concerts, going to the events are always great for him to either wine down and enjoy the event or do a little bit of research on what everybody else is up to and he fine that a lot of the places that either spend too much money to market to fill their room or just not filling their room is because they are stuck back in the day. Louie shared he was on a panel at the International Night Life congress a month ago and everybody was talking about Millennials and how they’re on their phones all the time and it’s ruining the experience going to a club or going to a venue to have their phones out and they just want to be on social media and he sat there and thought about his experience going in and he said, the usual behavior is not just because they are on social media and need to tell their friends or talk, it’s their documenting, they’re documenting everything they do and we do the same things, maybe not as much as the generation because depending on our age demographics but we want to tell our friends what we are up to, we want to share what we are eating, we feel like we are all media companies and we need to document. He told them going back to the experience of him experiencing a night life venue, “What are you guys doing differently than 20 years ago? You have a concert hall or a night club with a nice deejay or a band with some lights and a bartender but that’s the same concept as 20 years ago.” He was trying to poke fun by saying that he doesn’t use VHS tapes anymore, we have all changed, why have you not changed if you think about 20 year old concept of the night club, it’s exactly the same, and we have different sounds and different lights but that’s not a huge step in the experience. When he walks into a club and its dead and the bartender is on their phone and it’s the same old, same old for 20 years, he’s thinking well no wonder nobody’s here or it’s too busy and the promoter and the venue owner thinks, Hey, Louie look how packed it is, look how great it is here, it’s over packed” and he’s thinking, “Go ask 6 girls right now what they think about your club and I bet you 4 or all 6 of them will say it’s too busy here, I can’t get a drink, I wanted in line too long, I Iost my friend when I went to the bathroom” and you think that the over capacity of the club is your success but I bet that you’re even losing money because they want to leave early, they get frustrated to get to the bar to get a drink. He has seen that with his own experience by going to these places and thinking….these are issues that are going to bite them or already bit them.

He stated that it’s the same with Facebook likes, he has 10,000 likes. Likes do not equal sale at all. The amount of time that your organic reaches 1% you still have to target people, you might be targeting specific intricate ways of targeting like somebody that likes your page but also likes these certain items. A lot of people are just going for likes and it’s a visual thing and he understands as a branding play but that’s a small piece of the branding pot, you have 5,000 likes or 10,000 Twitter followers that never equal actual sales, you have to think outside of that, so you spend all of your money trying to get likes but he never do that, he tries to spend the ad budget on your actual target, let’s try to create a funnel, let’s sell tickets, let’s sell music, people will like your page indirectly because they see the ad and they don’t like your page currently and they’ll it like but that’s not the metric we go for so a lot of people are not thinking the new way of doing marketing and still thinking of the old mentality, we want more likes, we want to pack the bar, we want to do the old school way because it’s easier and it just doesn’t work.

• Louie La Vella stated that one of the mistakes that many business owners and entrepreneurs make is that they forget that they are also a customer, he hears it a lot with musicians or bar owners or club owners on them complaining when they go to another bar or complaining about, “Why do these people want to message me on Facebook or text me, I want to be on phone” they are romanticizing bout the old school days and he sit there and say your audience is 21, they don’t care what you think and they forget about them as a customer sometimes, “Oh, I went to the bar and it was too busy, they couldn’t get a drink” and yet they do the same thing. The first thing that everybody needs to stop and realize is that you are also a customer and think about how you want that experience to be. A lot of people disconnect that, they think “This is how I want to be treated”, but I don’t do this thing to my customer and then they wonder why there is a disconnect there and that’s a massive thing that everyone forgets. Same thing on Social Media “Oh, I’m going to complain about my dinner and I expect somebody to respond right away” but on the flip side “That idiot made a one star review, I think I should delete all my reviews so nobody sees any of them” you are disconnecting yourself as a customer though, you’re not thinking about what you would want, they want to have someone respond right away, they don’t want it to be deleted and you would hate that to happen but now you want to do that to them so that’s massive tip number 1 on returning customer service and just thinking about how you would want to be treated. The second thing is Consistency, a lot of people give up very fast, they try something new and it doesn’t work a couple weeks in and they give up. Have a long term goal, at the beginning of the chat he said he had a 20 year span of cool stuff that happened to get to where he is today but all of it was fun and there were pivots everywhere, he went into radio, he went into TV, it was all to the same goal of music, music show, music television, everything was in the same genre so that he could keep building brand awareness and now he’s on the listening committee for their award show which is like the Grammys up in Canada which is great and is more branding too and it’s exciting to be a part of that community as well and all that is a long term goal and he has those sites. A lot of people create an event like a bar event or new business shiny object syndrome and then they give up fast, if that’s something that’s serious for your business and it’s going to grow your brand, have a realistic goal, nobody is going to pack your club in 3 weeks and nobody’s going to have a brand new division of their entrepreneur business and think in couple Facebook ads “I’m rolling”, you need to have a long term goal but you have to stick with it. You can pivot along the way a little bit because things need to be tweaked and at the end if it’s not working out, fine, you remove it, stop wasting your time but you have to stick to a realistic goal.

• Louie stated that the celebrities that he interviewed are all down to earth people and he really like the fact that they are normal people and that people resonate with that and especially on Social Media where they can have Snapchat or Instagram stories or just respond as a normal person, it makes a human-to-human connection and that’s a common thread he saw with all of those people. There were a very few celebrities that he met that had that fake persona or were just rude and it may have been the industry that they went through and whatever path they went through just gave them that cold heart but 99.9% of them were all super down to earth and super nice and just appreciative of just being normal people which is amazing. A fun story that he likes to tell, he takes so many flights and sometimes flying on his own, you sit beside somebody it may not be in a first class and you go, “Hey, how are you doing? What do you do?” “I’m the president of this massive company” or “I’m the executive of this” and sometimes they ask him what he does and he would have a cool story and he’s always thinking on the plane everyone is such a normal person, you’re sitting beside who knows who and they are normal people and if you think about that with these celebrities, they really are. That down to earth groundedness is what is making them successful and holding onto their long term goals. You see some of them derail here and there and that’s when they lose sight of being themselves but to be real like that really helps in their personal branding, if you tweet at somebody and they tweet back to you or they do something on Ellen you laugh with them like, they’re just normal funny people, you laugh with them like, “Oh, I find that funny too, I would do something that crazy” and it really helps to be that kind of person and on his side getting those interviews of course being on television a lot of them were organize but Lady Gaga and Richard Branson, those were just last second accidental interviews. Lady Gaga was interviewing other people and she just got signed to Interscope Records like week before and that was years ago. She was a this rooftop party with her managers and all these other deejays were there and his TV crew was interviewing famous deejays and she was nobody and her managers came up to them and said, “Here’s this new girl that just got signed, we are ready to push her, she going to have a great album come this summer and she would like to get some media so would do an interview for her?” and he said, “I don’t know who she is and we have a lot of stuff going on but hold on this could be an opportunity” they listened to the song and it was “Just Dance” and they said, “Yeah, it’s a fantastic song, she has major backing, absolutely we will do the interview, not a problem” not knowing that she was going to be a superstar within a month or 2. These doors open in front of you and sometimes you may not be real person and think, “I don’t have time for this” this would have been a way different story saying the time he could have interview Lady Gaga and that was her first national TV interview as Lady Gaga just getting signed which is cool to have under his belt as well but you would have to try and see those opportunities as they open.

• Louie stated that he likes what he does and that’s one big thing that keeps him motivated to wake up and know that this is what he likes, so when there is down times whether it’s working with clients that aren’t his favorite and you can decide “I can fire these clients and just move on” there are up times too, it just keeps him motivated to wake up and do something fun. He thinks that everybody needs to do that whether it’s a regular job or whether you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re an entrepreneur don’t create for yourself that you don’t like. Do something you love and that’s a huge factor and of course the idea as an entrepreneur that you can create money out of thin air or anything that’s a failure you don’t count it as a “Oh man, I failed, I suck” you just look at it like, “Find no problem, let’s pave it, let’s tweak, let’s continue, it’s all good, I will create something new, I can adjust” that mindset is really exciting to have.

• Louie stated that he is fan of the dance genres, that’s what they did with the television network and radio like electronic music, dance music, house music and of course that was the music that was fairly strong in the mid 90’s when he was growing up but hip hop was strong too so that’s another favorite genre of his. He stated that it was funny because if he was asked what his favorite song is, he wouldn’t have had a good answer. There are so many new stuff coming especially that he has to listen to so many music and mix shows that he probably couldn’t give a straight answer on what his favorite song is right now but he would lean towards the club genres, the dance music and hip hop urban music is great and there are some pop rock songs that he loves too but he is not a fan of country or classical there are so many genre room in his brain to follow. Yanique asked him if he likes reggae and he stated that reggae is great.

• Louie stated that the tool he couldn’t live without is Facebook. He has been able to get clients and return the favor by making them millions of dollars on the platform of Facebook and of course that same Social Media but majority of his business is on Facebook and Instagram very close but those are the two. He stated that within those 2 apps he can message people, he can be in contact, he can get on phone calls, he can do his advertising, those are the BIG monster players in his industry.

• Louie shared that he is a big fan of audio books; he will listen to audio books like crazy. Especially when you’re driving or traveling. He stated that there are so many that he has gone through that are absolutely amazing and a few off the top of his head: Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek was a great one. Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk was a fantastic one. Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday was really cool. He was talking about how media manipulation happens and how groups of people can get in, utilize the media and reading that book years ago and being a marketing guy, you can start to understand how things are happening on advertising like self driving cars are going to be coming out stronger as the years go by but you’re seeing ads now like a Kia or Ford commercial. If your brain wonders a bit and you think about your kids and you move into another lane, don’t worry the machine has your back, just slowly getting us used to the idea how we are scared of we are better than the machine, “I don’t want the car to self drive, I’m a better driver” just slowly giving us a tiny step by step of training our brains to think, “No the machine is better than you” you wonder off, that kind of idea without being a hardcore. Have a little strategy, give yourself a 4 week campaign before dropping your track, this is a probably a 4 to 10 year campaign but you can see these little things happening and you can also look at the election. You can see how Donald Trump, how he used the media to his advantage, against his advantage and when you read a book like that and you look at what’s going on in the media and how we are all headline readers and we’ll believe anything on Facebook whether we click on it or not it’s scary and it’s extremely possible to do those kind of things which is scary.

• Louie stated that he lives to level up what he does ever so often and he started to scale away from night club and bar and doing a lot more festivals which is very exciting and record labels and speaking as well. He has a book that he authored a few years ago and he’s coming out with a second one and he’s starting to do more speaking engagements around North America and that’s a new level of what he’s doing. The entire year (2016) as he called it The Year of Authority for him, he’s going to get on podcasts, spread his message and just shares what he knows and do a lot more of his own podcasts and articles and he’s going utilize Social Media to build authority and brand awareness so that he can bump up the next level and start doing a lot more larger scale things and do speaking. He has done speaking gigs now which has been exciting. So that kind of the new next level for him which he has already hit and he starting to grow that and explore, just in podcasts, he has done over 45 + in last 3 months as a guest host which has been really exciting and a lot of hustle and a lot of fun and he is on pace before the month’s over to hit over 50 podcasts and he’s going to keep on going so that’s going to be a lot of fun for continuing to release and share those again throughout 2017 because he’ll have one a week to share which is great and that’s really cool for authority building and brand building. People can listen; they have a great conversation, and it is a cool tool that he’s picked up.

Louie stated that the night clubs are your basic bar and night club, there can be a 500 person venue, 1000 person venue but through your typical night club every week they have events going on or students nights so it’s a different atmosphere all together where as a Festival your talking 30,000 people showing up a day or more or maybe less and it’s such a massive cool undertaking and you work on marketing for 8 months, right now he’s working on marketing, even in September 2016 he was working on festivals for June 2017 but it’s really cool. You have a tight nit team and they organize everything to do with the festival and when it finally comes to fruition and you’re on stage with 30,000 people in front of you and this massive production and you’re thinking, “I’m the marketing guy, I was a part of bringing in these people in that’s really awesome.” And that a cool feeling and it’s a larger scale and not everybody gets to do that, if you’re a good marketer and you have friends and you know deejays, you might be able to jump in as a promoter at a night club but that’s not something that he does anymore, he consult and train a lot of owners and promoters because he knows marketing but he has a small hand full of bars and clubs now just because he knows them well and they are friends now and he helps them out but for the most part he has expended away from that and there’s different monetary value between a large scale festival and a night club so he can do different business and not work so hard but work on 3 projects instead of 15. 

He stated that in festivals now you’re dealing with million dollar deejays, million dollar bands, some of the biggest of the biggest and you get to discuss with their management things, forge friendships and that’s just a whole other ball game as oppose to the night club which is still fun and great but you’re working with the local club owner or the local deejay and sometimes they bring in acts but not usually not the larger scale because there is no way they can afford someone of that caliber for a 500 person venue so it’s a completely different ball game but it’s a lot of fun. 

Louie shared listeners can find him at –

www.louielavella.com

Louie La Vella Facebook

Louie La Vella Twitter

Louie La Vella Instagram

Louie La Vella LinkedIn

• Louie shared a quote that he has two quotes the first one for him especially is “Every day is a Friday” so whether it’s actually Friday or a Monday, if you feel like it’s a Friday it means that you are doing what you love, so if you can find something that feels like a Friday everyday then you’re doing well. The other one especially in the marketing sense he likes to always say, “Make sure you’re playing in the sandbox everybody else is playing in.” So whether your audience is on LinkedIn, whether your audience is on Twitter or Facebook or on radio or on print, wherever they may be, make sure you know where they play because if you’re in the wrong sandbox, no matter what you are doing over there you’re not getting the message across.

Links

• Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek
• Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk
• Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday

Brett Campbell, from journeyman cabinetmaker to fitness entrepreneur having built one of the fastest growing fitness brands in Australia is a man on a mission and he’s living the dream life of a young and successful entrepreneur. Impacted and inspired by the passing of a childhood friend, Brett is now taking his mission to the next level, helping the generations of entrepreneurs and professionals realize their true potential and assume a life of freedom and abundance that is possible for all who dare to take charge of their destiny. Brett’s mission is to help over 100 Million people discover, design, develop and deliver their passion and expertise to the world so that they can make more money, help more people and ultimately live a lifestyle of their design. Brett is also the owner and CEO of Fiit International, a global health and fitness company whose products and services have helped over 45,000 clients and the Authority Academy, an online community for Internet marketers, coaches, speakers and small business owners. He’s also the founder of the Unleash Your Greatness Movement, an international live event series to help others pursue living the life of their dreams. Having grown up in New Zealand, Brett now lives in the gold coast of Australia with his lovely wife Emily and their two pugs, Burt and Pugsley.  

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• On a global level, how do you feel about customer service/ customer experience?
• Health and fitness is important, how do you think it plays a role if your employees are healthier, not just physically but also spiritually and mentally so that they can really be a well-rounded employee in order to perform in your business?
• What are some important considerations for an entrepreneur or an online business owner to be successful?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• If you were sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated human capital, what’s the one piece of advice would you give them to have a successful business?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Brett Campbell stated that he was born in Australia and they were living in a trailer park/caravan park, himself, his sister and his parents. One day he was playing outside and he heard his name yelled out, “Brett, Brett” and he said to himself “Oh my god, what have I done” because he was a rascal type kid. I run into the trailer park and put his head the window and it was his mother calling out his name. She said, “Brett, Brett run across the road right now and get some help”. What he was witnessing was his father has his hands on his mother and was about to throw her through the window. He just came back from the local pub so he was drunk and this was sort of the regular occurrence. He ran across the road and got some help and that was the last moment, last memory he had of his father, shortly after his mother and sister and himself jumped an airplane and moved to New Zealand to start a new life. He shared this story purely because at that age he remembered clearly and vividly, saying to himself that he will do everything he possible can in his power to make sure that his mother and sister never have to worry ever again. He assumed the responsibility of being the man of the family and that’s quite a big responsibility for a young boy to take on but it has been the driving force of every single thing he does in his life. He went through school, got kicked out of school as he was the kid that talked too much, he got a call to the Principal’s office and they say, “Brett, it’s probably better off that you leave school now.” It got to a point where he would walk into English classes and the teacher would point to the hallway and say, “You’re sitting out there today.” It got to the point where he said maybe school isn’t the best for him to harness what he was suppose to being doing on this planet, which at the time he had no clue what that was but he fell into an apprentice cabinetmaker. He became a cabinetmaker and stayed there 5 years too long because he knew from day one that was not he was made to be doing on this planet. He was good at it, became really good at it and he became the best in the factory, he was grooming to take over ownership of the factory but the reality was that something he knew he wasn’t meant to be doing and there are too many people on this planet right now in a job, in a career, doing a course at university, doing something right now that they know that that’s not what they meant to be doing and at the time unfortunate for him, he didn’t recognize that quick enough. He then jumped on an airline, left New Zealand, moved to Australia and started a fitness company. He started as a solo personal trainer, he was training time for money, he was training people and then he uncovered what online Internet marketing was and haven’t looked back since. They built a franchise, they built about 16 different products and services that cater to the health and wellness industry ranging from a franchise to an education school to online products and services and then he found the love for online marketing and building business and the natural transition of people asking him how he did and how he can help them which led into Authority Academy where he helps entrepreneurs and business owners follow what they call The Authority Road Map which is a unique framework that can help anyone out there who has the passion, the skills, the knowledge, how do you take that and turn it into a business so that you can generate a very nice, comfortable lifestyle around that.

Brett agreed that he has had a very excited and adventurous journey thus far and there is a number of things that have happened and reason why these things happen is that he is the that guy, you hear the saying, “Ready, Fire, Aim”, he let off 20 rounds first so he’ll fire, fire, fire, ops he’s ready and then aim, hence the reason why he is able to do so many things because he has had that attitude from day one which is engrained that he just doesn’t give up, he’ll keep moving forward. He just wrote his first book and he shared in it that, “We work on the right things, just at the wrong times” and it’s something for entrepreneurs and business owners to really be aware of and with the opportunity that they have right with the online landscape and how easy it is to get your message in front of people. Too many people right now are working on the right things such as: maybe it is the right thing for you to be learning Social Media and Facebook but if you haven’t got the foundations, you haven’t understand what your business is all about, why you’re doing the business that you are doing, you can certainly be like he was; build a franchise with 35 locations in 6 months then realize that maybe this franchise wasn’t the path he wanted to go down.

• Brett Campbell stated that the customer experience is imperative, he talked about it in Authority Road Map, it is the second pillar which is Customer and Community and inside of that he talked about a concept call “Your Client Perfect Journey” “What’s the dream come through experience?” Whenever he’s working with anyone, he’ll say, “Let’s outline the first time someone hears or sees anything about you, what does that perfect journey looks like from there on?” Too many entrepreneurs, business owners do this and he admitted that when he heard about this online that you can generate thousands of leads easily online, he started to not look at each lead as a person, he was looking at them as just another number and they have generated 500,000 people on their databases and at the start they were generating 1,000 leads a day and he was just looking at them as a number. It is a very important distinction and he hears it so much now with people complaining about Social Media, “I only got 3 likes on this post that I did” or “I only have 200 people engage in this post and it used to be thousands” what we need to stop and remember is 200 people or 5 likes, that’s 5 people who have engaged with your stuff, people are taking time out of their day and so it ties back to the customer experience. You must first know that each customer is a human being with a soul, with their own issues, once you can really grasp that, it’s super important, any overall journey of a customer because what’ the goal of business is to get repeat customers, is to have people staying, paying and referring into your business.

• Brett stated that it is imperative and he talked about this concept in his latest book called Right Now: Why Not You and Why Not Now? and it’s all about taking action right now, not tomorrow, not next week or next month and one of the pillars he talked about is the concept of the 4 P’s which comes under the developmental phase. He believes that there are 4 things that we as human beings must develop these key areas, there is the Physiology, there’s our Psychology, our Personal Knowledge and our Productivity, as an employer it’s integral that we are teaching and training our employees in the 4 key areas, so health and fitness is one and it’s imperative. If you have someone eating terrible food and you can see that they are sluggish after lunch, you need to have those conversations and say, “How is this affecting your productivity? How this is affecting your focus and energy moving forward?” because it’s all about team culture as well, you lead from example, you can’t walk into the office with a pie and expect other people to not to follow – not saying any employer should say, “this is what you have to eat if you work here” just talk about the education around it like, “Hey, I notice that at 2:00 pm you get into a bit of a tired patch, I can see that your energy shift and you can see productivity drop” You need to address those things head on. Health and fitness is one component of it, it really comes down to the psychology as well and teaching and training your employees to become aware of what is actually happening when we talk about mind, body connection, when we talk about how they are feeling.

• Brett stated that every single business is an online business regardless. Do they produce and deliver their product deliverable online? That is probably classifies more as a capital leader online business. He thinks the biggest things once again is the beautiful luxury that we have with online space is that you can get feedback very quickly so we can create whether it’s an opt-in page or a product, you will know fairly quickly, all you need to do is send some traffic to a page and we could know within an hour whether it’s going to work or not. He stated that they just ran an Authority Academy event in the Gold Coast and one of things he was sharing with people is the concept of split testing and the luxury that we have with it is so easy, in 50 seconds you can have a brand new page split testing off each other and let the software that you are using define it but he shared this case study where they were converting, one of their opt-in pages were converting at 48% and it was over 20,000 conversions so it was pretty steady and then something triggered him to split test the page and finally converted at 58% over 10,000 conversions. Think about that number, over 10,000 opt-ins, a 10% difference, we’re talking about a lot of money when you are talking from the money you are investing to generate a client but you’re talking about the missed opportunity as well. What you need to be aware of when you are embarking online is the easability to be able to create and execute on something but also be aware that that can be all Achilles Heel for you as well because this is where working on the right thing at the wrong time really comes into fruition. For example, say you want to go from offline to online and you talk to some marketer out there who is a “coach” and they say, “Yes, you need to build a sales funnel and drive traffic to an opt-in and this is what it’ll look like.” What he sees and when people come to him and say, “We have been trying, we’ve built a funnel, we created this course or program and it’s not working.” It’s because they have lost traction and they have lost connection with the foundational components of their business and that’s really identifying what does your client really want and what does your client really need. So because it’s so easy to create a product or service and get it up online, a lot of people miss the core concept of are you delivering the right thing at the right time, what is the actual product deliverable that you are selling in exchange.

• In reference to Yanique’s question about the Hardware Store that is now migrating online from a Brick and Mortar set up. Brett suggested that the Hardware Store should take their contact list and upload it into Facebook – have your customers connect with you, post things of value to your customers. Use video and show customers how to do things, re-purposing videos as videos are “hot” Do not be solely focused on selling your products.

• Brett stated that the tool he couldn’t live without is ClickFunnels and Infusionsoft hands down. One that he likes right now is Trello, they use it as communication through team. It is used from a team communicative perspective.

• Brett shared that one of the books that have had the biggest impact is the first that he jumped into which he didn’t read a book until he was 25 years old. He taught himself how to speed read but he thought it was him being lazy just skipping through, skimming pages but at the age of 25 he immerse himself in his first book called The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber, it was the first book that he started and was like, “this is me, they are talking to me” which is ironic because it is the story about the entrepreneur, the technician and the manager and they used McDonald’s as an example of building a business that can be franchised and duplicated and he finally went on to build a franchise.

• Brett suggested that you need to connect with your big Why, your big mission, vision of what you truly want to be doing. He shared that he started the online world 8 years ago, all he want to do was make money online, sit on the beach and drink Piña Colada, that was the vision that he wanted but what he really wanted, his biggest vision in life is to stand on stage in front of tens and thousands of people and share the message that life’s too short to not be living to your fullest potential. If he wants to achieve this big vision and mission, there’s no way he can possible do it by himself and that’s where the concept that his friend created a framework called the EPT (Entrepreneurial Personality Type). The first thing as an entrepreneur, the question you ask yourself is “How do I get ahead, how can I help myself move forward?” when you do your first hire it’s purely on the basis of how can they help me move forward, it’s selfish act so to speak. You are giving someone employment, money and all of those things but the reason why people hire is because they need help. The next step moving forward through that is “How do we both get ahead, how do I help you now as an employee start living to your potential?” and that’s where a lot of employers get scared about, they say, “I don’t want to empower my employees too much, they would probably get up and leave.” That was limiting belief that he had and instilled in him as well until he had the conversation with a couple of different friends and one of the comments landed and it was like, “Why wouldn’t you want people to outgrow your business, it’s an amazing thing that means you have done a great job, you have helped them now go to their next level in life.” It is in agreement with his message in life is helping people live their full potential. He has people in his company now that doesn’t want to be there in the next 12 months because they are going to outgrow it. When you are around him, you are inspired to go and live to your true potential and if he has people in his company who is sitting around a computer and going, “This is not really what I want to be doing for the real of my life.” He has to understand and live with the reality that he is going inspire people around in his circle to go out to do something bigger and different. It also comes down to not being afraid that you need to have an employee that’s going to be a 20-year veteran in your company. The Ultimate Goal is Contribution – how do we contribute to someone other than ourselves – how do we get there.

• Brett stated that the one thing that he is working on right now is definitely his book; it has been over a year in the making. He released it in October 2016 but he wrote it 1 year previously in November. It is what the book’s message actual represents as it’s not a book to him, it’s the message. It’s what’s itched on to the pieces of paper and more so now because it has been out for a couple of weeks, he is getting tons of feedback, people messaging and tagging him in posts on Facebook just sharing how much of a change it has starting to make a change in their life because it’s very practical step by step, it’s not just philosophy, it’s like, “go and try this, go and try that” so you can start seeing momentum. All we need to move forward and start living to our full potential is to start creating momentum, start creating steps right now and that’s what’s really exciting, they have tied also Unleash Your Greatness Bali escape which they run every year, which is an event they run in Bali, it’s a 5 day event, it takes people from all over the world there and it’s amazing. He is just loving being able to now be in that position of contribution. He is still building a business, he is still building businesses but to be able to take that step out and really start to have more profound impact on people’s lives.

Brett shared that the book Right Now!: Why Not You and Why Not Now? by Brett Campbell can be found at www.rightnowacademy.com/book, you can also find it on Amazon and in book stores around the world.

• Brett shared listeners can find him at –

www.brettcampbell.net

Brett Campbell Facebook

Brett Campbell Twitter

Brett Campbell Instagram

Brett Campbell Podcast – Deep Dive Podcast

• Brett shared a quote that he has a couple and one of them is “Done is better than perfect” is critical because too many people get road blocked and stage fright on the sense that “It needs to have this before I do this” or “I have to achieve this before that.” The other one is from Michelangelo is “The greatest danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”

Links

• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber
• Right Now!: Why Not You and Why Not Now? by Brett Campbell
• ClickFunnels
• Trello
• Infusionsoft

Joshua Latimer felt his job as a banker for JP Morgan Chase to start a cleaning business in Michigan which he eventually grew and sold to a California based cleaning conglomerate in 2015. Now he’s living in Costa Rica with his 4 kids and wife where he helps small business owners from all over the world understand the power of business systems and automation and the freedom that they can bring. Joshua is the founder of www.automategrowsell.com, an online training platform for small local service businesses as well as www.sendjim.com, a follow up automation tool for busy professionals.

Questions

• What is your Zodiac sign?
• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• What prompted you to move to Costa Rica?
• Why is it important in a business, especially if you’re going to deliver a quality customer experience one that’s exceptional, why is it important to have systems and how does those systems help to maximize on your customer experience?
• Can you explain to us about what you do in automategrowsell.com, in terms of your online training platform?
• On a global level, how do you feel about customer service/ customer experience?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What are some important considerations for an entrepreneur or an online business owner to be successful?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• If you were sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated human capital, what’s the one piece of advice would you give them to have a successful business?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Joshua Latimer stated that he thinks he is a Scorpio but he hasn’t put in a lot of time on that totally being true. He stated that he was born November 18th. Joshua shared he is not sure the traits of a Scorpio, however, a lot of pain and suffering has helped to mold him.

• Joshua Latimer stated that he has always had an entrepreneurial spirit, he was the first one in his family to be an entrepreneur so when he started his first business he was 18 years old and his parents went on vacation and when they came home, he had used their Credit Card to buy 14 candy machines and their whole garage was full of candy machines. He had no discipline, he had no real focus or wisdom or knowledge in business, he just had the desire for it but he got a lot if push back from friends and family saying, “What are you doing?” “Go get a job” “This is crazy, just be a normal person” and he kind of cave to that pressure for many years like a lot of people have or is still doing, going to work and doing the thing that you’re not passionate about because it’s what you’re suppose to do. He did that for awhile but then his wife got pregnant with their first child, he had his “Come to Jesus” moment where he said, “Alright Josh, deep down you know you’re a square peg in a round hole and you know you want to start a business.” He felt like it was a now or never at that time, so he decided to start a cleaning business and his mother was so mad at him that she didn’t talk to him for a week, she was so freaked out that he was going to start a business rather than having a “safe and secure job.”

Yanique asked if was the same business that he sold to a California cleaning conglomerate in 2015. Joshua stated that yes, it was and that it’s a great business, it’s a repeat service, there’s a high margin and it’s a niche service, it’s a good business but it’s tricky to scale. One of the reasons it is so hard is because you’re inside peoples’ homes to have the right systems and protocols, when you have dozens of employees and you’re doing tens and thousands of dollars in revenue a week or a day sometimes, it’s very tricky to keep that thing tight enough to where it’s operating at a high level going in and out of peoples’ homes, it’s an intimate thing and that where the tricky part is to scale a cleaning business.

• Joshua shared that he was born and raised in Michigan, never really been anywhere and then decided to move with his wife and kids to Central America. It was a couple year process and he wanted his kids to know that the world is a big place; he wanted his kids to be bilingual and to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around them. He wanted them to take intelligent risks and start businesses and do things and live a big life because that’s who he is and he wants to pass that on to them because the world is a big place. People all over the planet are getting up and doing stuff all day and starting companies and getting married and as an American, it is really easy to not even think of that, to not even realize that. Joshua shared we are only a small percentage of the worlds’ population, so he can only help his family to open their eyes and expand their horizons in terms of culture.

Joshua stated that he was so self-centered in a business perspective and in how smart he thought he was perspective, it’s almost embarrassing and he looked around with his colleagues and other Americans, they don’t do it on purpose but they slowly become like that over time, they live in a bubble a little bit and so going down to Costa Rica and engage with people who makes US $2.00 an hour and interact with people who are terrified to start a tiny business and to understand the cultural differences and to see what he can offer there and learn from them as well it has been an amazing thing and because his new business is web based, he has the ability to do that which is amazing and as long has he has Internet, he can work from wherever.

• Joshua shared that systems are only important if you actually like your business and you don’t want to be a slave to it. If you want to make real money without you doing everything yourself, we have to take a hard look at that system and automation, it sounds fancy but it’s very simple and from the stand point of Customer Service, a lot of small businesses shoot from the hip and the founder or the owner or the person who is holding it all together, they’re the glue, they are smart. Persons who have a small business, they are very sharp, they are very talented and they are holding it together, the problem is you are exhausted, as your business scales, it gets harder and harder to hold it all together and things start dropping, you start dropping the ball, your Customer Experience goes down but you don’t even realize it’s down because you can’t possibly pay attention to 32 different areas in your business at the same time at a high level. So what a system is, it’s you taking a step back and being intentional in predefining the way that you do something in your business. For example, if someone’s really mad at you and they think your company stinks, there should be a process for that, they call, email or Facebook you, these days, probably Facebook so the whole world will see how much they hate you and once that happens, “What’s triggered inside of your business?” Most people today will just randomly see the message and then they’ll say, “Oh no!” and then they’ll do some stuff or they’ll email them back but it’s not standardized, it’s not systemized, it’s not thought through in advance, that’s what a system is. It’s going through all the little pieces in your business and being intentional about how you’re going to do this at a high level and then writing it down and then deploying it to your team and being consistent with it over time. Once you do that in all the parts of your business, the sky is the limit.

Joshua stated that his philosophy is that you run towards problem. One of his company core values that have already been established before they built the system is to have a way to know that Facebook and the customer service support email account and their customer support telephone number were checked really quickly and on going. Step 1 of your system might include using some software or assigning a low level administrative task person to constantly check these messages on a 15 minutes reoccurring basis as part of her workflow maybe she does other work and she is always refreshing that Facebook feed for example because you want to be present and you want to be very responsive in Customer Service. Step 2 would be, if something happens where someone is not happy that would trigger all of this other stuff, so you would give them a predefined script, not robotic, very human, very fun. Taking responsibility by creating a script for them to send back to the Facebook person and it would be in the 15-minute window because the system would be checking it all the time and would probably have the employees take responsibility, tell the customer, “I have the authority to make this right for you, we’re going to be on this, here’s my personal cell phone number, here’s my email address, we’re going to be reaching out to you, we are all over this. Thank you so much for telling us this happened, this is a huge help to us.” Step 3 would be for us to go find this person in real life so whether we review the orders from the time the message was sent, we try to find them and their phone number, whatever it is we will run and sprint towards that problem as a team. Step 4 might be to document the whole situation in our CRM or our support ticket software, whatever we are using so that we have a record of the complaint that was made and anybody that was involved in it. Step 5 might be, during your weekly team meetings, you review the previous week incidents and see if they were resolved satisfactorily or if we can tighten up or if the script needs to be changed or if we are doing our very best. That would be a simple word document that describes everything but the hard part of the system is getting your team to do it that way every single time. The way that you accomplish that is by being relentless in your pursuit of sticking to the system in your own life as a leader so when you constantly going back there an reiterating and reaffirming, it will work but people give up too quick sometimes with it.

Joshua stated that the meat of your leadership ability comes in the way you actually behave and execute in your own role. Everybody is watching you, your family and your kids so you have to be high level because everyone below you will do exactly what you do except a little bit less. If the bar is not high enough in step 1 by the time you are 12 layers deep and have all these staff members, the customers dealing with all the 12 layer employees at the bottom, you’re going to get a very low level experience because the bar wasn’t raise high enough by the leadership in the beginning.

• Joshua shared that what he does is in his niche of window cleaning and pressure cleaning is that over time people knew who he was in his industry. He would get a lot of requests to do business consulting or fly in somewhere and help them to systemize and automate and really dig in and rip the guts out and look how can we fix this business, where is it broken, how can we scale, how can we grow? He got a lot of requests to do that; he doesn’t have time to do that. His primary business his is software company, so what he did is create Automate, Grow, Sell, it’s for local service companies and it helps you go through basically 6 months of how do I go front to back, top to bottom, through the entire architecture of your company, how do I systemize it, it’s a private community that gets a couple coaching calls with him and there’s over 50 videos shot in Costa Rica with home work and documents and samples. It’s an educational product for service companies to help them stop being a slave to their small business.

Joshua stated that he tends to specialize with service companies but the customer life cycle and the way to engage enough to the sale and the way to get maximum profitability specifically to home service businesses like lawn care, landscaping, carpet cleaning, he has some other people in the boot camp but that’s kind of the core of who it is tailored to speak to if you decide to take it.

• Joshua stated that people in Central America are a lot less stressed out than people in North America and that includes the employees of companies. He almost started a pest control company in Costa Rica a few months ago and he still might invest in something like that. The deal with the way Central America customer service works, everyone is really nice while they provide you with horrible customer service. In general, it’s a strong trend; the people are not entrepreneurial so they don’t look at things the same way. He didn’t realize how entrepreneurial North Americans were until he lived in Central America and so he thinks we have a lot of work to do in North America in terms of getting our service back to the way it was decades ago and really being high level with our enthusiasm and the way we take care of our customers but he feels that we are light years ahead of the businesses down there, they just don’t quite understand power in those type of things, they’re all commodity based businesses, they have a thing or a service, you give them money, they give you the thing or the service and that’s it. There’s very little attention paid to the way that I feel doing business with the company and what happens after I do business with the company. There’s very little attention paid to the perceived value, the branding, the marketing, and the uniform with the company. They just don’t quite get that and for somebody that does, it’s a huge advantage but he doesn’t see very often.
• Joshua stated that it’s a cultural thing and that Costa Rica is an amazing place and he loves Costa Ricans, he learned a lot from them because the world is not about making more money but from a business perspective, there’s a lot of work to be done there and there’s a reason there’s no middle class, there’s rich Costa Ricans, there’s very poor Costa Ricans, the government takes care of everybody, it’s a socialized country, the Government pays for everything, does everything and so there’s not like people are destitute on the streets but they also have a very limited ceiling on what they can accomplish in their life. For example, if a young poor Costa Rican wants to start a business, the paperwork, the regulation, the process is a nightmare with all the government bureaucracy but on top of that, when they try to start the business, all of their friends and family are going to say, “No, no what are you doing? You’re going to loose your savings, don’t do that, that’s too risky.” Even if it’s the most simple business ever. So, there’s a lot of pulling you back down going on so the mentality there is that they love each other, they’re warm people but they live in fear in terms of entrepreneurism and they don’t know how to make money as a people, they just don’t get it. The very few people that do, exploit it, the government exploits it, there’s a huge corruption in all of Central America including Costa Rica and so the people building the roads are richer than you can ever imagine while everyone else goes to the grocery store and buy 2 eggs at a time because they can’t buy a whole dozen.

• Joshua Latimer shared how he stays motivated everyday; he stated that he’s motivated because he’s blessed, because he’s thankful, because he’s happy that he wakes up everyday. He stated that he wakes up and it’s a big deal, he wakes up and he has more to accomplish, more people he can serve. He thinks that it is easier to be motivated if your base line personality is rooted in gratitude because there are so many people that he can serve including his staff, there are so many ideas that he wants to execute on and there are so many things he wants to build and he wants his children and family to participate. Motivation to him isn’t something you focus on, motivation is a by-product of correct thinking and correct thinking starts with getting your eyes off yourself every second and looking at everything you’re blessed with and all the people around you that you can serve.

He stated that in his office at the door, there is a white board in his office that says, “Today I’m thankful for” and there is a line and he has a dry erase marker and he writes something new on it everyday. It’s a silly, tiny thing but we have to remind ourselves how blessed, fortunate and lucky we are. It’s very easy to feel sorry for yourself even if you’re doing successful things, even if you’re in America, poor people in America are rich if you compare it to the world but it’s easy to sit around and say, “poor me, I only have this but everybody else have that” or “my job, I hate but it’s impossible because everybody is keeping me down” which is not true, you’re in a perspective the way you view the world, it’s true to you. If you have the correct thinking, you’re going to get more and more motivated over time.

• Joshua shared some considerations for an entrepreneur. He stated that now he has a software company, so he did the local hometown business, started with nothing, eventually grew that to being very successful, almost doing US $200,000 a month in window cleaning and then he started this app and he’s going through that process right now, he has employees all over the world, they have raised money from investors. Some considerations, number 1. You have to count the cost, people love to underestimate what they are capable of achieving in a lifetime but they over estimate what they can achieve in a year. Almost everybody does this and with a small business, for it to work, you cannot quit, you have to stay in the game, it takes time, it does not happen by osmosis instantaneously 24 hours later, so people need to be very real with themselves on the pain that will be involved, the sacrifice that will be involved and the sacrifice required for them to win. The second thing is to get a mentor; you need to be around sharp people, like-minded people, people that are 3 levels above you. If you’re the smartest person out of all of your friends, you need to get some new friends, if you’re the smartest person in the room; you need to get a new room. You have to stay sharp, you have to surround yourself with people that add value to your life and not people that suck the life out of you. If you have negative family and friends and you’re going to start a business, you better seriously considering cutting that off like the Cancer that it is if you’re going to be serious about your business.

• Joshua stated that the one online tool he uses everyday other than is own app is Trello. They use Trello every day and they have a lot of online tools that they use. Trello is kool and it’s free, it helps you organize tasks, to do’s and projects using little cards and boards and it’s a great app.

• Joshua stated that the number 1 book that have had the biggest impact is the Bible in terms of business and life and relationship and systems, how to live your life, how do you want to get closer to God, how you want to be a better dad, you want to have a better business. There is another book that he read recently called The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller, he’s the founder of Keller Williams Realty. The book is very simple, it helps you to try and understand the importance of focusing on one high level important thing at a time while you’re moving through your business and trying to achieve success and a lot of us do seven things at the same time and we never really get anywhere but we go home exhausted everyday. The key is to prioritize things and to bite off one singular thing at a time until it’s complete, go to the next one, until that’s complete, you go to the next one, it’s really important, that’s what all the highest achievers in the world do and the book helps to explain that.

Yanique stated that she read in a book when she was in college that said, “It’s not humanly possible for you to do 2 things at the same time at 100%.” She could see the concept that Gary was trying to get across in terms of really being intentional in completing an activity to the best of your ability and by doing so just focusing on that activity for that period of time.

Joshua stated that the first page of the book says, “If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.”  Joshua shared this a Russian Proverb. The truth is that building a successful company is boring and it’s not always sexy and you’re not always on fire with motivation, it’s about setting and accomplishing goals period. One thing, then two things, then three things, then four things, then you get a set back and then you’ve got to be relentless and resilient and not quit and keep going and then you set and accomplish another goal, that’s the way that you do it if you want to really crush it but most of us are too concern with checking Facebook 300 times a day or checking our email 95 times a day. He stated that he heard a statistic that the average person checks their email 95 to 130 times a day. Our ability to focus is really bad, especially with technology now. He stated that it is something he is working on to get tighter into because it’s not about working hard, it’s about being productive and if you want to move quickly to success, you have to be highly productive and that means doing all the boring stuff no one wants to talk about, doing the right things when no one is looking, shutting down the distractions and getting crap done until it’s done one thing at a time.

• Joshua stated that what he would say is that it is almost a guarantee that they are doing a very poor job as a leader laying out the vision. They have the vision but the people around them aren’t motivated, you having the vision is useless to you. The Bible says, “Without a vision, my people perish.” Your company is going to perish if you don’t have a vision in the same way. If your staff is disinterested, demotivated, not focused, not motivationally engaged, it’s always 100% fault of the leadership. You can have a bad apple once in awhile but if there is a trend, you have to take responsibility and fix the trend so you need to cast your vision more effectively, you need to help your staff understand what’s in it for them, “This is who we are, this is where we are going, this is why we are going there and this is what’s in it for you when we get there” continuously reiterating the same vision is what’s required, you don’t have one meeting a year to tell everybody to get fired up and then wonder why they are disinteresting 90 days later. You have to be driving the train, standing at the front of the crowd, pulling your troops with you, when you have real relationships with them, you understand who they are as humans and you’re coaching them and doing all that stuff, they will go to war for you but these types of issues really always fall on the shoulders of the leader, they just don’t like to admit that, they want the ominous ether of black nothingness to take the blame, they want to say, “Well, there are just no good help out there, there’s no good employees” because that’s an easy way out.

• Joshua stated that the one thing that he is working on right now is sendjim.com, which is an app that lets you send postcards, emails, gifts and letters from your cellphone. He built this app with his business partner Chris for his own company before he sold it and they are going to use it internally. What it does is automate your follow-up process with your customers, when you are done doing business with a customer, you can push a button on the phone and it will automatically physically mail them a Thank You card and an appointment reminder card 6 months later and ask for referrals, letter or email 3 months later and it does all of that stuff without you touching it. Joshua is excited about it and he said it is growing really quickly. The app is available on App Store and Google Play Store. Great Relationship Marketing Tool. Joshua says your current customers are your biggest asset.

• Joshua shared listeners can find him at –
  • com | He also has his own Podcast - The Quick Talk Podcast – podcast about systems, how to win and lean into the pain and be successful.

Links

• Joshua Latimer Facebook
• Joshua Latimer Twitter
• Joshua Latimer Instagram
• com
• The Quick Talk Podcast
• The One Thing by Gary Keller
• Trello
• com

Automate, Grow, Sell

Calvin Wayman is a bestselling Author, Keynote Speaker and Social Media Entrepreneur. The most inspiring thing about Calvin is what he has done in such a short time. He shows that where there is a will, there is a way. Seeing where he is now, it’s crazy that in just spring 2015 he was still working an employee job, feeling stuck at a job that he was not passionate about; he ultimately decided to give himself a chance. He suddenly quit his day job to pursue his dream of working for himself and went selling door to door; he’s a man on a mission. He owns Cobbes Media, a Social Media Management Agency designed for small businesses and entrepreneurs to stand out beyond 97% of everyone else on Social Media. He has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, Social Media Examiner, The Huffington Post and was even named one of the Top 30 entrepreneurs under the age of 30 by www.influensive.com. He recently ran in a 50 mile ultra marathon just to challenge himself and he just barely released his 1st book which debuted on the Amazon top 100 of all books in the success category. His book is called Fish Out of Water: The Guide to Achieving Breakthrough and Permanently Transforming Into the New You.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• What are some recommendations for starting your own business and do you think customer experience is something that they should be thinking about from the initial stage or is it something you take into consideration after you start the business?
• How do you feel about customer experience as a customer and owning a Social Media Management Agency, how do you approach it online?
• What are some every day solutions that you would recommend to a small business owner to help them improve their customer experience?
• Can you share a little about your book and how can it really help persons listening to this show, what are the main take away, your purpose and intension was for this book?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Calvin Wayman stated that the thing that he tells most people right off the bat that is important to know is that he is a regular dude, he’s somebody who just wanted more out of life, wanted freedom and it’s important to know that because when he was getting started on his journey, he would look at people that he admired like Lewis Howes, Gary Vaynerchuk, Grant Cardone even Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen Degeneres - he would look at all these super successful business people and tend put them on a pedestal and say “Yea, these guys are great, it be awesome to be like them.” Knowing that there is no way in the world he could close to them or have whatever they have, so he put them on a pedestal or on a top of a mountain as a Guru that can’t ever be attained and what he learned over the last 1 ½ year since he quit his day job, being able to connect with so many amazing people is that they are just that, they are people and when that clicked for him he said, “Oh my gosh, here is this person in front of me that’s a multimillionaire or a billionaire having a conversation with them, seeing that they are just a regular human being” then it clicked for him that he can go after this and that excited him. It’s been a crazy 1 ½ year with things he has gone after and challenges he has put himself through and he just wanted people to always know where he came from like less than 2 years ago he was still working at his job, just going through the motion of what we all do, wanting to live a decent life, he has a wife and a 3 year old son. He wants people to realize that if someone like him coming from where he comes from can do it and he’s not come close to arriving where he wants to be but if he can do it, you can do it too.

• As an Entrepreneur, Calvin shared that throughout his whole transition and even when he was in his day job, something that was always in his mind, a quote from Zig Ziglar, “Help enough people get what they want and you can have anything that you want.” So wherever you are at in any stage, whether you’re an employee working for somebody’s company or you’re looking for more freedom, it absolutely comes down to customer experience because it’s coming down to making people feel cared about, loved, taken care of, helping them get what they want because the truth is, if you really want to go after more the way to get it is going to be by giving them what they want so you can have what you want. So you’re thinking of it on whichever side of the isle you’re on, employee or entrepreneur.

• As an Online Entrepreneur, Calvin stated that it’s more important in a lot of ways because customer experience is one of those things that is mandatory, you’ve got to have it and if you don’t have it then it’s horrible, that’s where stuff really get crazy when people don’t feel cared about, they feel betrayed and how he does it online is that part of the training he does on online Social Media often is something that he calls the 4 C’s to Social Media Success and the last C that everything comes down to is Connection, no matter what you do, whether you’re doing it online or in life, the way you’re going to build your business and have it grow and scale is by building those connections. He calls it “Doing the scaling by doing the unscalable.” He thinks that a lot of time what gets in peoples way when it comes to customer service experience or just the whole interacting and giving the customer something that is pleasant is a lot of times it feels like it’s taking time and it is and it feels like it’s taking a lot of investment and sometimes it is but they’re human beings and if you want to take it to the next level, then you have to have that foundation and there are so many great examples of it. A lot of people have iPhones and if he asks this question of “Who still have their iPhone box?” most people will raise their hand, it’s a box but they have it down to the detail of what you feel like when you open that thing, it’s a piece of cardboard but it’s designed so well, it has the phone right there on the top and it makes you feel special and you think you should be keeping the box and most people do, they don’t do anything with it, they just set it in their closet but they feel bad about throwing it away, it feels good so must be something worth keeping. So it touches everything, especially on the online space you have to scale by doing the unscalable, reaching out to your customers when they don’t expect it, even when you’re trying to grow your following and you think of your followers as “customers” - give them a good experience. Calvin stated that everyone that follows him on Facebook, he’ll go back to them and send them a voice memo so that it makes that touch more human because on line, it’s so easy to forget that there is another human being on the other line and so if you really want to stand out and give somebody a great experience, then just do something that makes it human, if they hear your voice instead of just seeing chat, then that’s such an easy way to stand out from everybody else. It’s super important no matter what your business is, certainly off line but also online as well and sometimes even more important because most people just forget about it.                                                                                                                                             

• Calvin stated that some people just do the work and don’t really touch back and they try to get cell phone numbers of their customers and they’ll text them and they can text from their computer system but that’s something that’s more personal, it feels more real. He mentioned doing the voice memo; sometimes they’ll do a quick video for a specific customer and say their name just to give them the results. Anything that he feels that make it more human, that probably one of the biggest thing you can do because that’s what people want to have but at the same time, it’s not making the mistakes because when the experience is bad, that’s where things really get in the way.
• He recently had an experience where he was at the other end of it, he got delayed at an airport for 26 hours and it was unnecessary. This is an example of companies that put policies over people and that is one of the biggest mistakes anybody can ever do when it comes to your customer experience, never put policy over people. He stated that a few weeks ago he went to the airport and everything he does is electronic, he’s a millennial so he doesn’t have printed out itineraries, he has them on his cell phone. He got in the line and he handed the Security his phone; he has the airline app on it, he goes to it and say, “Huh, I’m not seeing the barcode, I’m seeing the itinerary but I’m not seeing the barcode to scan” so he looked through the app he wasn’t seeing it either and his flight is in about 50 minutes so he needed to get things moving and after they can’t find it, they got several other security people over to come look at the boarding pass, to find the barcode, they can’t find it. After several minutes of several people looking through it, they then said he will have to go to a kiosk and print it out and he has never done that before. He went to the kiosk to print it out, the airline that he was flying had their portion of the kiosk turned off, so you couldn’t print it out. He went back to security and said, “Hey, the kiosk is off, so we just need to find it, here’s my itinerary showing my flight, showing my seat number and everything but we can’t find the barcode, what should we do?” And after having 5 different people look at his phone app, they couldn’t figure it out, so then they said, “You better go down to the airline’s customer service.” He went down to the airline’s customer service and said, “My barcode is not showing” and he says, “Yea, we have a little bit of issue, let me see if I can get it fixed” and then he says, “Oh, I actually can’t turn it on because you are within the 45 minutes before leaving” he says, “Even if I could, you’re gonna have to get another flight.” He said that his flight’s not for 40 minutes, that’s plenty of time. He said, “I’m sorry I can’t” and he asked him why and told him that he has a meeting tomorrow morning at 9:00 am, he can’t miss that meeting. The customer service representative said, “I can’t turn it on” and he just kept on saying it would make so that he might be late and it was literally 40 minutes before the plane leaves and he asked him, “How long does it takes for you to walk to the gate” and he said it takes him 7 minutes but he doesn’t have to go through security. Calvin asked him to give him 15 minutes, let him try but he kept giving him all the reasons he can’t and said that he didn’t want him to come back and have to reschedule he would rather me reschedule right now. So here’s someone that could have made one little switch and said, “Yeah, we have had issues, let me turn it on, I understand that you’re under the 45 minutes that me try to get people through but let me get you through.” He talked with him for 15 minutes and then even after he had it booked, several other people way later than him was going through security to get on that same flight. He had so much time and what makes it even worse, he had to sit out that airport for 26 hours missing an entire day, missing his important meeting that he had and when he got the flight the next day, he looked at his watch from the time he was at security to the time he got through and it only took him 9 minutes. Now here is someone putting policy over people and what he learnt from him after they booked it, he asked him, “What made you not want to do it?” and he said, “Well, there’s this manager lady that every time it’s under the 45 minutes, she gets mad at the gate when we turn it back on” and so, he was covering himself to not get in trouble with his own manager and it was enough to have him a customer not wanting to use that airline again because it was such a negative experience, he had never been delayed for so long for something and unnecessarily. That’s an example of having an experience gone bad because what it ultimately came down to a company that has a policy, and policies are important because they help a company function and run more smoothly but when you have policies that contradict the human experience and you put policies over people, that’s where you have a problem and there is a really amazing book that talks about this type of thing that puts it in a great way and it’s buy Dale Partridge, the book is called, People Over Profit: Break the System, Live with Purpose, Be More Successful , it’s such a good book and it shows how you need to be thinking about your business whether it’s online, if it’s an airline or if it’s a brick and mortar, businesses are about people fundamentally not just processes or policies. If you take care of your people, you’re going to take care of your business and where everybody gets in trouble. There’s this big thing happening with Wells Fargo over the last few months in hot water in the United States and the biggest issues that they are having is how they have been treating their people or their customers in not good way. The biggest take away is you got to put your people over your policies.

Calvin shared a great example of Morton's Steakhouse, there’s this guy jumping on an airline and he’s going to go on this long airline flight so he sends out a tweet and he tags Morton's in it and he says, “Man, this is going to be a long flight, I would love a Morton's Steak at the end of this.” He was just joking; he sends out the tweet completely joking almost like if it’s starting to snow, we’ll make a tweet that says, “Dear winter, please go away." He gets to the end of his airline flight, he comes off the plane and guess what he sees right there in the airport, a guy in a tuxedo, bow tie and all with a Morton's Steakhouse meal for the gentleman completely for free. Morton's saw that tweet and if you think of all the logistics that had to come in play for that to happen, for somebody at Morton's to see that tweet, to then get it approved in however long and say “Let’s do this stunt”, and to even find the guy’s airline and see when he was going to land and plan everything to get the food cooked right, to be right there in the airport when he landed, it’s crazy, so many resources were put into that but the question is “Do you think that made a connection with this guy? Do you think it gave him a good customer experience?” Absolutely! And that’s the point, it blew his mind so much that he was so excited about, so impressed, realizing what Morton's did, he ended up writing a blog - posting and sharing his story and it ended up being shared thousands and thousands of time and Morton's business blew up because of that and that’s just one little thing, taking care of one customer, doing one little thing and most people might look at that in the beginning or even the idea of it and say “Well, we can’t do that because that’s going to cost us time, money and resources” but it’s something that you can’t scale and do over and over but it’s when you do those human touches that your whole business will grow and Morton's has that story within their culture and so it just has this whole culture of taking care of people and people over processes, people over policies, people over procedure and that’s how any business continues to flourish is when they keep that in mind that it's the people that matter and give them the experience, they are the reason YOU are in business.

• Calvin stated that January is coming up and that’s when he thinks the book is really going to become heavy and super important because in January everybody sets New Year’s resolutions and they get super excited about it and then come February everyone flat lines or people quit. When he started the book, he was analyzing that and was like, “Why is that? What’s happening here?” and what he discovered is there is this thing that is not talked about in business or goal setting or aiming high in any part of your life and it’s this period where after you get excited, after you start taking action on a goal, you hit this point where it’s not very exciting anymore, you feel out of your element, you feel awkward, You feel like a fish out of water and that’s because you’re doing something that is out of your element jus t like a fish is out of its element when it’s out of water. The tragedy is when most people hit that point, like in February when they become fish out of water, because they are out of their element, they end up reverting back to their old fish bowl of mediocrity and so what his book is all about is recognizing that this is going to happen, so in any business that you’re in, if you’re a business owner that wants to completely change the culture of your business or develop a whole completely new customer experience, then you’re going to go through this growth stage where you’re going to feel like a fish out of water because it’s going to be completely new territory from where you’re at right now. That’s what the whole book is about is recognizing that you’re become a fish out of water but here are the principles that you can go through to not just revert back and flat line and become normal but completely break through and create an entirely new standard for your life or your business.

Yanique stated that there is a section in the book called, SWIM which is an acronym and it says swim like a shark. Shark and development and moving forward in your life, are they connected and can you share with us a little bit about why you would need to swim like a shark and what are the characteristics of a shark that we would need to be inculcating into our lives.

Calvin shared that shark in his book is a really positive thing; he uses the opposite like a "guppy" which your smaller average version of yourself and a shark is something completely different, something you transform into. He did that because when you breakthrough that fish out of water phase, you don’t just become a bigger fish, you become a completely different fish, something that’s confident, you literally transform. One of the main principles he talks about near the end of the book is swimming like a shark and SWIM is an acronym of four things that he noticed with successful people and when you start behaving like a shark then it pulls you in that direction to become a shark yourself and SWIM stands for Success, Words, Improve and Measure.

Success is defining success the right way and he has noticed has he talks to millionaires and billionaire, they think of success completely differently than a guppy does. For example, a guppy thinks that success is arriving at a destination or getting the result but what he noticed is that successful people are masters of the mundane, they are used to doing the same thing over and over and that is success. Said in a different way, they view success as something completely in their control, so they are focused inward on saying, “What can I do?” they take personal responsibility for it and it’s by doing those things and taking personal responsibility that makes the result happen as a buy product but they are not waiting for the result to come before they say, “I am successful” like you might as a guppy, “I’m not going to be successful until that day, until I achieve this.” You can wake up, be successful today, you can have your goal in the distance and say, “If that’s my goal, what action can I take today to get me closer.” That’s the main thing with the S in SWIM in that chapter, is recognizing what sharks think about success and realizing that it’s in your control and staying focus within your control.

Words is showing that people that are successful and they live by success principles are the people we admire whether they are a famous movie star, whether they are Oprah Winfrey, Ellen Degeneres, a millionaire, a billionaire or somebody with a big company, they speak differently than most people, they have a different language, the words they use and the topics they talk about is what Words is all about. A piece from the Words section and it’s something he learned from one of his mentors Michael Bernoff, he is known like the other Tony Robbins, he’s great with transforming people into a new version of themselves. One day he was getting coaching from him and he asked him a question and he said, “Sure” and he completely stopped the conversation and said, “What did you say?” and he said, “What?” and he asked again, “What did you say?” and he said sure. And he said, “Calvin, do you know what sure means?” He said sure means screw you and it shocked him, he said, “What you need to realize Calvin, is that sure and maybe and I don’t know and perhaps, those are all fluffy, uncertain words and if you want to be successful, what you’ll notice is successful people use words that are definite like yes, no, absolutely and they are certain in the things they say, they are absolute.” It was an amazing coaching lesson for him and he said, “Calvin, what you say matters, the words you use matter.” He looks at the word “sure” as a curse word for him because he went through the same process and he saw how he changed his language when he was on his way to becoming a millionaire. That was a major lesson for him, so that’s what Words is all about.

I stand for Improve, this is important if you’re looking to grow your business to always have a better customer experience. You will notice with Apple or any good company that has been around for awhile is that they don’t ever arrive, they’re always improving, and they’re always looking for the latest ways to develop the customer experience. A great example of somebody that finally got their act together was Nintendo. For years they were stuck to the console and in the day that was the thing to give the best customer experience but then these things came around called the cell phones and people were on mobile and it took them forever but finally this year they came out with PokemonGo. PokemonGo was a way of improving from where they were and it created such an amazing customer experience and it exploded and it had the biggest growth of any app in history when they made that switch. That’s what I is all about. It is always continuing to improving where you are because successful businesses, successful people never arrive.

The final thing that helps with everything is M. M stands for Measure and measuring the right things. He went to a mentor and was complaining because something wasn’t happening the way he thought it should or he wasn’t growing as much as he thought he should and he said, “Well, how are you measuring it?” and he replied, “I’m not measuring it.” And his mentor said, “That’s the problem, you don’t know if you’re winning, if you don’t keep score and you get more of what you measure.” Measure is super important it’s what he notices with so many successful people, it’s what sharks do, and they measure the key indicators of what they want to move. So keep score but measure the right things, measure the things you want to get more of. Examples of what you should measure and what you shouldn’t measure, according to his mentor, what most people do if they want to get in better shape or increase their finances and so they measure how heavy they are, if you think you’re going to get more of what you measure, you’re in resistance, you don’t want to measure how heavy you are because don’t want more pounds. People want to get out of debt and yet they are measuring their debt, so they are in resistance. So what do you measure? You measure what he explains as a lead measure, something that if you do more of it, it will change the result. So if you want to lose weight, instead of how much you weigh, you could do a couple of things, you could measure how much weight you lost, so you get more of it or even better, measure the thing 100% in your control like how many days you worked out or how many sets you did or how much you maxed out, how many perfect days you had with eating well. Do the things that if you do them that they are 100% in your control then it can predictively change the result. If you want to get out of debt, measure your income, measure ways to make money and that’s what going to get you closer to getting the actual result that you want. M is for measure, you don’t know if you’re winning if you don’t keep score and to take it one step further, measure the things that getting more of is going to help you win. This is what the sharks do, this what makes them successful and the cool thing is anyone can adopt it. That is how you SWIM LIKE A SHARK. calvinwayman.com/book

• Calvin Wayman shared how he stays motivated everyday; he stated that he is motivated by the I in SWIM. HE believes in Tony Robbins when he says, “Progress Equals Happiness.” That’s what drives him, he wants freedom, he likes impacting peoples’ lives but more importantly, he likes to see where he is at and taking it to the next level and that makes him feel good. When he went from being completely in debt to becoming debt free that felt good, improving in that way. When he went from being an employee to having his own company, that felt good. When he was 30-40 pounds overweight and he lost the weight, it felt good. When he went from running a half marathon to an ultra that felt good. Just getting up every day and saying, “What can I do to improve myself?” just to stretch yourself a little bit because we are all where we are at and to get where it is that you want to go is not as crazy of a drastic change as we might think, it’s like 1% improvement a day but over time, in a hundred day, you are twice as good.

• Calvin stated that the one online tool he uses everyday is Calendly. In an online world where you’re talking to people from all over the world and their different time zones, sometimes it’s hard to meet but when he got Calendly, that just fixed everything so people can go set time with you and it takes out all the guess work. People come to him all the time and say, “We should connect.” And then he can put it in their court instead of going back and forth and being stressed out, he can say, “Here’s my personal link feel free to pick a time and I’ll be there.”

• Calvin stated that there are some books that he tries to read every year because they make an impact like How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is a big one especially when it comes to dealing with people and having customer experience. Rich Dad Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not by Robert T. Kiyosaki was huge for him creating the type of business he wanted to and being more entrepreneurial. Something more recently is a book called The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller, it’s all about if you want to be most effective, how you can strip away all of the noise and find that one thing that you’re completely the best at, focus on that one thing, get it done and it just changes everything. That was huge for him especially when he was writing his book because he had so many things going and when he read that book and realized if he just focus on this until it was done, focus on completion, then it makes everything better.

• Calvin stated that the one thing that he is working on right now is his first live event. It is something that he has never done before, stepping into new waters and that’s what he is nervous about but excited about it at the same time.

• Calvin stated that listeners can find him on:
• www.calvinwayman.com

            Calvin Wayman Facbook

            Calvin Wayman Snapchat

            Calvin Wayman Twitter

• Calvin stated that he has a quote but it is not tied to the customer experience but it’s tied to a business owner, an entrepreneur or somebody that’s leveling up. Sometimes when we are moving or we have a desire to move into a direction, we feel stuck and we feel like we are facing adversity and we don’t know how to get through it and something that has helped him is another thing that he learned from one of his mentors is “Done is better than perfect.” It means just move in any way that you can because often times as business owners or entrepreneurs we are our own worst critic and we want it to look perfect but progress doesn’t happen without movement. Movement requires action and when we are hitting adversity the biggest thing it does to us is the fear freezes us so to break that apart, just give yourself permission that it’s better to look sloppy and do something than nothing. So done is better than perfect and just take that next step.

Links

• Fish Out of Water: The Guide To Achieving Breakthrough and Permanently Transforming Into the New You by Calvin Wayman
• How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Rich Dad Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not by Robert T. Kiyosaki
• The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller
• People Over Profit: Break the System, Live with Purpose, Be More Successful by Dale Patridge