Navigating the Customer Experience

Jane Anderson is a Personal Branding and Presentation Skills expert. She is a communication expert with over 12 years in personal branding and LinkedIn in profile development. Jane works with experts in their field to grow their businesses and increase their leads, her clients include Virgin Australia, Cisco, Leggo, IKEA, Rio Tinto and Origin Energy. Jane has been featured in Business Insider, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Courier Mail and Marie Claire and is the host of the number 1 ranked iTunes Podcast, The Jane Anderson Brand You Show. Jane is a nominee for Telstar Business Awards for 2016 and a mentor on Thought Leaders Business School, helping clever people be commercially smart. Jane has been endorsed by LinkedIn as one of the top influences in Australia and New Zealand; she is also the author of 3 books including Connect: How to Leverage Your LinkedIn Profile for Business Growth and Lead Generation in Less Than 7 Minutes per Day.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• How do you feel about customer service/ customer experience on a global level?
• From your book, what are some of the top things that will help business owners to grow their business, to leverage and understand their business and how customer service can help their business and get more leads and more customers and will they see results?
• Yanique indicated that se read Jane’s website that Jane believes people should really be optimizing on their personal brand because people buy you.
• 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

• Jane Anderson state that when she was growing up something that she has always been interesting in was the world of business but while she was in high school, her very first job was in retail and she worked for a company called Mavis Shoes in Australia and Mavis Shoes is a family type shoes store and they have branches all over Australia. She started working for the Mavis Shoes brand when was she was 14 years old but the keeping was that the Mavis family owned the Mavis brand and it was a big iconic family in Australia and they sold the company and moved on. She started in retail and remembered how the experience was with customers and how she was allowed to have a customer by herself for the first month. They had to have somebody with them the whole time, the standards of training was high but it lead her down the path of really starting to become interesting in personally branding businesses so the Mavis name is still known in Australia, they are 3rd and 4th generation retailers and she has since gone on to work with other industries like State Government, Roads and Transport but she kept coming back to retail, she spent about 15 years in retail, she was a manager. She did a marketing degree but have always loved customers, she loves being able to make them happy but she worked with the Mavis family for 12 years and one of the things she found while working with them is that what drew people to the business was because everybody had a story about the family, everybody knew something about them or they knew the daughters and what she notice was that the family had a strong reputation in the community and they were very well respected and her job was to make sure that their values of customer service that she adapted those and did things in the same way as if they were in the store, she went on to be a area manager for them. She then went on to work for a super retail group, Supercheap Auto in Australia, it is the fastest growing retail companies, they have just over 10,000 staff and she was the Learning and Development Officer for them. She always knew she would go out on her own, it’s something she has always been committed to is customer service. She grew up in a place called Lismore in Australia, which is laid back, she moved to the city when she finished University because she just wanted the jobs there and she has gone on to doing other things.

• Jane Andersons stated that on a global level from what she see and talking clients is that she thinks there’s not one way to do things anymore, there are so many channels the way you access customers and particular now, what’s the digital platform that matches the face to face customer experience. She stated that she was talking to someone the other day and they said, “the only reason why I on Twitter is make a customer service complaint because if I can’t the answers, they’ll soon answer me if I’m on Twitter”, so the customer service experience she thinks is a lot more transparent than it use to be in the past. If somebody has a bad experience, it’s not that hard for us to go and find out, people make comments on Facebook pages and Twitter, so the digital foot print as part of your customer experience in your business is something she thinks people don’t always think is much. She stated that the other thing is about evolving and changing, so if you look at the retail industry, something that they have noticed in Australia and it’s been in the media, is that retail businesses are being extraordinary slow to adapt online shopping as part of their experience, so a lot of Australian shoppers have shopped overseas online because the can get it cheaper and so Australian retailers suffer because they are not offering the customer experience that people want, so people will shop overseas. Those 2 things, the impact of digital social media, businesses evolving and changing fast enough because it’s the ones that edge all, who can move quickly if they look at thing like Instagram or what people are able to sell and create the customer experience and integrate that, it’s just not walking pass the shop front anymore.

Jane stated that the challenge is that the customer is driving the direction of the experience, not the businesses and it depends on the kind of business you are in but she thinks that 1 of the challenge is being able to know when to listen to customers and when not to, she always thinks of that Henry Ford quote, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Sometimes it’s that balance, it’s not necessarily playing with the popularity contest. They’ll say, I need you to look at what’s trending and stop marketing around what customers or what people are talking about and what’s trending but the problem with that is that you’re just diluting your business because you’re focusing on what people are talking about what they want but sometimes it’s about being comfortable that what you’re talking about is actually about what people need and you have to be comfortable that you might not be popular, you might not be everybody’s favorite but if you’re following what everybody is interested in, you become commoditize, so you have to be very careful that you can still stand out even if customers are wanting it and everyone’s following what customers want. Sometime you have to actually go in the opposite direction.

• Jane stated that when she first started her business, she is a sole entrepreneur and have a team of 1 staff member full-time and rest of her team are contractors but one of the things when she first started and she left corporate business life was that she had some money saved and she thought she was going to go out and start her business and the first year she lost about $30,000.00 in google advertisments and search engines optimization and it wasn’t that anything was wrong with those products, they are fantastic but she spent it on the wrong person and she was a little naïve and this person said that they were an expert but she might have well just given the money away. When that happened she had a choice, she had either go back to job or she had to find a way to make it work with zero budget, so it forced her to start to learn about LinkedIn a little more, it’s free and she can go and start reaching out to people and contacting them and that was in 2009. At the time she was also writing profiles for her clients, so they were getting jobs, and branding people and what happened was that she used LinkedIn to help grow her business and that was how, she learnt from someone in the United States of America about how the algorithms work. She is also productivity. The book was written for people who are time poor, who just really need it to work for them when they need it to, when they are trying to grow their business and what are the activities they need to work on that will get the growth. There are thought leaders, experts in their fields she has worked with and she generally says, “you can get your turn over up to the $300,000.00 mark just purely through LinkedIn before you start your website.” She stated that LinkedIn is extraordinary powerful and what it did for her at a time when she had no money and she had to try and work out how to grow her business, it puts you in the drivers’ seat as to hoping that you will get an enquiry on your website.

Jane stated that a client who is a sole entrepreneur, her name is Rachael Burke who lives in Australia and is a Sales Expert and she came to her and said, “I’m not really good at lead generation but I’m really good at selling, so I just need more customers.” So what she did with her was to show her the formula and how to get it to work and she increased her sales by over 66% in 3 months, so that’s in the hundred of thousands of dollars. She does LinkedIn for lead generation for large organizations as well as small ones and sole entrepreneurs. Jane stated that in Australia, they have a business which is a big superannuation and superannuation in Australia is like money you put away for your retirement and they built all the LinkedIn profiles for the staff and for the financial planners for the business and what she got them to do was, they have a change of legistration in Australia so it was a great time to educate the market on some of the changes because nobody was educating the market, she was out looking. She said to them that they need to run webinar, they need to got out and educate some of these clients and they got 500 new leads from that webinar. That was purely through leveraging the profiles and that was about 50 staff that got their profiles built. The opportunities that are in there but the thing is with LinkedIn is that, she find most people will come to her and say, “I’ve got a LinkedIn account but I have never achieve any results from it.” and then she’ll ask them what their profile say, there are often be no content in it at all or she’ll ask them how often they have reached out to people? What have you said to them? What have you invited them to? What’s your content plan? And they don’t have any of that, so LinkedIn doesn’t make clients magically appear, you have to go out and find them but you’ve got to have really good collateral and they make a decision about you in 3 seconds. You have to make sure that all your collateral and profile is so nice and polished and sharp and that it matches how amazing you are in person because we only have 3 seconds for them to go “wow, this person knows what they are doing, this person is amazing, I have to talk to you.” To have a profile that really works, like making sure it turns up in search results as well as having that impact when they see you. For just a simple 3 seconds, that’s how long they look at it before they move on and have a look at somebody else, so they have to make sure that they make their job really easy.

Jane stated that people need to shift their attention now onto the other person, so you’re looking for what’s the common ground or what the purpose because the other person is asking themselves “why are you offering to connect with me?” so you’ve got to be able to answer the “why”, so if you’re reaching out and for example, she was reaching out medical financial planner, if he just looked at her profile and say, “why is she offering to connect with me, I don’t understand.” She explained to him that she does a lot of work with doctors, she helps them with lead generation but she helps them who are going into specialist training programs and she said to him, “I would love to catch up with you, I think there’s an opportunity for me to perhaps add some value to your clients, if not, that’s totally fine but here are some links, you are welcome to check out what I do and I would love to catch up with you for coffee one day and see what I can do to help you as well.” And so he met with her, so it all started from there and you’ve got to focus, look at their profile, what is it that they do and you have to address, “I notice this on your profile or I notice that you do this type of work, I notice that you’re in the same industry, I do this type of work or I help people like you in this space, so I thought I’d connect.” Jane stated that what happens is that just because you are ready to sell, doesn’t mean that the customer is ready to buy. So when you reach out to people, people have got to get to know you so they are going, “hold on, I haven’t even met you” and it’s a little like dating. She recalled she went on a date with a guy once and he turned up with a bag pack and she said to him, “have you just coming from the gym?” and he said, “No, you never know, things might go alright” and she thought he was joking and he opened his bag and there was a tooth brush, he had a change of clothes, his undies. She stated that LinkedIn is a little like that, is that sometimes we turn up with a bag pack, we’re ready to move in together, start this relationship and go in whole but the customer is saying, “hold on, can we just have coffee first, who are you?” So we sort of scare people and that’s when you hear people say they just get harass by sales people. You have to connect, be liked, friendly but then you’ve got to let people get to know you through your content, Mark Port who wrote the book, Book Yourself Solid said, “you have got to earn the right to sell.” And the problem is that most people don’t earn the right and then they scare people away. You can then ask for the value, you can ask for what you want based on the value you delivered. So in other words, if you have given enough, you have done enough content, if you kept visible enough, if you build enough trust, now you’re ready to go and ask for what you want. One of the things she does with clients is that she will look at how much value they have given to their audience because what they do is done nothing, they have given no value and they will say to her, “I want to be able to grow my business on LinkedIn but it’s not working.” But are not giving their audience any value, so you can’t go and ask for what you want because you haven’t earn it yet. You can do that in less then 7 minutes a day.

• Jane shared her concept of people buying you, her experience working with this family from she was 14 years old, people’s connections were so intertwined. Jane shared back then the only way people really knew who you were was if you were on TV or something or if you are in the newspaper. Now, Social Media has heavily leveled the playing field so if you leverage your name and identify your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) that you bring to your customer. Jane says thought leaders will at times come to her and say there is so much content out there already about for example productivity and Jane believes there is only one of you and so people deserve to hear your unique views on the subject – your experiences, your voice, you lens, your interpretation and your insights. Your Social Media profile, particularly something like Linked In offers great opportunities for a small business owner or soloproneur that is leveraging their own brand – you own your own profile, you can add agility, personality and so much more which is a threat to larger companies.

• Jane shared how she stays motivated every single day – Jane thinks it is important to be really clear about your purpose and what you want. Jane shared she thinks that motivation really hits you when you have a choice at 2:00 am in the morning and you have the choice of going to bed or finishing that last bit of work because you really want to do it and get it done. Jane says she believes that it is in those moments that your motivation will either work for you or against you and it is in those moments that purpose is really important. Jane says some other factors that really keeps her motivated is that she is very particular about the people that she works with – she chooses to work with thought leaders and experts in their fields as they inspire her. She further stated that if they bring the best to her and inspire her then she can bring the best to others and inspire them. Jane also shared that it is important to find a group that you can belong to that are similar to you such as an industry association etc. and then Jane said there is also the basics such as eating well, get enough sleep as these activities help to make you more productive and efficient.

• Jane shared the one website, online tool or app that she absolutely cannot live without in her business is LinkedIn as a Social Media platform but the one app she cannot live without is actually an app that she created. Jane spent some time as a Productivity Consultant working with some real large corporations, she did a lot of work helping CEO’s and EA’s how to work really well together and what she found working with the two set of persons was the speed of communication between going to meetings and being on the run. Jane said she was looking an Concur, which is an IT company that looks at the on-the-go economy and how there is this shift to doing things on the go. Jane said the app she has created is called “Memo-Mailer” and it can be accessed at memomailer.com and it is available on iTunes. Jane stated the way that it works is holding down the button in the app – say what you have to say and then the app will email the memo to your Inbox. Jane said sometimes ideas come along at really inconvenient times and this tool really captures those things. Jane stated that she built the app with her colleague Dermot Crowley, who is an expert in Productivity and he has written the book Smart Work, which was recently released and hit Best Seller in Australia. Jane said that’s the app she definitely cannot live without.

• Jane shared some books that have had the biggest impact on her Sew Your Thoughts by Matt Church, he has spent the last 30 years helping people who are experts in their fields commercialize their ideas. She also mentioned Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port, which is a New York Times Best Seller and Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Jane mentioned another book she really believes is great is How the World Sees You by Sally Hogshead, she has created a diagnostic testing that helps people identify what makes them fascinating. Jane also mentioned Seth Godin’s Linchpin as a great book too. Jane gave us an additional nugget through the book – Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck – another “must read!”

• Jane shared the one thing that is going on in her life right now that she is really excited about is a piece of work that she is working on to further develop her Linked In engagements with clients which will be called the Lead Generation Indicator. The tool is specifically designed for people who are experts in their field and will help clients identify 12 activities that will grow your business even if it is from scratch with absolutely no clients. A complete package for business owners.

• Kay stated that listeners can find him on:
  • Jane Anderson LinkedIn
  • Jane Anderson Facebook
  • Jane Anderson Instagram
  • Jane Anderson Twitter
  • Jane Anderson SnapChat
  • Jane Anderson Periscope
  • Jane Anderson Website

• Jane shared a quote that she has on her wall and sees all the time during times of adversity – “If you are going through hell, keep going.” Winston Churchill ***Jane says she feels that this is a quote that she believes is in the trenches with her when she needs to hear something real and authentic.

Links

• Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port
• Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
• How the World Sees You by Sally Hogshead
• Seth Godin’s Linchpin
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

Daniel “ Dan” de Witte is a Business Coach, Digital Strategist and Entrepreneur dedicated to sharing his knowledge with small businesses who want to leverage the online market. As a business coach, Dan specializes in tailor business strategies, business development and automation. Working closely with businesses to identify their needs, Dan thinks outside the conventional box to develop easy to implement effective solutions. As the founder of the Outer Space Network, Dan has used his knowledge and experience in rapid growth and brand development to create an original mentoring and support platform. Although bright eyed and bushy tailed, Dan isn’t a stranger when it comes to starting and growing successful businesses, starting his professional career as an internationally published photographer. Daniel knows designs and presentation, his creative flare and instinct for presentation gives him a competitive edge in brand development.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• Could you explain to our listeners who are thinking of transitioning from brick and mortar to the online space, how it is that they can manage their customer experiences and do you think it’s different in managing that experience face to face versus online? What are some key indicators that need to be considered?
• In your new product Active Relay, could you share with us what are some ways you try to humanize that experience even though it’s automated?
• On a global level, how do you feel about customer service/ customer experience?
• What are some every day solutions that you would recommend to a small business owner to help them improve their customer experience?
• If you have a customer who wants to migrate from their existing email marketing plan with Aweber, Constant Contact etc, - would Active Campaign facilitate that migration?
• Please give us an example of how Zapier works and what does it really mean for a small business?
• How do you stay motivated everyday?
• What are some books that you have read that contributed to your success along your journey?
• What’s the one thing that’s going on in your life that you are really excited about that you are working on develop yourself or your people?
• Where can our listeners find you online?
• What is quote or saying that helps you stay on track and re-focus during times of adversity?

Highlights

• Dan de Witte stated that he officially launched a brand new tech product called Active Relay. He has moved from his coaching base platform into another SAS (Software as a Service). He stated that he would be where he’s at if the internet didn’t exist and that the crakes of what he does and stated that that’s inspiring, for instance, we’re doing this podcast over Skype when I’m in Jamaica and he’s in Australia and there’s nothing more inspiring and powerful than that. He loves adventure spots and love getting out has much as he can from the computer, although of lately he hasn’t had enough time away from the computer because of the launch of the new product but that’s definitely one of the aspects he enjoys in life because that’s the ultimate goal, creating these digital businesses or businesses that are enabled by the Internet is to give us more time, more freedom so that we can do the things that we love and enjoy doing but also spend time with family and friends that are valuable in our life.

• As an online Entrepreneur, Dan shared that branching into the online space can be overwhelming to start because there’s all the flashy whiz tool and everyone trying to tap the next best thing that you should jump on and use and he’s a big believer of simplicity, so starting with one platform and working your way up from there. To tie that in with the customer experience is humanizing that whole aspect. We can get caught up in creating automations and automated business processes that we end up automating ourselves or working ourselves out of the business which is a blessing and a curse at the same time, it’s a blessing because it gives us more time to and more freedom but a curse on the same token, we lose the one to one connectivity as you would if you were a traditional brick and mortar base business where you can actually build that relationship by a simple hand shake, exchange of a business card. When you go online, it becomes a lot of smoke and mirrors and one of the challenges a lot of businesses faces is making sure that they are messaging what they do in the offline space, the brick and mortar space is the same as what it would be in the online space and as humanizing as possible because at the end of the day, all we want to do is be a part of a community and what you are building in your brick and mortar businesses regardless if it’s Joe’s Tire Shop down the road, he’s got a community of people that come back to him time and time again because they built the relationship and what we want to do is to try and replicate that relationship in the online space.

• Dan shared some background information on his new product Active Relay, it is a payment platform that is designed around a CRM called Active Campaign, so they are the payment platform element of an email marketing CRM. They are selling digital products and digital services and even physical base products online, it’s quite a challenge for you the user to sell something without having to do a lot of configurations, multiple third party tools and at the end of the day it stacks up and become expensive for you the user or the seller of whatever you sell. The whole goal of Active Relay was to simplify and enable people to sell online smarter, better, faster. The second element to that is bridging the customer experience and making that 10 times faster. In the online payment space, which is where Dan is heavily focusing his energy is in that ecommerce space and around how can he bridge the relationship that they have offline and taking that online to becoming what they call a lead in the online space as well or an email prospect is taking that person from being just an email prospect to actually giving you their credit card over the Internet because that’s the next step, getting that credit card information from them. He stated that he is not going to go up to someone random in the street and go, “Will you marry me?” because 9 times out of 10 they are going to say no. There are the people that first move or advantage are the opportunist but 9 times out of 10, if someone walked up to you and asked you to marry them, you more than likely would say no. It’s the exact same in the online space, so what they have done in Active Relay is, they are enabling people to sell things online faster and smarter and simpler but they are also shortening the checkout experience depending on the experiences of people who listen to the podcast, when you purchase things online, you generally have to go find the product, add the product to the cart, confirm that’s the product you want in the cart then go to checkout and go through 2 or 3 steps in the checkout before you get your product. What Active Relay is design to do is put all of that onto the one page, so you clink on the link to buy the product, the product is on the order form, the information you need to fill out is on the order form, you it buy, you then get funneled into the Active campaign CRM and away you go. That’s how they have shortened that experience and taking that journey from being a bit of a barrier. What people have been finding online is that multiple steps or doing more than one thing at once, it becomes a real blocker in the space and everyone’s lazy and if it seems too hard, then we are going to cut away from it. He stated that you can take people on a wild journey and that’s the most exciting thing for him in the online space. You get to control the whole journey, you can do that in the offline space as well but you have a lot more control in the online space because they don’t get to ask you anything back, you get to tell them what they are doing on the next step, you give them the options, “Do you want to do this? Yes or No” you’re not doing “Do you want to do this? Yes or No or Maybe” that “maybe” is a lot of hesitation. So they want to make it as simple as possible for people to purchase your product online or even just be in your community online.

• Dan shared that he just got back from around the world trip and using the brick and mortar, the United States customer experience is phenomenal compared to Australia. He stated that Australia’s customer service is rubbish. He remembers walking into a classic American diner in New York, there was a lunch line waiting to get in and they put their names down on the list and waited to be seated and the head waiter /seater remembered their names and 45 minutes later after they had left and he was like “thanks Daniel and Lauren, I hope you enjoy the rest of your travels and safe travels back to Australia.” In the amount of time that he sat them down, sat 30 or 40 other people in the diner and he still remembers his name. They left the diner saying “that’s really cool”. That whole experience was amazing, just simply by remembering their name and you can do little things like that in the online space where you can send an automated sequence of emails and have someone’s first name in it because it feels more personal, the connection is more genuine and then you go to a café in Australia and it’s like “Good morning, what would you like?” that’s it, there’s no effort to build some form of relationship and then they deliver you the stuff and there’s no “enjoy”.  He stated that there are restaurants in Australia that are fantastic but the general consensus of the diners in Australia, the customer experience isn’t there from a personality stand point.

Yanique stated that something as simple as remembering the customer’s name is very important. It’s powerful because regardless of where we are from in the world or what language you speak or what culture we are from, we all have something that is unique to us and that’s what people call us by and so you give someone your name, it’s important to use it and use it properly because it differentiates the experience and it sets that whole experience a part. Looking at what Daniel remembers from his trip, the food could have been good but he didn’t mention that the food was great, he mentioned that the fact that waiter was serving 30 or 40 other tables and he remembered you and your guest names and that’s what stood out in his mind. It is always the little things that separate the really good companies from the ones that doing the bare minimum.

• Daniel shared some everyday solutions for small businesses online to improve their customer experience – being authentic on Facebook and authentically telling the story of you, if you are one that always wear make-up everywhere and you’re all about the make-up and the aesthetics, then you need to genuinely portray that online in Facebook videos and pictures but if you are a person who loves building the relationship around who you are and authentically portraying that, you win as well. It’s like picking your digital persona to resonate what you are in real life because people can smell fake from a mile away. When you look at portraying your image online, you want to make sure that it is as authentic as you are in real life. The way to do that is to test it with your audience, ask your audience, “What do you think of our new website or what do you think of our new eBook or guide that we just release in the market space?” the ones that care will tell you and the ones who don’t care aren’t customers you’re going to have long term.

• He shared that in regards to tools that you must have – Active Campaign which is an email marketing CRM because you want to keep in contact with your people regardless if you own a brick and mortar business or not because at the end of the day we are all playing on out mobile phones, we’re all checking Facebook, so if you can be connected with them by simply sending them a email that is just touching base saying, “Hey, how is your day going?” that speaks wonders to building the relationship and you can do all of that with active campaign and it’s a really simply platform to start out, to get you online you looking at USD $9.00 a month. The other tool that he really loves is called Zapier which is a connectivity tool that connects anything that you can think of to anything you can think of in regards to online tools, it’s the junction box for PowerPoints so you can plug in to anything and it’s a great tool for increasing productivity and fast tracking a lot of internal stuff, for example, if a client does something, you want to be notified or if they email in some content, you want to upload it to something else, if someone schedules an appointment in your calendar and you want them to go into your email CRM to send them an email saying, “Thank you for booking in a time”, there’s so many things you can do with Zapier. WordPress, there are so many free platform out there to get you up and running like getting your website online but if you really want to increase your speed. He stated that why he recommend WordPress is that you can upload themes, you can connect it to any platform and what WordPress is, it’s essentially a CMS and that stands for Content Management System, so you would have a WordPress installation on your website and that would manage your whole system so that things like your homepage, your thank you page, your blogs and all of that gets managed in the WordPress element of your system. If you couple these 3 together and if they are done in the right way, you’re not only saving yourself time but also money in the process on developing your products and infrastructure but also, you’re improving your customer experience because all 3 applications are designed to make life easier and make life more efficient.

• Active Campaign would assist in on boarding – customers would have to do the migration themselves but it’s a very simple process.

• Dan stated he has a Zapier connection that connects an opt in form on his website and it connects to his CRM Active Campaign. He has a pop up on his website and this pop up doesn’t actually connect natively into Active Campaign – so he uses Zapier connection to send the data over. Dan also stated that he uses Slack, which is Facebook Chat for your staff. If a client certain number of actions over a particular time frame for example clicks on 3 emails, reads 4 blogs over the space of two weeks and has not purchased a product from me before. Dan de Witte says he wants Zapier to send a notification to his Slack Team to say, “Hey, can you personally follow up with John Smith because he has done x, y, and z in the last 2 weeks and not purchased a product.” This action shows we have someone on board that is paying attention what is happening and is reaching out to help them have a better experience.

• Dan de Witte states that he’s burning the midnight oil as he’s up by 4:30 am most mornings and not in bed until 11:00 pm most nights just because of the launch of Active Relay. Dan states what motivates him is giving other people the opportunity to be more and do more in the online space. Giving others the flexibility, more time to do things that you really enjoy doing! Dan stated your staff in your business, if you are a Brick and Mortar, are your biggest brand ambassadors – if you are not inspiring and leading them then you are shooting yourself in the foot.

• Dan de Witte stated that he’s not much of book reader as he learns through doing, however, he would recommend Start with Why by Simon Sinek, Dan says anyone who wants to learn who why what you do will sell – this is the best book to read. The Art of the Start by Guy Kiyosaki. Dan further stated he reads a lot online and he learns a lot online.

Yanique shared how learning for her online has been such a remarkable and great experience that she has learned so much from You Tube videos, reading articles, connecting with people in Facebook Groups and so she agreed with Dan that doing is definitely one of the best ways to learn quick.

• Dan de Witte says short answer would be Active Relay. Dan says he is thoroughly enjoying the journey he has been on with Active Relay over the last 6-8 months. He says he’s learning everyday about his users are selling online and how they would want to sell. Dan shared he’s newly married and he is thoroughly enjoying that personally that he’s doing now!

• Dan de Witte says listeners can find him on:

www.goactiverelay.com

www.activecampaign.com

Dan de Witte Facebook

Dan de Witte Twitter

• Dan de Witte shared one quote or saying that really connects with him all the time is “Logic will get you from A to B but creativity will take you anywhere.” Dan says we are all creative in some aspect.

Links

• Active Campaign
• Zapier
• Slack
• Start with Why by Simon Sinek
• The Art of the Start by Guy Kiyosaki

Dr. Anissa Holmes is voted one of the top 25 women in Dentistry by Dental Products Report. She has effectively mastered the skill of the use of social media with a Facebook following of nearly 50,000 fans. As a Practicing Dentist, Social Media Strategist, Author, Podcaster and Speaker, Dr. Holmes shows dentists exactly how to create a profitable, thriving dental practice which has motivated, inspired team members and patients who are now raving fans. She does this by providing actionable steps to help dentists develop their business culture, their systems and their brand. Dr. Holmes is the host of the iTunes podcast, The Delivering Wow Dental Podcast and is also the author of the book Delivering WOW: How Dentists Can Build a Fascinating Brand & Achieve More While Working Less.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• Can you share with us how you use some of the strategies and actions to create that delivering wow experience in your practice?
• In your book you say that there’s a myth that says “To be successful, we must be better than everyone else, we must try harder and work longer” but then further on you say it’s not about being better, it’s about being unique, can you speak a little more about that?
• On a global level, how do feel about customer experience from the Jamaican perspective, what do you feel are some of the things that are limiting organization from really delivering that WOW experience?
• Do you think that there is a direct correlation between poor leadership and poor customer experience in a lot of businesses?
• 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?
• Do you offer programmes for persons who may want to take the step a little further, who may want to connect with you and learn how to use Facebook to build their 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 your 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

• Anissa Holmes is originally from the United States of America and grew up in New Orleans and attended dental school in Alabama. After completing dental school, she met her husband who is an oral surgeon and he grew up in Jamaica. They decided about 10 years ago to move from the USA to Jamaica, he figured that that’s where he could make the biggest difference so she sold her practice she had in Birmingham and she started again in Jamaica. She worked a few years for another dentist who had a really great reputation and about 5 years ago she started a brand new practice in Kingston, Jamaica and the premise there was that the practice would eventually be the number 1 dental practice in the country known for delivering a wow experience to its patients.

• Anissa Holmes shared the first step of creating an amazing practice; one that people talk about, one that has a fascinating brand is first creating that vision and saying, “What do I want to be known for? At the end of the day, what am I working for? What do I want to achieve?” Her vision was to create the number 1 dental practice in the country known for delivering an amazing wow experience and that was the vision that they would be there and that was the vision before anything was put in place and from there they said “What sort of practice would we need to be? What sort of team members would we have to have? What would have to be our core values?” Before they did anything, they actually thought about what they wanted to be and when she says “we”, it really is “we”. She feels like businesses that are super successful, if you look at Zappos, Amazon, Disney - it’s all about the team and for her when she was creating her core values for her company, she involved the team and they said “What do we want to be known for?” They did things like saying they wanted to be very unique, they wanted to make an impact on the community, they wanted to build strong teams, and they wanted to be known for delivering wow. So they set those core values out and so every decision they make had to be in align with those core values, so pursue growth and learning and so having those luncheon learn session where her team is constantly training and having book clubs where they are reading books together in terms of growing business and personal development with a kindle and that was something she did for her team, she thinks it’s really important, many people create this checklist and just put it down somewhere or hang it up but they don’t live it and once you have that, you know your vision then you have to say what sort of business do we need to be, what sort of team do we have to have and then you have to start creating amazing systems and really just designing how you are going to get there.

Anissa agreed that there were team members that weren’t agreeable in her vision. She stated that it’s very interesting because she really believes now that she is in a different realm and working with business owners and dentists and a lot of them have fear. Fear that the team is not going to buy into this whole creating an amazing experience culture and so what happens is that they do nothing. What she always says is that if you are a business owner, it’s your business, it’s your vision and her team is very aware for example if they have 100 things that have to happen to be able to create amazing experiences or to have consistency in the quality of work that they do or to make sure they are seeing people on time. These 100 things have to be done and if she could do them all by herself, she would have no reason to hire someone and she can keep that money in her pocket but she made a decision that all of these things need to be done, so there are different people that need to do it and the job has to be done and this is the vision of this company and it’s okay if you don’t feel like this is the right company for you but at the end of the day this is the company, these are the values, this is what we are working for. Anissa stated that when they first decided that they are going to be known for delivering an amazing experience, some people that was working at the practice said “okay, we are willing to try” they are still there and they are happy and they are making more money than they have ever made. This year January they had the entire team write down what it is that they are going to achieve, she put down her dream to go to Europe and have gone to Europe, 4 of her team members actually got cars this year which is a huge deal for people working in small businesses in Jamaica to be able afford a car. They have had amazing things happening and it’s because she aligned with her team members, she told them from the very beginning, if you they help her grow this business, you are going to develop personally, you are going to impact your family, achieve all your personal dreams and those that bought in with her, they are definitely living their dreams and some people it wasn’t for them and that was okay and she was okay to let them go.

Even along the road she has had different people and had to increase her team, just a few months ago they were testing someone for their new Dental Assistant, they needed to add a new Dental Assistant and someone came in, she was an assistant at another practice and she says “You mean I have to give a tour?” And that’s something when they look at their reviews, people constantly mention that – customers say “I can’t believe that I am getting a tour before my procedure”, and so this person was clearly not going to fit into the vision and the culture of the practice and so she just didn’t work out.

• Anissa Holmes stated that it’s very interesting because when you look at businesses, a lot of time they are focusing on what’s the competition doing, what’s this person doing and in Jamaica for example, her practice has a social media presence that is now over 50,000 fans and they are doing some cool things and as a result of it they see other practices that are doing similar things or posting similar things of what they are doing and she says it’s okay because they are connecting with people and growing their businesses but she is not focused on that. What she’s focused on is really always being innovative, being different and really not looking at what any one else’s doing and every year trying to strive to do something different. For example, 2 years ago they said that their vision, their focus for that year would be to create KPI’s and systems so that everything would be written down and so they created the manuals, they did that to systemize the practice and the next year; they said how can they create customer experiences , so that was their whole focus for last year and that’s when all of their team members were trained in Hand and Arm Massage and now they offer complimentary Hand and Arm Massages, so everything in terms of their brain storming with their team building was, how can we create a better experience, they created a system that at the end of an appointment they were guaranteed that a patient would give them a video testimonial and it’s just creating that system, touch points of giving them a tour, offering them a Hand and Arm Massage, giving them the headphones and the iPads, giving them a warm towel at the end, the Doctor, the Hygienist, the Front Desk saying, “How was your experience?” Guaranteeing that the person is going to say it was great, so that was their focus, just focusing on that.

• This year their focus now that their system is in place, they have an awesome team, their doing great experiences, this year they are like “How can we be different in our community impact?” So this year they say every month they are giving to different charity, they have done small make over competitions, they have given equipments to Children’s Hospital, their dental clinic, they have done all sort of things and it’s about being unique, not worried about what anyone else is doing, just trying be very innovative, be very different. In their practice they have a guarantee that you’ll be seen within 15 minutes of your appointment time or your next exam is free but you have to have the systems in place and that was done 2 years ago, she could have not given that guarantee then but they have it now and they guarantee that you will have an amazing experience and you get a great quality of work. Just focusing on what can you do that makes people become very drawn to your business. Anissa stated that in marketing, it’s not good for her to go out and say, “I’m a Dentist and I do fillings or I’m a Dentist and we do teeth whitening” doing an advertisement like that is not very effective because Dentists are supposed to do that but when you create an advertising campaign or creating promotional pieces about how you make people feel and how you have been able to change their lives by taking away the fear and giving them an amazing experience, what happens is that people are drawn to your business and you are able to grow.

Dr. Anissa Holmes stated that hiring for the right profile, they do that and they look at DISC testing behavioral style, for example, if their Hygienist is very outgoing in terms of her behavioral style, they want someone who has the profile of being a very sensitive, very compassionate type to be her Dental Assistant and so they kind of have that balance, the person who does their training of Dental Assistants has a different style and that’s part of it. The other part is that once you start to be knowing for having a certain type of business, those sort of people are going to be attracted to your business and so they are now finding that a lot of their new hires are actually coming to them saying that they know about their business already, they have been following us on Facebook or people are talking about them in the community and they want to work in their practice and so it’s that sort of the mindset of the people and again, once they come in having that training and so most people are not trained on understating that they way you connect with people is not by necessarily talking, it’s about listening and a huge part of their training with all of their team members is understanding the importance of listening, of asking questions, so you can get to the heart of the matter.

For example, in dentistry, a lot of people may say, “I don’t want a crown” some dental offices or dentists around the world will say in their mind, ”They don’t want it because they can’t afford it” or “They don’t want it because they are afraid” but you are not asking them why they don’t want it and you just move on and you miss out on that opportunity to help them. Dr. Anissa Holmes stated that what they do in her practice they will say “Why don’t you want that crown?” and they may say, “The reason why I don’t want it is because my daughter is getting married next month and so I just don’t have any money right now”, and you can say, “Will you be ready in a few months?” and then they say “Sure” and you say “Okay, great, just write it down and when you come back for your next cleaning then we’ll go ahead and have it sorted out then” or they’ll say “I don’t want it because I don’t think I need it” and then you can say “Okay, let’s talk about why or what happens if you don’t do it. In my experience of practicing for so long this is what happens and so if you don’t fix the tooth, what’s going to happen is that you’re going to be out one day and you’re going to bit down and it’s going to break, it’s going to split, you’re going to have to take it out, it’s going to be more procedures, more cost and based on the condition, you are in a 80% chance that that’s going to happen to you, are you okay with that?” The person is going to think and say, “You’re right, I need to do it.” It’s all about training your team, letting them understand how that happens and when they see it happening over and over again, in terms of people making decisions to have a purchase or do treatment because of asking questions, they buy into it.  

• Anissa Holmes stated that she feels that a lot of organizations and businesses locally and internationally, the challenge is that they don’t understand how valuable it is to help you to grow your business and for her having business, her dental practice is set up on systems, it’s very profitable, it can run without her and a lot of people think that for you to have success, it’s going to take 20 years of you working, 80 hours a week and that is not the formula for her that she wanted to take and for her she said, “How is it that I can create a practice that can essentially run without me?” meaning that she is there because she wants to be there not because she has to be there, she has 2 other dentist that gives her freedom at this stage in practice which is over 17 years to now start teaching other dentist and do other things as well. That’s the key for saying, “What’s going to be the way for me to get there? Is it working for 20 years or is there a smarter way?” Once you start thinking of the smarter way, everything that she does, she likes to break it down and figure out how she’s going to do it. For her, the how of how she was going to get there was looking at creating a unique business, creating something that people would be talking about and it’s because she got it, because she understood the importance of putting in an amazing customer experience and there was an objective there. Also if we do this, this is what will happen to me personally, she can have a more balanced life, better things for her family, for her team as well. A lot of people just think that a business is all about having it for 30 years and you work in it until you can’t work anymore and that’s really what business is all about and people at a higher level realize that that’s really not what business is all about and it’s about serving your customers, being able to solve their problems and also create something that would give you that balance and be able to give you that profitability to do what you want to do for your family, people just don’t know that formula so they just work too hard.

• Anissa Holmes agreed that there is a correlation between poor leadership and poor customer experience in a lot of businesses and it boils down to leadership and sometimes you have great team members or you have a great product or service but you have no one to really lead that team and a lot of times that vision does come from the leaders. In her practice for example, it was her coming and say, “This is the vision I have for my practice” and getting people inspired to take part and they knew that it would help them to achieve their dreams as well and so she finds that businesses that have the strongest leaders are the strongest businesses so it absolutely boils down to that. Sometimes as a leader, you have to make decisions that may make you uncomfortable, for example, there may be people who are on your team and you have to be the one to says, “Listen, this is not working” or training them again or saying “I’m sorry but we need to shift you to a different position because you’re not able to really give your fullest potential in this position” and being able to shift people around in a way that they understand and not get offended and leaders have to make those uncomfortable decisions but they also have to be there to inspire people to greatness.

• Anissa Holmes stated that staying motivated it’s really about just creating a culture where you are having fun, where you are solving peoples’ problems. She hears from her team that it’s not like going to work, it’s like you have a family and you build that culture and you see the lives that are being changed, how you’re helping people and that’s really powerful. The other thing that’s interesting is that her team, they all know their strengths and they know their weaknesses and for her, she really great at coming up with strategy and design of different implementation plans that they are going to be doing, she’s really great with helping to inspiring but a lot of the “nitty gritty” details that have to happen and she can’t do everything herself. She is not great at following up with patients every single night for phone calls but that’s something her husband does every night and that’s great but for some reason she can’t do it but it’s important and it has to be done and so one of her team members who is really great at that, she’s one of the assistants, people love her, she’s the one that actually makes all the calls, she does it the next day so by then they have the time to settle and really assess but she calls every single day and she follows up with people and she’s consistent. So they all know their strengths in terms of their behavioral styles and weaknesses so what they do has a team is that they don’t judge, just take the best of everybody and put them in the right spot that way the business can continue to thrive and that boils down to leadership and because of the culture and everybody knows it, no one gets offended, it’s about everybody giving their best so that the business can grow and at the end of the day if the business grows, everybody wins because we are able to have a more profitable business and as a result, salaries can increase and benefits can increase and everybody wins.

• Anissa Holmes shared that the one online tool she uses everyday is Facebook, she stated that she started using Facebook in 2010 when she first started her Dental Practice in Jamaica and that’s when Facebook was getting started with their business pages and when she first started using Facebook, she said she is going to use this tool because you can share your culture and you can share your practices’ story and it’s very difficult to do that in other forms of paid advertising. You can actually build a community of people that are helping each other that are not even patients, some are patients, people are asking questions and people are answering each other questions and it’s really cool. At that time they started to get 5 new patients a month because people were engaging with them and over the years, is that their audience has grown, they’ve understood what content works, what doesn’t work, they understand how to embrace Facebook Ads and targeting and creating audiences where they can retarget people, for example that have been to their website, people who are similar in their characteristics behavior to their existing patients. Now they are getting 40 or 50 new patients every month just from Facebook marketing and she’s spending only US $500.00 a month for their paid advertising and it’s very interesting because about 2 years ago she was testing the return investment on all of her paid advertising and she actually made a decision to drop every other form of paid advertising, they had a yellow pages ad and so she was spending US$800.00 a month, she’s getting 4 new patients, just speaking in USD and is she’s charging US $200.00 , then she is breaking even. Now she said let’s shift that money over so now she’s spending $500.00 a month and getting 50 new patients and the industry standard is 12-15 a month, they are getting 50 just from Facebook. She loves when people come in from Facebook because that means that they know them already, they know their culture, they’ve been following them, they see what they’ve been doing in the community, they see how they are changing lives, they’ve seen patients video testimonials, they’ve been to their website, they know about their team and to her there is no other form of paid advertising where you can just connect with people like Facebook.

• Anissa Holmes stated that she currently has an online course and it teaches dental practices, she has students from all over the world; she has several hundred that are in the programme. It’s an online course, the first 3 or 4 modules is teaching you about how to grow your culture and the importance of that and how you have to have that part right before you start creating ads and copy writing, create calls to action and targeting and creating ads and that’s available on her website which is www.deliveringwow.com. It’s created specifically for Dentists but the principles are uniform and where she is now that her practice has grown to the point where she can cut back a little bit and the plan now is for to work 2 ½ days and spend the other time working on training small business owners/ entrepreneurs, so the next step for her is creating an online course which will help local businesses not online entrepreneurs, local businesses where you have a wine shop for example or if you are have a training centre promoted on Facebook so that’s the next step for her.

• Anissa Holmes stated that there are a lot of books that she reads all the time and a few books for when you’re just getting started are: The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, Eat That Frog by Brain Tracey, those are some great books, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose by Tony Hsieh - book talking about the story of Zappos and creating an amazing customer experience. What she tells people too is that you have resources in terms of books but podcasts are really great and she use to spend her time with books and now she is also really hooked on podcasts because you are actually able to speak and hear from the authors of what’s going on in their mind and even for herself, strategies she spoke about in her book that was released earlier this year, they have already implemented additional strategies. Things are always evolving, you’re pivoting, you’re testing, you’re growing and so listening to podcasts is another way to get that fresh material as it comes out.

• Anissa Holmes stated that she is excited about a few things, in her Dental Practice, they just added another Dentist and they are super excited about this and so are the customers. They are at a point now where there is no debt for the practice and that’s where they want it to be and they are now looking to taking the team out of Jamaica for training, getting into that international space with them. They are excited to start that next phase of just taking it to the next level in terms of being able to have other experiences and bringing additional things back to Jamaica to make the Practice even better. Personally, just growing her online business and blogging and as she creates one course, another opportunity opens for her and she is really excited about what’s going on the online space as well.

• Anissa stated that listeners can find him on:

                                                              Twitter @deliveringwow

                                                              Facebook @delivering wow

                                                              Delivering WOW Website

• Anissa Holmes stated that her motto, what she is known for is keep “Delivering Wow” “and it’s just two words but to her it means so much, it means always just get to one point, you say what’s next for me? How can I make a bigger impact? How can I inspire more people? How can I change more lives? And once you do that, your business is growing, you are profitable, how can you impact your family, how can you travel more, how can you achieve your dreams?

Links

• The Delivering Wow Dental Podcast
• Delivering WOW: How Dentists Can Build a Fascinating Brand & Achieve More While Working Less
• The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
• Eat That Frog by Brain Tracey
• Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose by Tony Hsieh - book talking about the story of Zappos
• Twitter @deliveringwow
• Facebook @delivering wow
• Delivering WOW Website

Joseph Pine is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker and management advisor. Joseph has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, at Ted in California and today is a Lecturer in Columbia University’s Technology Management Programme. He is not an academic, however, having worked for IBM for 13 years, Joseph specializes in helping people see the world of business differently through his many ground breaking books beginning with the award winning, Mass Customization: The New Frontier In Business Competition, including Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want and most recently, Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier. He is most popularly well known for his bestselling book, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage which was recently name one of the 100 best business books of all time by 800-CEO-Read.

Questions

• What is your Zodiac Sign?
• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• In terms of the book which says Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, can you expound on that a little?
• If we are in the experience economy and we are on a stage, how do we find out what is our true character or is our character based on the persons we interact with?
• What are some important considerations for an entrepreneur or an online business owner you to be successful?
• In a government institution where they move slow, the employees seems like they don’t want to be at work, how can that be translated into a way that as a government, your citizens of the country are running to pay their taxes because the service experience is amazing and is there an economy that exist like that?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• 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

• Joseph that his Zodiac Sign is a Libra if he remembers right on the cusp of Scorpio.

Yanique stated that one interesting fact about a Libran is that they are very free spirited and asked Joe if that’s a true characteristic of his personality and Joe disagreed and shared he believes he’s free spirited in being creative and innovative.

Joseph stated being free spirited is not a true characteristic of his personality, he is however sort of buttoned up and introvert and a free spirit is very much of extroverts, so he would not say that describes him. If you think of characteristics of a free spirit is being creative and being able to think of new things and do things differently and that part he would ascribe to. He feels like his purpose in life is to figure out what’s going on in the world of business and then to develop frame works that first describe what’s going on and then prescribe what companies can do about it. Joseph shared that his birthday is October 22.

• Joseph stated that he was very much into computers very early in Elementary School and so he got an Applied Mathematics Degree; he joined IBM and worked there for 13 years. He started off in a very technical job and moved up into management and into a special project he did for a computer system called the AS/400, was to help run a group that helped customers bring customers in the business development process of the system and he discovered at that time that every customer was unique that they want to use the system in different ways and put together different hardware, different data, different software, just unique. He moved into strategic planning and that sent him on a discovery of how they would resolve that issue, how they could design systems for the uniqueness that he saw and that led him to the book “Future Perfect” by Stanley Davies it came out in 1987. In it he had a chapter on Mass Customization and when he read that chapter, it was like the heavens opened up and the angels sang, it explained everything that he saw going on and when IBM sent him to MIT for a year to get his Master’s Degree in Management of Technology, he decided that he was going to study that topic the whole, he was going do his thesis on mass customization and then he was going to turn his thesis into a book and that’s what he did. The book came out in 1993 and really defines that fact that we can give every customer exactly what they want but do it at a price they are willing to pay, so you have coequal imperatives of both mass and customization, the individual customized plus low cost efficient operations. He worked on that and he left IBM in late 1993 to see if he could do it on his own, 23 years later his wife is still not sure if it’s going to work out but so far so good. Early on he discovered that if you customize it good, you automatically turn it into a service and if you customize a service, you automatically turn it into an experience and if you design a service that is so appropriate for a particular person exactly the service that they need at this moment in time then you can’t help but make them go “wow” and turn it into a memorable event and that is an experience. That lead him to discover the experience of the economy, where they would have an economy based off of experiences where goods and services would no longer be enough and companies would need to do is to stages experiences for their customers, and so he took on Jim Gilemore as a partner in 1996, they started to develop ideas together and that resulted in their book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage in 1999 and that really laid it out and that set the stage for the entire movement towards customer experience and operation towards user experience and towards experience marketing and marketing all of that is fundamentally based on the fact that they are shifting into an economy where experiences have today become a predominant economic offering. When they first wrote the book in 1999, they talked about the nascent experience economy, the coming experience economy, they came out with an updated edition a few years ago and they changed all that language saying “no it’s here, it’s now, we are in worldwide, we are in an experienced economy” that’s what consumers are looking for. Since that time, they also discovered that in a world of paid for experiences people often question what is real and what is not and increasingly they don’t want the fake from the phony, they want the real from the genuine, and so they came out with the book in 2007 called Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, the new consumer sensibility describing how companies can get customers to perceive their offerings and by extension their places in their company as authentic. In 2011, he also came out with a book called Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier, so that goes originally to his technology background, looking at how digital technology is being used in experiences and recognizing that what it is about is fusing the real and the virtual and that’s what that book’s about. Joseph also mentioned that his partner Jim Gilemore has come out with a new book called “Look” about the observational skill, it’s a great book on how you can bring different kinds of observational skills into your personal practice and into your company.

Yanique commented that she recently read a study done by New Voice Era that said “up to $62 Billion a year is being lost by companies collectively on a global scale because of poor service.” She stated that assuming that the service is based on the experience they have had, so it’s no longer the price or sometimes the quality of the product, they will work with you if you are willing to make certain amends but how they manage that whole experience with the customer really depends on whether or not they stay with you.

Joseph agreed and stated that it is important to recognize that each of the offerings he’s talking about is distinct economic offerings. You grow an economy based off commodities, the things you pull out of the ground or raise in the ground, animal, mineral, vegetable and then we shifted in the industrial revolution hundreds of years ago into an industrial economy where goods, physical things became the predominant economic offering and in the latter part of the 21st century, we shifted into a service economy and that’s where quality became job one, that’s where services became important and the research that Yanique points to is about services which are the intangible activities that you perform on behalf of an individual and that’s why mass customizing a good turns it into a service because you’re doing it for an individual not inventorying it, doing it on demand. Now what we are shifting into is an experience based off experiences. Experiences are in fact a distinct economic offering as distinct from services and services from goods, they use goods as a prop and services as the stage to engage each and every person and by creating a memory which is the hallmark of the experience. It’s important to differentiate that, you don’t want to talk about the service experience and they are distinct things. You can have a service; you can surround that with an experience and the term you are using “Customer Experience” it’s important to understand what that should mean. Most people use the term they mean “let’s make it things nice and easy and convenient” and all of those are good characteristics but they are service characteristics, you’ve got to go beyond nice and easy and convenient if you want to create a true distinctive experience.

• Yanique stated that in terms of the book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, she stated that she does a lot of customer service training and the why how the mind processes things and that’s based off what she hears from the participant. When you say to them, you have to pretend like you are on stage that contradicts the whole authenticity approach. They should come to work and pretend but at the same time you want them authentic, be true to who they are and be true to the quality and culture the company stands for.

Joseph stated that it’s a very common misconception of acting is that it is fake, that it is pretend, that’s not what real acting is about. You can have people that pretend when they are acting. The book they talk about the real fake makers and basically defines that people can perceive your offering as real – real or fake – fake but also as real – fake or fake – real and acting can be any one of those four as well, so a lot of people that are fake acting which really is pretending.

His favorite example is Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, Fish Market You Tube Video he was just there leading an Experience Expedition with clients 2 months ago. Pike Place Fish Market is a fish market, it is moralizing the fish video, and the most best selling business video of all time and what they do is getting fish out of the sea and putting it on ice in an open market so they are commodity traders but how they sell that fish is with wonderful theatre, they have these different routines to engage guests, often 20 to 40 people around the fish market waiting for someone to buy because that’s when they have their signature moment, when you order a fish, they shout of the order like “7 flying to Minnesota” and all the others shout back “7 flying to Minnesota” and then they throw that salmon across the counter, 15 to 20 feet where somebody catches it and wraps it up for you and people love seeing that happen. These people understand that they are on stage, they understand that they are acting but they are very real, they go home smelling like fish, so the fish video goes through 4 different principles, they are all acting techniques. They talk about play, the notion that you are on stage, you are there to have fun and give a great experience for the audience. They talk about “be there” which is a standard acting technique that you need to be there in the moment, you need to forget about everything else and focus on the task at hand and that’s what actors have to do. The other is chose your attitude, acting is fundamentally about making choices, about choosing what parts of yourself to reveal to those in front of you, we all know we act differently in front of our boss than we do our subordinates, we know we act differently in front of our friends than we do strangers, in front of our parents then we do our children, it’s not that we are being fake or phony, it’s just choosing what part of ourselves to reveal and that’s what real-real acting is.

• Joseph Pine stated that in general and this relates to authenticity which is you have to true to yourself is one of the 2 key standards of authenticity that create that real -fake matrix and the other is you have to be who you say you are. The character must come from within; the character that you are and that you bring that to life. Another great example of acting is the diner in Chicago called Ed Debevic’s, it’s very famous and it’s shut down for the moment. It’s a normal corner diner, it’s not a high end place, he and his partner Jim Gilemore went there once for lunch and the guy at the front who met them had a nametag that says “Smiley”. So smiley was his character, not sure if it was his real nick name or a character he subsumed but that was a guy that can be smiley and he was smiley. He met them with a big smile and he asked how many people was in their party and he picked out menus and he proceeded to walk them through the restaurant and every once in awhile he would stop and one time he stopped at a table and asked them how they were doing and they would cooled their heels behind him he interact with another customer, at one point he started to talk around the table, up the chairs, up the tables, back down the other side and they kept following him until he finally delivered them to their table right at the front of the restaurant. It’s a wonderful, engaging theatre and it is that character that he created call Smiley. Speaking of phone interactions, one of the companies that is famous for great customer service that he thinks rises to the level of an experience in Zappos in Las Vegas, where they sell shoes on line and they are famous for their call centres where people would call in. Joseph met their Chief Culture Officer, Jon Wolske and he came up from being a phone representative himself, contact centre employee and he said that what he would do as he played in a rock band when he was younger, he would take on that rock band persona, he had things around his cubicle that talks about being a rock star, whenever he gets a call, he would look at that image that says “you are a rock star” and that would be the character that he played but that was a character that was a part of himself, he wasn’t trying to be something that he’s not.

Yanique stated that she is a big fan of the movie “the Fast and the Furious” and Vin Diesel has a very jovial personality and she has been watching him offline in some of his snaps he puts up on Snapchat as well as Instagram and even on Facebook and he seems like a very relaxed, easy going and jovial person but he doesn’t play those characters in “the Fast and the Furious” he’s serious and person in the family who doesn’t smile too much. She said that is very interesting that if you get a role that epitomize your true character, it makes it that much easier and more believable for people to connect with you.  

• Joseph shared that for online entrepreneurs, the key thing to understand is what business are you really in. So understand if you want to be in the goods/ services business or truly in the experience business and then you need to think about how do you create that experience. The number 1 thing is time, like Zappos said. Most companies with their contact centres, they measure how little time customers spend with their representatives. They want them off the phone very quickly, they think it’s costing them money, at Zappos, they don’t measure that. In fact, everyday they celebrate which customer representative got to spend the most time with a an actual, living, breathing customer and it’s usually in the hours and that doesn’t bother them a bit, they don’t think about the dollar signs clicking off about cost, they recognize that they are doing the right job for the customer and that customer is going to be one of their raving fans, they are going to tell other people about it, they are going to come back again because they gave that great experience over the phone and so that can be done online, that can be done in a small business, it’s again recognizing what is your stage, what is the theatre that you are going to put on there.

• Joseph Pine II shared that an economy like that exists few and far between because being a government employees have so many differences than normal employees, you don’t have the profit motive that causes you to want to do a good job, you don’t have the fear of losing a job or the business if you’re not doing it well, the people you are interacting with aren’t “customers” cause they are not paying you, the government is and so all those things make it incrediblly hard for government employees to really do a great job. Every once in awhile you get what’s call a natural, you get someone who is just naturally vivacious or outgoing or having a service attitude that does want to do a great job and will turn into a great experience interacting with them but for a government entity to do that, that’s very few and far between. Joseph stated that the one that always come to mind is that he and his partner Jim gives out is “An Experience Stager of the Year Award” every year at their annual Think About event. It was be their 19th year September 21st and 22nd in New Orleans. One time they gave the award to a government entity and that was the Cerritos Public Library in Cerritos, California outside of Los Angeles. The Head Librarian Wayne Pearson, he got tired of people telling him that the internet was going to commoditize his business, people were saying “why are going to libraries in the future when you get over the internet every book that’s ever been published, every paper that has ever been written, every thought that has ever been thunk.” He wanted to create this reason for existence for libraries, so he created what he calls “World’s First Experience Library” Cerritos Public Library - Best Library Experience Video and architecturally it ‘s very distinct, it’s the first use of titanium in any architectural structure in the United States of America when it was built in 2002 and they have a basic theme, every great experience needs to have a theme it doesn’t have to be in your face like the Cerritos Public Library, doesn’t have to be fantasy like Disney, it’s simple “The Organizing Principle for the Experience” and the theme for the Cerritos Public Library is “Journey Through Time” that a visit to the library ought to be a journey through time, so they have different areas in the library that are themed after different points in time, a classic period, a modern period, an ordeca period and they have rituals based off of that like when it’s time to close the library, everybody starts to put away their books and gather up their stuff and they go down to the main lobby where this huge screen and every night at closing time they play the scene from the movie, The Sound of Music where the kids are singing, they all sing along and by time the last kid sings good bye, the library is closed and they go again another day. The town has over 3,500 of them are in the library every day. This is a government entity that understands that it’s in the experience business and that comes directly from Wayne Pearson and it’s continued on to this day.

• Joseph shared that the one online tool that he couldn’t live without would be Google because he is constantly doing research, he is constantly trying to figure out what’s going on in the world, looking for new examples, seeing what people are doing and that always gives him new ideas which eventually lead to new frame works. Often his Google goes into Wikipedia to be able to research something in deep but he also has Google alert so anybody that’s in the praising experience economy or mass customization or authenticity business context and also chief experience officer, he’s a big promoter of the fact that companies should hire chief experience officers to lead their offerings and turn them into a true distinctive experiences. He is also on Twitter and he learns a ton just seeing what’s going on, a lot of example through that and connecting with people, he has gotten a lot of business through that.

• Joseph shared that the biggest thing is to see the effect that they are having in the world. Sometimes it’s very direct in consulting with an organization, he helping them to create an experience plan for example. You can go and visit them when it’s fully implemented and you see the difference that you make and other cases when he’s giving a speech somewhere and you see the light bulbs go on in people’s head and they come up to you after and say “wow this really makes sense” and they talk about how they are going to make a difference in the world. One of the things they have is an Experience Economy Expert Certification Course, 4 and half day of emerging in the experience, publicly every year in August in the United States of America, privately in house around the world and they have over 200 certified experts and they see the difference they are making and sometimes they are the owner of the business so you see what they are doing differently, sometimes they are internal consultants helping the business and sometimes they are consultants to other clients and you see what a difference they are making there. On Twitter, he has people talking about what a difference his book makes, he may not be having any interaction but his books are out there, the ideas are out there and people are taking them on, he doesn’t hear of everyone that does but people are bracing the ideas and making a difference in their business which allows them to hire more people, which creates more jobs, which moves the economy on. So the fact that he knows that he is making a difference in the world is highly motivating.

• Joseph shared some of the books and first one is “Future Perfect” by Stanley Davis it was written in 1987 and one chapter that inspire mass customization his book Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Values on the Digital Frontier was actually inspired by another chapter in Future Perfect. Another great book that had a tremendous effect on him is “The One to One Future” by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers and that book came out in 1993 and he read it and said “wow, this is talking about in marketing, what I was talking about in operations” if you could mass customize then you could also have a one to one dialogue with individual customers, what could you create. When he was done reading the book, he discovered that Don lived 2 towns over from him in Connecticut at the time. He then called him up, got together and they figured out what that would do is create a learning relationship with customers that would grow and deepen overtime and allows you to lock them in because you always knew more about them than anybody else and you see that come into fruition today with all the companies using AI today to predict what people want. Another great book is “Computers as Theatre” by Brenda Laurel and it really make the case that you need to think about computers not as a tool but as a medium for a stage. He learned a lot about theatre and dramatic structure from reading her book, it’s a great book and he had his class at Columbia University read a portion of it.

• Joseph shared that understanding that work is theatre and so what you need to do is to come up with that play/drama that you want to create, that’s what your strategy is about, what is your drama that you want to create in the world. And then you need to direct your workers to action, give them roles to play and help them characterize those roles and give them the where it all to be able to perform them, actors rehearse, give them backstage time and then you need to create an employee experience that is as good as the experience you create for customers, so they have the where it all to perform your drama on your business stage.

• Joseph shared that he doesn’t have people; their business they call “2 Gurus and a Marketer” Jim Gilmore and their partner Doug Parker. They had a partner meeting and came up with some things that they are excited about. One of them is that they are working with some companies to create some videos, to be able to take their ideas and bring them out there further than they can reach with their speeches and consulting and their books. They are working with a company that brings custom learning to individual people in businesses wherever they are and so they are going to work with them to create new modules that they can then help people in their jobs, frontline personnel create that great, wow experience for their customers, so over the next 6 months they are going to do that, increasing the reach to make more of a difference, helping many more people embrace The Experience Economy.

• Joseph stated that listeners can find him on:
  www.strategichorizons.com
  Joseph Pine Twitter

• Joseph stated that there is a famous quote by Margaret Mead “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Links

• “Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition” by B. Joseph Pine
• “Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want” by B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore
• “Infinite Possibilities: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier” by B. Joseph Pine, Kim C. Korn and James H. Gilmore
• “The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage” by B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore
• “Future Perfect” by Stanley M. Davis
• “The One to One Future” by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers
• “Computers as Theatre” by Brenda Laurel

Kay Valenzuela is an international award winner, founder of CXchange Institute, business entrepreneur and a recognize strategist of Customer Experience Design. Kay has been revolutionizing the Spanish speaking market with her own programme that focuses on customer experience, mastering the strategic competitive advantage of customer experience and she has implemented this certification in a number of Spanish speaking countries and is looking for great opportunities to launch into the English speaking market as well.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• As a customer experience expert, how do you feel about customer service/ customer experience on a global level?
• What are some every day solutions that you would recommend to a small business owner to help them improve their customer experience?
• What are some important considerations to take into account for an entrepreneur or online business owner you believe to be successful?
• In terms of sustaining a service culture, how do you translate that culture to be part of their DNA that it spills over into their customer experiences?
• What are some critical qualities that a leader needs to have in order to run a business that is customer service driven?
• 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

• Kay Valenzuela stated that she thinks of herself as a very curious person and out of curiosity, after working with Service Quality Institute for some time and doing the interactions with the participants she had before she would always take notes on “Where did they want to go, what were the resolutions they were expecting to find?” And she started keeping track of all those questions and all the things they had on their minds and the challenges they were facing, she just wanted to find the solution for them and for herself because sometimes solutions in customer experience are not that simple, so at the end of a 4 year period, she summed it all up and started partnering with people around the world and experts in the field that started to help her out putting all the answers together and they ended up having a research on development institute and now they have the certification programme open worldwide.

• As a Customer Experience Expert, Kay shared that with customer experience, we are facing a very interesting challenge and the message we taking across is the following, people have been trying to change people for a very long time and that hasn’t taken us very far, so what if we just start looking more inward into the organization instead of the people. That’s like a different approach to the whole customer experience issue because we keep on having these figures and we keep on having all these budgets that’s basically blowing out in the air, not knowing exactly what we are expecting from it, so now we have the opportunity to set in place a strategy that can be measured, that can be controlled and can be managed and then after we have fixed the story what we have inside then we can go ahead and talk to people.

• As a Customer Experience Specialist, Kay shared some solutions she would give to a small business owner and it’s that the first thing we need to figure out is where we are and where do we want to go and then after we have that clear answer then maybe we can set up in place a strategy that we can follow, a strategy that we can put into a plan and make sure we take into account everything that is really important for accomplishing this strategy and the first thing would be is “Knowing the kind of service you want to deliver, how do you want to make your customers feel?” That would be the first question that you would like to answer very clearly, clearly enough so that it can also be answered and understood by all the people in your organization. Number (2) would be listen to your customers and your employees, listening is a basic must to figure out what is the strategy that you have to put in place, it doesn’t work anymore when you go from the organizational perspective, you have to listen to your customers and make sure that you are following the right path complying with three major aspects that customers have today and that is: (1) what is the level of effort they need to put in placein order to get what they want. (2) How do they feel while doing that effort and what is their success rate achieving what they want to achieve in your organization. (3) Is you have to define the journey; you have to be in touch of what happens with you or with your organization and your customers at every touch point. Make sure you track their emotions, make sure you really understand what it is they are trying to achieve at each point of contact and you have to train your people to make sure you deliver the experience you discern from them.

Yanique commented that this may be a whole lot for a small business owner to take all in – she asked how do you move the small business owner from the mindset of training being an expense and rather an investment.

Kay shared in getting business owners to understand that training is not an expense but more of an investment and is directly linked to their bottom line. Kay stated that from her point of view, what happens before is that they are absolutely right, they have been training people but on the wrong issues so they don’t see the outcome of that investment and that’s why everybody thinks it’s an expense but when you figure out that it’s a perspective issue everyone knows and does what they need to do in regardless of what they know, not only what they are trained on. So every time you hire somebody, that person comes with an experience and they will put that into place at your organization, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you’re a large or a small organization, you will face the same challenges if you don’t get that communication aligned. So what training does is align the vision and align the strategy you want to put in place. If you want to have a bakery and you have to hire chefs, if you don’t tell the chefs the recipe you want to deliver, then it’s impossible for them to figure out on their own, so training would be the first step but it definitely has to be in place within the strategy to deliver great service, it will not happen out of the loop. It’s impossible to have different kind of people with different experiences, ages and different generations to think alike and to deliver a consistent message if they are not trained on it.

• Kay Valenzuela shared some of the considerations that an online entrepreneur should take into account is that the world is digital and the digital part of the strategy has to be in place whether you have a physical space or not, you have to take into consideration what is the journey your customers are going to follow and the trends are they will go to your webpage, they will go to your social media channels, they will probably get to know you so much better than you’ll ever get to know them by the time they reach you for the first time, in fact statistics say that 8% of the purchase decision has been made online before the customer reaches anyone for the first time. It’s about understating who is the person you are selling to, who is your customer, you have to have a profound understanding of the purpose of your business in their lives and what is it they are trying to achieve when they get in contact with you be it at a physical space or a digital space. You have to make sure you are managing the whole customer journey within the customer sales cycle and make sure that you are very fast at telling them what it is exactly that is so unique about you that they want to stay on your page and they really understand what it is that they are going to achieve by doing business with you. They say you have 6 to 8 seconds to catch the attention of anyone online, so with so much noise out there and so much competition worldwide and you have to come with a clear message across right off the bat when they go to your web page.

Kay Valenzuela stated that more important is what is different about you? Why are you unique? Why do you deserve their time and most likely their money along the way?

Kay also stated that value also comes from perspective, that’s why it’s so important to be able to draw your customer persona and make sure you have a profound understanding because if you don’t know who you’re selling to, it is very difficult that you are going to create that value right off the bat within 6 to 8 seconds, so you have to know who is your target audience, what is it that makes them feel comfortable with you. There are only 2 ways to stay in business today, it’s either you look like your customers or you only do business with the people that look like you, so you really have to define the personality of your business and you really have to define who is your target audience, not everybody that buys from you is a real customer.

• Kay stated that from her point of view, it has to do with the owner of the business, it is that primary leader that already has a vision and a way to inspire in such a dramatic way that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a beginner. It will be sustainable if the leaders that manage it have a sustained vision and a sustained attitude towards their business. They are role models and the leadership line has to be in touch with that, they not only being listened to but also being watched every second of the day, so sometimes it’s very difficult to have a great experience culture if you have a leader that would say one thing when he’s in front of the customers and probably something else when the customer moves away, so the culture begins with the leadership and they have to have a sustained message that comes across really clear to what it is that they want to be for their customers and it will follow along. She stated that she has a lot of noise thinking that culture is something that you can create, culture is something that you already have depending on your behavior, so if you have an inconsistent message, you will have an unsustainable culture, if you have a clear message, you will have a sustained culture, whatever it is, whether it be of quality or not much of a quality. Whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re saying in a consistent way, it’s what becomes your culture.

• Kay Valenzuela shared some leadership qualities a leader must have - the whole experience must be like a story, so they need to have a clear story, there’s a story that invites people to be either apart or move away from what ever you mean as an organization, so when leaders have a clear story and that story is compelling enough, it will definitely help them out not only to sustained the culture but to also have sustained message for their customers. They have to have a clear story, it’s like their identity seal and they have to find a way to create along the touch point, how are they going to tell that story on and on and on again with the same level of engagement. People say that initially, you need more engaged frontline employees and it has been her experience that what we need are more inspiring leaders.

Yanique stated that in a country, the leaders of a country are the one that inspires the citizens and that’s why the countries who their GDP’s is better and their ease of doing business are better because the leaders in the country understand, they put themselves in the customers’ shoes which are the citizens and they really understand the importance of transcending that message in a way that is tangible and you feel that it’s easy to do business.

Kay stated that when you think of other leaders that are not organizational driven and you say what is it that makes them different? How come you have such a few individuals along history to have had the power to transform the ages and the way society runs and it’s because they have something to say and they feel it’s important to them and it rubs on and she feels passionate when she thinks about this. You think about what is it that they do different? Why do you have organizations that are so successful? Why do you have departments within a failing organization that is successful? So it always comes back down to the message the leader is taking across, how much does he believe in his own dream? What does it mean to be apart of that organization? What does it mean to achieve a certain goal because it makes us better, because it inspires us? And then people follow along and it’s not business dreaming, it’s leadership dreaming, it’s the way they communicate.

• Kay Valenzuela shared how she stays motivated everyday; she stated that she is trying to follow a very clear line. It’s has been her personal story, when she started working with customer service, she also had an entrepreneurial ambition towards training, towards what customer service meant and the minute she started getting in touch with people and feeling their concerns and all the things they have to face and the same time the big gap they had trying to find some balance into who they were when they are not working and who they were when they are working and it created a whole lot of noise. When she was able to understand customer experience in a different way, in a way that it touched her as a person and understanding how making a great impact in somebody’s life also meant that she was writing a chapter of her own story then it made a whole lot of difference and gives her so much because she sees customer experience now as her own developing story every day. She wants a great story to be told about her day, she wants to be a part of amazing stories, she wants to be a part of stories that will transcend her own leaving time and space and it can only be done through interactions we have with people, it’s the stories that we create together that makes us relevant and that sense of relevance is something that everybody wants and she found it through customer experience and the interactions with people.

• Kay stated that the one online tool she uses everyday is Whatsapp, it’s her primary line of connection to the rest of the world now especially when she is traveling.

Whatsapp is an instant messaging app that you can connect with others through your telephone number and you can send them instant messages, you can send them files, you can send them voice notes, you can send them pictures and it’s really a great resource as a business owner.

• Kay stated that the books that have had the biggest impact and the first one that comes to her mind is “What Got You Here Won’t Take You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful” by Marshall Goldsmith. The ways that he makes you work through the latter of life thinking how did you get to this place? And do you think you have enough to keep on the journey? And he actual makes you reflect a lot on what are the possibilities in front of you and you are able to make those choices for the better. She also mentioned that there is a book in Spanish from a Spanish writer and beautiful speaker, the book is called “Transformation” by Mario Pooch and it talks about your ability to transform at any moment in time of your life, trying to achieve happiness, whatever that means to you and how you can reinvent yourself everyday to become better, to be better for others, to leave a legacy on society and creating a great story for yourself, one that will be worth not only leaving but also talking about it.

• Kay stated that she would ask what motivates them because if their employees are not motivated then there’s got to be something wrong with the message they are listening to. She would try to figure out what motivates that leader; does he feel that he has the same kind of connection with his business to where he started? Ask him about how he has met his expectations? Ask him how does he feel? Because if they are enthusiastic and they are really connected it simple shows and it rubs on.

Kay stated that when it comes down to leadership, embracing the possibility of being vulnerable and being transparent, it takes so much weight from the leaders’ back because sometimes they feel because they are in a leadership position, they need to have all the answers, they need to have all the strategies and they need to know everything that has to be put in place and that is actually not true. When you think of the characteristics of combining your leadership position also with the capability that your team has to flow in with you and increase your ideas, make them richer, make them profound, you will always get so much more than when you put all that weight on your back thinking that you have to have every answer, when you think about your teams, they’ll be more than happy to share into those ideas they have with you because if you really think about it, they are the ones that knows more about your business than you can because they are the ones facing the troubles and challenges every day, sometimes we are too way back or upstairs and we forget to have those interactions with the customers. Sharing those ideas and collaborative style of leadership will always give you a wider perspective of what are the right steps to take and how do you manage better, how do you lead better and how you interact with your customers better.

• Kay stated that the one thing that she is working on right now that she is really excited about is CX Mastermind, that is a certification, it’s taken 4 years to put all the programmes together, it’s 5 different programmes, it’s an interaction certification and they are really enthusiastic. They are already down to 6 different countries and right now she is in Mexico in a great alliance with the University of Technológico, Monterey. She is very enthusiastic about the impact that the programme has made on the participants and the fact that it’s based on Science more than philosophical or business orientation, it’s taking the conversation to a whole different level. The first day they spent talking about how much do you know yourself? And people think that they are talking about how much do you know about what you like or what you don’t like? And what they are referring to is do you know how you are biologically built? There are so many answers within our brain, finding the answer to the question. Why do people do what they do? They have found that answer and they have been able to put it in a very simple communication line that people can relate to, understand and you can see in their faces when they see those “blind flashes of the obvious” just lighting up in their faces like “oh, that’s why this didn’t work” “oh, that’s why my employees didn’t listen to me” or “that’s why I couldn’t find the solution.” And it all comes down to, we all have been trying to change something that is dynamically changing on its self and we’ve stayed with a fixed pattern of doing business and that is the one thing that needs to be relocated or redesigned. It not the people, you can’t change people no matter how many hours of training you put people through, you just don’t have the power to change people, the only thing you can do is either inspire them or you can model for them, they will decide what they want.

• Kay stated that listeners can find him on:
  www.kayvalenzuela.com
  Kay Valenzuela Facebook
  Kay Valenzuela Twitter

• Kay stated that she has a few quotes and one of her favorite is “The only thing that your competition cannot imitate is how your customers feel when they do business with you.” The other one which is more inspirational is “It’s never too late to have a new dream and work to follow it through.”

Links

• “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful” by Marshall Goldsmith

Robert Ilijason is an IT Consultant specializing in databases and business intelligence, mainly working with automating processes and data flows. He has worked with customers such as Ericsson, TeliaSonera and mainly IKEA. He is also a writer. Since a few months ago, he is also a retailer and he’s opened an unmanned grocery store in the small village of Viken and now expanding in Sweden. How Robert came across our path was, in doing some research for our podcast interviews, we bucked upon this article and these videos that spoke about this gentleman in Sweden who created an automated store where there were no actual employees and all you needed was your smart phone app to basically navigate your entire experience.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• Can you share with us a little about the problem that you were experiencing why you created this app?
• How would you rate customer experience in Sweden, do you find it’s different from other places in the world?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• If another business owner came over to you and said they are looking to do something similar to what you’re doing in your business, creating an app, but are looking more to have an app to complement their existing store with employees, what is some advice you would give them in terms of developing something that would be customer oriented?
• 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

• Robert Ilijason stated that he has always been a tech person for all his life; he started out with computers when he was 10 years old. He started to work with it professionally when he was 20 years old and now he is 40 years old and has been with it for 20 years. He has had a lot of different titles, he has been a Web Developer, a Database Administrator, a BI Consultant, which is his current title, but what he’s been doing all these years is solving problems using technology. People go to him with a problem and he uses the correct technology to solve the problem that they have.

• As an avid problem solver - Robert shared that one day he had his son and he was home alone with him for the first time, he was about 6 months old back then. It was late at night, he was supposed to feed him baby food, his girlfriend had left him a note of what he was supposed to do and he managed to drop the last jar of baby food and it was too late for the stores in Viken which is a small city with about 4000 inhabitants. The stores were closed and he kind of panicked as it was his first time and he didn’t know what to do so he took his son, put him in the car and they drove to the closest city which was Helsingborg and that was a very bad experience because his son (Max) was screaming because he was both hungry and afraid and wondering what was happening and Robert was sweating all over because of the panic he had. During that trip he decided that he doesn’t want to live in a place where he can’t buy stuff all the time but his girlfriend told him that they need to stay in Viken, so he decided that if he can’t move to the store, he has to move the store to him. In Sweden it is very expensive to have personnel and in most countries, so having a 24/7 store in Viken was out of the question, at least if you have your ordinary store. Robert started thinking, what if they just remove the personnel and it proved to be quite simple because the people working in the cash register can be replaced by the customer, it’s not totally without employees because someone needs to fill up the goods and remove the old goods and clean out the store but you don’t need to have someone there all the time. You download the app, you can register online and it takes 15 seconds. You can use the app to enter the store, walk around, you scan what you take and when you’re done, you press the button and after a few weeks you get the invoice.

It is a way for him to count the transaction cost because he can add credit cards or different kinds of e-payments they have in Sweden but that cost him a few Swedish quarters which is about 20 or 30 cents per transaction and by bulking up all the purchases the customer does throughout the month, he can count the transaction cost quite a lot. The app was launched in mid January of 2016.

Robert stated that most people in Viken are happy that it exists. The biggest problems he has had is not with technology but with his lack of knowledge within retailing, he doesn’t understand that he needs parking spaces and he didn’t have the carts to put goods in, there were a lot of minor things that he missed and the goods on the shelves were the wrong kind but now that it’s turning around by fixing all the problems has they come along and now it’s looking well and he’s trying to expand into more villages in Sweden.

• Robert stated that customer service is pretty well and he mostly have that experience in many countries in Europe and they are well in the customer experience, in the northern part more so, they are calm people and try to help everyone, it’s a very helpful mentality all over so it’s pretty good. That’s why companies such as IKEA has had such a success all over the world, they figured things out and tried to make things easier for their customers even if it’s their bottom line sometimes.

Robert stated that while working with IKEA, he can talk about business intelligence which is not customer service but basically collecting everything that’s happening in the stores. From the stores, from the suppliers, from the trains, boats, trucks to basically optimize the flow of goods to lower the prices to make it more available and cheaper for people, to maintain a good quality while lowering the price for customers. The data is used to provide a better experience. Most companies are using that data, if you are ever asked by a company if you are happy with an experience, you sometimes press a button or you’re answering a survey online, that’s always collected and he recommends that people do it because even if people don’t look at you’re specific answer, they look at it in an aggregate and they will identify problem points and they will be able to fix them if you help them out. If you’re not happy and don’t tell anyone, the problem won’t be fixed and that he sees in his own store because some people are very active in getting back to him and letting him know that “hey, you should really have this product or you should not sell this product and this a problem for whatever reason”, they can help him out to optimize what he has on his shelves. He has the statistics from the sales but they can also tell him “I didn’t buy cheese today because the cheese I want wasn’t there”, he would optimize it in the app so it’s very simple, you can press the button and you can either type or speak to send him information of what problems they’ve had. Robert stated that the app has everything; he tries to push everything in there so it’s easy for them and for him. 

If customers have a problem in the store like purchasing something and it spoils after a day and they want to return it, do they communicate that in the app? Robert stated there is a small box in the store where you put stuff that are bad for whatever reason or you just want to return it and it informs him of that in the app. What is the response time for getting back to the customer? Robert stated that there is a call centre so it depends on when, if you do it in the middle of the night, it will take a few hours but during working hours, it’s almost immediate response but they have very few customers so it’s easy to have a high service.

• Robert shared that he tries to look at the possibilities and try to be around positive people, he gets support from his family and other entrepreneurs in the area and by talking altogether they can keep each other’s spirit high so when someone is down they can always help them out to make sure they see the possibilities because it is hard to start something new and you don’t know if you’ll succeed and the costs are sometimes much higher than the money coming in. If you just prevail, you’ll most likely succeed.

• Robert shared that the most important advice is to start on paper and to talk to someone who actually understands user interfaces because one of the biggest challenges that he has seen when he downloads other apps is that they are very cumbersome to use, it’s confusing, they don’t always follow normal practice that most apps use and especially for bigger companies, they execute poorly. Start on paper and talk to someone that understands how the flow in the app works and do all this before you even talk to a technician. Most technicians, they think in a special way and for them things are obvious but not always obvious for the customer and an example is Apple’s Ipad, the first Ipad wasn’t better than the competition, it was worse in many regards but they managed to tell people instead of saying they have 5 gigabits, they could store 5,000 or 1,000 songs and that’s a huge difference because not everyone understands what is a gigabits it. For a technician a gigabit is obvious but for a normal person, it’s not. He sees it a lot where, you’re in the business and you understand the business and you expect everyone to understand what you’re doing but most people don’t, so you really need to start from the beginning and have someone who understands this and be a part of the app development from the very start.

• Robert stated that if you have a lot of notes on a professional level, Evernote is also something he uses very much. He uses all different types of cloud services like for storage such as Dropbox and OneDrive and Google Drive.

• Robert shared that there are many books that have had some impact on him but for this particular project, there is none. He has been influenced by a lot of American entrepreneurs and like everyone else, Steve Jobs is a person to look up to, he did a lot of good things and also Richard Branson. He also mentioned that he really appreciates Tony Fadell, he likes people who are simplifying things and if he had one topic in his life, it would be simplification, he wants to automate and simplify things so there is time for other stuff.

• Robert stated his excitement and focus is the expansion. It is the main part right now but what he’s mostly focusing on right now is Version 2.0, so right now to shop in his store you need to have your mobile app, you need to go into the store with the app, you need to scan the goods, you need to press to pay and the next version, you just have to have the phone in your pocket. You will go to the store, the doors will automatically open, you go in, you take whatever you want and then you just leave, after a few minutes you get a preliminary invoice which you can accept or reject and after 24 hours you get the proper invoice. So basically, you don’t need to touch the phone, it will be much simpler for the people who don’t like to use technology, it might be more simplified for the elderly, it might be that they are just not into tech and they are afraid of his store today because it’s very tech focused, you have to understand technology. Even if the app is simple, there is a barrier but he can remove the barrier. He stated that it is looking promising right now.

• Robert stated that listeners can find him on:
  www.narassar.se
  Robert Ilijason LinkedIn
  Robert Ilijason Twitter

• Robert stated that one thing he is using from IKEA is a statement that their founder said and that is “Most things remain to be done.” It reminds him that even though he thinks something is as good as it can be, he can make it better and even though sometimes it feels like he’s stuck, there are so many things that can break it free for him. That is one quote that he is trying to think about a lot.
• Here is a link to visually view this unmanned Grocery Store - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShNL3oU4Mi0

Links

www.narassar.se

Robert Ilijason LinkedIn

Robert Ilijason Twitter

Evernote

Dropbox

OneDrive

Google Drive.

Robert Ilijason Unmanned Grocery Store Video

Emilie Shoop is a Speaker and Coach, founder of Shoop Training and Consulting and the creator of the premier team building event Rally the Team as well as the popular program The Shoop Shift: Six Gears to Rev Up Your Culture, Team and Leadership. She is the go to Leadership Expert when you want to learn how to maximize the efforts of your team the right way, so you go from just being another manager or business owner to being an influential leader.

People are complex and Emilie helps you learn to make each employee shine; she is a pro at getting to the heart of an organization’s people challenges and helping you to turn problems into success. Shoop Training and Consultant was created because one of Emilie’s pet peeves is unhappy people in the workplace. People are either unhappy with the work they are doing, their bosses or their employers. It is her belief that everyone has an innate desire to do well and somehow people lose track of that along the way, it is this belief that drives her to reach out and impact others with her people focused leadership.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• Why do you think that leadership is important to customer experience and how you think what you are doing impacts on the external end of the business with the customers?
• Dou you find that some people are place in leadership positions because of their years of service with an organization or sometimes what’s on paper in terms of their academic successes but not necessarily because they naturally have an ability to lead other people?
• As a leadership expert, could you tell us three (3) things that you think every leader in any business needs to master in order to lead a very successful team with a culture that is built on service orientation?
• What are some recommendations that you would give to a business owner in the online spectrum in terms of leading in a strong way and creating a culture where you can translate how you feel to your customers and employees on an online platform?
• Can you tell us a little bit more about the Shoop Shift?
• 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 where 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

• Emilie Shoop stated that she started her career in IT, she spent a lot of time with highly technical people and was highly technical herself, she found over time that she really just liked the people side of organizations and when she became a manager she got to start impacting her team by using good leadership and it was very interesting how many people complained about going to work and they don’t like the environment that they are in and just a few tweaks of leadership could make a lot of teams and a lot of employees really happy. When Emilie started her business she didn’t want to fix peoples’ computers for a living, she wanted to help people be happier at work and that’s what she set out to do.

Yanique stated that most of the companies that she has done business with and IT is one of those departments where they are very hard to communicate with; they don’t like to talk very much and a lot of things that they think are normal or that everyone should get, they get annoyed when you don’t get it because they thinks it’s normal and you should do this to get the computer work, it’s just a basic behavior and you are looking at them because they do it every day and you don’t.

Emilie agreed that IT persons are not really people persons and that it’s easier to target the IT world because it’s highly technical but she has been in organizations where there’s a lot of nurses and they are highly technical and they struggle with the same thing and same with financial institutions where people are really good with numbers but not good with the people aspect of it and so there is a lot of work to be done to help people to come out and realize what they think is “common sense” and “how could you not know that this is what you need to do” to get that across to the person in a much gentler way.

• Emilie stated that she sees it a lot where people will ask do you do customer service training and when she digs a little bit deeper and find out what’s going on in an organization, it usually comes down to some poor communication and poor training for the employees that are trying to give good customer service but they don’t have the tools, they are not equipped with the right information to do a better job and so they don’t realize that they are not doing a good job because they are doing the best they can with what they have and so she gets to work with people and help them figure out where the leadership break downs are coming from and a lot of times she sees that somebody has been put in a leadership position that doesn’t know how to let go of the daily activities and lead the team, they just keep taking over and doing it all themselves and team members are not able to grow and actually learn how to provide the best customer service.

• Emilie stated that she sees where some people are place in leadership positions because of their years of service with an organization or sometimes what’s on paper in terms of their academic successes but not necessary because they naturally have an ability to lead other people. What she sees is that for example: “I really like Suzie and how she works on this and we want to reward her some way, and the only way we can think of is to promote her” and then that promotion comes with a leadership component, instead of finding a way to reward that person for doing well, it could be with a different type of job with a different type of responsibility but making sure that responsibility matches with their natural gifts or their abilities or even desires. A lot of times people are promoted into those positions and they have no desire to lead a team.

Emilie stated for recommendation on promoting someone like Suzie without putting her into a leadership role, you want to make sure that you know Suzie well and have the conversation with her so that you can say “what is it that will help you feel more fulfilled with the growth opportunity that you are looking for, here’s what we see as opportunities or needs of the organization. Are any of these a good fit for you?” And so, looking for a way that she could take on more responsibility in ways that makes the most sense for her. Sometimes they have that person will become the one that trains others and that’s a different responsibility but they don’t have to lead them, they are just good at explaining how to do what they do or she as seen them take on different escalations so you are not the first line, you’re the second or third line or you only handle the special cases and that’s a way to have a different type of promotion in that scenario but really getting down to individual and figuring out what’s best for them.

Yanique shared that the approach of the organization is to include the employee in the decision making process of how it is that they are rewarded and that way it’s a win-win situation for both people because the company wins because the employee is doing something that they actual enjoy and they appreciate that reward versus just giving someone something they’re not too pleased with and they may fail as a result because their strength is not in that area.

Emilie agreed that stated that we fall into that trap of thinking that we want that recognition and we get caught up thinking the only way to do that is to become a manager and lead a team and that’s not the only way to get there.

• Emilie shared that the first thing is connecting, taking the time to connect with the individuals on your team, not just lumping everybody together but really getting to know the individuals. That will do so much for your business and how invested everybody is in your team. The second one is over communicate, the number one complaint she gets when she goes into any organization no matter how good they are at communicating, there is a lack of communication. She always tell people to start erring on the side of over communicating, look at it like marketing where you have to say the same thing ten (10) times for somebody to realize that they even heard the message, pretend you’re marketing your leadership message and you just keep repeating it and that will really start to help boost organization as well and then really just investing in your team and finding out where the weaknesses are, where they can use some extra help and focusing on the strengths and where you can boost there and just really having a pulse on the need of the team and making sure you take the time to fulfill those.

• Emilie stated that it really comes down to being human and not trying to be over professional. When you try to make everything kind of textbook or this is a business and therefore I should talk like a business, it’s really hard for people to connect. If you work with people in an office, you tend to have those conversations about “what happened over the weekend?” or “how’s the family?” or “I have this going on in my life.” The more you can incorporate that human inside of things, the more people can connect with you because that’s really what people are looking for, that human connection.

Yanique shared that she purchased a book called “People Shock: The Path to Profits When Customers Rule” by Tema Frank. The theme of the book was in moving forward in the world today, even though things are becoming totally automated, the one thing that customers are constantly yearning for is some level of human interaction.  A lot of what she talks about is at the end of the we really have to get back down to the foundation of dealing with people and that simple human interaction. A lot of companies think that when they have an IVR system that says “press 1 for this and 2 for that or 3 for that” and after you have press 1,2 or 3 you have another set of buttons you need to press before you actual get to a human being.

Emilie stated that a few places where she called have the option for you to have them call you back, you can hang up and they will automatically call you back when it is your turn.

• Emilie shared the history of the Shoop Shift, she stated that over the years of working with her clients, she started to notice some trends that if you take a little shift in those areas, your business, your leadership, your team and your culture, everything will just start run a lot smoother. When she started to work with a company, she listed out the different areas and then help them figure out where they are hurting the most and they can start with that but the different areas are clarity, having a clear mission and vision and where the business or team is heading so that people know what the point of their work is, is very important. The second one is connection and having that really good connection with your team and making sure that everybody feels that they are apart of something bigger and people care whether or not they show up is really important. The third one is the communication and that’s where we focus on where there might be areas of improvement for communication, a lot of time we spend time on what needs to be communicated because they might be sending out information that nobody needs but totally missing something that everybody needs so she works in that area. Then coaching, she is not a big fan of discipline in the workplace but how can you coach people to get better performance and really focus in on strengths of people and just brings out the best in everybody. The next one is conflict and this is one where people try to eliminate all conflict in the workplace and she is an advocate of having some conflict because other than the petty high school drama, if it’s not that, it’s usually two (2) people that really care about their job, that are really passionate and they really want to do something for the customer or the business and they just have a difference in opinion on how to get there and she thinks that’s a great situation to be in. Lastly, you put it all together in the culture and people see different cultures in organizations and they look at their own and if you’re not working on that intentional everyday, your culture is going to fall to the least common denominator, so she helps people put that in the forefront and focus on that on a daily basis.

• Emilie shared that a unique app because it is really a time saver and a lifesaver and with every thing being online with pictures and visuals are so helpful, she loves PicMonkey. It’s a website where you can manipulate graphics in no time. You don’t have to be an expert and you can get cool graphics to put on your social media, on your website, in your PowerPoint and it’s super easy to use.

• Emilie stated that she wanted to pick a book that was really impactful and really a good fit for customer service and that book is “The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in Life” by Robin Sharma. It is motivating for you as an individual but just really breaking down how anybody can give world-class service in any job that they have. It is a really good story, well written and is very powerful.

• Emilie stated that the advice she would give is just stay focus on the people, if you focus on people as individuals, not trying to group them together or lump them into some way that you can make it easier for you to manage but if you focus on people as individuals, your business will be successful. The more you care about your employees, the more they care about your clients.

Emilie shared that the advice she would give an individual that is not a people person and is concerned about the bottom line as she has worked with persons like that and it’s a little bit of struggle because there is some convincing on her part for them but usually she has to break it down into the bottom line where if you connect more, you will have a lower turn over rate with your employees and that turn over rate is this much and it cost you this amount and that’s why it’s important. Getting a new client is much more expensive than taking care of an existing client and you can show that return on the investment and there are some people that you just cannot convince that that is important and they are not the right people to be with, then there are employees that are okay with that, it’s just picking and choosing the right combination than an employee to make it fit.

Emilie shared as consumers our expectations and standards are raising and how we all want to be treated overall.

• Emilie stated that she is really excited about an awards program that she has, she realized that this whole people skills thing and being people focused is really hard and it’s hard to get good at it and it’s not something that people get recognized for very often. A few years ago she started a leadership awards program where she goes through and give people awards in the different areas and it’s been really exciting to see that grow and to see more out of her region but right now it’s more regional and it’s something where each of the leaders get to share their tips and their thoughts on the aspect of leaderships. If they are really good at dealing with conflict, they get to share a little bit about that. It’s just an exciting day. The leadership award for this year is November 2016 and she has nominations coming in now so this is like the nerve-racking part, where she has to get all the nominations in.

• Emilie say listeners can find her on:

http://www.shooptc.com

Emilie Shoop Facebook

Emilie Shoop Twitter

• Emilie stated that her go to quote is “You have not because you ask not.” She usually finds that when she is stuck or hitting a barrier, if there is no harm in asking, either for help or for the sale or whatever the case might be. She likes to remind herself, whom can she ask?

Links

• “The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in Life” by Robin Sharma
• PicMonkey
• “People Shock: The Path to Profits When Customers Rule” by Tema Frank

Asa Leveaux is fiercely committed to guiding entrepreneurs to achieve result-based transformations; he activates the genius in their minds and in their money, he also trains them to know that they are the answer to someone’s prayers so they can possess an existence that is saturated in apossibilities.

If you are looking for a proven expert who can guide you to address what is blocking you from your true success, to locate where your genius can best be nurtured and how to reside out of the box, you have met the right person. Mr. Leveaux has over a decade of organizational experience working with amazing clients, customers, employees and decision makers while guiding them to achieve remarkable success. His mission and commitments are to take you from your level of bull and give you the tools and resources that will support you on your journey to blissful success.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourselves and your journey
• What are some of the founding principles that helped you to be successful?
• How do you feel as a customer in your everyday activities?
• What are some of the things you help businesses work on to ensure that they can make even more than USD $10,000.00 after they’ve made their first USD $10,000.00 and what are some of the keys things they need to be doing differently than everybody else in their industry and market they are in?
• From your book, can you share some information you are able to get across and who it is meant to help?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• As an entrepreneur, what are some important considerations for an entrepreneur or online business owner you believe for them 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?
• 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?
• 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

• Asa Leveaux is the founder of Genius Academy; he created the Genius Prescription System, which is a seven step system for aspiring entrepreneurs to make their first USD $10,000.00 in business. And though Genius Academy is the Chief Strategy and Revenue Officer of the Leveaux Group and best selling author, those accolades and achievements just didn’t embody who he was all the time. There was a time that none of those things existed but what did exist was a level of frustration with himself, a level of frustration with no one allowing his cash register to ring as he became an entrepreneur, frustration with his family of not giving him the support that he thought he needed from them, even the frustration of not being able to provide for his little boy who he calls his “son” and his “sun”. Even though he was on state assistance for food, he still allowed him to go to school to second grade without a lunch and that was the last time he allowed himself to do that, he understood that he needed to take action to make that no longer a reality.

• Asa Leveaux shared that some of the founding principles that have contributed to his success for him is one, understanding that your passion is your problem. What he means by that is we all have a passion, it may be a non-profit which helps battered women, it may be to make sure that children can read in our communities, it may be that we love to make clothes and love fashion and that’s our passion or even fixing cars is something that we know that we are born to do but whatever that passion may be for you, realizing that no one else in the world was given the passion that you have, the way you have it, so because of that don’t insist that support from friends or family should be as high as yours because it’s not their passion, it’s your passion. Don’t create this unreal contract between them as though they need to support you in a way that you support yourself because they have their own passion to work with. That has been the biggest step for him.

• Asa stated that in his everyday activity as a customer he has come to a point in his life that he doesn’t create expectations for people, so when he enters a store or an atmosphere where he is about to make a transaction, he does his best to enter that space not expecting anyone to be nice to him but stated that’s an internal work he had to do with him being himself. He stated that if he was the person that is over that transactional environment or that retail store, then he is creating that expectation for those individuals that are providing customer service on his behalf to do the necessary things and making sure that those expectations are written down and are clear. So as a customer, doing his best to be mindful and conscious and loving of other people where they are, that’s how he operates. As far as a business person that may have individuals that is responsible for customer service in his organization, that expectation looks like a PWS (Priority Award Statement) and SOP’s as in you will treat the customer this way and being very specific about that to ensure that the customer experience is a good one.

• Asa Leveaux shared that some things that he ensures that he tells them is that your result statement needs to be visible, clear and consistent. So often individuals are not clear about what they provide for people. If you are in the health care profession and you ensure that people are resilient, that by itself is not enough, he needs to understand that when he exchanges value for value which may look like money for your time, he needs to know what the results are so that he can be very clear of what to expect from you and the result statement has to be there and if the results statement is not there, now he’s a confused buyer and your sales conversation will be longer and harder because you did not set it in stone what it is that you do and how you do it and who you do that for. For instance, he started this interview by stating his name, stated the he ensures aspiring entrepreneurs make their first USD $10,000.00 as a result of creating a Genius Prescription System, he knows who he is meant to serve, he knows how he’s going to serve them and result that they are aiming for, if you don’t have those components, you are wasting your time and theirs.

• Asa shared that the most recent book that he wrote was a book called “I am Woman Enough: 365 Affirmations for Women”. When he mentions that he wrote that book, he initially gets hit with flack and he understands that because his response to their request of him creating that book was that he was not going to work it, he was complete in his experience of writing books that were affirmation based at that time but women kept asking him for the book. His thing was that he is a man, he is void of ovaries, so that doesn’t make him an expert on being a woman and he was very clear on that. He saw all of the strife that women and men have sent to Steve Harvey, T.D Jakes for writing books catered to women, he didn’t want to be a part of that, he didn’t sign up for that but when a woman stopped him in Texas and said “If you don’t write the book, who will?” He had nothing to come back with, he had no rebuttal and so because of that, he wrote the book, however he had 22 other women to help him in that endeavor. 

Asa stated that I am Woman Enough book lead him to write his third book called “I am Man Enough: 365 Affirmation for Men” and the reason he wrote that because men sometimes, more often than not, get the bad end of the stick as far as blaming the world, so men are responsible for so much bad to the point that they are not seeing anyone taking a role their empowerment, just because you are the majority in certain spaces does not mean you do not need empowerment, just because you have a preconceived notion of power. That is the reason he wrote that book.

There was a time when he was involved with someone in a relationship with someone and they were coming up to their one year anniversary and he wanted to give her something from the heart, not because he was being cheap but because that’s something she valued and it’s important to understand what your partner values, just because the last person liked flowers doesn’t meant the new person likes flowers. He was writing out all the reasons why he loved her and he was placing them in a box to look like a treasure chest and people were passing his office and seeing the project and said I should write a book about that and I said “What do you want me to do? Make all these reasons for her and give it to every woman?” They said exactly and that’s what he did. He created a workbook for couples called “365 Erotic Reasons Why I Love You” He is meeting a need, when your customer is saying they have a potential need; meet the need, that’s called research and development.

The first book he created was based on his desire to hire more people that look like him, he was 23 years old with three different businesses and Oklahoma wanted to hire more black people and all of the black people that were showing up to him were usually very young, even younger than him and they didn’t have the necessary skills not just to get in his door but to get in any door. When he talked about this to other entrepreneurs in his community, they were experiencing the same thing. So he wrote a book to help them, the book is entitled “Why I Won’t Hire Black People: Racial Profiling for a Reason”. He stated that when you are writing books, it’s important to research your genre of book, he understood and was very specific, he was going for African Americans in the workplace and he started to look at books that were already doing that so he was reading books like “Black Faces in White Places” or “What It’s Like To Be Me” or “To Be Black In Corporate America.” “What could I do to ensure that people would react, create an emotion in people that would allow them to take action?” In his experience, the real true emotions that will …. are sexual and anger. When you are angry about a book or the content or even the person who wrote it, people tend to take more actions by obtaining more evidence of why they hate the person or why they hate the book, which is why he created it. Another thing he wanted to show them subconsciously is that a lot of times he is hit with “I shouldn’t be judged by what I look like if I am trying to be hired as a black person” and he would say “you are right, however, you are judging my book by its cover by not wanting you to be judged by yours”. It is a lesson within itself. The books are available on Amazon and his website – www.asaleveaux.com

• Asa Leveaux stated that every day he doesn’t feel like being motivated and sometimes it comes at 7:00 am in the morning and sometimes it doesn’t come until 11:07 pm at night. Asa stated that even with entrepreneurs, sometimes we don’t answer the phone until noon because we haven’t got the motivation yet, sometimes we quit the business three times before noon because things become difficult and we don’t see a way out but in those moments and in those days that he does have a hold on motivation, how it comes is him caring about the individuals who are waiting for him to show up. He knows that he was called for people that are choking on frustration and if he is too concerned about what’s happening or not happening with himself rather than what they are going through, he will remain unmotivated.

• Asa shared that if you are an online entrepreneur, the first thing he will want you to consider is your domain name. He stated that causes him a high level of anger when he sees a domain name that he knows is not converting anyone. For instance, if you have a book and you are saying that your book is available on Amazon and he asks where can he get it and you say go to Amazon and he asks what is the name of your book and you tell him but he doesn’t see it at all. How does he get there and you tell him that he needs to put in a search for your Amazon, he’s going to be angry, if you tell him to Amazon.com/selfhelp/Jamaica/yourname. He’s going to be angry again. It would be easier to go to a company such as GoDaddy.com and get a domain for your book and create something called a vanity URL which is just you’re pointing where your product is to the point that you want to bring them to. The Woman Enough book that he mentioned earlier, instead of saying go to Amazon and look for Asa Leveaux or look for Woman Enough book, he said go to WomanEnoughBook.com or ManEnoughBook.com and that just takes you to where he wants you to go. Asa stated that you should always direct people where you want them to go and make it easy for them.

Yanique mentioned that she did an interview with Jay Baer Author of “Hug Your Haters” and he said from research, one of the number one things that customers want is speed. The quicker and easier customers can access you online the better because nobody has time to be digging and going through different pages just to find one thing.

Asa mentioned that also with name, everybody’s name does not convert well in a podcast or any other auditory format. For instance, his name is Asa Leveaux, some people don’t know how to spell his last name, Asa is easy but why would he make that his potential customers’ problem of finding that out. Even though he has www.asaleveaux.com, he also has a www.lifewithasa.com. So he rarely says go to asaleveaux.com on auditory format but he will say it on a written but to say it out loud, he would usually say go to lifewithasa.com and they all point to the same website.

• Asa Leveaux shared that he compartmentalizes his life, meaning when it’s time for business, it’s business and when it’s not, it’s not. So for him, his phone is real so he doesn’t want to be contacted at 11:00 pm at night from anyone unless something is happening or they are going out for drinks. There’s a company call Grasshopper that allows you to receive incoming calls and make outgoing calls through their app, he makes all his calls through the grasshopper app and the thing about it is when he calls, his business number shows up, so if they want to call him back, that’s the number they call him back on.

• Asa shared that when he started his entrepreneurial journey the book that gave him the fire he wanted was a book called “Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!” by Robert T. Kiyosaki and he read that book more times than not and was totally enthralled by it, he says that whenever he sees it, like in a waiting room or someone pulls it out, he’ll read it again just because he likes it that much. Asa also stated that another book that made on impact was a book called “The Richest Man in Babylon” by George S. Clason, which he really loves. The last one would be “The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure” by Grant Cardone. If you want to take responsibility for everything you have in your life, you need to read that book because everything that you could be doing could be 10 times that.

• Asa shared that something he did this morning, he was thinking about the customer experience, as he was getting ready for this interview, he started thinking about what it means to “woo your customer” because you want to them to be wooed, you don’t just get married to them all of a sudden, there’s a wooing process that needs to happen. How can he woo them quicker, sooner, faster? Genius Academy has a main platform called the Entrepreneurial Playbook and the Playbook gives you the different plays for your entrepreneurial journey, it’s a monthly subscription. He then thought what can he do to woo his customers? He then created the opportunity for anyone to take advantage of experiencing that for 30 days for USD $1.00. There’s a link for Genius Academy at lifewithasa.com or they can go to www.geniusacademy.co and look for the Entrepreneur Playbook and he also listed the coupon code.

Asa stated that the Entrepreneurial Playbook has different course within it that they get to have access to so for instance, if you want to know how to publish your book, it’s there. If you want to sell your book on Amazon, it’s there and if want to sell period, it’s there. Marketing, how to operate your business, financing and speaking, it’s all there. There are eight courses that you get in the Playbook and you have access to all of them.

• Asa shared that for him it’s two fold. He stated that if he has people that are working for him, he will ensure that one of his (KPI’s) Key Performance Indicators is that they show up motivated because he may be out putting out a fire (figuratively or literally) and he doesn’t have the capacity in that moment to motivate the person that is handling his customers. However, when they get hired on, they will sign the agreement that these are your Key Performance Indicators and if you do not show up well in these specific ways that are measureable and quantifiable, meaning that you have a positive customer comment cards and you can resolve or de-escalate issues, then you will no longer be an asset. Ensuring that motivation is embedded within the things that are measured to keep someone on the team. The next thing is from a leadership point of view because as a leader, you are responsible for everything that does and does not happen in that business. Because of that you just let people know that you care about them, not necessarily the customer but the person who is caring for the customer because that’s the issue a lot of people don’t get. When you are the manager or even business owner and you keep saying the customer is always right, what are you then saying is that you have no value as the employee. One of the things he learned from Richard Branson is that he doesn’t say, “the customers are always right”, he says, “I value my employees” who are then feeling valued now can give value. If you have a workforce that is happy, they can then give that happiness to someone else but if they are depleted, they have nothing to give.

• Asa says listeners can find him on:

www.lifewithasa.com

www.asaleveaux.com

Asa Leveaux Facebook

Asa Leveaux Twitter

Asa Leveaux LinkedIn

Asa Leveaux Pinterest

Genius Academy Facebook

Genius Prescription System

• Asa stated a quote that helps him by Albert Einstein “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.” He uses that to ensure that he is clear whenever he is talking. He understands that your ego can be wrapped into using words when you are talking about the problems of life, you could talk about the vicissitudes of life but he would rather not go that route because his main goal is not for anyone to see the intelligence but he would rather you understand so that you can spend the money. If you are not clear on what he is talking about, you are confused by it, which actually means someone who doesn’t buy. So if he can’t explain to a six year old and that’s with anything, his business plan, how he’s going to talk to his customers, how he’s pitching a new product or service, if they don’t get it, he needs to go back to the drawing board and start over. He stated that he used his son for awhile but he is now 10 years old so he asks his nieces and nephews if it make sense to them and if they can tell it you as far as what it is that you do, then you are clear now.

Links

• “I am Woman Enough: 365 Affirmations for Women” by Asa Leveaux
• “I am Man Enough: 365 Affirmation for Men” by Asa Leveaux
• “365 Erotic Reasons Why I Love You” by Asa Leveaux
• “Why I Won’t Hire Black People: Racial Profiling for a Reason” by Asa Leveaux
• Grasshopper
• “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 Richest Man in Babylon” by George S. Clason
• “The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure” by Grant Cardone

Paul Brunson is a Mentor, Entrepreneur and Television Host. His goal in life is to help you live your best life in love and professionally. He’s the world’s most influential matchmaker, founded and exited three businesses, hosted two television shows and spent nearly a decade working directly for a billionaire. He’s now here to share many of his experiences by mentoring and coaching thousands of people.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• What are some things you would recommend to a business owner to build stronger relationships to really come over as being authentic and true in what they are selling?
• As a small business owner, how do you find your mentor? How do you know that this person is someone you can connect with?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your 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

• Paul Brunson shared that the last 7 years of his career where he left financing and became a Match Maker. It was really interesting as people would ask him “Are you really a match maker, is there such a thing as a Match Maker?” It was a career that he was passionate about and it allowed him to do so many things, so the biography, in terms of hosting television shows and launching other businesses, he was able to do that as a result of becoming a Match Maker. Most recently he has hosted a few television shows, “Love Town: with Oprah Winfrey” and “Preachers of the L.A” where he did the after show. He stated that he is preparing to launch a new show on ABC Primetime which is his own show where he is Executive Producing, he also launched a Match Making Agency and he also launched several other projects that he is proud of and so he stays really busy. He stated that for his entire life, he joked about doing many things and often times we all say that we hustle and have 3 or 4 jobs but what he most recently discovered over the last year and a half is a book called “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results” by Gary Keller that really changed his life. If we want to be good at things in life, we can do multiple things and be good but if you want to be great, it requires a singleness of purpose and that is what he is trying, get focused and divest out of all of his projects and just really focus on one.
  
• Yanique stated that it is important that whatever you are doing, you put 100% of yourself in it. She was reading a book that says, “You can’t effectively do things 100% at the same time,” in other words, if you are watching the television and reading a book, you are following the gist of the movie and you’re reading the book but you’re not doing both activities at 100% because it is just not humanly possible.
  
• Paul agreed with the phrase and stated that on top of that there’s a switching cost that not a lot of us realize, so you’re watching the television and at the same time you think you are working and responding to an email, technically you can’t do both at the same time so you’re only doing one but what you’re really doing is you’re going from the television to the email and when you go to the email there’s a switching cost, your mind now has to re calibrate to the email and because it is re calibrating that’s a cost and energy involved and so it re calibrates to the email then you go back to the television and has to re calibrate back to the television so there’s a cost and time allocated to that. It just goes to show that there is really no such thing as multitasking.

• Paul stated that for business owners to build stronger relationships they have to start with themselves, they have to start with a true examination of who they are. You can’t begin to outline what your mission is, your brand position mission statement is, you can’t come up with your marketing concepts, you can’t do any of that until you are first not only deciding of who you are but also be comfortable with who you are. There are a lot of small business owners attempt to replicate what they see other people in their industry doing and you can’t do that; you have to grasp your uniqueness. Paul Brunson says he always says your uniqueness is where your power is, that’s what differentiates you and you want to embrace that. First, know who you are and the second is to understand that effective marketing is about content marketing and a key component to content marketing is relevant, value added, consistent information so you want to always be making sure that the content you are distributing is not just relevant to you but it ties you with your customers and the experiences that your customers are going through. You want it to be value added and essentially moving them forward towards whatever they’re goal is, so if you’re helping someone get close to their goal, you are a value add to them. Consistence is tricky because if you’re leveraging Social Media, you have to be extraordinarily active and consistent in your content and not just daily content. We’re at a point now where you need multiple pieces of content to be distributed on a daily basis. So to really engage the customers for them to really know authentically who you are, doing some soul searching, you have to know who you are and you have to embrace that and you have to articulate that or convey that through consistent value added content.
  
• Yanique made reference to a video Paul Brunson posted on his Facebook Page with his mentee about “How do you know who you really are?” Paul stated that the importance of knowing who you are is critical because ultimately if you’re a small business owner or micro business owner, people are not necessarily buying you, they are buying your brand and your brand is never what you say it is, it is what everyone else says it is and so the trick is you have to figure out how do you break through the noise. He stated that he has a memorable brand and the trick to that memorable brand is being unique and a lot of people said, “Paul how can I be unique?” There are a lot of people that look like me or maybe from Jamaica but the bottom line is that every single person on this planet, everyone listening to this show, there is no one that has ever walked this earth that has had the same set of experiences like you’ve had and if you really think about that, it’s powerful because what it shows is that you have a unique perspective on life and so the key is how do you translate that unique perspective to your brand. Part of identifying and being comfortable with all of your uniqueness is in identifying that you truly do love yourself and connecting with yourself. People define self love in many different ways but he always looks at it as if you think about your optimal life in all the different facets of your life, think about your career….what’s the best career you can imagine, how much money are you making? What kind of flexibility do you have? What’s your title? Think about the best romantic relationship you could ever have, think about best spiritual relationship you could ever have, think about all those aspects of life and after you have identified the best of the best, then you ask yourself one simple question. That is simply, “Do I feel like I can reach that? Do I feel like I can get there?” Not to say there won’t be hurdles or challenges along the way or maybe you feel like you can get there but you are 20 years from it, that’s fine but the big question is “Do you feel like you can get there?” If you don’t feel like you can’t get there, if you don’t feel like it’s possible, that means you don’t feel like you can ever become your optimal self and that means you have a problem with self love. Self love is really each aspect of your life, all those categories, business, social, health, romantic and then collectively saying in all of these categories “I feel like I can become my best self” that is self love. High self esteem is just simply saying in each one of those categories “I can get there” so there’s a big difference in self esteem and self love but ultimately that’s what self love is.

• Paul agreed that in connecting with your mentor, it’s hard to put something on paper and match 2 people together. “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” by Sheryl Sandberg COO of Facebook wrote this book and in it she wrote something that really moved him was that, “If you have to ask someone to be your mentor, it’s too late” in other words, you can’t someone to be a real mentor to you, it jus t happens. We know that nothing just happens, so you have to put the work in, so what is the work. He stated that he wrote a blog post specifically about this, about how he was able to acquire certain mentors and that he believes that what Sheryl said was absolutely right. He never had to outright ask, the first thing is you have to make yourself mentor material. “Are you mentor material?” That’s the first question, whenever there is a problem; the first place you want to point the finger is inward and ask, “What can I do to change the situation?” Are you mentor material? Are you someone that someone else would want to give advice to? Are you someone that someone else would want to surround themselves with? Are you someone that exhibiting that you are ambitious? Are you mentor material? That is the first step. The second step is to then identify the people that you would love to be mentored by and that in itself takes time because a lot of people will select possible mentors based on awards or accolades that they’ve acquired but that’s not how you select a mentor, you select someone that shares your values and you select someone that you personally witness walks their talk, that’s really what you want to do. It’s not a long distant relationship, this isn’t someone that you’ve just observed on social media but this is someone that’s in your life somehow, somehow connected that you know that they actually walk their talk. The third part is then you add value to that person continuously over a long period of time. Paul then gave us a scenario, as he was mentor material, super ambitious, wanted to learn, the second part was that his mentor was his boss so he had a personal experience with him and was able to see how he was delivering on what he was talking about, he was walking his talk. The third part is that after he stopped working for him in about 2004, he then continued to add value to him even though he stopped working for him. He lives in Turkey and he would visit the United States of America, he would continue to help him, helped to arrange meetings, when he launched a new business in the United States and ask him to sit on the Board and help launch those programs, he wasn’t being compensated, he continued to add value to him over the years and how he found out that he was his mentor, Paul posted on Instagram about 3 years ago a story “2o Habits I Learned Working for Two Billionaires” and the second part of the article he said “And he continues to be a mentor to me to this today.” And he read that post and reposted, he was really proud of it and even had it translated into Turkish, at the end he said that he didn’t realize that Paul Brunson looked at him in that way and thanked him. In other words, at no point did he ask him, when you have a true mentoring relationship, you will just realize at a certain point that that’s your mentor and not only will you realize as your mentee but your mentor will realize that and that’s the most effective mentor relationship.

• Paul shared that he is a reader and he is traveling now and the books that he has with him is a oldy but a goody, “Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing” by Harry Beckwith which is one of the modern marketing books, “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results” by Gary Keller, a book he read in the last few years that changed his life, he just finished a book call “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” by Jonah Berger which is great for people focusing on their personal brand because it’s about how words spread and ideas spread especially in the day and age of social media. Another book is “Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion” by Gary Vaynerchuk that had a big impact on him. Some of the classics too that have been very helpful is “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu and his favorite is Sun Tzu and Sun Pin who was his grandson. It’s really fascinating because Paul has witnessed how over the years even in business school his teachers would reference Art of War all the time and in actuality, that book is probably one of the most influential books not just on war strategy but business strategy that was ever written. A wild card book that influence business is a book that was written about Abraham Lincoln but what’s fascinating about the study of Abraham Lincoln is that it is a very refreshing read, any of his biographies because what it does is that it illustrates how if you feel like you are too old, his story will help to sway you differently, if you don’t think you’re smart enough, his story will sway you differently, if you don’t feel like you’re connected enough, if you don’t feel like you’re in the right social class, or you came from the right family, his story will help to sway you differently, here is someone who came from meager beginnings with no connections and was one of the oldest elected president at the time he was elected and he rose to greatness and stands as one of the most influential presidents in US history and there is a lot of inspiration that can be pulled from his story.

• Paul stated that the app that he cannot live without in his business is Instagram as it is allowing him to connect to a degree that he was not able to connect with people before. He stated that over that last 10 days, he has received 2 speaking offers specifically from Instagram. He was able to build a rapport with certain people via Instagram and it’s one of those platforms that when it first came out he didn’t think it was going to be effective for him but it has really turned into something that’s special. He shares the he can’t live without it right now, it is one of the first apps he opens in the morning and one of the last one he closes at night.

• Paul stated that he is that there is so much that he is excited for but he just started a daily video blog, it doesn’t have a title, it’s a daily video blog that allows him every day to speak to his community about a subject that he believe is important to him and typically he talking about business or relationships and it’s something that he’s really excited about because he has a Primetime television show and so many people come and say “Paul, I want to be on TV, I can’t believe it, this is wonderful.” But when he pushes them and he asks why do you want to be on TV, typically he would get the response that they want to help people, he would say “if you want to help people, do it now, don’t wait/” He stated that he has fallen victim to that as he is hosting a show in the US called “Our World” and it’s a weekly show that covers news impacting African Americans so in particular around business, entertainment and Arts but it’s not on the major networks and he remembers saying, “I love doing this show, I hope it’s picked up on a larger network” and he said to himself, why doesn’t he continue doing it himself because ultimately it’s not about popularity, it’s about the influence. He reiterated that he is most excited about the daily video blog and can’t stop thinking about the different things he’s wants to do with it.
  
• Paul stated that he has committed to 100 episodes, so every day from Monday to Friday he is committed to that. He wants to show that given all the things that he is doing in his life that he can still drop a quality video blog every day and he can do it, many people should be able to do it and he also want to be able to point back and show what has resulted because of the deployment of it and even on metrics alone and not that number of followers is critical, since he has started doing frequent videos, not only has his audience increased, but more important to him is that it has become more homogenise and with it becoming more homogenise, the fastest growing demographic of his audience is Jamaican, it is the number Jamaica followers has dramatically increased and also Nigeria, they are out pacing the United States and he is planning on sharing all of that at the end of the 100 video to show what has been the result.

• Paul says listeners can find him on:

Paul Brunson Website

Paul Brunson Facebook

Paul Brunson Twitter

Paul Brunson Instagram

Paul Brunson YouTube

Paul Brunson LinkedIn

• Paul stated that he has a lot but one that is very simple when you see a Nike sign you think of “Just do it” he thinks of that quote whenever he has an idea and he is thinking if he should or shouldn’t, he always says “Just do it”

Links

• “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results” by Gary Keller
• “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” by Sheryl Sandberg
• “2o Habits I Learned Working For Two Billionaires” by Paul C. Brunson
• “Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing” by Harry Beckwith
• “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” by Jonah Berger
• “Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion” by Gary Vaynerchuk
• “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu
• “Abraham Lincoln Autobiography” by Abraham Lincoln
• Instagram

Stephanie Calahan is the Business Vision Catalyst who is known for the fast transformation that she facilitates with her clients through working at the intersection of heart and head. She works with busy, purpose-driven entrepreneurs to own their brilliance, leverage their business and get their message out with power, ease and joy so they can make a powerfully positive difference in the world, exponentially up their level profits, shift their mindsets towards possibility and take a no-excuses approach to boldly creating a highly successful and meaningful business built around who they are. With her unique combination of right brained and left brained thinking, intuitive incite, passion, results based coaching, powerful questioning and strategic systemizing magic. In record time, her clients dance with joy as their visions become reality in their business. After risking personal health and happiness as a high achieving executive and former jet-lagged consultant in corporate America, Stephanie vowed not only to create a life of real freedom for herself and her family but also to teach fellow entrepreneurs how to do the same.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• How do you feel about customer service as a business owner on a global level and do you think there’s room for improvement?
•  What are some everyday solutions that you believe can help improve customer experience?
• How do you stay motivated everyday?
• What are some important considerations for an entrepreneur or an online business owner would need to take into account in order to be successful?
• What is one online resource, website, tool or app you 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 lack the consistently motivated human capital, what advice would you give that person to have a successful business?
• What is one thing that is going on in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are either working on to develop yourself or your people?
• Where can our listeners find you online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Stephanie started by stating that she worked a little over a decade consulting for Fortune Fifty/ Fortune One Hundred clients and leading a team of 250 to 300 people. She stated that there was a lot of activity and stress involved with that world of work. When she started working there, she thought she was going to retire from where she started as she was a true blue employee that really believed in the work that she was doing and was going to continue that until her retirement. Into her experience with that career, the company went from a privately held LLC to a publicly traded company, and when they made that shift in corporate organization, there was a drastic shift in the corporate culture, there was a drastic shift in the treatment of their clients, there was a drastic shift in the treatment of their employees and that no longer matched who she was. The company moved from being people-focused to being bottom-line focused. A lot of the things they did in support of their clients as well as a lot of things that they had done culturally in support of their own associates were disappearing. She was being asked a lot of times to do different things on many occasions that was right on her ethical borders so much so that there were days late into that experience where she was getting physically ill at work because the people that Stephanie reported to were just asking her to do things that were not right for a myriad of reasons, they weren’t illegal but they were just not right. Fortunately, her husband who is very supportive had a conversation and they decided that it was time for her to walk away, it took her about 2 years to be brave enough to talk to her husband but she was nervous because that meant she was walking away from a high 6 figure income and they decided that it was the absolute right choice and she did that and decided to start Calahan Solutions rather than getting another job. When she went to decide what she was going to do within Calahan Solutions, she looked at the work that she did that she wanted to bring with her, the parts of that corporate experience she wanted to bring with her that were positive, the things that she enjoyed doing, the things that she was good at doing. She looked at her peer reviews and reviews from the leadership team that she reported to and looked at the things she did really well and just combined all of that into a business. Her business has morphed and changed quite a bit over the years because one of the things that she didn’t let go of was over working, she was a workaholic and almost worked herself to death. In 2009 she was told she would not see 2010 because she was so ill and so in the course of getting well, she had to rethink her business and that rethinking of her business and how she wanted to deliver services allowed her to become fully her and not hold back because there was this workaholic part of her and there was a part of her that thinks that people are not interested in that aspect of her and so she blocked a lot of who she was too. While that health experience was a scary one, she was actually really grateful because it brought her to where she is today. It has also allowed her to recognize that life is really short and if it’s going to be short, if we aren’t guaranteed tomorrow, then she needs to be the best she can be everyday and so it has given her motivation to really go for those things in her business that are important rather than letting fear hold her back.

• Stephanie shared that Customer Service/Client Service is one of the most integral parts of what she does. The work that she does, all the way from the conversations that she is having now, the blog post that she writes, the interactions that she has with her clients, the interactions that she has with her prospects are all about service. The work that she does is transformational and if people don’t feel well cared for, they can’t take part in that transformation in a really significant way and then the work that they do is the same thing. The more you can think about the experiences that you are providing whether it is through the conversations that you are having, whether it is through the on-boarding processes that you have when you have new clients but even if you have products that you sell in a store, products that you sell online, think all the way through that experience to make sure that it’s something that’s going to be really positive and enjoyable for the people that are doing business with you.

• Stephanie shared that one solution she thinks can apply to a lot of people listening is to think through the experience your customers are having when they are interacting with you online and that can be a lot of different things. Stephanie shared an experience that she had (a bad customer experience), that she also wrote a blog post about it. She stated that there was someone she was following online that she really respected and she decided to purchase a product online from this person, she made the purchase on a Friday night and all of a sudden she got 7 different receipts for that same purchase and the purchase was not a low price purchase. Her credit card got impacted by over US $4,000.00 from that one purchase because it wasn’t a US $4,000.00 purchase; it was 7 different purchases of the exact same product. She then franticly started making phone calls to the company trying to get a hold of anybody because that wasn’t her intent to spend that amount of money and she didn’t want to buy 7 versions of the digital product. After 4 hours of calling different numbers, she eventually got someone who had absolutely nothing to do with her purchase, she told the person that she needed their help to escalate the problem, she needed the money to be put back on her card immediately. With all said and done, everything got resolved but it was 4 hours of her time in panic, stress and also unnecessary because if when they had put the product up on their shopping cart they had ensured someone to test it and actually pretend to make a purchase, they would have seen what happens from the customers’ perspective. Stephanie Calahan further stated just because you have stuff set up correctly in the first place for product A doesn’t mean that product B is going to be set up correctly. Test every single one of them, look at the landing pages you’re going to have, look at the thank you pages you’re going to have, look at the emails going out, look at the impact it has on a credit card and what the credit card receipts have because the more smooth you can make that process, the happier a customer you are going to have.

Stephanie advised in her own business - she has a few family members that are not that technically inclined that she would ask to run through the process for her and she will refund it right away. Just for them to go through it and let her know if there is anything confusing or if the process was clunky in any way and give her that feedback. She stated that there are a lot of big corporations; the amazons of the world who have teams of people that they call usability testing but smaller businesses don’t have teams of people to do usability testing but you can do something really simple like that which doesn’t take a lot of time that can really save your reputation and relationships by investing in time to do that.

• In reference to the question of recommendations that Stephanie has for a company that has a physical storefront with items for sale (brick and mortar). The solution she suggests is to be present. In our world of ever changing attention spans where we could have an iPad going, the cash register going, our phone ringing and someone at the counter, just pay attention. Whoever you are interacting with whether it’s on the phone or at the counter, give them your full attention for the time frame that you’re having an interaction with them and let them know they are important to you because they are, they are your customers. Give them the respect that they deserve as they are doing an exchange with you, whether it’s asking a question or making a purchase. Some people look at customer service only from the perspective as people that are giving you money and that they become the customer when they have made a purchase from you. However, the truth is they are your customer the minute they’re in your sphere of influence because the conversations and relationships that you build with people even before they have made a purchase influence how they feel about you.

• After asking Stephanie Calahan how she stays motivated everyday - she believes in having a big Why? Simon Sinek has a TED talk video on YouTube Start With Why. It’s about getting that piece that’s deep inside of you that you tap into that allows you to do all the things that you absolutely adore about your business and to also do the things that you are less excited about. She stated that her “Why” ties back to her personal experiences. She mentioned that in 2009 she was really ill almost lost her life and the reason she is here today is because a really good friend introduced her to a holistic health coach that helped her figure out the complex mess that she was in and helped her so that she could be here today. She realized that after she got well and learned more about his business, that there is no way she would have found him if she hadn’t been personally introduced to him by a friend and there are so many different world changers that are out there and he would not consider himself a world changer but he changed her world because she’s here today because of the work she did with him. She stated that there are so many world changers like him that are so amazing like him but people don’t know they exist. So her “Why” is to help change the world in a very positive way by helping those world changers get found and be aligned with clients and do what they do best.

• Stephanie stated one of the most important things that entrepreneurs and businesses should take in account is to build a business that is in alignment with who you really are. There are a lot of people that build businesses based off of what one guru or another says and it’s like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and it doesn’t work and then they’re always pushing rather than letting the beauty of life and the beauty of their ideal clients find them and just flow. She shared that the first thing she would suggest a business owner do is look at what they have going on in their life right now and identify those spots that are really feeling off and get honest about it and adjust. The more you can build a business aligned around who you are then the more comfortable you are and not comfortable in a bad way as she is a believer in stepping out of your comfort zone, “comfortable” meaning it matches who you are from an energy level, from a spiritual level, from a business strategy level and from a learning and personality values level. The more your business is in alignment with who you are and the less you’re pushing, the more energy you have to be focused on somebody else namely your customers or your clients. When you have a business model that is always making you stressed, you don’t have the mental capacity to be thinking of other people in the same way as you do when you are truly joyous about the work you do.

Stephanie also stated that one of her programs is called “Money, Mindset and Magnetism”, the clients that align and sign up to be a part of that program are typically having challenges with their sales in one way or another and what she finds is the case with every single private client that comes into that program is that initially they are more focused on themselves, they are not selfish people but they are more focused on themselves than on the people that they are meant to serve, so their sales conversations just implode. They don’t work as well as they could and there’s so many things when we are solid within who we are and our mindset is clean and confident then we are in a different mental space to be able to truly think about the person on the other side of the counter, on the other side of the phone, over Skype, over Google Hangout, whichever way you connect with your ideal customer or client that it allows you to think from their perspective and get much more creative with how you can make their experience a positive one. When customers | clients | patients have a more positive experience, they’re more likely to continue to want to work with you.

• When asked what is the one app, website, resource or tool that she absolutely cannot live without in her business - Stephanie shared that she adores Infusionsoft (https://www.infusionsoft.com) which is an all in one marketing tool that allows you to make your customer experience very personalized and build relationships with the people you are interacting with rather than it being transaction based. There are different components and there is one component called “Customer Relationship Management Section” and that’s where you can gather all kinds of information about your clients and customers and give yourself good information in order to interact with them. If you do online sales or brick and mortar sales then this tool will allow you to identify who signed up for what giveaway you have, who purchases a product and it allows you to have a more intelligent conversation with them. If you are in a business where it is more one on one interaction, it allows you to note the important things you learned about those people that you are working with. She calls it her memory in a box, she can go back to that person’s record anytime and know what they talked about, what they are interested in and it helps her refresh her memory so that she can treat the people that she is working with, with great respect and honor. She further stated it is more than a CRM as there is also an Auto Responder portion where you can do newsletters, you can do automated communication based off of the types of interactions the customers and clients are having with you or your site. There’s a Shopping Cart portion, there’s a number of different elements that can be used to allow you to know what your customer is interested in and then be able to serve them with that.

Stephanie mentioned that the tool – Infusionsoft (https://www.infusionsoft.com) was built specifically for small businesses and they have customers that are in service coaching industries but they have people that run all kinds of different brick and mortar stores whether it’s retail stores and they have customers all over the globe doing all different types of businesses but it specifically for the small business.

Stephanie mentioned that she has been doing business with them (Infusionsoft) for a number of years and like a lot of businesses, they have some growing pains, at one point they were getting customers so fast that their customer service wasn’t so good for a while but they addressed that. They recognized where their growing pains were starting to cause them problems and they made adjustments. So Stephanie suggests as another tip - as your business grows, the way that you interact with your customers will need to change and so be open for that and look at those spots where maybe things are falling through the cracks that didn’t use to fall through the cracks and those are customer improvement opportunities too.

• Stephanie shared that when she thinks about Customer Service, one book that is really fantastic is “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t” by Jim Collins. You can be a good company and make a lot of money or you can be a great company that makes a lot of money and makes an impact too. In Jim’s book, he did a study of a number of different organizations just understanding why were some companies merely really good and others great and what did the great ones have in common? And one of those things that all the great ones have in common was really good customer service.

Stephanie mentioned that when she framed her business, she had to decide if she wanted to be mass numbers or did she want to be high touch and by high touch, she means how well did she know the people she was working with and how involved did she get with them in relation to the work they are doing together. Stephanie Calahan decided that high touch was really where she wanted to sit in that coaching space and so she has a unique rule that she wants to be able to love her customers unconditionally in order to work with them because when you can accept your customers and clients unconditionally in the coaching space, then you have the ability to really help empower them to make fantastic changes in the direction they want to go in their business so customer service is one of the ways that she is able to do that.

She also stated that another great book is “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions” by Guy Kawasaki which is about relationships and talking about how you engage with your community, with your tribe, and with your audience. She also mentioned “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini which is a different form of engagement but understanding how the words that you use impact the people you are working with so to make sure that you’re conscious about that and how you interact with people.

• Yanique asked Stephanie…..we have a lot of listeners who are business owners and managers who feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated Human Capital.  If you were sitting across the table from that person, what’s the one piece of advice that you would give them to have a successful business? Stephanie Calahan shared that one advice that she would give is if you are lacking the human capital, systemize. There are so many different technologies out there that allow you to be fantastic at what you do. She then gave an example, when she first started her business; she was going back and forth in email with people anytime she wanted to schedule anything and she could have a lot of people going back and forth with at any given point trying to schedule a conversation on the phone or face to face and sometimes she dropped the ball because she would miss an email or her phone wouldn’t sync to her computer. That is a relationship gap when you don’t reply when you should and so one way that she automated that piece of it was to set up an online availability calendar that syncs with her calendar that is outlining when she’s available for different types of conversations. Let’s say she meets someone on a Facebook group and goes back and forth on messenger. Now, if she wants to schedule a conversation, she can say go to this URL and pick any time that works for you, you can trust that any time that’s on that calendar that shows available that she is also available and it eliminates that back and forth, it eliminates that unproductive time and allows her to have more time for the important things of the conversation and there is a lot of different things you can do within your business to automate different administrative functions and different operational functions so that you are freeing up more time to do the things that you really love to do.

When you talk about those businesses that don’t have a lot of human capital, there are some things where people interaction is critical and there are some things like scheduling a meeting that is really administrative and the technology is there that makes it so easy and so streamlined that it is a happier customer experience than the aggravation of all the back and forth. So it ultimately ends up being a better customer experience by automating that piece and frees you up to have more time to be able to do those pieces that are more important face to face or voice to voice.

• One thing that is going on in Stephanie’s life right now that she is working on to develop herself and her people – she stated that the thing she has been working on for the last couple of months that she is the most excited about is something that came from a love of wanting to combine the concerns of people who are Podcast hosts, Radio Show hosts and the concerns of people that are guest on these shows. She is writing a book right now that is called “Guest Appearance Gold: Sky Rocket Your Reach, Grow Your Influence and Attract Great Clients by Leveraging Your Guest Appearances and Expert Interviews” and she was hearing from hosts that they have all of these guests on their shows and they don’t do anything to help promote the show, they just come on and do their thing and then they get off and that’s a frustration from the hosts perspective. She was also hearing from the guest expert side of going on these shows that it isn’t really doing a whole lot for their business and that’s largely because there’s this whole piece in the middle that’s missing that wasn’t being leveraged by the guest experts and so she has written that book and it started out as a simple check list and after 60 pages, she said it’s not really a simple check list anymore because she was giving a lot of why’s behind different things that people could do and so her intention when the book is done is to give it away because she would like more people to be able to really get the biggest return on investment and in this case it is a time investment that will benefit hosts of shows as well as benefit the people that are experts on those shows.

Stephanie stated that what is interesting about when you go on shows; it’s a two way customer service experience because the host is the customer of the guest but the guest is also the customer of the host, when you’re really working together then you can get amazing exposure for the conversation you had together which benefits everybody.

• Stephanie says that listeners can find her on:
• Stephanie Calahan Website
• Stephanie Calahan Twitter
• Stephanie Calahan Instagram
• Stephanie Calahan Facebook
• Stephanie Calahan LinkedIn
• Stephanie Calahan Youtube
• Stephanie Calahan Google+
• In reference to one quote or saying that Stephanie has that she reverts to during times of adversity and challenge. Stephanie stated that she has many as she has been collecting quotes since Elementary School but the one that comes to mind is by Alan Cohen “It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.”

Links

•  “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t” by Jim Collins
• “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions” by Guy Kawasaki
• “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini
• Infusionsoft
• Stephanie Calahan Website
• Stephanie Calahan Twitter
• Stephanie Calahan Instagram
• Stephanie Calahan Facebook
• Stephanie Calahan LinkedIn
• Stephanie Calahan Youtube
• Stephanie Calahan Google+
• Simon Sinek TED talk Youtube Video