SIMPLE brand With Matt Lyles

In this week’s episode of the SIMPLE brand podcast, I talk with Dennis Geelen, creator of The Zero In Formula!

Rarely do we hear anyone talking about an equal and integrated focus on being both customer-centric and innovative. But when you look at some of the most successful brands today, that’s their focus.

Beyond just saying you’re going to focus on being customer-centric or innovative, you must be intentional, and it takes planning down through every layer of every team in your organization.

Dennis’s Zero In Formula is the plan to help you do just that. Dennis is a customer experience and innovation speaker and consultant. And he’s the bestselling author of the book, The Zero In Formula.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• You need to get your purpose, direction, and systems defined before hiring and focusing on your people
• Every organization needs to solve indifference in their customers and their employees
• You can solve customer and employee indifference by being equally customer-centric and innovative
• How companies tend to lose their customer-centric focus as they grow
• Should Customer Experience (CX) be owned across a company or owned within one team? 
• How to instill empathy to really know your customers
• How to figure out what a customer needs instead of giving them what they want
• Five principles to help you instill innovation into your team
• Why diversity and inclusion are valuable for innovation
• The traits and behaviors to hire for in order to ensure your team is customer-centric
• Steps you can take to know if your organization is customer-centric

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Dennis's site
• Dennis's book - The Zero In Formula
• Dennis's course
• Dennis's tools and resources to build a customer-centric and innovative business
• Customer Camp Clarity Call Cheat Sheets

When you think about the best ways to lead and retain people, one of the primary strategies should be to be nice. And, it’s not as easy as just thinking you’re nice and being done with it.

No, there’s actually a method to it. And this week’s guest actually created the method - it’s called the Nice Method. And our guest is Dave Delaney!

Dave’s a keynote speaker, author, corporate trainer, and host of The Nice Podcast.

And Dave’s the founder and head of Future Forth, where he helps leaders of fast-growing companies retain talent, improve communication and strengthen their culture.

It turns out Dave’s an expert on how leaders can strengthen their team culture - all by being nice.

Dave and I discuss lessons from his Nice Method that helps leaders learn how to foster communication mastery and build a strong culture in today’s complex environment - the nice way.  And we also get into his improv comedy background to discuss how improv can help you grow a stronger, more engaged team.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Dave's site
• Dave's ebook - The Nice Method (Use code "SIMPLE" for a free download!)
• Dave's blog - Bring the Nice
• Dave's podcast - The Nice Podcast

• Clint's site
• Clint's book- Tattoos, Not Brands: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Smart Marketing and Business Building
• Clint's podcast - Tattoos Not Brands

This week's episode features a "from the vault" discussion with Christy Wright.

Christy is a #1 national best-selling author,  she’s a personal development expert, and she’s the host of The Christy Wright Show. She’s also the founder of Business Boutique, which equips over 40,000 women business owners to make money doing what they love.

Christy and I get to talk about her new book: Take Back Your Time: The Guilt-Free Guide to Life Balance.  

 In Take Back Your Time, Christy gives you the method, framework and lessons to help you identify what balance looks like in your specific life. And she uncovers the steps to help you focus on what matters most and achieve your own version of balance.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Christy's book: Take Back Your Time
• Christy's site 
• Christy's podcast: The Christy Wright Show

In this week’s episode of the SIMPLE brand podcast, I talk with Jenny Blake, author of Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business!

In the last episode, I talked with Jeffrey Shaw about how you can gain more control in your business - and in your life - through his self-employed ecosystem of personal development, business strategies, and daily habits

In this week's episode, I’m taking those lessons further to discuss HOW you can gain more control in your business and life through developing the right systems.

Think about your own role. Can you honestly say that you’re consistently doing the work that you and only you can do? Or better yet the work that you and only you SHOULD do?

If you’re like most people, then you’re likely doing too much of the work that you shouldn’t do and not focusing enough on the work you should be doing.

But imagine for a moment that it could be better.

Imagine being able to work fewer hours, while making an even greater impact since you’re working on more strategic work.

Imagine empowering your team to answer their own questions or develop their own solutions BEFORE they even have to ask you how to solve a problem.

Imagine being able to have more free time without that free time negatively affecting your business or career.

Well, you don’t have to just imagine it. You can actually have that in your business. But it’s not going to magically happen just by you hoping for it, imagining it, or manifesting it.

You’ve got to put in the work to build the right systems and strategies to make it happen.

And this week’s guest can help you do just that. It’s Jenny Blake!

Jenny is an author, podcaster, and keynote speaker who loves helping business leaders move from friction to flow through smarter systems.

Jenny hosts two podcasts with over one million downloads combined: Free Time for heart-based business owners, and Pivot with Jenny Blake to help people learn how to navigate change.

And she’s the author of three bestselling books including her latest, Free Time: Lose The Busywork, Love Your Business.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Jenny's site
• Jenny's book - Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business
• Jenny's Free Time Toolkit
• Jenny's podcast - Free Time With Jenny Blake
• Jenny's podcast - Pivot With Jenny Blake

In this week’s episode of the SIMPLE brand podcast, I talk with Jeffrey Shaw, author of The Self-Employed Life!

When someone goes into creating a small business or becoming self-employed, one main reason is to have more control. 

Unfortunately, too many self-employed business owners find out the "self-employed life" can feel like a roller coaster where they have even less control than before. 

We’re being bombarded by and chased by way too many demands. It’s becoming harder to get traction in our business. And, if we do make traction, sometimes it comes at the sacrifice of our friends and/or family.  It’s exhausting. Too many business owners and business leaders become burned out, or sometimes, even worse.

What if you could have far more control over your business than you previously thought? It turns out, you can. The key is setting up the right environment for sustainable success and happiness through a Self-Employed Ecosystem.

Thankfully, this week’s guest can help with that! He actually developed the Self-Employed Ecosystem concept. It’s Jeffrey Shaw!

Jeffrey's a highly sought-after keynote speaker. He’s a LinkedIn Learning instructor and a contributor to Entrepreneur Magazine. He’s the founder of the Self-Employed Business Institute, the host of the top-ranked Self-Employed Life podcast, and the author of the bestselling book: The Self-Employed Life.

Jeffrey and I talk about how to help business owners gain control of their business and life by creating the environment for the results they want instead of an environment that goes off the rails. And much of that is through creating Jeffrey’s Self-Employed Ecosystem. And honestly, even though these lessons are designed for self-employed business owners, I think they’ll help any busy leader!

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Jeffrey's site
• Jeffrey's book - The Self-Employed Life

In this week’s episode of the SIMPLE brand podcast, I talk with Tamsen Webster, author of Find Your Red Thread: Make Your Big Ideas Irresistible!

Have you ever had a big idea and you were trying to get others to believe in and buy into that idea?

It can be frustrating knowing how great your idea is, how much potential your idea has, and then recognizing that the people you’re trying to convince just aren’t getting it. But what if there was a process you could follow to help people not only understand your idea and have it resonate with them but for them actually to "buy in" to your idea as well? 

It turns out there is a process for that - a pretty powerful process. And once you learn this process, you’ll be able to win over, inspire and influence your audience - every single time.

Part strategist, part storyteller, part English-to-English translator, Tamsen Webster helps experts drive action with their ideas. Tamsen honed her trademark Red Thread approach in and for major organizations.

Tamsen and I discuss her lessons and her process for taking your big ideas and making them irresistible to any audience. And it turns out that the key to doing this is by building the story that your audience will tell themselves about your idea.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Why just identifying your audience’s problem and sharing your solution isn’t enough
• How our brains generate stories to make sense of our decisions
• How brands are doing storytelling wrong 
• There are more storytelling structures behind just the “hero’s journey”
• Tamsen’s Red Thread elements that help drive any story forward
•  Story structure is like a programming language for our brains
• Where most marketing and communications fail in using storytelling
• The importance of giving your audience a choice

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Tamsen's site
• Tamsen's book - Find Your Red Thread: Make Your Big Ideas Irresistible

In this week’s episode of the SIMPLE brand podcast, I talk with Nicholas Webb, author of What Customers Hate! 

When we look at the best brands in the world, they’re the ones that are delivering a great - and usually simple - customer experience. But beyond that, they’re also the ones that take steps to proactively avoid friction and the things that customers hate. These companies have learned that if you can eliminate what customers hate, you’ll automatically become the best option in your market.

This week’s guest knows all about removing friction and what customers hate. 

Nick’s the author of many customer experience and innovation-based books including What Customers Crave, The Innovation Mandate, Happy Work, and his latest bestseller -  What Customers Hate!

Nick and I discuss how to deliver an experience to your customers that will retain them AND turn them into loyal evangelists.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Most promoter and customer satisfaction data is useless and wrong
• How to take a true self-assessment of your customer experience
• Self-awareness will show where the things that customers hate reside in your organization
• Customer experience is an innovation activity
• How brands can ensure they get the right insights from their customers
• How to know why customers hate aspects of your customer experience. SPOILER ALERT: it’s not in the traditional scores and surveys
•  How Lemonade Insurance became a success by fixing the top things customers hate about insurance customer experience
• Why most brands still tend to focus on customer acquisition over customer retention
• How to better understand your customer experience through “Customer Experience by Walking Around”
• Why “Happiness as a Strategy” is valuable in your employee and customer experience
• The five touchpoints that make up the human experience
• Why the first customer experience touchpoints are the most valuable 

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Nick's site
• Nick's book - What Customers Hate
• Nick's book - What Customers Crave

In this week’s episode of the SIMPLE brand podcast, I talk with Joey Coleman, author of Never Lose a Customer Again! 

Across all industries, up to 70% of newly acquired customers will stop doing business with a company within the first 100 days of being a new customer. That’s a pretty shocking stat. And one of the main reasons customers leave in that timeframe is because they feel neglected in those early stages of customer onboarding.

Thankfully, Joey Coleman can help you turn that around to not only keep your customers but also turn them into raving fans.

Joey is an award-winning speaker and a customer experience design expert. He’s worked with hundreds of companies to help them deliver remarkable customer experiences while dramatically improving their profits. 

He’s the co-host of Experience This! podcast along with Dan Gingiss who’s a SIMPLE brand guest in episode 48.

And Joey’s the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller -  Never Lose a Customer Again!

Joey and I talk about his lessons that’ll help you turn one-time purchasers into lifelong customers and that’ll help you retain your best customers and turn them into raving fans. And the lessons are all from his First 100 Days® methodology.

SPOILER ALERT: customer loyalty isn't about focusing on marketing efforts or simply closing the sale. Customer Loyalty is about focusing on the First 100 Days® AFTER the sale and focusing on ALL the interactions the customer experiences.

And just when you think our discussion is all around customer experience, we take a hard right turn into a discussion that I've NEVER heard anyone talk about before: the value of empathy..........with yourself. Think about it. By now, many of us understand the value of empathy, and we strive to empathize with others. But we rarely empathize with the one person who usually needs it the most, ourselves.

Want to know the other topics we discuss? They're right here:

• How companies over-emphasize the wrong things to contribute to the vibe of their brand
• The dangers of silos to your customer experience
• Why business leaders have a tendency to focus more on customer acquisition than customer retention (half of the reason is biological)
• Why the majority of customers leave a brand within the first 100 days after their purchase
• What brands can do in the first 100 days to retain customers
• The eight simple phases in the customer life journey
•  Empathy is going to be the single most important skill for humans to have over the next 20-50 years
• The importance of having empathy for yourself

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Joey's site
• Joey's book - Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale Into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days
• Joey's podcast - Experience This!

In this week’s episode of the SIMPLE brand podcast, I talk with Maria Brito, author of How Creativity Rules the World! 

Innovation and creativity are absolutely necessary in order to evolve your customer experience or even your employee experience. And you’re going to need to constantly evolve the experience so you’re going to need to constantly focus on innovation and creativity.

In the last episode I talked with Sara Frasca on the importance of creativity and innovation and how to build a culture of innovation. And I’m following that episode up this week with another episode on the importance of creativity. 

We’ve established that creativity is important, and we’ve established that everyone can be creative - not just a select few. But when it comes down to being more creative and really building your creativity muscle, you can only do that through establishing and committing to the right creative habits.

And Maria Brito helps you learn how to do just that. 

Maria is an award-winning New York-based contemporary art advisor, author, and curator who was named by Complex Magazine as one of the 20 Power Players in the Art World

She’s written for and she’s been featured in Entrepreneur, HuffPost, Elle, Forbes, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and lots of other outlets. And she’s the host of The "C" Files with Maria Brito on PBS.

And Maria’s the author of the bestselling book -  How Creativity Rules The World!

In her book, Maria helps you overcome limiting thoughts and dispel the traditional myths we tend to have about creativity. And she helps you and your team learn how you can cultivate the habits, the actions, and the attitudes that inspire creativity and innovation.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• How creativity has been stifled in the corporate environment
• Creativity is the top skill that employers are looking for across all job openings
• How some brainstorming sessions can kill the creative process all together
• Creativity doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and commitment
• How empathy ties to being more creative
• How the digital world has taken away the ability to empathize
• How the more diverse your team is, the more creative it can be
• Why analog habits (using real pen and paper) help strengthen your creative muscle

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Maria's site
• Maria's book - How Creativity Rules the World