Category: Leadership

Ultimately, your business exists to do two things:

•    Attract customers
•    Satisfy customers

If your business doesn’t perform these two fundamental functions, it doesn’t matter how well you do anything else.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking otherwise. 

If your customers don’t feel inspired by their interactions with you, then your business – the business you felt such freedom in starting, the business you have poured everything into – will fail before you even see it coming.

No excuse you make can change a bad customer experience. No amount of “blame-shifting” will make your customer feel better when their expectations aren’t met. You made a promise to your customers.  Maybe you said it.  Maybe it was implied.  But you made a promise to do something for them.  Everything your business does either delivers on your promise or doesn’t.  Their satisfaction stems from their experience of how well you deliver on that promise.

The customer experience is a dynamic one.  It’s not a one-time thing.  It’s happening the entire time (and even a little before and after) a client interacts with your business.  As a business owner, not only do you have to create positive impressions from the start, you must ensure the customer experience remains outstanding and consistent throughout repeated exposures to your brand.

The “Pink Pen” Story

In order to drive my point home, I’ll illustrate with a story that I found from E-Myth.  This is a story of how a very positive experience fell apart because of one small incongruity in the customer experience.  It happened in a very nice restaurant.

“Not too long ago, I decided to try a new upscale restaurant in town. As I pulled up to the restaurant that evening, I saw that the signs for the restaurant were tasteful and informative.  The parking lot was spotless, and the landscaping was immaculate.  Even before I set foot in the door, I knew this was a five-star establishment.

The maître d’ was friendly, polite, and seated me promptly.  Though the restaurant was nearly full, it felt like the other members of my party and I were the only ones there.  I felt like royalty. 

The interior was subtle, upscale, and perfectly lit.  I was led to a courtyard that looked as though it belonged in ancient Greece or in a Maxfield Parrish painting.  It had been a hot day, but somehow the courtyard was the perfect temperature.  As I sat down, I was delightfully surprised; the chair was comfortable to sit in!  It was the sort of chair that not only looked nice, it was also the sort of chair I could see myself sitting in for hours, lingering over desserts and coffee, long into the evening.

The white linen tablecloths were crisp and without a hint of fold lines.  The wait staff was dressed in spotless white shirts, black dress slacks, aprons, and were keenly attentive without being overbearing.  They were stationed around the periphery but were never intrusive.  I could see a waiter at all times, and I knew that at my least whim, I could summon one over with a look. 

The meal was exquisite.  The appetizer was sublime, and each course was better than the last.  The flavors were expertly combined in unusual ways, and at the end of the meal, I was pleasantly full without feeling stuffed.  The desserts were masterpieces of culinary creation. 

When the check came, it was in a discreet leather case.  Though expensive, the meal and the experience seemed well worth the price.  But when the receipt came back for me to sign, I took one look and stopped cold.

They had thoughtfully provided me with a pen to sign the check.  But there, nestled in the black leather case, was a cheap pink pen with a little fuzzy tassel on the top.

I stared at it.  I thought, “This is absurd!  This pen doesn’t belong here, of all places.” 

But there it was. I held up the cheap, plastic, pink tasseled thing and looked at it.  It was a non sequitur.  I wondered if they had done it on purpose.  Were they so worried about a customer taking a pen that they replaced all their regular pens with pink tasseled ones? Had they run out of nice pens?  Was this just an oversight?  Out of an incredible dining experience, that pen was the only thing that didn’t fit. 

It was a systems failure. And no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I told myself “it’s just a pen” I couldn’t get the image of the pink pen out of my mind! 

It was just one tiny element of a fantastic evening.  But it was so incongruous; it was all I could think about.  Even now, it’s still the most memorable part of the experience.  It’s the only story I tell about my evening there!”

The Three Steps:

How many “pink pens” are you handing out in your business each day? As a business owner, you need to develop your “pink pen radar.”  Your customers aren’t stupid; they won’t miss the little things. You can’t afford to either. You need to be on the lookout for inconsistencies in each customer’s experience. 

In order to do that, you’ll need to change the way you think about your business. You need to get out of your head and into your customers’ heads. Together, we can achieve that.

Here are three steps to get the process started:

1.    Review your lead generation material through a new lens.  What is the promise that you’re communicating to your customers in your message?  What expectations will they have when they come to you?

2.    With those expectations in mind, look at your business with a set of fresh eyes – the eyes of your customers.  What do they see? Walk through each step of their experience as if you were a new customer – from the initial visit to your website, to the time they leave your store. A great way to organize this is to create a flowchart of every client touch point. Make notes of each step in the process.  Is their experience going to be consistent with the promise that you’ve made them?

3.    Ask yourself: what are the “pink pens” that dilute, distract, or even destroy the experience you intend to create for your customer? Once you’ve determined those inconsistencies, fix them! Most importantly, give your employees the information and the opportunity to help you develop that “pink pen radar.”  Give them permission to go above and beyond without always having to stop for permission. Provide them with the information they need to make informed decisions.  

Don’t let a small incongruity become the one thing your customers talk about.  Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  And the most important beholder of your business is your customer. 

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Steve Feld, MBA, provides training and business performance coaching to business owners, professionals and executives. Steve also speaks to organizations, conducts workshops and training.  Focusing on the lead generation and revenue creation to get growth results for the business. Contact Steve today to see how he can assist you grow your business, [email protected], or www.bizcoachsteve.com. He is in the business of growing businesses. Need a speaker, contact Steve today. #bizcoachstevef #entrepreneur #smallbusiness #business #smallbiz #coaching #businessowner #businesscoach #leadership #marketing #speaking

You probably know that one person that is very disciplined.  You also know that person that is very disheveled and cannot get it together. Maybe the person you know is you and you are either disciplined or could use some discipline in your life.

If you are the person that is very disciplined, focused, knows what they want and how to get it, then kudos to you. You probably have a daily task list and knock it out every day.

Unfortunately, many of us are the ones that could use some discipline in our lives. But how?

So how do you maintain a disciplined lifestyle? By combining an automated brain program—doing whatever needs to be done—with an incredible commitment to your goal.

It becomes increasingly harder to be disciplined in a society that prizes instant gratification. We are more concerned about feeling good all the time, so we seek immediate pleasures, whether it’s a new car, an exotic trip, likes for our posts, or a new partner. Our long-term goals are not so important anymore. We get comfortable and wait for a special event to give our lives meaning, happiness and success.

• Discipline is the difference between being in control of your future and letting your environment dictate your destiny.
• Discipline means freedom and happiness. It gives you the ability to do what you want because you know you can learn how to achieve any dream you set your mind to.
• Discipline teaches you how to control your thoughts—and how to be happy in any situation, to visualize positive emotions and trigger an optimistic mood.
• Discipline builds self-confidence, mental and physical strength, and inspires you to grow as a human being. With growth comes the ability to enjoy life in deeper, more meaningful ways.

Anyone can develop discipline. It’s a learnable skill and it’s not complicated—you just have to train yourself for it. Here are 7 simple ways to get disciplined.

1. Set BIG goals: When you challenge yourself to achieve bigger goals, you really dedicate yourself to the craft. The more time you spend on it, the harder it becomes to quit. Once you have spent so much sweat, time and effort on it, if you quit, it will be for nothing. The bigger the goal, the more invested you become.

• Set CLEAR goals:  Clearly define what your goal means to you and what you will specifically do to achieve it. If you set a goal to live healthier, for example, will you go running every day? At what time and for how long? Will you eat healthy? If there is no clear goal, there is no opportunity to create the specific steps you’d need to do to accomplish it.

• Know that EVERYDAY matters: When you wake up in the morning, do you know what’s most important for you to accomplish that day? Every goal, every priority, you have set for yourself has to be done – it will determine whether your dream lives or dies. Professional athletes know if they skip even one training session, they are already behind; they know they will lose a competition that is still three months away if they don’t do what they said they would, if they don’t follow through with their plan—if they aren’t disciplined.

• Don’t ARGUE with the plan: If you want to go to the company award ceremony and be recognized, then you must stay with the process you laid out to get the sales that will get you that award. It’s the same with everything else in your life. When you start the process, you cannot question it, you cannot hesitate, you cannot back down—you have to work hard every single day to reach your dream, full force.

• Build a No-Matter-What mindset. Build the mindset that no matter what, you will accomplish things when you said you would. No matter what. You have to create pressure for yourself, otherwise nothing will get done. There is good stress and bad stress, and you have to make sure you are operating under good stress—butterflies in the stomach, a manageable adrenaline that stimulates you.

• PLAN a routine:  Create a routine that becomes second nature, automatic, normal. Athletes, for example, know what hours they train, when to break for lunchtime and dinnertime, and when to rest. In training, they know they have to do a warm-up, main training, and cool-down and recovery. By following the same routine, it becomes second nature—the discipline preps them to win. Planning your own routine—and sticking to it until it becomes automatic—can prep you for success, too.

• COMMIT:  Discipline was instilled in me by my mom. There was a big snowstorm and I didn’t want to go to football practice because it was brutal cold, and I knew the coach would have us out in the snow. My mother told me I chose to play and commit to being part of the team. She told me that I will have to follow through with it until the end and do it well. So, I did go, and the coach called more plays to me in the game to me because of that commitment. You must really consider whether you are able to commit to something for a long time and see it out to the end.

To do all this you need to:

• Understand the transformation process:  Your body and brain will do everything it can to resist change and growth. You need to know that it’s natural to feel lazy and undisciplined—but you also need to know that you have all the power to fight it. Start with your thoughts.
• Go above feelings:  The hardest part about discipline is maintaining the actions needed to achieve your dream or state of happiness. It requires constant hard work and fighting against comfort and instant pleasures. To do so, you have to separate yourself from the feelings that stop you, like fatigue, laziness or self-pity. You have to go above them, even if your feelings tell you that you are tired, stressed and alone in this struggle.  Get a Score mentor to hold you accountable to your own goals.
• Resist the brain:  All people are lazy, even the most successful businesspeople, the most accomplished athletes and the most talented actors. But it’s not simply laziness—it’s your brain saving energy for you. Any movement takes energy, and the brain is doing everything to stop you from moving by sending body signals about how hard it is to move and thoughts about how scary it would be if you fail. But you can trick your brain: Imagine your body is a beautiful machine and you are operating it as a higher force from above. Separate yourself from your body. Play it as a computer game. You are the one who commands your body to accomplish tasks.
• Find pleasure in the hard work:  Shift your focus to the process and concentrate on getting the work done faster and better every time. Speed is important; you have to move quickly in order to achieve perfection in a set amount of time.  Try to make a difficult task into a game.
• So many people quit too early. Success is all about persistence, and discipline is what gets you to your final destination—the realization of your dream. The more you learn about your craft and your capabilities, when you start seeing yourself improve, the results will make you hungry for more. Self-improvement is an amazing drug.  You will be addicted.

Disciple is a source of power. It is an engine that helps us understand and explore our capabilities and life’s opportunities. Discipline is not boring; it’s the freedom to put all our energy into creating something meaningful and beautiful.

It’s up to us to choose the life with discipline or without, with a goal or without, with a dream or without.