You Don’t Need More Leads (ft. Jason Friedman)

ason Friedman 0:00
When you can step in your customer’s shoes and understand them, you can start to create an experience that will transform them, that will help them to their highest desires, their needs are met, their wants are completed. And that’s that’s where it all begins, right?

Brandon Welch 0:19
Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I’m your host, Brandon Welch, and I am joined today by somebody you definitely need to know, my friend, Jason Friedman, my new friend, Jason Friedman, is going to talk to us about the customer journey and how to maximize every part of the marketing equation in your business so that you can do more with less and stop wasting the money that we always talk about on this show and in our book and in our agency. This is an episode I’m extremely excited for first, first guest we’ve really had outside of the Frank and Maven circle. Jason and I were connected by kind of a mutual friend and contact in the industry, and we had a call, and just decided it is definitely time we do a podcast episode together. So Jason, thank you so much for being here.

Jason Friedman 1:07
I’m super excited to be here, man.

Brandon Welch 1:10
Jason has a bio that’s going to take us about nine minutes to read, and he he tried to get me to shorten it. I’m like, No, the people need to know about this. So just a reminder, this is the place where we answer your real life marketing questions so you can eliminate waste in advertising, grow your business and achieve the big dream. And Jason is going to help you do it faster and with fewer dollars spent today. Are you ready to go? Let’s do it. Alright. So get your get your glowing smile on, because I’m going to read about you for about the next three minutes. Jason Friedman is a former theater professional who’s now a serial entrepreneur and coach. You left the part out in this, by the way, where you, like, went on tour with rock bands. Drop, drop the names of the rock bands you’ve been on tour with just

Jason Friedman 1:54
I was out with Fleetwood Mac. I was out with Rush. I was out with Peter Gabriel Wow, running the

Brandon Welch 2:00
run the lights and doing the production side of things, right?

Jason Friedman 2:04
Yeah, I was lighting guy, yeah.

Brandon Welch 2:05
Love it. So former theater professional who’s now a serial entrepreneur coach, dedicated helping entrepreneurs and small business owners grow and scale their companies, a master of storytelling. Jason has founded and exited five successful companies. Now a CEO of CX formula. He is teaching businesses how to captivate their audiences using his proprietary kinetic connect kinetic customer formula. We’ll talk about that in a minute. He’s also the CEO of spotlight brand services, a marketing and brand management agency helping e commerce businesses crush it on Amazon and other online marketing places. His clients have ranged from Fortune 100 companies to solopreneurs and industries as diverse as retail, Foot Locker, Adidas, Nike. You’ve heard of those brands, right? Hospitality W hotels, Universal Studios, Disney, I want to hear about that one, Burger King, financial services, Bank of America, Wells, Fargo, fidelity, higher education like Stanford, Yale Duke and Harvard universities and online service information products such as Click Funnels, Product Launch Formula, as k method company and more big names. He was named Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year for business services in 2009 and his company made the Inc 5000 list for three consecutive years in 2007 through 2009 after successfully exiting that business and the high eight figures in 2020 Jason’s company CX formula made the Inc 5000 list one more time, this time ranking number 64 for nearly 5,000% growth and out ranking number one in New Jersey, growing from zero to $9 million in just a few years. Join us as we dive into the insights of a leader whose strategies have earned him accolades like Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year and propelled multiple companies into the top of the Inc 5000 list. Is all of that true?

Jason Friedman 3:51
Oh, my God, man, I hate listening all this stuff about myself. Yeah, it’s all true.

Brandon Welch 3:56
Probably even cooler, probably even cooler than me. That was within about three minutes we figured out we were both like pilots, aviation enthusiasts, dads, dog lovers, culinary enthusiasts, customer experience enthusiasts, like I can’t wait for the day we get to have a good dinner together and talk about all the things. So

Jason Friedman 4:17
I can’t wait also, yeah,

Brandon Welch 4:20
so Jason has flown most of his career in the same airplane I have the archer tube, right? It’s like crazy, right? Yeah, it’s crazy, right? I named my I named my son Archer after that airplane. So, but today we’re going to talk about what is CXF, or, sorry, CX formula. We’re going to talk about the proprietary method Jason’s using to help companies squeeze more and more out of their marketing dollars. And he has some pretty frank advice for you, which is something, as you know, we are a big fan of around here. So tell us about CX formula, and what you’re doing is this your sixth business that you’re you’re starting now.

Jason Friedman 4:55
No, it’s actually a few more than that. I just mentioned the one. That we exited, and I actually think I only mentioned the successfully exited ones. We’ve learned a lot from winning and from losing. So yeah, I’ve got a I’ve got a lot of hard won experience, for sure, CX formula, like, when I was a kid, my best friend Drew and I grew up together. We’re still business partners, you know, we joke. It’s, you know, like the longest successful relationship by choice that we both had. And we were driving down the road one day, and we were so frustrated. We just had an experience at a bank branch. His dad gave us a check for a million dollars. Now we’re 17 years old, we’re driving down the road with a million dollar check going to put it in the bank, and the bank wouldn’t let us deposit the check. Like they thought we were fraudsters. They thought like, I mean, the story goes on, friction, just to do the thing that his dad asked us to do. And how is this possible? Like, how do businesses get away with being so difficult? And, like, we just started this long, long conversation. We’re like, you know what? Someday we’re going to create a business called making it better. And like, I’m telling you what every single company we’ve had the through line is making it better. And what we’ve learned over and over again is that every single one of us, all of our businesses, in spite of our best efforts, we make it hard for our customers to do business with us. We make it hard for our customers to have success. And so Wow. Chin, so true. To help people do that differently, we want to exclusively. We’ve worked with a lot of big companies, like you mentioned a bunch of them. We are now on a mission to work with entrepreneurs, small business owners exclusively, and we want to help them really, like use the lessons we’ve learned over the last 30 years to actually help them scale their businesses consistently, reliably, and we do that by making their customers love them more. And it’s a very simple equation, and that’s what we do at CS formula. Man, it’s just that’s how we do it.

Brandon Welch 6:54
What if? What if that was the goal we woke up with as business owners? How do we make our customers love us more today? Would the profit and the retention and the lead costs and the overall growth? Would it just happen as a byproduct? And that’s and that’s what it happens. It does, you

Jason Friedman 7:11
know, and employees love we’re coming to work even more, right? They love being there, because instead of getting all the complaints and the customer service requests and the refunds and all that, they’re getting people just, like, loving on them, like, this is amazing. I want to tell more people. This is fantastic. How do I buy more stuff? Like, it’s a different environment. The culture thrives. Like, everything gets better, right? Yes, not that much.

Brandon Welch 7:32
It’s a it’s a Walt Disney Chick fil A approach to business, right? And that’s what they do, is, like, the most magical place on Earth. So what are you mentioned that small business is your passion on that you’re taking these things you’ve done with large, large companies and just taking that, you know, world class formula, down to Main Street. Can you tell me more about what drove you to do that? Yeah, so

Jason Friedman 7:57
you know, my, my big company that we, you know, we did, you know, the lion’s share of our business, like results, you know, multiple, you know, 10s of millions. We did over 150 million in sales in that one company that that exit after that, you know, I spent some years with a non compete agreement. I call it my prison sentence, right? Like, you couldn’t do marketing, you couldn’t do storytelling, you couldn’t do events, you couldn’t do, I couldn’t do a whole stuff from you. Yeah, yeah. Like, don’t be you don’t be who you are, right? And that’s fine, you know, they paid a bunch of money, so, like, it could not be you for a little while. But at the end of the day, you start realizing, like, you know what? Like, I actually want to help people. And so one of my mentors, a coach, mentor, Dan Sullivan, you know, strategic coach, he used to ask this question. He’d say, like, Who do you really want to be a hero to? Like, who do you want to help the most? Who do you want to support? And I think of it a little differently. Not like, Who do I want to be hero to, but who do I want to be a guide to? Right? I think of our customers as the heroes. And so like, Who do I want to guide? Who don’t want to help? Who do I want to share? And I just believe in entrepreneurship. I am an entrepreneur. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I love entrepreneurs. I love small business owners. I love that Main Street America kind of business, yeah, the ones that grow up to be huge companies too. That’s great. But I don’t I want to help those people, like the freedom that you and I want, so that we can fly our airplane or take our kids wherever they want to go, and not have to say no to things, right? I want to help people want to YES to themselves and to bringing more jobs to the economy, you know, creating more opportunities. So when I started that, then it was like, you know, how can we best help them? And so what I realized is we get, as small business owners, a lot of us, we get this entrepreneurial seizure, as Michael Gerber says, and we create the worst job ever had. And that’s some of us, and others of us, we get to a point where we get to the ceiling of complexity and we can’t break through that revenue number, or we’re bobbling up and down. We’re porpoising, you know. And. Yeah. And it doesn’t have to be that way, right? There’s a way to do

Speaker 1 10:03
it, yeah, yeah. It doesn’t have to be that way, yeah. And so,

Jason Friedman 10:07
so that’s it, like, we are on a mission, right? And I love we want to help entrepreneurs. And so when I wake up day and I help some people grow and scale their business, like that was a great day. And and that’s what I’m about, man, it’s about that at impact. Love it. Love it.

Brandon Welch 10:23
Amen to that like that is so so spot on. That’s that’s exactly the heart of our business. And we’ve turned away a lot of actually national corporations and just companies that would use our formula and our stuff. But just as a individual engagement, there’s nothing that brings me more joy than than helping the the local business, because you’re impacting employees, you’re making a better life for the community. You’re making a better life for literally, causes that that touch people immediately, not through chains and chains of committees and, you know, corporate dividends and all that stuff. So, yeah, man, so, so glad we share that mission. What is the, I’ll just ask, like, what is, what is the biggest thing in your space that you see Main Street America businesses suffering with, like, what’s the big idea that they’re missing? Oh my gosh, there’s,

Jason Friedman 11:15
there’s a few, right? You know, we, I already mentioned a little bit that I think we make it hard for our customers to do business with us, and I think it starts right. We add so many we call them friction points, right? We add so many obstacles and barriers to success, to fluid momentum in our businesses without realizing it, with the best of intentions, right? And the reason why we do that is because we look at it through the lens of the business, not through the lens of the customer, right? And so it’s just so important to kind of, like, step into their shoes. And so, you know, as that kind of theater nerd for my whole life, like, I understand I was not an actor, right? But, like, I worked in this business for so many years, you have to know, like, when an actor wants to get into character like Matthew McConaughey. He’s going to be in a film, and he’s playing this, this person, whoever that is, he’s not Matthew McConaughey. When you’re watching him on the screen, you forget that he’s Matthew McConaughey, and you believe that he’s that other person, because he gets into character completely when you’re going to do that, right? Yeah, for us to take us on the journey. When you can step in your customers shoes and understand them, you can start to create an experience that will transform them, that will help them to their highest desires, their needs are met, their wants are completed. And that’s that’s where it all begins, right? And so it takes the desire to do that, like if you want your customers to win, and you appreciate the value of your customers winning, then the rest of it’s easy. I’ve got the formula. Yeah,

Brandon Welch 12:46
we’re gonna talk about that formula in just a second. Something you just said was stepping into a world for your for your customers. We call that. What’s the world you’re trying to create, which I think is so in line with what you guys are are doing? We use that as a world where ideal customer, name them, can achieve hope or hope or need without pain or fear, and you insert what those hopes, needs, pains and fears are for your company, and that is where it’s we don’t we will not work with a client unless they go through that process with us. And you’re seeing you watch entrepreneurs who had a moment like you did with that bank and that check, or the Million Moments we have in a year where somebody let us down and didn’t, didn’t rise to the level of expectation, and you watch them go, Oh man, that’s why I started this business in the first place. The best ads and the best ad campaigns I’ve ever done were because we tapped into the heart of that business owner and took them back to the day they started the company, and what they were thinking, that vision, that world they were trying to create. So I think we have it innately, but, but the the distractions and the shiny objects and the payroll and the regulations and all the all the crap, just pulls us away from it, right? Well, 100% like

Jason Friedman 13:57
I so resonate with what you’re saying, and this is one of the reasons I love this. Like, we’re so in alignment. You know, it’s like, you listen to people and like, when I talk to entrepreneurs, like, if I say them, like, what’s the result your clients want? Right? I might be talking to someone that likes, like, weight loss or they have a GM, they’re like, the result that they want is they want to lose 20 pounds. I’m like, no, no. Why do they want to lose 20 pounds? Like, why is that important? What’s going to be different? And they’re like, you know, I don’t know. I’m like, Well, are they going to, like, what do they do now? Like, Saturday night, they’re sitting on the couch, like, shoveling ice cream in, watching Netflix by themselves, because they don’t feel good in their own skin, and they don’t have anything that fits, and they don’t want to go in their closet because they’re afraid, right? Like, that’s their typical like, the transformation then is, like they feel good, like they’re picking up the phone, calling people to go out, because they feel good in their clothes, and they’re ready to go out, and they’re having a life, and they’re living again, yes, fell in love with themselves, right? The way they did. It was through that 20 pounds, but the result, the AHA, the transformation is that confidence, like falling back in love with yourself, you need customers to. Understand that, and we have to help the small businesses, I know you guys do this too, get that clarity first, because I can reverse engineer the things that’ll actually help them get that result. If you’re trying to lose 20 pounds, that’s what everybody’s trying to do. That’s not going to set you apart from your competition, and it’s not going to be enough to motivate your customer to make it happen.

Brandon Welch 15:20
Yes, that’s right, yeah. It’s, what are you really selling? It’s not the weight loss. It’s the play in the backyard of the kids, or pleasure on the marathon with your friends, yeah, or feeling good at your high school reunion, maybe for some of them, 100% Yeah. So what are, what are some of the processes you use to, I guess, solidify a that putting businesses back on the customer’s point of view, and then engineering that change in the business to where it isn’t just a exercise that we did and, you know, a temporary fix. Yeah,

Jason Friedman 15:57
so, like I said, you know, theaters at the heart, it’s the model and the metaphor that we use in our business, right? So, you know, here’s the thing about theater, right? You go to a show, and the you have the worst day ever. You kind of didn’t even want to go. You get there, you’re getting dragged there by your spouse. You sit down, dim. The music starts to play, the curtain opens, and it all kind of falls away, and you start to pay attention, you start to focus. And then as the show goes on, you laugh at certain moments, you cry at certain moments, you you kind of shriek back at certain moments and and you’re like, you’re literally kind of having this emotional journey, like you’re like, you’re living it all of a sudden. And at the end, you jump to your feet with these kind of like crazy standing ovation and that’s amazing, because, you know what a different audience last night had all those exact same reactions at the same moments, right? Right? When it’s important to have the words, the words matter. There’s a script, and we rehearse it, and we create these movements that drive people to have these feelings and these emotions, and we use all the senses though, the lighting, the sets, the sound, yeah, the whole thing, right?

Brandon Welch 17:07
Yeah. So there’s a script. So we script

Jason Friedman 17:12
the reaction. First we write the world’s best testimonial. So we Wow customer is we actually write the testimonial. But not just I lost 20 pounds, or I had to, I actually have you write it for their journey. Where were they when they started before and go through that. I’m sure you guys do something similar, right? Because we’re so but we write that whole thing, and then from that moment, I can reverse engineer all the things that need to happen to have those things happen, those feelings come out to life authentically.

Brandon Welch 17:43
So wise, yeah, so wise. Like, it may it talk about it now. It’s like, Well, duh, that’s why wouldn’t we have done that in the first place? But it’s, it’s, it’s because the, it’s because of the million things that happen to an entrepreneur before they get to the front door. Even the best ran businesses are the best intentions, right?

Jason Friedman 18:00
Well, and we’re thinking about, okay, like, what are the things we need to do, not, what are the things they need to experience, right? Like, yeah, our actions, like, so there’s, there’s four key things. Like, we call them these, these four key factors that affect everybody, right? It’s their attitudes. What are they thinking and expecting? Their behaviors, what are they doing the obstacles, the friction points and then the momentum, the things that are moving them forward? All of those have to work together. And if people are feeling badly, that attitude stops them from doing the behavior, so they’re never going to get

Brandon Welch 18:35
the result. Or if it’s a cybernetic loop, yeah, exactly

Jason Friedman 18:39
right. It’s a huge cliff that they fall off, right? And then if it’s a hard step where there’s a technical glitch or a problem or whatever else, that friction is going to override any possibility. And so, like it’s really understanding how all those factors play together.

Brandon Welch 18:54
The quote that comes to mind is failure to plan. Is a plan to fail. And sounds like what you’re doing is giving them a plan to succeed, right? And so it’s, I think a lot of entrepreneurial spirited people think of the idea of a regimented experience as, like rigid and no, I wanted to be more charismatic and things like that. And I’m thinking of a couple of guys I work with who are the most talented people in front of a person, but they can’t even, even with the best salesman they could hire, they cannot duplicate that passion. And I think the missing step is one, an outside expert like yourself, that comes in and creates a new belief, a new just a pattern disrupt even, probably even for your business and my business, people who are very passionate about this, that outside person coming in, just disrupting the flow is everything, just starting a new process. And then the second part is just that it’s, it’s a documented like from training to the 20th anniversary of the business. This is our way. This is. Of Walt Disney way. This is the Chick fil A way, right? Of course.

Jason Friedman 20:03
And you know, I think of it as an operating system like, we literally give you an operating system to make customers delighted and give you that, like the word of mouth that goes viral, right? We talk about an ideal result. It’s customers who rave about their experience. They return to buy more products and services, they renew their subscriptions and their ongoing memberships, and they actively recruit people to your business. It’s not like a past review, it’s people. They go out there like, do you know? You know? Do you know Jason? Do you know Brandon? Do you know you know, whatever you’ve got to be in their business. Like, they get so excited because of the results they had. That is we are looking for. And so if we want that, we want to do that night after night, just like in theater, we’re not re scripting it. Now. Does that mean that there’s no improv? Does that mean that there’s no creativity in certain moments? No, it doesn’t. And that’s the part that people lose sight of. We can still bring individual personalities and flexibility into the system. We just have to do it in the moments that are designed for that, so that we can do things. You know,

Brandon Welch 21:05
it’s a jazz it’s a jazz musician who has a chord structure but never plays the song exactly the same way, right? It’s the of the leads in the structure there, or, of course, but

Jason Friedman 21:16
the rules, there’s rules, right? There’s notes, there’s rules, and they have then they can do whatever they want inside those parts, and that’s what makes them ethical, right? And personalized. I think

Brandon Welch 21:25
of Michael Jordan to the he was such an improviser and raw talent like you, like we’ve never seen, right? But you think he wasn’t at the gym, or Kobe Bryant, they weren’t at the gym every single day, rehearsing the drills and all that stuff. It’s the same, same thing. So, fundamentals, yeah, yeah. So the winging it entrepreneur is just never going to have that level of excellence or or duplication. And that’s going to lead me to a question here in a minute about growing versus scaling. So that’s that’s coming up, but real quick, what are some of the results you’ve seen from somebody who started with a haphazard process and then went through, you know, customer experience formula like you are teaching.

Jason Friedman 22:08
I mean, I’ll give you a very basic example, right? A, a behind the wheel driving school for 16 year olds, right? Jersey. The driving the license is at 17. I’m in Jersey, right? So I’m just going to use that right? So at at 16, they can get a learner’s permit. But in order to do that, they have to hire a six hour behind the wheel driving school. They pay them three $400 whatever, you know, whatever the price is, to go. And they go with an instructor. They go like, three lessons, two hours, a clip, give or take. Okay, right? So the experience to hire a driving school is horrific in general. It is this. It’s like, everything about it is bad. So I had a driving school, and I’ve worked with lots and lots of them. It’s a story for another time, but, but I’ll give you one specific one is business more than doubled in size in three months from changing the experience. And so like going from like, you know, $300,000 a year in revenue to $600,000 a year in revenue,

Brandon Welch 23:09
like nothing, right? And did he spend more on advertising to do that? Did he spend?

Jason Friedman 23:16
Well, he built a slightly better website that had some information on it, but did he spend more on like, media? Not a single dollar. Wow, not a single dollar, right? So we know it’s not rocket science, but it’s, it’s a different perspective, right? And it’s a different level of understanding, and you’re looking at things from a different angle, and that’s that’s changing. Like you said, there’s a paradigm shift. There’s a pattern interrupt the paradigm shift. And when you do it and you see it once, once, I kind of create an awareness with a client like that, they can’t unsee, they just can’t unseat and so, like, they’re like, they’re changed, right? Yeah, yeah.

Brandon Welch 23:57
First step is admitting you have a problem, right? I think of, I think of some of the very, very best service people I know, the highest quality, most credible people you know, in their towns. And I would say a really, really good sales close rate is 60% and then we, when we back up and start going, Okay, well, how many calls did you actually set an appointment with? And we realize a lot of times they’re setting only 70 to 80% of the calls that on the high end, and some of them are in the 40s and 50s. And I’m going, don’t, don’t call me saying, how do we improve results until we start at the at the front end of that so my people that are listening, I know you know who you are. Like, wanting that new customer is so powerful, but that that the one that’s already in your world. Jason said the other day of our on kind of our planning call for this. He said, Imagine you have a bunch of customers, but they’re they’re just sitting in your doorway looking inside, and they never come in. And that’s effectively what we have you. When we’re not, when we’re not taking this experience seriously, right, taking them through the process, for sure. So growing versus scaling. I thought that was a really interesting way you put that. Do you remember that conversation we had? I do. I do. Tell us about a company that grows versus a company that scales effectively?

Jason Friedman 25:22
Yeah, I mean, you were talking about it kind of before you started painting that picture, right? So you got this entrepreneur who is like the dancing bear, right? So he’s the guy that’s out there. He’s making rain, he’s talking to everybody, but he’s also working with everybody, because he’s the only one that can do it, and so forth that’s growing. You’re, you know, you got one resource, and you’re bringing in one sale, and you’re you scale is a leverage game, right? It’s one any versus one to one. And so if you want to start to scale your business, create bigger results with less effort, right? Like we want to be able to do that, and that’s not because we don’t want to have the effort expended. We want to spend effort in different ways, right? And so if I can bring more customers in and get them results, and I can start to really scale my business, like a lot of people come to me when they’re stuck, they hit the ceiling of complexity they can’t get past. They’ve been at a million dollars in revenue for the last five years. They can’t get past, right? That driving spoil. He’d been at $300,000 for his entire existence, and he was in business for 20 years before we started

Brandon Welch 26:24
talking, wow, boom. I’ve met lots of companies like this, yeah, right. And

Jason Friedman 26:29
they don’t think about the many relationship and how we’re going to do things at scale, because they feel like, okay, it’s not going to be personalized, or I have to adapt to every single person, or whatever. There’s systems that we can put in place that allow both, right, the personalization. We call it mass customization. We can customize and personalize at scale, right? Think of Tesla like that. Not every Tesla is the same, right? You go in and you pick, there’s a kit of parts, but you pick what you’re going to put together. You make your Tesla, your Tesla. It’s not the same as the guy who has one next door. It’s yours and it’s, it’s, it feels special. And so do it, right? It’s, it’s

Brandon Welch 27:10
possible you think of a like a Ruth’s Chris steak house, and you could order a steak, I don’t know, probably 80 different ways, right? But does a Ruth’s Chris steak taste the same at all locations across the nation. Of course it does. Of course it does, yeah, right into the process, yeah.

Jason Friedman 27:26
And you can trust that whenever you go into that brand, that is going to be the experience that you have. Now, different waiters and waitresses and people there. They make a lot of money there. They do a great job almost every time, but it’s going to be a slightly different one depending on their personality. And they’re allowed to bring their personality to the table, right within the rules,

Brandon Welch 27:49
right? Yeah.

Jason Friedman 27:50
So rules, it’s the jazz musician. They have to do jazz. I was actually at a Ruth Chris for my son’s birthday a few weeks back. I don’t think we talked about this when you’re talking. His birthday was on February 4. And so we were out at a at a Ruth Chris, and my, my mother in law was there, and she was like, loving the bread. Like, she just was loving the bread that night so much. And like, I don’t know, they must have brought us. Don’t get mad at me, you know. But she’s gonna be like, right? But like, they were, like, bringing loaves and loaves and loaves and like they were happy to do it. They’ll actually charge no whatever. And at the end of the night, there was, like, a few pieces of bread left. And so she had, and she had a bunch of her meal left because she was eating so much bread, she didn’t eat her steak completely. So she she asked for a bag to bring home the steak. And she said, you know, could I also have a little container to put these couple pieces of bread that are left over. She was like, as you know, loved it so much. The guy’s like, I’m gonna bring you a fresh loaf to take home. No, you didn’t have to do that, right? And she’s like, No, no, no, no, it’s too much trouble. Please don’t you’re gonna embarrass me. He’s like, okay, okay, okay. And so he left. He comes back with the baggy for that, and the fresh loaf packed up ready for her to go home, and he wasn’t letting her leave without it, right?

Brandon Welch 29:03
That was somebody, somebody made that happen in their in the training.

Jason Friedman 29:08
However, that happened, right? Yes, for her, it was magical. It was unique. He could have done that with every single person every night, who knows, right? But to her, it was special to her, and it was personalized. And he didn’t need to do that. The restaurant didn’t need to spend the extra $5 or whatever it was, on the loaf of bread, but at the end of the day, there was nine of us out there. It was an $800 meal, and yeah, why wouldn’t you give them an extra loaf of bread? Right? But most businesses wouldn’t go that that distance, and it’s not a big deal.

Brandon Welch 29:37
And so many stop to count the cost, and it’s like the second you’ve done that, you’re toast, because you’re not looking at it through the eyes of the of the customer, right? You’re thinking about it from the eyes of the accountant. And love you accountants, but Dad gum, it like, Let us make the experience special, and then we’ll have, we’ll have more beans to count later, because they’ll come back right,

Jason Friedman 29:55
right? Well, and the key to what you just said is, is, is words matter, right? And we look at cost. We’re not looking at the investment, right? That’s the difference. That $5 got her to be like, I’m coming back to a ruse, Chris, the next time we have a special event, right? Yeah, they’ll be back. That was, that was the best Facebook ad they ever spent, right? But it was a loaf of bread. Wasn’t a Facebook ad. And that’s what we people do. We are so busy chasing strangers and trying to turn the customers that the people that are in our house that already said yes, now we have an opportunity to make them say yes forever, and

Brandon Welch 30:32
we don’t. And that problem, I like what Ritz Carlton does. It’s a literally, a policy that it doesn’t matter if you’re the janitor or the hotel manager, you have a budget of like, I think it said up to $300 if, if you can solve a problem or delight a customer, and it costs no more than $300 no permission needed to just do it. You’ve ever heard that? Yes,

Jason Friedman 30:57
I have, and I love that, and that’s one of the things we teach people like, we have a marketing budget, we have an advertising budget, we have a budget, but we don’t have a customer success budget. We don’t have a customer delight budget. Delight,

Brandon Welch 31:11
yeah, oh, man.

Jason Friedman 31:12
Like, what are we doing? We’re spending our money on all these other things. We’re budgeting it, we’re thinking about it, we’re planning it, but the planning for customer delight, customer success, that advertising, that marketing, all of that value is completely not thought

Brandon Welch 31:27
about. I’m I’m actually proud to say that is a budget that we have in our company. And I’m actually even prouder to say that we break it every year.

Jason Friedman 31:35
That’s amazing. Like I was gonna ask about it. You want to go, you want to go over budget there? Yeah,

Brandon Welch 31:39
exactly so. So if I’m, if I’m a we have a lot of home service providers. We have a lot of like, legal and medical professionals and just service oriented companies. And you would think service is obvious. They’ve already got this built in. But talk to me about some tangible takeaways, like some of the big three to five things that, if you were just talking to our audience, like, hey, go right now today, make sure you’re doing this. Are there, are there some things in that category?

Jason Friedman 32:08
So you’re looking for, like, strategies or tactics they can use right

Brandon Welch 32:12
now? Yeah? Common, common offenses, like, like, what are some of the big, most common rocks you turn over with, with the people that you work with? Yeah? So,

Jason Friedman 32:20
like, again, first and foremost, literally, script, the ideal customer testimony. We call this cult, creating your ideal customer script right now, all the words, like, where they were before they found you. Like, are they problem aware? They’re just like, I’ve got a problem. I gotta solve it. They’re solution aware. I know that I can buy somebody to do this, or they’re brand aware, like, I know that I can hire this company, whatever, wherever they are, waited from that point, what is their whole journey? They’re nervous, they’re scared, they’re excited, whatever. Write it all out, all the ups and downs, all the things they go through, and to the end where they’re delighted, they’re excited, and they’re telling somebody about this write that script first sounds

Brandon Welch 32:55
like such a great team exercise, like just, just to get your people together and do that, everybody writes their own

Jason Friedman 33:01
and it will be so interesting, like and I would take people that don’t like in your business. We call it front stage and backstage. So front stage, all the you know, people that touch your customers backstage, all the people behind the scenes that are never seen by the customers. Bring them thin, because the people that are behind the scenes impact customers too, and they sometimes forget that, right? So bring them in and do this exercise, and do it for each avatar, for each prototypical customer, because they’re all going to be a little bit different, right? Love it. That’s the most important first thing that I think everybody should do, and it costs you nothing, right? And then some, yeah, exactly. Second thing, like, if I’m giving you a low lying fruit actually shop your experience. Be your customer. Go out and buy from yourself, right? If you have a certain Undercover Boss, yeah, yeah, Undercover Boss, it baby, like, have somebody that you know that’s not you call your company, like most, most of our receptionists, like, so in my business, we had a we didn’t have a receptionist, we had a director of first impressions, right? So I love that impressions. Her job was to make everybody feel welcome and to make a great first impression. Her job wasn’t to answer the phone or greet somebody at store, right? I love that able to create a great first impression by how she answered the phone, or how she transferred a call, but it’s a different outcome, right? So for you, for your business, like, Get really clear. Like, what does it look like in your business? Right? Because as we start to, like, figure out where the friction points are, we’re going to need to be able to overcome them with these kinds of things. So get really clear on that,

Brandon Welch 34:40
okay, that’s gold. Yeah, I

Jason Friedman 34:44
think the third thing that I would, I would encourage you to do, beyond shopping your experience and going through it, like, go through like, really analyzing the pain points, the friction points, where do I get stuck? Right? What does get stuck doing? And make a list of those. You’re not going to ever get rid of all the friction in your business. You’re not going to ever get get rid of or even reduce all the friction your business. But you’ll find places where you can you’ll find places where you can just eliminate problems, you can fix them, or you can reduce them. So go dedicate

Brandon Welch 35:16
a Yeah, dedicate a

Jason Friedman 35:18
certain amount of time, a week, just to making that perpetual, and then under percent two weeks. Yeah, yeah. You want right, a smooth flow, right? Find ways. Find ways where you can really set and manage expectations. One of the biggest problems I see in companies is we don’t do that. We don’t set an expectation. We don’t manage it. And pro tip, a customer has an expectation, even if you don’t set it. So if you want to actually have it be the expectations that they should you want to, you know, be able to do great things for them, you got to set matters those expectations and bring them along that journey. So make sure you’re doing that, and then the last thing I’ll say is stop over delivering all the time. Wait what? Stop delivering. What? Well, yeah, I know controversial. So thing, everybody believes in this, not everybody. I shouldn’t say that a lot of people believe in this, under promise, over deliver, right? I’m going to do this, and then I’m going to deliver here. The problem with that is context is everything, if you ever do is say it’s going to be here, and I do this, what I’ve created is an expectation that this is what it is, and there’s no difference. And so if everything’s a 10, it may as well be a five. It doesn’t have that familiarity breeds contempt. Yeah, 100% and wow. Chronic over delivery costs a lot more money. You got to keep doing it. You got to keep one upping yourself all the time, right?

Brandon Welch 36:54
So it’s really hard. It’s it’s really not delight, necessarily. It’s Surprise. Surprise is the foundation of delight, right? Yeah, exactly, right. Wow. Yeah, that’s that. That may be the most profound thought on customer service. I’ve heard, like, leave some in the reserve tank, so that you’re not always at 120%

Jason Friedman 37:18
Yeah, right. You can’t be, and it’s not appreciated, right? And so here’s the thing, customers are won and lost in micro moments. We win and lose in micro moments, right? And you can have a raving fan become a raving lunatic. No joke, you’ve seen it. You’ve seen it. The camera

Brandon Welch 37:39
guy is writing this down, right? Write that down. Nate,

Jason Friedman 37:41
What’s up, buddy?

Brandon Welch 37:45
He’s here, yeah, yeah, he’s

Jason Friedman 37:46
here. I know He’s working. He’s working. Unfortunately, a cameraman. I am a cameraman, so you know. But I wish, I wish I had Nate here with me next time, if we do this again, like, I want to come and hang out with you. Like,

Brandon Welch 37:59
if we can do it, yes, we’re going to do it, man. We’re going to get together someplace, and someplace, maybe someplace warm. Just bring, pack a couple mics in a suitcase.

Jason Friedman 38:06
I love that. And Nate and an EIGHT. We’ll put Nate and an EIGHT. Nate the camera, guys, he’s on call. Yep. Love it. Perfect. So if you think about, if you think about this, this idea of over delivery all the time, again, these moments, they matter the most, right? And so we do is based on your avatar, based on your ideal customers. You have to find the key moments that matter most to them, right? And that’s where we will over deliver, right? And those will matter more to them, and they will appreciate it. Now, people don’t all love the same things, right? There’s a great book, The Five Love Languages. I’m sure you’ve read it. I’m sure you know all about it, right? Oh, yeah, acts of service, receiving gifts, personal time, physical touch, you know, words of athletics, right? We all have different things that land for us as special, right? So we also can’t treat everybody as a one size fits all, you know, answer like giving somebody I left a $25,000 a year mastermind program because they sent me piles of books every other month. And I was like, I am not reading any of these. I am not taking advantage of this group. I’m wasting 25 grand. I’m out.

Brandon Welch 39:17
And you, even though they may have provided other value. They over did that. And you’re thinking, they over my language, I’ve got to be paying for this somehow, and you associated the value of something you didn’t want with what you were paying, right?

Jason Friedman 39:29
And and overwhelm right? They overdid it, and they overwhelmed me. And so, like, at that point, I was like, ah, too much.

Brandon Welch 39:37
Versus what if the leader of the group would have just handwritten you a note and said, I think you’ll really like this one book. Let me know what you think, right? Percent. Yeah, 100%

Jason Friedman 39:46
and that’s one of the that we do, right? So I’ll take a book that if I know that you’re let’s say I know that you’re struggling with, I don’t know, Facebook ads. I’m making this up. I don’t know, right? And I have a book that I

Brandon Welch 39:59
read on. I was really interested to see what you were going to say, because I was going to that could have been funny, but you landed it. I mean, Facebook ads.

Jason Friedman 40:07
I mean, listen, I can find me funnier, but so, yeah, let’s say that that’s it. So I might find a book that I know, like I found a book that’s good in that, and I might actually go through because I’ve read it before, and I might, like, pick a few pages. I might dog ear them. I might put a couple post it notes in there, and I’ll send you this book and say, Hey, man, I was checking this book out as I was reading. I thought of you. I just highlighted, I think would be super helpful for you. Take a look. Let me know what you think.

Brandon Welch 40:30
Yes, that book and shiny forehead, that’s what, that’s what you can find a book on. I’m suffering from shiny forehead, that’s what it is. Maybe I’ll just send you some powder. I mean, there you go. They saw this. Thought of you, my friend. Tim miles, there’s a chapter in his book called Good company, and that’s what he said. He goes, there’s nothing more powerful than I saw this. Thought of you, email or a text, or, even better, a package in the mail, right? Yeah, I

Jason Friedman 40:57
got one today. I got a it was a friend of mine sent me an email that had this really interesting thing in it on pricing. And she knew that I was thinking about something about pricing. We had a chat about a couple weeks ago, and she sent it to me. She said, thought of you, I think this will help. And I was like, that’s awesome. And so then I wrote back to her, and then we’ve been in this banter all day, and like 20 other things came out, and I just, the last thing I sent her was a picture of a head exploding because she blew my mind with like, three things that she said to me in the emails a day. And I’m just, wow, I’m so grateful that you were in my life.

Brandon Welch 41:32
Yeah, right. And that went, that went over better than sending you 100 different things. All right, yeah. So that’s that’s really good, but I think it’s good advice for any relationship, 100% right? Contrast,

Jason Friedman 41:45
we teach a bunch of those things, right? Like, if every day there’s an expectation of of something over delivering, it doesn’t matter anymore, so don’t over deliver. Over delivery chronically leads to overwhelm, strategically, over deliver in the moments that matter based on your avatar. Love

Brandon Welch 42:03
it. Yeah, love that, dude. I’m gonna already say this is, this is probably the most profitable advice we’ve given in the history of the podcast, rewind, rewind flag. This one. Send it to all your friends, because this is the kind of stuff that, frankly, I mean, selfishly, makes my job easy. Advertising a mediocre company will put them out of business. Putting heavy marketing on a mediocre to a poor company with a four star experience actually going to there’s going to create more headwinds, putting a tiny bit of gas on a world class customer experience is exponentially. It’s uncontrollable fire that will grow. They will scale. In fact, right? It will scale. And

Jason Friedman 42:49
the best thing is, like the marketing messages that you share are the success stories of the clients. Like you don’t have to come up with clever this and that and the other thing, right? It’s it makes it Messier, because what’s clever is showing the success like that’s what gets other people. It’s a movement. It builds a movement. Right, amazing. Right. Love that. For those that really want to help more people, this is how you do it, right? So,

Brandon Welch 43:15
true. So true. Yeah. Um, so my H back, my roofing, my law firms, my people who are dealing with really skilled trades, any advice to those particular folks? Because, like you said, they may be the guy that’s out running the show and the master technician. I know you said write the script. I know you gave us those piece of advice, but like, what’s the what’s the frequency and the time it takes to actually make this a reality?

Jason Friedman 43:50
I mean, it, it could be quick, right? I mean, this is I these are not typical results. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a doctor. You know, I only play one on TV. Results are not typical, but it doesn’t have to take a long time. It really doesn’t right, okay? Like, you know, I know, I know. Like, you know, you have the moms groups in town, right? We talk about businesses, right? The moms groups, I’m sure, are a strategy for many of the people listening, right? If they’re not, okay, here’s another, like, you know, no brainer. Get in the moms groups. How do you do that? By making moms think you’re awesome. That’s all you got to do. And then all of a sudden, it is, it’s better than Chick fil A, right? Because you’re gonna probably do it on Sundays, you know. So, like, it’s, there’s also stuff you can do, right? But like, what you what you want to do is you want to find the things are, talk about a bowl. If you want people to talk about you, I’d be talk about a bowl. And when you’re doing that, it’s like, if you suck, people are going to talk about you. If you’re awesome, people are going to talk about you if you just do a good job. They’re not they’re not. Right?

Brandon Welch 45:00
And so the share worthy, but we gotta

Jason Friedman 45:02
get things that are talk about double so like in your industry, what is that? I’ll give you an example. I had a furniture delivery company come to my house with a mattress. I spent $12,000 on this mattress, which I thought was quite a bit of money for a mattress, and I was happy to spend it because I laid on it and I fell in love nearly instantly, and I paid for white glove delivery. The beat up dirty truck showed up in front of my house. Oh, man, the guys with their disgusting outfits and big dirty boots were carrying the mattress in. It was in plastic, but kind of dragging it on the ground, even though plastic, and then they refused to put on booties before they traipse their muddy shoe or take off their shoes before they traipse their stuff into my house on my beige carpeting. Oh, god, that’s not happening, yeah, right? So, like, if they came there and they had a decent outfit on and they looked professional, and they didn’t drag that, maybe they even had white gloves, I don’t know. Just saying that could be, like, a little kitschy, right? I wasn’t looking for the white gloves. I was looking for the quality that that implied, yeah. And they said, Hey, listen, we’d love to we put on booties. They maybe put out like a little mat to wipe their feet on that, you know, anything like that

Brandon Welch 46:29
gesture.

Jason Friedman 46:30
If nothing else, it would have made me feel so much better. But, yeah, they’re dirt truck and they’re dirty everything else. So I said to them, I’m like, Guys, I’m sorry you’re not coming in. And they’re like, we’re calling our manager and baba, baba, and we’re leaving this on your front doorstep. I said, you can do that if you want. That’s okay. I paid for white glove delivery. I paid for you to be able to come in my house and not make it ruin my flooring if you’re not open to that. And so then the manager was, the guy was like, literally screaming, the manager on a speaker phone with me right there, and then he handed me his phone for me to talk on. I mean, we’re just past COVID. I’m like, All right, like, this is a little weird. So like, I take his phone and I’m going through this, and then the manager is like, Listen. He’s like, if you’re not going to take the any explicative mattress, then we’re going to just leave it on the explicative floor. And I said, I said, I said, you again, you can do that. I said, I’m going to call the store that I bought it from, and you can take it up with them. Leave it wherever you want. I’m going to take photos of where you left it. So if any of the landscaping is destroyed and what have you, then they can take it up with you to repair place that that’s fine. I said I’m not being unreasonable. I don’t want to damage my home because you refuse to prepare a booties. I’m sorry.

Brandon Welch 47:54
Like, it really wasn’t an unreasonable request. No, it wasn’t, not at all, no. But the

Jason Friedman 48:01
way they handle it so, like, if you’re a roofer or a contract or whatever, like, what do you need to do to be better than everybody else around you? Like, it doesn’t have to be big things, right? It doesn’t have to be crazy. One of my clients happens to be a mattress retailer. Now, here’s the iron the store I bought it from was my client. Oh, my goodness, right? Wow. They were, like, appalled, right? They made it better. It was all fine, whatever. And I would highly recommend them. They did everything right? This wasn’t their fault. They were in California, and they were delivering to New Jersey, so they had to use another delivery company. It wasn’t them delivering it whatever, but she was appalled, and she she made it all better. She made it all better. But you know, what was so funny to me is, like, one of the things that they do, like they were, she was complaining when we were doing the journey mapping, we had them in for a workshop, and we did this whole thing. I’ll tell you more about that later. But when we came in, they were like, you know, one of the frustrations we have is we have when we go in to take the mattress out, the homeowners always, like, you guys have to wait. We need to vacuum and clean under the bed. And I said to them, why don’t you do that for them? And she’s like, wait. Like, I’m not a cleaning person. I said, like, what are we talking about? A cordless to vacuum it up and, like, what are they going to say? If you said, Hey, we got that. We’ll take care of it. No problem. She’s like,

Unknown Speaker 49:26
Oh my God.

Jason Friedman 49:29
She’s like, they share worthy probably be a big deal right

Brandon Welch 49:32
next day to the to the mom’s group, and she’s going, they even vacuum under the bed. Yep,

Jason Friedman 49:37
it wasn’t a big deal. And so all of a sudden, that’s what happened. It when it went almost viral in the mom’s Facebook group in their town, and like all these people were like, go there, go there, go there, boom. It’s like they got a bunch more sales, literally, because they had a $200 cordless vacuum. You. And better yet, it reduced the amount of time that their delivery people stayed on site by like 10 minutes per like location. So they got three extra deliveries in each day while making their customers happy. So they saved money and got more sales. So

Brandon Welch 50:18
yeah, there’s, there’s a there’s a there’s 100 opportunities for everybody listening to do that vacuum under the bed thing. It find what that is in your business. My dad, my dad always used to tell me it only takes a little bit to be better than average. Just a little bit. My whole life, he was holding up this little just a little bit. I bring a report card home, a little bit. Clean your room little bit right. And it’s so, so true. That’s often the difference between 200 people raving about you and people saying nothing at all. This is brilliant. I hope everybody’s taking notes. I hope you’re putting this on slow mode to listen over and over again. Jason, if, if there are some of my friends listening who want to take, want to dive in deep to the customer experience formula, how could you help them do that? Yeah,

Jason Friedman 51:12
I would love to help them. I would love to so the idea that we were just talking about, right, this, this kind of strategy, like, a little bit better. There’s a there’s a powerful question that I teach people that gets you the answer to that, like, and it gives you the way to actually figure it out. And I want to gift this to your audience. Actually, I’m not the best question at all. Okay, you spend a minute, you got to earn it. It’s free, okay? You got to earn it. So if you go to gift, G, I, F, T, dot, c, x, formula.com/maven, M, A, V, N, you can download it. All you got to do is put in your email address. It does a probably a 10 minute read. It’s a PDF, and it will give you a like, this is one of those things, like I said, you can’t unsee it after you’ve seen it. You will use this in so many aspects of your life and your business. It’s a powerful, powerful question, and it will change everything for you when you use it. So it’s my gift to you take a look at it. All I ask is, if you download it, actually open the PDF and read it. Don’t let it be one of those things that sits on the hard drive and you forgot. Yeah. And then, gift,

Brandon Welch 52:21
gift.cx. Formula.com, forward slash Maven, we’re gonna put that in the show notes, and we’ll put it in the email that goes out as well. Thank you so much for that. I can’t wait to go look at it and then beyond that. Do you have any programs or coaching that you offer?

Jason Friedman 52:38
Yeah, we definitely do. 21 Yeah. So our program is called the kinetic customer formula. And the what we want to do is we want to take prospects with potential that have all this opportunity, that are stagnant, and we want to turn them into kinetic action, taking results, getting customers. And so we teach you that formula through two ways. Really, we have a deep dive, immersion workshop. It’s a three day workshop. So if you’re interested in that, you can check us out at CX formula.com, and and you can do that, and we really twist your arm hard to bring three people, you and two others. So if you’re the entrepreneur, I want you to bring two members of your team, because it’s a team sport like and then you’re going to take this home. We’re going to give you tools and resources to bring that back home, and we want you to, we want you to leave with a winning operating system for your business. We will when you do that, it’s going

Brandon Welch 53:29
to make everything better. It’s going to make every ad work better. It’s going to make every employee and love their job better. All the things, right? 100%

Jason Friedman 53:38
Yeah. And now other option is to go through our online training course. So we have a kind of, you know, go at your own pace. We like you to do it in a period of, like, eight weeks or so, so that you keep up that momentum. And we, we built the program to do that for you, and then we have coaching that goes along with that. So, and we mail you a bunch of cool tools and things that you need to do it. So that’s the other option again, you know, ci formula.com, you can check it out if you want to chat about it. Happy to do so. And like, you know, if you do nothing else, like, even if you don’t go down that road, like, listen to the things we talked about here. Like, we’ve given you a lot of really good ideas that will literally change the game for your business

Brandon Welch 54:21
folks, you’ve got a world class consultant who has worked and polished the highest level of brands and the biggest companies in the world coming down to entrepreneurial level. I love that so much, and he has tools for you. Please share this. Please like and subscribe. You know somebody who has a customer experience that could be improved. I know you do. Could be the restaurant you visited last night forward in this episode, and just tell them I saw this and thought of you, and that’s where all that is helping entrepreneurs get more out of the company. So Jason, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for all of the wisdom you just poured on 1000s of people. Yeah, anything else you’d like to close with?

Jason Friedman 55:03
No. Man, I’m so stoked to be here with you. I so enjoyed. It was so much fun. Nate, thanks for all you’re doing right now to make us look good.

Brandon Welch 55:11
And he’s polishing, yeah, yeah. I think he said he’d make us look 15 pounds lighter.

Jason Friedman 55:15
Oh my gosh, like that. That’s the transformation I want. I’ll pay money for that. Yeah, sure, exactly. Thanks for having me, man, and anything I can do for you, let me know.

Brandon Welch 55:25
Thank you so much. We’ll be back here every Monday answering your real life marketing questions, because marketers who can’t

Jason Friedman 55:31
teach you why are just a fancy lie.

Brandon Welch 55:34
He did it. Have a great week.