How Customer Focus Drives Business Growth

Summary

Build Your Business Podcast: "How Customer Focus Drives Business Growth"

Episode Overview In this episode of the Build Your Business Podcast, hosts Matt and Chris Reynolds delve into the pivotal role of customer focus in driving business growth. Amidst personal anecdotes and unexpected challenges, including Matt’s battle with carbon monoxide poisoning, the Reynolds brothers provide actionable insights and inspiring stories that underscore the importance of prioritizing customers to build lasting, successful businesses.

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Personal Updates and Life Changes (00:01 - 10:17)

Matt and Chris share significant personal developments, including Chris Reynolds' upcoming move from Boston to Jacksonville, Florida. This relocation is driven by the desire for better weather and enhanced opportunities for their children's athletic pursuits. They discuss the logistics of the move, the impact on their family life, and the challenges of transitioning from one city to another.

Notable Quote:

Matt Reynolds [06:14]: "Weather was a huge, huge piece of it. And we said whenever the kids were out of school, this was the thing we definitely wanted to do."

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Matt’s Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Incident (10:17 - 19:36)

Matt recounts a harrowing experience where he accidentally carbon monoxide poisoned himself while working in a cabin. Despite having a carbon monoxide detector, he initially mistook the alarm for a battery issue, leading to several days of exposure. This ordeal resulted in severe physical symptoms and forced him to take a hiatus from business operations.

Key Points:

• Matt details the signs and symptoms he experienced, such as foggy thinking, imbalance, and dizziness.
• He highlights the importance of taking safety alarms seriously and ensuring proper ventilation when using propane appliances.
• The incident underscored the unpredictability of life and the need for resilience in the face of unexpected challenges.

Notable Quote:

Matt Reynolds [16:12]: "I just cooked them on the stove, which everything is propane down there because there's nothing natural gas."

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The Importance of Customer Focus in Business (19:36 - 53:51)

Main Discussion: The episode transitions to its central theme—how a customer-centric approach can drive business growth. Matt and Chris explore various aspects of customer focus, drawing from their own business experiences and broader industry examples.

Key Themes:

1. Service as a Core Value:

   • Chris emphasizes the significance of building a company culture centered around exceptional service.
   • Quote:

     Chris Reynolds [22:36]: "There’s something to being an elite technician who is also fantastic to work with."

2. Combining Technical Expertise with Customer Care:

   • The duo discusses the rare but powerful combination of technical prowess and emotional intelligence.
   • Matt highlights:

     "If you are an elite technician and you are fantastic to work with, like go out of your way to help the customer, you will always have a market."

3. Long-Term Relationship Building:

   • Chris shares a story about refunding a client for a feature that was already available, which transformed the client into a devoted advocate.
   • Quote:

     Chris Reynolds [33:12]: "That guy was on the… became a stark raving fan of ours and went nowhere without talking about our company."

4. Doing the Right Thing Over Short-Term Gain:

   • Both hosts stress the importance of ethical decisions that prioritize customers, even if it means foregoing immediate profits.
   • Matt asserts:

     "If you choose rightly, in the long term, it will always work out in your favor."

5. Personalized Customer Interactions:

   • They advocate for direct, human-to-human communication with customers to build trust and understanding that large companies often miss.
   • Chris advises:

     "Get as many customers on the phone as possible. Talk to them, know them, understand their lives."

6. Leveraging Small Company Agility:

   • Small businesses can outservice larger competitors by being more flexible and attentive to individual customer needs.
   • Matt points out:

     "If you have a small company, you can communicate authentically that you actually care about your client, which is a big separator."

Examples and Case Studies:

• Tony Hsieh’s Zappos:

  • The hosts reference Zappos as a benchmark for customer-centric business practices, highlighting their exceptional service and customer satisfaction strategies.

• Turnkey Coach’s Approach:

  • Matt shares personal instances where he went above and beyond for clients, such as providing direct support despite his health issues, showcasing their commitment to customer success.

Notable Quotes:

Matt Reynolds [26:33]: "The customer is always king… being customer focused is everything, regardless of the industry you're in."

Chris Reynolds [36:50]: "If you can build trust and long-term relationships, that's what truly differentiates you from the big guys."

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Actionable Strategies for Being Customer-Centric (53:51 - End)

Practical Tips for Entrepreneurs:

1. Prioritize Customer Relationships:

   • Engage with customers personally through calls and meetings to understand their needs deeply.

2. Under Promise, Over Deliver:

   • Set realistic expectations and strive to exceed them, fostering trust and loyalty.

3. Transparent Communication:

   • Be honest with customers about what your business can and cannot do, and guide them accordingly, even if it means directing them to competitors.

4. Empathy and Understanding:

   • Show genuine care for customers’ personal and professional lives to build a strong emotional connection.

5. Flexibility and Agility:

   • Utilize the nimbleness of a small business to adapt quickly to customer feedback and market changes.

6. Building Trust Through Integrity:

   • Consistently make decisions that reflect ethical standards and prioritize customer well-being over short-term gains.

Final Insights: Matt and Chris conclude by reiterating that customer focus is a universal principle that transcends industries. Whether running a SaaS platform, a coaching business, or a product-based company, putting customers first can lead to sustainable growth and a loyal client base. They encourage entrepreneurs to leverage their small size as an advantage in delivering personalized and impactful customer experiences that large corporations cannot match.

Closing Quote:

Matt Reynolds [53:51]: "If you understand that AI is a non-interested third party, then communicating authentically that you actually care about your client is the big advantage you have over bigger companies."

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Conclusion This episode of the Build Your Business Podcast serves as a compelling reminder that putting customers at the heart of your business strategy is not just beneficial but essential for growth and longevity. Through personal stories, practical advice, and thoughtful discussions, Matt and Chris Reynolds provide listeners with the tools and motivation to transform their businesses from fear-driven to freedom-oriented, emphasizing that the key to enduring success lies in unwavering customer focus.

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Join the Conversation If you found value in this episode, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform. Share it with fellow entrepreneurs and business owners who can benefit from these insights. Stay tuned for more expert advice, real-world success stories, and actionable strategies on the next episode of the Build Your Business Podcast.

Transcript

[Matt Reynolds]

Hey, coaches, are you still chasing clients? Every month we're flipping the script at the business of coaching workshop. We'll help you learn how to keep clients longer, set premium pricing, boost your dollars per hour, and let referrals, not marketing machines, make you more money. Register for free at Turnkey Coach Voc. That's Turnkey Coach Voc. We'll help you build a coaching business that lasts foreign.

[Chris Reynolds]

You're listening to the build your business podcast, powered by Turnkey Coach, where we help business owners find freedom over fear. I'm Matt Reynolds and I'm his brother, Chris Reynolds.

[Matt Reynolds]

Join us as we help build your business and move from fear to freedom together. You are listening to the build you'd business podcast where we take you from fear to freedom. I'm your co host Matt Reynolds, here with my brother, Chris Reynolds.

[Chris Reynolds]

How's it going?

[Matt Reynolds]

Who has been in Boston for how many years did you live in Boston?

[Chris Reynolds]

Almost eight. Pretty close.

[Matt Reynolds]

You are in the process of moving to Jacksonville, Florida. You're down there now waiting to close on the house. It has been a crazy couple weeks. So for those of you who listen intently, you'll notice that we did not put out a new episode last week. I want to give you some back background because we both have kind of crazy stories. I'm going to let Chris start with his and then I'll tell you mine, which is really nuts. So one thing I've noticed about you our whole life is that you are all in or all out.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

There's nothing in the middle, 100%. So when you moved from the Ozarks to Boston, you were like, we'll be here the rest of our life. You know, we'll try to send our kids to MIT or something. You know, one of the, there's obviously tons of great universities in Boston. A few weeks ago, you texted us, texted the family, mom or sister, whatever, and you said, I think we're moving to Jacksonville or outside of Jacksonville. Yep, we're moving to Florida. And it came as a surprise because you've always been so pro Boston. So I want to take just a few minutes. And by the way, for our listeners, if you listen every week in the beginning of a podcast, I don't think you should go into kind of personal details of the host because you haven't built the rapport with the host. And for the podcasts I listen to on a routine basis, you know, the founders with David syndrome or all in or whatever, I actually want to know what's going on in their lives. So we're just going to take a couple minutes and talk about what the last couple weeks has been like. And so, yeah. Why the move to Florida and how did you go from I'm a hundred percent all in on Boston to we're taking our kid. You have three kids who are 14, almost 15 and under.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

To Florida.

[Chris Reynolds]

So we're actually moving to an area called Ponte Vedra, Florida, which is just west of Jacksonville. Just west and south of Jacksonville, or just between Jacksonville and St. Augustine. So, yeah, the story is pretty simple. It was all three of my kids are going up one school system.

[Matt Reynolds]

It's like elementary to middle, middle to junior high, junior high to high school.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah. The way that split out where. Where we were in Massachusetts, that those were all different buildings. And you know, you have just a. Everybody sort of dumping into the same space.

[Matt Reynolds]

They're going to have new people, new friends, regardless. Some of the friends will move with them. A lot won't.

[Chris Reynolds]

There's also a ton of, like, a lot, you know, when they move into high school, especially, there's a lot of kids that end up going into a private school. For my oldest kid, moving into private school for his friends or whatever would have been like, just as disturbing. Like, I'm losing these friends anyway. So I think the. The primary driver for us, which I think you're going to laugh at, is it's just weather, like, pretty much what it is. We wanted to move to.

[Matt Reynolds]

Too damn. Too damn cold.

[Chris Reynolds]

And yeah, the thing is, like, I still love Boston. Like, I handle cold a lot better than my wife does. Doesn't really bother me as much, but there are definitely times in the spring where you're like, oh, my gosh, summer is literally never going to show up. I think we had like 15 consecutive weekends that were rainy and under 55 or something over the last. It was just crazy.

[Matt Reynolds]

Like, we go like, in, like in April and May and June. Like, right, June.

[Chris Reynolds]

Like, you're like, where, Like June. Where's. Where's summer? Like, I don't get it. Yeah, so I think that's a big part of it. My kids are really, really, really into sports as well.

[Matt Reynolds]

And so which as a side note, you were not really into sports. Right. You were one thing. People have followed me for a long time. You were very good at sports. You were athletic. Certainly a better f. Yeah, you were certainly a better athlete than me. I think. I hope that I can take some credit for that, that you played with my friends and myself for three years.

[Chris Reynolds]

What it is three years older than.

[Matt Reynolds]

You and then you played with all these little kids. You know, if you were like in the second or third grade and you're playing with sixth graders, I was a man amongst it. And you hit puberty early. Yeah, like I remember just a super transparent. You had like armpit hair before I had armpit hair.

[Chris Reynolds]

It was ridiculous, I'm not going to lie. Yeah.

[Matt Reynolds]

And I, and I hit puberty at like 17. Late bloomer.

[Chris Reynolds]

I don't think it was quite that.

[Matt Reynolds]

So. But yeah, so it's pretty late.

[Chris Reynolds]

Look, weather was a huge, huge piece of it. And we said whenever the kids were out of school, this was the thing we definitely wanted to do. And I just saw this opportunity where I thought we can go now or we can go in eight years.

[Matt Reynolds]

Right.

[Chris Reynolds]

And we just have to decide which one we want to do. So we'll talk to the kids. Which we did. And the kids seemed really excited about the move and a lot more opportunities in terms of athletics here. Just because again, you don't have so many rain outs on baseball types of events and football starts considerably earlier here. My boys are already at football practice right now today. And my daughter is a, like an elite cheer athlete. Phenomenal. And so she got into a Division 1 cheer program here which was, was awesome. So they're all super excited.

[Matt Reynolds]

And she's held as Sylvie.

[Chris Reynolds]

She's 11 right now.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yeah. Pretty young.

[Chris Reynolds]

Just turned. Yep. So, yeah, so like that was a big, a big part of it. The other thing is, I mean, you're absolutely right that I am all in or all out. Which also means that we move super fast on things, far faster than most people even understand. Like, I think a lot of the time when we talk to people in Massachusetts and said, hey, you know, we've, we're moving, they're like, oh, when? And we're like, like Friday, you know, like, like they're like, whoa. But I, I just, I don't like the, the medium place. Like I don't that once I've made a decision, I just want to move. Time is short.

[Matt Reynolds]

It's like you're in purgatory, but in real life. Yeah, you're kind of stuck between two places. So.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah, so that's the primary reason for this. And so we're doing a couple little rental things right now. I'm in a, like a vrbo. And then after that we're going into like a rental for up to a year or something like that. So that while we're in the neighborhood that, that puts us in the school system and all that once we're there, we will have an opportunity to either build or we can buy. But we don't have the pressure of, like, I want to let my house sell in Massachusetts first. Like, there's just a series of things I want to make sure happen in order to be responsible. And there were some really nice rentals that were available. I thought this is a pretty good. Pretty good way to do it. So anyway, that's. That's where we are. You're going to see the background behind me change some.

[Matt Reynolds]

I think you'll really appreciate when we hit like September and it would have been really cold in Boston and you're going to be like, it's still really hot and we can go to the beach and Florida.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah.

[Matt Reynolds]

So. And you, you guys took a ton of vacations, too. You fully embraced Boston area life like you learned how to. We never snow skied, as a matter of fact, in Missouri. I've talked about this before. If, if you say the word ski, that means water ski, right? Because nobody snow skis here. You guys learned how to snow ski. You did all the things that Northeasterners do. You became fans of the Red Sox and the Patriots and all that sort of stuff. I'll be interested to see if your kids again, because you were never really into sports. You were just good at them. If your boys will move to being fans of Florida teams. And I know they've already. They've kind of. They're a Miami Dolphin fan, right? They like the Miami Dolphins. But you guys have been Boston Red Sox fans. You've met David Ortiz. You've, you know, all that kind of stuff. So. So congrats on the move. I know that's a big deal. When does everything come in? You said kind of the end of the month of June.

[Chris Reynolds]

I got my car delivered like the day after we got to the Verbo. And then I have a. Like, we packed up a pod, one of those, you know, big rectangular pod things we pack. Carter and I packed almost the entire thing. It was crazy. And we did it in a day. I also have a crazy story going into that. We don't have time for it, but I'll tell another time. But we got that thing packed up. It's going to show up the day that we have on July 1, whenever we actually go into the longer term rental, I guess.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yeah.

[Chris Reynolds]

So it'll get there and we'll unload that. I'll fly back to Boston at least once to organize the final process of selling the house, getting everything, all the final stuff Moved or donated or given away or whatever we're doing with all.

[Matt Reynolds]

The rest of the furniture.

[Chris Reynolds]

But.

[Matt Reynolds]

And you, you still have board meetings and stuff out in the Northeast and.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah, in New York, I'll be there.

[Matt Reynolds]

Getting on the Amtrak train and going to New York City and whatnot. So maybe it's equally as exciting but not as fun. So I. Carbon monoxide poisoned myself over the past five days. And I'm still. You may have to carry me a little bit on this podcast.

[Chris Reynolds]

Still a little lightheaded?

[Matt Reynolds]

Yeah, Just crazy. It's weird, man. The story there is that we have a cabin about 40 minutes away and you were supposed to come down in a couple weeks and hopefully we get a. Because your move, we've pushed it, but your boys want to come down and we've got a gun range down there and they've never shot guns and stuff, so we'll. We'll do all that. But we've had record rain for the past three months. So set a record for April, set a record for May. June has been nuts. It's raining outside right now. It's. I've never seen rain like this. I was telling my cmo Josh, I was like, I don't ever remember there being rain like this. And he said, oh, you haven't remembered rain being like this because we set a record for April, we set a record for May, and we set a record for two months in a row. Any two months in a row for rain. And June has continued to be the same. Like I've got my irrigation system turned on for my lawn and just have had it off all because there's so much rain. So the good news is the garden looks great, the tomatoes are growing like crazy and all this stuff. So I go down to the cabin. So Rachel, my wife, is a stay at home mom and she works her butt off with the kiddos and whatnot. She doesn't have a lot of like go to meetings where she's got meetings that she's out of the house for, you know, a day to day or two, three days at a time. And she had a bunch of those coming up at the end of last week. And so I thought, well, it'd be a good time for me to go check on the cabin, just make sure everything's fine with all the rain that we've had and just everything's good. So went down to the cabin. It's kind of our Covid project again. People who have listened to me for years will know I was patient zero for Springfield, Missouri. So I was for Covid. I got Covid on February 27th of 2020 and was the first guy in the hospital and the first COVID test they gave to and all that sort of stuff.

[Chris Reynolds]

Scared the crap out of me then too, by the way.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's what you do. And I was, I was number three in Missouri and I think I was in the, in the first 50 in the US so after we got Covid, which I only gave to my wife and she didn't, she never really got sick. We had this project that we did in April, May, June of 2020 where we, we bought 10 acres. We built a little cabin on it. We mostly built the cabin ourselves. The cabin is a small little 550 square foot cabin of which a chunk is a shop. And so the actual living space is like 350 square foot small. Two sleeping lofts, you know, king size bed on one side, the other sleeping loft has four twin size beds on it. A lot of, because of the rain, I didn't go outside hardly. I normally I grill steaks or whatever, but I just cooked them on the stove, which everything is propane down there because there's nothing natural gas. Everything had to be converted to propane and so cooked on the stove, cooked on the oven. Thursday night. This is the part that I'm embarrassed to tell people Thursday night. So I have a carbon monoxide detector down there and it goes off on Thursday night. And I'm like, well, I'm in this tiny room and I'm cooking steak and potatoes. And I understand everybody's listening is going to be like, you idiot. And so it starts going off. But if you've ever had a smoke alarm go off and you're like, oh, it's just like the batteries or something. So I unplugged it out of the outlet. It still has batteries and so it's continuing to go off. I try to reset it, try to reset it. It's beeping, it's beeping, it's beeping. I'm just like, I'm just trying to get dinner cooked. So I chuck it in the front yard and Thursday night. So I again, carbon monoxide is kind of a heavy gas and stays relatively low to the ground. So I sleep up in the loft. I've got a CPAP and so that probably was quite helpful. So Friday I don't remember very much. I don't remember feeling super off on Friday. Saturday morning I get up, I'm gonna come home early. We've got a church thing at like 7:30 in the morning. So I'm going to come home early. And so I'm cleaning up and I'm kind of shaving my head and trimming my beard and getting ready to take a shower and I feel worse and worse and worse. I feel like the balance issues are like, you're drunk. But I didn't feel drunk. I just felt like I can't. I'm foggy and I'm off balance. I end up tripping over an extension cord, which was set up for four podcasts and the ring light and the camera and all that sort of stuff. Very unlike me to trip. So, you know, we've lived in this house for six years. I've never tripped down the stairs. My wife and daughters have tripped down the stairs numerous times. Like rolled down the stairs. I've never rolled down the stairs. I trip over an extension cord, it catches my left toe. I have shoes on. I'm dressed and I turn to try to like, release my foot from the extension cord, turn kind of twist backwards and fall through a massive glass shower door. Tempered glass shower door, which was not cheap. And I don't know how much it was, but it was not cheap. And I don't really remember falling, but I remember the glass like exploding all over me. And now I'm laying on my back. For those of you guys watching on YouTube, you can see, oh, yeah, I've got. I've got chunks. And I think there might be a. There might be a piece of glass there. There's gonna be like.

[Chris Reynolds]

Like my knee. They're gonna be scrubbing stuff out of it for years.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yeah, when we had the bike wreck as a kid, so I told my wife, I was like, hey, I'm supposed to come home Saturday. But I'm like, I'm just like so beat up and sore and falling through this glass. And I'm just gonna rest here and take a nap. But I didn't feel. I wasn't feeling any better. And so Sunday morning I'm supposed to open up the church and be the guy that like, unlocks the church early in the morning to make coffee and stuff. So I get up early, you know, whatever, 4:35 in the morning, and I'm getting ready and I'm cleaning it up. I end up taking a shower, a shave, take a shower with no shower door. I clean up all the glass as much as I can out of the shower, which is not perfect by any means. And I just feel worse and worse and woozy and vertigo and all that. Sort of stuff. So I'm carrying bags out to my truck to, you know, the, the fresh groceries and, you know, clothes and podcast stuff. And I'm just like, I am so dizzy. I don't, I don't think I can drive home. Like, do I have. Did I give myself a concussion? Which I don't remember hitting my head really hard. It was kind of my, my upper back that went through the class. So I texted my wife and I said, hey, I. And this is Father's Day. So I'm like, hey, I don't think I can drive home. I don't think it's safe to drive. I think you guys are going to have to come down here and get me. You know, it's like 40 minute drive. And she's like, absolutely not. Don't drive home, we'll come get you. So she gets ready to come and get me. She gets the stuff done she needs to do. It's a couple hours to get down here. And all of a sudden, look, I haven't thought about it at all. All of a sudden it hits me. The carbon monoxide detector went off on Thursday night and I'm like, oh, no. I have been asphyxiating myself for the last four days. And so did you open up everything at that point? Yeah. So I went out on the porch and I sat down. We've got the cracker barrel rocking chairs. I sat down out there. And then I'm like, okay, I need to open all the windows and open the door and everything. And within a couple hours, I was feeling better. Not, certainly not at all, a hundred percent. And again, after four days, I don't think there was a consistent leak. I think it was just when I was running the propane oven and stove. So, yeah, it all makes sense. So anyway, I've been on oxygen for two days. Everything's been weird. I've had to push back all my meetings a couple days and grateful that I didn't die down.

[Chris Reynolds]

I'm also grateful Jenny. When I told Jenny the story, it's my wife, when I told her the story, she was like, oh, you need to tell him. Not to tell the part about throwing the carbon monoxide test, that's the part you keep in your brain and not.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yeah, everybody's like, oh, you got to get a carbon monoxide detector down there. And I'm like, there was one. It went off. I couldn't get it to reset. I thought it was just low on batteries or something. And which. That happened one time before with Rachel. And I When we were down there and my sister, Our sister went and stayed down there with her husband several times with friends. Go down and stay. And it went off on them and. But they go out a lot and, you know, do campfires and stuff. And so I just sat in this tiny little room with no ventilation.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah.

[Matt Reynolds]

And just. And just sucked up carbon monoxide. So anyway, been a crazy couple weeks. Certainly a crazy week for me. And then you're off to Florida and so sorry that we weren't able to come out with a. The other, the other issue is the tripping over the cord now. Like, it makes way more sense because, like, I was just not at, you know, brain capacity and I was. Didn't have the balance. And then I couldn't get my camera to work. Like, I try. We were trying to record on Thursday night and then again or Wednesday night and again Thursday morning. And I'm like, I can't get my camera to come on, you know, But I just, my IQ is about 40. 40.

[Chris Reynolds]

I could tell you were very frustrated. You were like, why is this not like, this is not normally that hard. So you're just like slapping keys.

[Matt Reynolds]

So thank you for staying with us and listen. Okay, so that's, that's been the last week or two for us. It's been wild. I've got, I literally have like 10 meetings today and I still feel, I feel like I'm about 90%. I've been on oxygen and, and that helps clear the carbon dioxide as, as quickly as possible. So today we want to talk about being customer focused and the importance of customers and being customer focused in your business. And I, I think this is good because you have a true engineering development business that helps work with kind of SaaS products and platforms. We started as a, as a B2C company at BarboLogic, and we've moved into the B2B space with SaaS. I was thinking about this. Did you ever read. Dang it.

[Chris Reynolds]

What is Tony Shay, Tony Hsieh's book? Happiness? Delivering Happiness.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yeah, Delivering Happiness. They ended up being bought by Amazon, but they were like the shoe store. They were like the Amazon shoes. And shoe ordering online and delivery is not something that you typically equate with customer focused happiness under promising or over delivering. And yet that's what he did. And so I think regardless of the business that you're in, whether it's online coaching or some sort of fitness coaching or engineering development or whatever else you're in, you know, I, I work with a lot of construction guys like Plumbers and electricians, H Vac, all that kind of stuff. Those are not things you tend to think about. Like, you think more about the skill set is this. Does the coach have the skill set to get me to my goals? Does the dev team or the engineers, can they get the job done in the right amount of time? Can the electrician or plumber, can they do a good job and avoid carbon monoxide leaks and whatnot? But the reality is that the thing that keeps people coming back and the thing that makes people kind of stark raving fans is being uber customer focused.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yep, no question.

[Matt Reynolds]

So this has been a deep part of our core values from the very beginning, that we are service oriented. First, we have four primary tenants. The first tenant is service. We serve our customers, our clients, which now includes both the end user lifter and the coach, as well as we possibly can. We want to again, under promise and over deliver. And so I'll stop there. How have you integrated this into your business knowing that you're kind of a dev team? That is, you know, and I think dev teams have a reputation of being, you know, the worst.

[Chris Reynolds]

The worst, yeah.

[Matt Reynolds]

And sort of weird, you know, socially awkward guys that are just like programmers. And so how does customer focus really intertwine or be a big part of the core value system of what you have there at certain.

[Chris Reynolds]

I mean, I think I kind of built it entirely on that principle. I just. I've interacted with engineers my entire life, because I am one. And there's definitely this prickly personality type that you interact with with some amount of frequency. There's sometimes a personality type that just hits you as the laziest person on the planet as well. That's just like, well, we can't. And then they throw some technical jargon your way about why you can't do a thing and sort of attempting, I think, to exploit the gap in, you know, knowledge around the technical details. It's just a horrible thing. And I thought, man, it'd be awesome if you could build a company that was a series of elite engineers that just had the opposite of that, that they were just like all the way to the top. They could just drive value over and over and over in a way that they were enjoyable to work with and not all the things that you normally see now. I mean, some of that I can't avoid when it. The personality type of engineers. There are some engineers that are quite good, intend to be very kind, but just their communication skills aren't very good. So some of that is just sort of Might be at the leadership level and less so, you know, on the ground, but. But we, we drive this home all the time. And I think in every organization, the more you can do that thing, the more successful you'll be by comparison to your competitors. I actually had a. I think I did a post on LinkedIn in the last week about this concept where I basically said, if you are an elite technician in whatever business, right. We've talked about the technique, the role of the technician, the role of the manager, how all these things work. If you are an elite technician and you also happen to not be a jerk, that puts you in a certain, at a certain level. If you are an elite technician and you are fantastic to work with, like go out of your way to help the customer. You have infinite patience. You know, all the things that you need to do. Like the. There's like such a tiny number of people that are that way.

[Matt Reynolds]

Sure.

[Chris Reynolds]

That you will never. You will always have market. You will always have market because, like, those two things don't exist very frequently. Not enough. There's a greater size of market that wants that than there is people to deliver it. And so, yep, one way for you to win a lot is just to drive those two things, right. Just, just be super, super good at what you do, high end of the technician spectrum and then be on the high end of the eq or the way that you relate to your customers and kind of value that you drive. Those two things cover also an enormous number of sins. Mistakes can be made. You can fumble the ball pretty bad and still recover out of those things because you've built up an enormous amount of trust, which is a conversation that we had a few weeks ago. And you've built a lot of goodwill. Yeah. With your customers.

[Matt Reynolds]

I think the same is true on the fitness side. If you're a coach, everybody kind of knows the coach that's great with people. And we also know the coaches that aren't. It's one of the big differences I see between public sector and private sector. So you'll see a lot of like Division 1 coaches or even pro athlete coaches who are maybe good coaches, but because the athlete has to do what the coach says, then they don't really have to worry about customer service. In the private sector, customer service is king. But you'll often see coaches who are excellent at customer service, but the technical skill is not there. They're not a very good coach. Whereas I think in your business, you're looking for the person who's the technical expert. And I Wouldn't say that's easy to come by, but it's expected. But you also sort of expect them to be kind of weird and socially awkward and they don't really know how to talk to people and whatever. When you have the combination of both, regardless of the industry you're in, of technical expertise so that they have, your client has the trust that you have the ability to get them where they want to go, like whatever that goal is. You coming back to Andrew's talk a couple weeks ago, you have the integrity to actually follow through with the stuff you say you're going to do. But ultimately they understand that you care like you deeply care about them. That's where the great separator lies, is in that combination. And over time, once the client understands that you have technical expertise and that you have high integrity, they trust you on the integrity piece. The thing that matters long term, as we talked about with Andrew, is really the do they care? Are they customer centric piece. It's not. The customer is always right. This sort of adage from the 50s or 60s or whatever. The customer isn't always right. But we focus on being customer centric to help them understand even if they're not right, we're going to take the time to walk through what are better options for them so that you are constantly focused on being customer centric. And then last thing, and I'll turn it back over to you, is that expertise takes time. Like it just. There's nothing you can do to become an expert strength coach or an expert developer without a couple decades under your belt. But you can be fantastic at customer service on day one. And so while you're trying, if you're a new business owner and you're trying to develop your technical skills, whatever that is and whatever industry that is, that you just have to understand that takes time. But what you can do to start separating yourself early on is being super customer friend focused or customer centric. And so I think that doesn't take a lot of time. And in a post Covid world, we've all seen this, that customer service has just been kicked in the nuts over the past five years. And what we would have never accepted in 2019 or early 2020, we now just sort of accept, like you go to restaurants and the restaurant is great and the food is great, but the service sucks. You're like, well, that's just the post Covid world that we live in. Well, to me, you can look at that, you can get frustrated and say like, well, that's you know, that sucks that the world is there. Or you can see it as an opportunity and say, I can separate myself in this spot and I can actually be customer focused and do everything I can for the customer. And obviously there's boundaries there. You don't want to go so far that you're like losing significant money or spending, you know, tens of hours of time on every customer. But it is a great separator for those who are maybe not as technically proficient at the skill set of the industry that you're in. That's the number one thing you can change to make sure that you build trust with your clients.

[Chris Reynolds]

A couple things to maybe help guide people as they're thinking about this. Especially if you're in a founder role and you've got all the power to make these kinds of choices, there are some hard ones that are out there and you've got to decide kind of which way you're going to go. One of the things that I think drives the highest, the deepest amount of relationship, which is ultimately driven in this case by trust with a customer, is when you do something that is not necessarily in your best short term interest, but it is in the interest of the customer and they know it. I'll give you a little story about this. My first company, which we talked about a couple times, called Bright Core, we grew this thing to be big enough to take it to private equity and do well. What launched it from, we had kind of a early SaaS quoting system for agents which is, you know, wasn't the market we decided to stay in. We stayed with those insurance companies, but we, we grew the product offering that we were going to build because the other one was not going to work in the way that we designed it. But in that process, there were a couple of relationships that changed the game for us. Changed the change the game. I mean like, no question. One particular customer of mine, whose name is Art Meadows and he, he has run multiple insurance, small insurance carriers across the United States, is extremely well known guy.

[Matt Reynolds]

He's, by the way, we should get Art on the podcast for sure because I, I've never talked to him. Art. And I've heard so many stories about Art from, from you, from Phil, from everybody.

[Chris Reynolds]

I'm on like three boards with the guy. So like I, I, I talk to him all the time. But so our, what really kicked off that relationship is that at one point or another we were negotiating a contract and he had paid for something that I think like three or four months down the line we actually added to the Product as a whole, unrelated to that. That deal. And so I called him up and I said, hey, listen, you paid. I don't. I can't remember what it was. 3, $500, $4,000 or something for this feature, but it turns out like we already have it, so we don't have any development that we need to do. I'm just going to send you the check back or I'm going to send you the money back. And he was like, what? I was like, yeah, I mean, we didn't, like, we're not going to do the work. And this was for contract base work, so like, I'll just send it back. That was the best $4,000 I've ever spent in my life.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yeah, right.

[Chris Reynolds]

Are you kidding me? You know what happened after that? That guy was on the. Was the head of almost every committee in the national conference. He became a stark raving fan of ours and went nowhere without talking about our company. And almost all of our word of mouth, which was almost all of our sales, came from that relationship and then the second order relationships that came afterwards. And it's an example of just, like, doing the right thing.

[Matt Reynolds]

Right.

[Chris Reynolds]

Just do the right thing. And sometimes it won't work out in your favor. Like, I don't want to. It's not rainbows and butterflies. Sometimes it won't. Right. It's okay, do it enough. And usually it will.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yep. Yeah. I would say long term, it will always work out in your favor. It's kind of. It's sort of like poker, where if you play the right hands the right way, there's some level of luck involved. But ultimately, if you play enough that it will end up in your favor.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah.

[Matt Reynolds]

So maybe the first time or two or three or whatever, maybe it doesn't play out in your favor. And so for us, are one of our core values from the beginning of the company has been we choose rightly, or what we believe is rightly based on the information we have at the time, like literally, morally rightly. What is the right decision to make? Whether it's good for us or not. And so whether it improves the bottom line or not, we're going to do right. A couple examples, even from this past week, I noticed that I had made a couple mistakes on programming for some of my clients in the.

[Chris Reynolds]

Fog, the.

[Matt Reynolds]

Fog of war, in what felt like I was in Forrest Gump mode, I'll just say for a few days, and in kind of a fog. And I noticed some mistakes I'd made on programming, and then there was like one lady that she trains every morning at 5am and when I got up, for some reason, she didn't have a program, and it was because I just was. My brain was all screwed up, and I said so. I ended up sending out what was an embarrassing message to everyone on Turnkey Coach to say, hey, I just want to let everybody know I've had. I've had carbon monoxide poisoning for the past four days. I'm coming out of it. I'll be okay. But if you see something that looks off with your programming, then, you know, please reach out to me. And I gave everybody my cell number, which I'm pretty protective over. If you see something that needs to be changed or you want me to look at, please do that. I had a call with a guy yesterday who's already a Turnkey Coach Coach client, and it was the first call I had taken in four days. And I told him. I gave him a quick overview of the story and said, hey, it was an audio call, not a zoom call. It's like zoom call. Even now struggling a little bit to, like, look at the camera and look at the screen, and my eyes are still kind of like darting everywhere. And so I said, hey, if you want. He had some questions about opening a new gym. And I said, hey, if you want to do a call, we'll do a call. And happy to do it. And so set up the call and then gave him a super quick overview of what I'd gone through the last few days. And he was so grateful that I did the call with him and still answered questions and was sharp enough to be able to answer the questions I didn't have. I basically just needed, like, auditory and speaking. I didn't have to have, like, sight and smell.

[Chris Reynolds]

It's a lot more.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a lot of. Lot more senses. So anywhere you can look to go above and beyond for the customer, especially if. And this is the key as well, I think, is especially if it doesn't take an enormous amount of additional resources and sometimes even if it does. Right. So for you, a $4,000 check was probably.

[Chris Reynolds]

It was a lot back then.

[Matt Reynolds]

There was a lot back then, right? There are times when you need to make that choice, even if the resources are high. But for us, we're constantly looking for places where if we can just make the connection and build the trust with people. I had another call last week before I poisoned myself with a lady who's wanting to test out Turnkey Coach the platform. And she is a sort of A counselor, life coach, but I think she's actually a licensed psychiatrist, psychologist, but we have to be careful with licensing piece there across state lines. And so I did a call with her and we, I just listened to her needs and after the call said I don't know if we're the best fit for you. And so I want you to chew on this for a couple days and if you want to continue the conversation, let's do but if we're not, I will actually do the work behind the scenes to find out who is the competitor that is the best one for you. That's another one that builds a tremendous amount of trust is like listen, this guy's not trying to get my money. He's not trying to sell me or close the deal right away. He actually cares about ultimately my need. And so for us again coming back even to a higher core value, our goal is to change as many people's lives for the positive by improving their quality of life. Whether that's the end user client or the coach or whatever. If that's not us on our platform then we will find the one that is. Yeah, if there's a competitor that's better than us for what you need, send them to the competitor. What you'll find is that that person will become a tremendous salesforce for you because we'll say hey, call Barbell Logic, call Matt Reynolds, call turnkey coach because they're not going to try to take your money, they're going to try to find the best f fit that's best for you. And so these are the tactical or practical sort of in the trenches examples of the things that you can do to make sure that your customer focused all the time. So last thing I'll turn it back over to you is that you know, we've gone through a pretty significant change over the past several years of being a hundred percent B2C. Well that's if you're 100% B2C it's pretty easy to be customer focused because you're trying to meet the needs of the customer to B2B SaaS platform which sort of keeps the customer a little more at distance. And so when we focus on still on providing the needs of the customer which has now turned from the end user client that is trying to change your life and fitness to the coach or to the coaching business and we still still focus on that thing, then what we end up with is incredibly happy, overwhelming, stark raving fans as we've talked about because they're like, look, they are as for me, as I am for me, my wife doesn't care as much as they do, my friends don't care as much as they do. But this company actually wants me to succeed even if it's not with their company.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah. And I mean, you know, you, I've ended up with partnerships out of that before that are very interesting. Right. So like sure, if you're actually different enough from someone that you are not the right fit for the customer, you're probably about the right distance from whoever you're sending them to to be good partners with that, with those people. You can send them deals, they can send you deals whenever it fits better and you know, the customer doesn't realize it. So just I think there's this thing, it's with all founders, I mean it's like you're going as hard as you can, you're going 90 to nothing all the time. And so like trying to get those deals, trying to get that cash through the door. Every, every startup in the world is cash poor. If you didn't take a ton of investment from somebody, you're trying to figure out like how do I navigate the cash situation? And so don't let that overwhelm your drive to do, you know, to build a good business like you need to, to build a good long term business you need lots of allies. And the way you build allies is with trust and long term relationships and long term thinking just in general, like all the things that you do, you should be thinking on a further time mark than almost everybody else is and drive your behavior based on that rather than any kind of short term need because the short term needs gonna ebb and flow. It's not gonna, you know, it very rarely will that be the game changing thing. Right. Like in the case of the $4,000 deal where we returned it, $4,000 meant a lot back then and we were cash poor at the time for sure. But it wasn't going to be the thing that made us successful or not successful. But it turns out what would make us successful or not successful was that very critical relationship. Do the right thing and you'll find that it makes a significant difference in your business.

[Matt Reynolds]

The last thing I was thinking about was that if you are a young company, not necessarily a young founder, not by age, but you've got limited resources, you're a relatively small company and you're trying to build, you have a tremendous advantage here to be able to be customer focused where bigger companies cannot be. And we can go all the way back and this is going to date myself a little bit and even maybe before you, is that there's, there's an infamous satire of what was originally a government sponsored phone company. Right? It was like it was Bell Labs or whatever, what? And they were just, they were dealt with them or you know, Comcast or some other. If you have a technology, a cable or an Internet or a phone or whatever, that is truly a monopoly in your area. They don't care about talking to the person. And likewise, if you're in a company that does have a significant number of competitors, you have the opportunity to talk to your clients. And talking to your clients, I've found, you know, for me, especially as the CEO, but even my team in general, when we're able to make actual human to human contact, you know, we've done all these podcasts on AI. AI can provide and automate so much of the skill set or the, the sops or the steps or the order of operations or whatever. But if you're honest with yourself, you understand that AI is a, is a non interested third party. It's just a computer. And if you can communicate authentically that you actually care about your client, then that is to me the big advantage you have over bigger companies. Because if they have 10,000 clients or a hundred thousand clients, they can't talk to them all. If you have scores of clients or a hundred clients or whatever, the thing is you can. And so as often as possible you gotta get em on the phone, you gotta get em on a zoom call. I like a zoom call as much as zoom calls sort of, you know, just suck the life out of me. Being able to see them face to face, have a conversation, make sure you communicate that you care, be authentic about those things. These are places where you can really optimize that customer focus where bigger companies cannot. And so you might look at another company that has 10 times the budget of what you have, but they cannot do the personal one on one relationship building and trust that you can do. And so that's the real place that you can make a difference as a smaller company. And so I think communicating with those customers not just via email or text, which I still think is good, certainly not automated, I think customers can still see through if they're receiving an automated email or text from AI, but if it's actually like hey, I'm talking to a human and then you get them on the phone, zoom call, phone call, whatever, that's the place that you can really reduce the gap between a small up and coming company and a Big company that has a big budget because they don't have the resources to talk to the 10,000 plus company customers that you have. And so practically what the takeaway would be here for me is that you should get as many customers on the phone as possible. You should talk to them, you should know them, you should know what they do, you should know what their, you know, what's their home life like, where do they live, how many kids do they have? Somebody like you, like, it's okay. Your, your wife's a stay at home mom, she works her butt off with the kids. Your kids are deeply involved in sports. You know, you've got kids that are in, you know, a football tournament or a baseball tournament, or Sylvie's in a cheer tournament or whatever. Asking them about those things and actually caring how it went is a great separator between you as a small business and somebody who is a much bigger business who can outspend you, which you cannot do, but you can out service them by being customer focused.

[Chris Reynolds]

Think about why that is. There's like a pretty good understanding, I think, around why you can beat them. And it's because it's not that a large company can't talk to all the people, it's that the people with power can't.

[Matt Reynolds]

Right?

[Chris Reynolds]

That's the problem.

[Matt Reynolds]

Right.

[Chris Reynolds]

And so you've got people, you know, when you talk to Comcast or you talk to, you know, it used to be AT&T back in the day, I guess AT&T is still around, but it's a different kind of a different animal these days. But when you talk to these large companies, you're talking to somebody so low on the totem pole that they have to do whatever they've been told to do. And they've been, they've been smacked around multiple times for going outside the playbook, right? So if what you need is something that's outside the playbook, they can't do it. And they know they can't do it. The situation with you as a founder in a company that is still small is that you have all the power and you can do whatever you want to do for those customers. And because of that, that is why the relationship is different. You can talk and you should like exactly what you're saying is, right, talk to your customers so that you can build empathy for their situation, whatever it is, whatever pain it is that you might be able to resolve for them and make things better. The difference between you and the big guys is that you can care about it and do something about it.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Reynolds]

You know, even in a situation where you're talking to like a senior vice president of a really large company, they can't make large changes without going to a committee. That's right, they got to go to a committee. They, oh, this is, you're outside of our tcp, our target customer profile. So, you know, sorry, we can't do this thing. Look, there's, there's reasons for that stuff too. They're in a different phase or you may be at that phase someday too. But for now, don't ever imagine that your size being small is holding you down. In reality, in the early days of a business, it is the thing that allows you to win. That's what it is.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yep, exactly. Last story here is that we tried to integrate into company health initiatives. Basically like the, a lot of big companies have, through their, through their medical insurance and HR departments have, if they get healthier, the health insurance drops, gets cheaper and the price, the price gets cheaper. And because I had really good connections with the network, I could often talk to the CEO or the COO or whatever and I would have this great conversation with them and they were like, this sounds awesome, let's do this. And then you discover the gatekeeper is actually the HR person who actually can decide yes or no for you. When you are the founder and you can decide, you have the power to decide and you see a person. We still do this all the time, even as a 10 year old company and a relatively mature company that, okay, this specific potential client may be expensive to acquire, maybe a loss in the long term, but the upside is so huge that if we make the contact, if we make the connection, if we have the phone call, if we do the thing, if we tweak little things here and there to make sure they understand we care about them, then they come over and the potential network effect is huge. That snowball is massive. Whereas when you talk to the big company, even if you talk to C suite level people and then you realize, well, the C suite is actually not the gatekeeper, then that's a big leg up for you. As a smaller company, if you don't have, if you talk to somebody and you love it, and then you have to send it to a gatekeeper who has to also love it to pull the trigger on the thing that is a disadvantage. And so that's a place where as a smaller company you can make a big impact. So the key here is this. Regardless of the industry, whether you were a service industry, which makes it totally obvious, or A product industry or a SaaS as a service, which is something in the middle. If you go back and look@tonyshe zappos.com who is selling shoes, retail shoes, you can still focus on service. Service is the great delineator between everyone else. And so even if the, you know, I could buy Nike shoes from Nike, I could buy Nike shoes from Zappos, I would buy them from Zappos. As an example, I used to buy shoes from Zappos all the time. Zappos had a similar program as Amazon prime and they would tell you that your shoe would be there in two days and then it would show up in one day.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

Under promise over deliver, care about your customers immediately send them email like, you know, when the thing gets delivered, this is a pure product company and they would send me, do you love your shoes? Is there anything we can do to improve? If you don't like your shoes or they're a half size off, you can send them back. Here's the code to print off and send the thing back and we'll send you it like all the way from a service company like coaching to a SaaS company like yourself or like Turnkey Coach to a pure product company. It's all about the customer. By the way, this is why Jeff Bezos is one, because from the very beginning he said it's all about the customers. Like we are going to do whatever we can to cut costs to make customers happy. And again, I'm not saying that everybody's listening to this, is a big Amazon fan and I certainly think they've done some things over the past, probably aren't great, but ultimately what they're doing is they're fighting on behalf of the customer to get the customer the best prices to get their product in the fastest time so that the customer feels like. And if you've ever had to return anything from Amazon, very simple, very easy. Here's the link. Print it out. UPS shows up at your door in the next day or two and as soon as they pick it up, it refunds back to your account. You can be customer focused across the board, regardless of the industry. And that is a great separator between you and even the massive companies like Amazon in the world. Amazon has done great because they are good at this. But most of you in your industry, if you look at the top three to five biggest businesses in your industry, are not good at it. And so they may have the technical experience, they may have the pricing power to beat you on pricing, but they can't likely beat you on being customer focused. And so customer focused is everything, regardless of the industry that you're in.

[Chris Reynolds]

Absolutely.

[Matt Reynolds]

Awesome. That's another episode of the Build your business podcast. If you've gotten value from this, please give us a five star review. I'm fine. You don't have to send me an email. I'll be okay. I'm 90% there. Congrats, sir, on the move to Florida. So big life changes across the board. We would love to get ahead at some point. I did the best I could to record to record them in the cabin. So thank you so much for listening. 5 star review on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you hear the podcast, share it with a friend or family member, somebody that can get value out of this. Have a great weekend and we'll see you guys next Friday.