← Business, Bourbon & Cigars
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I want to start today with something a little uncomfortable. You know, over the years, I've been in a lot of rooms with a lot of business owners and leaders, people running serious companies with a lot of revenue, and all the challenges that come, even with the best teams. And there's a conversation that happens in those rooms that almost never makes it to the public version of anyone's story. It's not the polished version, you know, it's what people actually say when they stop posturing, when they're trying to make themselves and their businesses or companies sound better than they are. Talking about things like, my company is growing internally, it feels completely chaotic, or I don't have the process as people think I do. And the one that I hear all the time is I feel like I'm guessing more than I'm leading. Now, here's the part of all this that should grab your attention the most. Those aren't confessions from struggling businesses. Those are confessions from growing ones. From leaders whose companies are expanding, whose revenue is moving in the right direction, who, from the outside, they look like they've got it all figured out. And the reason that I'm starting there is because there is a direct line between what leaders admit privately and what their clients experience silently. Clients aren't calling to tell you the experience is starting to slip. They just quietly start looking somewhere else. That's what this episode is about. Today, I'm going to walk you through what I call the client experience gap. The space between the experience you believe your organization is delivering and the experience your clients are actually having. It's one of the most expensive gaps in any growing business, and it almost always widens in silence before anyone inside your company even notices it. I'm going to show you why it opens up in the first place, why most leaders are the last to see it. And I'll give you a concrete framework, one we've used inside our own organization and seen work with leaders across multiple industries for identifying it, naming it precisely, and then starting to close it. By the end of this conversation, you're going to. You're going to think about client retention differently than you do right now. Not as a customer service issue, as a leadership issue. Welcome to business. Bourbon and cigars. I'm Scott Joseph. For over three decades, I've built and scaled companies. In that time, I'd made a lot of mistakes, some expensive, some flat out embarrassing. And I paid close attention to what caused the ones that cost the most. I've also spent years inside rooms with high level leaders listening to what actually breaks inside organizations that on paper look healthy. That work is what led me to Me Plus Ultra. It's a mastermind community built for business operators who want the honest version of these conversations, not the conference stage versions. What I'm sharing with you today comes directly from what I've seen inside those rooms. So let's dive in. So here's what we're going to cover. First, I'm going to paint you a very specific picture of how the client experience gap actually forms inside a growing business. I'm doing that because it never happens the way leaders think it does. Then I'm going to walk you through four things that need to be true inside your organization to start closing it. Not generic advice, specific operational moves. And I'm going to close with something that will make the whole thing stick. You know, a few years ago, I sat in a room with a group of leaders, owners and executives running companies ranging from mid size to well past the hundred million dollar mark. At some point in the conversation, the topic shifted from strategy to honesty. And what came out of the next hour was one of the most useful things that I've ever witnessed in a business setting. People started telling the truth. Not the version that they tell a client or an investor or a new hire. The brutally honest version. You know, I could remember one person saying, my company's growing, but internally it just feels chaotic. I've listened to another person. You know, I don't have the processes that people think I do. Someone else with a business that most people in that room would have envied. I'm afraid to make the wrong decision because everything is on the line. Don't you think about that. Talk about brutal honesty. None of these were weak operators. Every single person in that room had something real. They built something big. What they were describing wasn't failure. It was the friction that shows up when a business outgrows the systems it was built on. It's almost a universal experience. At a certain stage of growth, the company moves faster than the infrastructure beneath it. And that's when cracks start forming in places that leaders can't see from where they're standing. And here's what I've noticed about those cracks. They don't show up first in your financials. They show up first in your client experience. Think about a restaurant, you know, that starts strong, great food, attentive service, the host knows the regulars by name. Word starts spreading, the place gets busier. So now you got to start turning the tables faster and the kitchen's adding staff. The Original chef is now managing instead of cooking. And the host is overwhelmed and stops having the time for those personal touches that made people feel like regulars. None of this broke overnight. Nobody made bad decisions. You know, there was not a bad decision that was made. The food's still good, but something shifted quietly. And the experience the new customers are getting is not what built the restaurant's reputation in the first place. That's the client experience gap. It doesn't open because your team stopped caring. It opens because the company change. Things got more complex and the standard that used to hold got thinner. Not all at once, but it happened in small, repeatable moments that eventually add up to something your clients feel long before they put it into words. And the dangerous part, the part that makes this so expensive, is that by the time a client tells you their experience has slipped, they've already been thinking about leaving for a while. Most clients don't complain. They just don't come back. So what do you actually do about it? I'm going to give you four things that need to be in place, not in theory, operationally, inside your business. The first is this. You have to name the gap before you can close it. This sounds obvious until you try to do it. You know, most leaders, when they think about their client experience, thinking about their intentions, the experience they're trying to deliver, right, the standard they've communicated to the team, the values on the company website, that's not the gap. The gap lives in specific, repeatable moments where what you intend to happen doesn't match what, what actually happens under real operating conditions. Handoffs between departments where context in the background information get lost. Response times that start slowing down when the team is under a lot of pressure, the follow up stuff that happens inconsistently depending on who's handling the account, onboarding, that's excellent when leadership is watching and average at best when it's not. Those moments, they're not random, they're patterns. And patterns are diagnosable, but only if you're willing to look at them without defending them. The client experience gap isn't a customer service problem. It's a leadership problem dressed up to look like one. The first step is to stop asking, are clients happy? You need to start asking, where specifically does our experience break down under normal operating conditions? Those are not the same questions. One invites reassurance, the other invites honesty. Right now you're juggling every decision, putting out fires and trying to grow your business on your own. Every day feels like a grind. And no matter how hard you push the breakthrough you've been chasing seems like it's just out of reach. You don't have the right perspective or maybe the network to see the opportunities waiting for you. The Business Bourbon and Cigars Leadership Retreat is your chance to change that. Imagine being in a room with entrepreneurs who have already overcome the challenges you're facing. Leaders who have scaled, innovated and found the clarity you're searching for. Through our Mastermind style sessions, you're going to gain actionable strategies and the opportunity to connect with active Me plus Ultra members. These aren't just networking contacts. They are entrepreneurs who think strategically, spot opportunity quickly and and can provide insights that accelerate your growth. This experience allows you to see firsthand how high level leaders solve problems, create momentum and unlock opportunities. So you can leave the retreat not just with a plan, but with a network that expands your possibilities faster than you ever thought possible. The first five people to apply at me+ultra.com BBC50 is going to receive 50% off their ticket. Don't wait. Secure your spot now and step into a space where real business breakthroughs happen. So the second thing. A real standard has to be observable, teachable and inspectable. A lot of organizations have experienced standards that are actually just aspirations. You know, we respond to clients quickly. Our team communicates proactively. Those aren't standards, those are intentions. And you cannot hold a team accountable to an intention. A real standard can be observed. It can be taught to a new hire on day three and it can be inspected. Meaning someone inside your organization can look at a situation and answer clearly, did we meet the standard? Yes or no? Here's the operational version of that same language. Instead of we respond quickly, it becomes every client inquiry gets a response from a named owner within two business hours. See how much more specific that is. Instead of we communicate proactively, it becomes every client receives a written summary of next steps within 24 hours after any meeting. That's the difference between a value and a standard. Values describe who you want to be, and usually only when you're at your best. Standards describe what must be true, and only one of those two things holds when the team is under pressure. The third thing? This is where most organizations fall apart. You have to identify the earliest signal of drift, not the moment of failure. Client experience standards don't fail dramatically. They erode gradually. By the time a client leaves, the drift has been happening for months, maybe longer. The question isn't how do we fix this when it breaks? The question is, what's the earliest visible sign that the standard Is beginning to soften. I want you to think about how a pilot reads instruments. You know, the value isn't in the warning light that's already late. The value is in monitoring the indicators that precede the warning. You know, altitude, airspeed, fuel pressure. Each one tells you where things are heading before they become critical. The pilots who catch problems early aren't more talented than the ones who don't. They're just watching different things. So let me ask you, what are your indicators? Not the client complaint. That's the warning light. What happens in the weeks before a client complaint that you know, if you had caught it early, would let you course correct before the experience fully broke? That's the signal in most organizations. They don't have a name for it, which means they can't watch it. Or at least I should say watch for it. The fourth thing, standards only survive scale when ownership is assigned to a specific person. Not a team, not a department, not leadership in general. This is where I've watched well run organizations quietly lose ground. The standard exists, you know, people believe in it, and it holds. When the company is small enough that everyone knows what everyone else is doing, that's easy. Then the company starts growing, right? And those teams start expanding in. And with that, responsibility shift and the standard that used to hold starts to belong to everyone, which functionally means it belongs to no one. A standard without an owner is just good intention waiting to fail. When the leaders in our group fail, work through these situations, the question we always come back to is simple. If you stepped away from your business for 90 days, where would the standard slip first? Whatever you just thought of, that's the gap. And the reason it would slip is because it's depending on your presence rather than on a system and an owner. The goal isn't to have you watching. The goal is to have a person, a process, and an inspection point that keep the standard running whether you're in the building or not. So let me pull this together. The leaders in that room I told you about, the ones who admitted their companies felt chaotic internally, who said they were guessing more than they were leading. They weren't bad operators. Most of them had great intentions, strong teams, and genuine care for their clients. What they hadn't done was build the structure between their intentions and the client's actual experience. And that structure is what keeps the two things aligned as a company grows. The client experience gap is not a problem that shows up on a revenue report until it's already done significant damage. You don't want to wait for that. It shows up first in the conversation you know, a client has with their team, maybe on the drive home after meeting with you. It shows up in the email they almost didn't send, in the referral they decided not to make in the renewal conversation. That should have been easy and wasn't. You close the gap the same way you close any gap in business. You stop being vague about it. Name the specific moment you know where things are breaking down. Put a person's name on owning it, and build a way to check that it's holding. Because if no one's checking, it isn't holding. Your competitors aren't taking your clients. Your own growing pains are handing them over. That's the honest version of the client retention conversation. And it starts, you know, with being willing to look at the gap before I let you go. If today's episode hit close to home, if some part of what I described sounds like something happening inside your business right now, I want you to know there's a room where that conversation gets worked through at a different level. The Business Bourbon and Cigars Leadership Retreat is where operators like you step away from the daily demands of running a business and get honest about what's actually happening inside their organizations. No stage presentations, no polished highlight reels. A room of high level leaders who are willing to pressure test each other's thinking and help each other see the gaps that are hardest to spot from the inside. If this episode resonated with you, there's a good chance this is exactly the room you need to be in. Visit me/Ultra.com BBC50 to claim 50% off your ticket. Spaces are limited and they fill up for a reason. Hope to see you there and thank you for being here. I'm Scott Joseph. This is Business Bourbon and Cigars until next time. Cheers everyone. Sam.