Business Unscripted - Triumph Business Solutions
Welcome to Business Unscripted, the podcast where real business conversations happen. Hosted by Dave Worden, founder of Triumph Business Solutions, this podcast dives into the raw, unfiltered realities of running and growing a business. Each episode explores the struggles, strategies, and accountability moments that shape the journey of entrepreneurs and business owners.
With a mix of solo episodes, co-host partners, and guest appearances from other business owners, Business Unscripted offers diverse perspectives and actionable insights. Whether you're navigating challenges, seeking strategies, or just looking for honest conversations about business, this podcast has something for you.
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Business Unscripted - Triumph Business Solutions
Who's Representing Your Business When You're Not Looking?
A simple U-Haul rental becomes a cautionary tale about customer service when Dave shares his nightmare experience with disengaged employees who left him stranded with a dead car battery. This seemingly small incident launches a deep exploration of how frontline customer experiences can destroy even well-established businesses.
The conversation uncovers the hidden costs of poor service at every level. Duarne and Dave break down exactly how much money businesses lose when they fail to monitor the quality of customer interactions, with Warren sharing his own wake-up call after discovering his sales team had become so lazy they were simply directing potential clients to "send an email" instead of following the established discovery call process.
Beyond diagnosing the problem, the hosts offer practical solutions that business owners can implement immediately. They discuss the ideal profit margins businesses should target (50-70% for products, 80-90% for services) to support quality service, how to create meaningful check-in systems with clients, and why negotiating scope instead of price preserves your business value. As the second half of the year begins, they explain why now is the perfect time to reforecast your business and adjust your customer experience strategy.
Most powerfully, the episode challenges the common assumption that employees will care about your business as much as you do. Instead of being disappointed when they don't, the hosts argue for creating robust systems that ensure great customer experiences regardless of who's delivering them. From regular quality checks to proper training and incentives, they outline exactly how to maintain your standard of excellence even when you're not in the room.
Ready to transform your business's customer experience? Check out our revamped Triumph Mastermind program with daily Q&A sessions and weekly strategy calls. Founding members get special lifetime pricing!
What's up? What's up all of our Business Unscripted family. It's Dave Worden here, host of the Business Unscripted podcast, and, as always, well, most of the time I'm here with my business partner and my co-host here, dwarren Bernhagen. Dwarren, I hope you're doing great, but if you're here and you're watching, you know we're going to talk about business topics, things that we've seen, experienced not only in our businesses, our lives, but in our day-to-day, and how you, as business owners, can level up and make the most of every opportunity that you have in front of me. But, warren, before we kind of jump into it, you know, obviously you weren't here last week because you had some exciting and amazing things going on in life. So fill me in, fill us in. How is little baby doing?
Duarne:Yeah, we welcomed Monday before last little baby, anastasia Dawn, to the family. She was doing great. She is still doing great. She's at home with mom, got home late last week so of course I decided to take the Friday off last week to be there and help out with mom and baby. So we've got a great support network of family around which is helping still. But it's just incredibly cool to have another little baby in the house. For those who are not aware, like, my other daughter was born a year ago, three days ago. So it's now one year three days. So we just celebrated her one year birthday and she's also at the point now where she's walking and biting and teething and all those other wonderful things and talking. So you know, know, it's super exciting. Lots of little babies in the house, lots of baby formula, lots of nappies um, somehow I managed to get out of changing nappies a lot still, I don't know if that's a good thing I should be saying on camera, but you know what?
Dave:it's great it is what it is right it is.
Duarne:It is Like you know. Look, my wife is telling me tonight over dinner she feels like she's working a call center US account again where she's up all night looking after baby. And, for those who are not aware, newborn babies have probably the size of a walnut is the size of their stomach, which is why they feed so often and pretty much feed and then poop straight away afterwards, so they can't retain a lot of that. But uh, good thing is first. Checkup of the baby was a couple of days ago. Everything's going well. She's already gained half a kilo, um, so that's fantastic love it.
Dave:It Well. Congratulations. I definitely know what it's like to have two babies in diapers at the same time. My two oldest are 10 months apart. Yeah, I see.
Duarne:You know what I'm talking about.
Dave:Irish twins is what they call them right.
Duarne:That's it. It's exciting times.
Dave:So are you all done then? Oh, yeah, yeah.
Duarne:Well, funny story, I go down to talk to Paige's doctor, who was actually the one who did the operation for the cesarean. So three cesareans my wife's had to have for our three children. And whilst we were having that that happen, the doctor decided to show me photos of the operation and say so, no more children. Okay, because her uterus wall is paper thin now so you need to let that heal up for a while. But yeah, just no more babies. Okay, make um, it's not, it's not the, it's not the right time. And I said we, we've already decided on threes. Enough, so we're good and she's good. So, even to the point, my wife went and posted on facebook because her doctor was nagging her to go and put up because she wanted to share the um post of our daughter, um, so she's put it up on facebook. About three days ago, doctor's comment on there was remember, no more babies after this you committed to it.
Dave:You're sticking to it. No more babies got it.
Duarne:Yeah, it's like the doctor says no wife and I are happy.
Dave:She better not be telling me that she's pregnant again well that's.
Duarne:I think I have some responsibility in that too, so I got to be a little bit on top of that one too.
Dave:Love it, love it, love it.
Duarne:Well, all right.
Dave:Well, we're not here to talk about babies as much as we all enjoy them, I'm sure. But so I wanted to share. You know, when I was initially kind of thinking through you know if you're talking pre-show, I wanted to share. So you know you're talking pre-show. I wanted to share. So yesterday and I'm a little more relaxed today as I'm in the middle of moving, and so this is actually the last time I'll probably be doing this from from this location here in my office but and I wanted to share an experience that reminded me how important customer services no matter when it's you doing it as a business owner or if you have employees doing it how important it is to really kind of check up on your employees and customer service. So I, I read a U-Haul and obviously you know everything goes fine throughout the day, other than they didn't put in right.
Dave:When I, when I pick up the u-haul, I guess this is actually another customer experience, because I, literally the guy is like completely checked out first thing in the morning. I get it right, but I go in hey, I'm here to pick up a u-haul, I got a reservation at 9 00 am. They're just, they're just opening up. He's literally looking at his phone and he's talking, like literally staring at his phone, and he goes, give me your license. And so I get the. Okay, give him my license. He's staring at his phone, he goes to his computer, long story short, hands me the key I'm supposed to have like dolly and all this stuff that you know. He's like, okay, here, you're all set.
Dave:And I go and okay, like back to truck, out, like I'm like okay, it's a big old 26 foot, you know u-haul, and just says, okay, you're ready to go, doesn't walk around the truck with me, doesn't tell me, like, what the fuel gauge is or any of that, so that that started the day. But then I get home, after driving right now they charge you a dollar per mile. So after driving about eight miles home, I open up, get ready to go. There's no dollars which are supposed to be in the truck. I call him up and he goes oh man, you're supposed to grab those from the from right by the front door, like you know. I'm like no bro, how am I supposed to know that? How many times do I rent a U-Haul? Oh, my gosh, yeah.
Duarne:I'm moving every other week.
Dave:That's totally my bad, my bad, my bad, I'm supposed to know that right. Well, I'll just put it out front and you can come grab it. I'm like with the U-Haul that you're going to charge me another $8, like $1 per mile to grab Baron back. So another $16 to get a $10 dolly that I may or may not possibly need.
Dave:I'm like dude, just take it off my account. So that was the first one where he's just like he completely blamed me for not knowing. So now I go back to return it and it's it's about 8, 50, um, and they close at night. No, I was supposed to return it like 1 am overnight, like, because I didn't know when I was going to get everything done, because it was pretty much just me moving, and then you know if I'd say it was helping me a little bit, but it was just me, yeah. So I returned it early and, mind you, I'm walking up and this, this dude, the totally different guy working this, this gas station, new hall station, sees me walking up, goes to turn off the open sign and goes to lock the door.
Dave:What, yeah, like. Goes to lock the door and what, yeah, like goes to lock the door and I'm like dude, I go to pull it and I can see him. He rolls his eyes as I open the door and I'm like, dude, I just want to return this U-Haul. He goes oh fine, give me the key. So he gets the key, turns around, he's like don't get it in the morning. I'm like do you need anything from me Do you want to go look at it? He's like don't do it in the morning, like okay, so he takes the key, I turn around, I walk out, I go to my car. My car doesn't start, my battery's dead because there's an electrical thing on my battery where the brake lights will stay on if I don't like untap the brake pedal all the way sometimes.
Duarne:And I didn't.
Dave:They were on because I didn't walk to the front car to go to the truck, not around the back.
Duarne:Yeah, so my car's completely dead, oh shoot.
Dave:I get out of my car. I see this employee. He pulls by me. I said dude, can you give me a jump? My car's dead. He said no, can't do it, my car pulls off, so he just leaves me in his parking lot, yeah, with a dead car, like and his car is like a chevy, so like I know that he can jump me like yeah yeah so he just he's in such a hurry and it's 8 55 now, so it's still five minutes before they're supposed to close, and so he's already in his car pulling away.
Dave:So I mean, the lesson of the story here is like your employees give, so I'm never gonna rent the u-haul from this place ever again and this is a gas station, right, so you could have potentially bought gas through the station as well at some point.
Dave:Wow, it's just like you're, like that is just that experience just rubs you the wrong way, right, because you have the moment I guess this relates to life in general like you have every single opportunity to decide what's more important, like helping somebody out or getting to you know, maybe at a hot date, I guess maybe I don't know but to say to lie and say, yep, you can't, like I can't jump you for my car, for whatever reason, I don't know what the hell that means.
Dave:Like why, why wouldn't you be able to jump? Everybody could jump um, and then two just like speed off and not try to figure out a solution for a customer of yours. Like I couldn't imagine ever doing it, you know. And so it just really rubbed me the wrong way. Now, luckily, like 10 minutes after that, somebody else came back to return to u-haul um as well and they were able to jump me and I was able to get on my way. But like that customer service experience just kind of reiterated to me, you know how important it is to like check up on the people who are really the face of your company. So if you rely on other people to deliver service for you or you rely on other people to sales you know make the sales calls for you you as the owner should have some sort of processes in place to check up on them, whether it's every so often they record a call every so often.
Duarne:you check in on the quality of the customer service that is being provided under your name. Well, I've got a couple of things I want to say about this. We've all had these bad customer experiences. That's pretty incredible Two different staff, same place Sounds like there's a cultural problem within that organizational business. Um, my question is this, right, um, in that situation, do you go and give u-haul the bad review online or do you review the gas station? Do you review both of them? You know, because how else do you get feedback to the owner of the gas station? I don't know how U-Haul works there, but I'm pretty sure back in Australia the way U-Haul works is they rent the space. They pay a commission for all the rentals to the actual gas station owners, so they actually have a privilege to be able to earn money by having those the equipment there.
Dave:so yeah, I think that's the same way.
Duarne:It might be the same way, yeah so I mean like so realistically, I mean the u-haul, the whole branding of u-haul, is being dragged down at this point because of the actions of one bad affiliate, commission-based partner, right, and that partner obviously has a huge problem with their staffing because they've got multiple staff, two staff, two different shifts, who both have bad attitudes and are not customer-focused. Now, retail, I'm not saying the customer is always right, because that's not always the case at all, but what I am saying is that you do have a level of customer satisfaction, a customer care that you want to offer for the customer service that you provide, and if you don't have good customer service, then that's horrible. We had a situation in the hospital just the other week where we had a resident doctor decide to carry on like a loose cannon and just starts, you know, calling things out. You can't do this, you can't do that, you can't do without asking questions, and I had to ask him to leave the room, um, and when he came and I told him to come back with an actual doctor who's actually, you know, that he reports to, and he came back and we spoke about it with that doctor and one thing I made a comment of was you have no bedside manner, you have no customer care. Your, your empathy is at an all-time low there.
Duarne:You know, if I could review the hospital right now, I'd be rating it zero stars because of you and your actions. So I totally get how one experience can cause that. And in this day and age, I mean, how easy is it to go on to social media and just hit that, go on to Facebook, record a little video and go hey look. So here I am right now at this gas station, dead battery, kind of sucks. Just returned this vehicle. This guy peels out of here five minutes before closing time and decides to tell me not, can't you help you with a, you know, jump start your car. I mean, this is a gas station, a garage, isn't that what you do?
Dave:we help I mean for sure, and I get that. But I guess on the flip side of that like and I would have, I guess, play the other side of it too, where you know a lot of these places are small mom and pop places like there's, like you and I, and here's the other thing that I think a lot of the customers need to understand too which is where I'm coming from as well is that, like, just one one bad experience like doesn't warrant necessarily you trying to destroy that company's reputation of course not I, I think like it has to come with some sort of like great assault.
Dave:Like you know, maybe the guy was having a bad day, maybe, but it's that's where I talk about. Like us as owners, it's our responsibility to understand what's going on and if you let it go, yeah I asked you this.
Duarne:You and I may feel that way, but in an event where you've got a gas station, you don't have a clue who the owner is, you've got no way of finding out who that owner is, and you're stuck there, pissed off at nine o'clock at night in a car park with a car that won't start and this guy's just gotten done this to you. I mean, how many people in your position would take the high road and do what you did, versus jump on social media and start ranting. I mean, that's the reality. That's the world we're living in right now as well. People can put out very, very quickly a bad experience. They're not gonna. If that guy had said, look, I'm gonna stop, you're probably not gonna sit there and jump online and go look, look, great experience just had here. It's not going to happen. Most people won't do that. But if it's a bad experience, they'll jump on and try and tell people about it, trying to warn them of the bad experience, and I get that. But there's a nice way to do it and there's a not nice way to do it.
Duarne:But as business owner, you're 100 right. You are you. You have these people that you've hired. You've trusted them to be the face of your business and if they go and do something untoward to a customer, if they treat them the wrong way, if they, you know, say something or act in a way that doesn't make that customer feel good or special, then that customer may tell 10 other people when that name, when your name, comes up oh, you know, these guys over here. No, I'm not using them. I had a bad experience. I don't recommend using them. Use someone else. Oh, okay, when there's a post in the community, post on facebook, and people saying, hey guys, I'm looking for somewhere I can hire a truck, where do you recommend? Well, don't go to u-haul over here. These guys treat you like crap. I mean, these are the sort of things that you're going to expect to see, because people feel they're doing good by warning other people against bad experiences that they've had personally.
Dave:Yeah, I don't have a problem with that. I just feel like, you know, I heard, I remember where I saw I think it's all from one of my buddies who's a business owner as well. But I heard, I don't remember where I saw it. I think I saw it from one of my buddies who's a business owner as well, but you know, he shared a post or maybe it was like an image post that said you know?
Dave:so many people are so quick to destroy a local business in terms of reputation, but yet people will continually go back to Walmart or McDonald's or Taco Bell, even though how many times that they've ruined their order or you, you know, had a missing item, etc. You know, so many people give so much benefit of the doubt to the big companies, but when it's a small mom and pop who's trying to do everything, people, people, one bad experience and they're like, oh, I'm not going back to that mom and pop, but they'll go back to walmart, you know, 14 times in a row, even though you know they it's wal. I totally get you.
Duarne:And then I totally get that, but what you're also looking at is there's a. I totally feel that there's not enough leeway for businesses For me.
Duarne:I try and talk to the business when I have a problem, makes it really hard, though, and the guy peels out of there and doesn't, and he's not there to talk to, and it's like eight miles the next day to go and talk to them again when you get the reality where you're getting told well, you know you were meant to remember to pick up your dolly, even though I didn't tell you, because I was too busy on my cell phone. And look, I get. People have bad days. But none of this changes the fact that these are people who have been put in charge of customer experience at the front end, and if it's happening at a gas station with two different staff, that's not an isolated incident. Well, and it could be also the training.
Dave:That's where, also like the training, the customer service, as the owner, like, are you just throwing these people in? And again, I this is this is in general, I'm not talking about what this absolutely is but like you have to have training in place, you have to have, like you know, follow up. You know, it's one of those things you know. So many people don't need to be taught new things, they just need to be reminded. And, and that's the thing, like, whether you're a business owner, an employee, like you just have a lot of people have to be reminded.
Dave:We all have put yourself right in that employee's shoes and realize that, like they have a lot of things going on, just like we do. But the problem is and this is a fault of my own as well you know a lot of things going on, just like we do. But the problem is and this is a fault of my own as well you know, a lot of times, no matter what we have going on, how much we expect everybody else to just do what we want, without reminding them of what needs to be done, and so that's why I feel like it's definitely important to remind people way more than it is to educate or tell them the first time I totally agree and I think this is why, if you're going to incentivize staff, one thing that you should be doing is incentivizing around positive feedback for customer interactions and service.
Duarne:I mean, it's one of the things that motivates and drives Like in Australia we don't have the tipping service right Like you guys have tipping over there and from what I understand, it's a little out of hand at times, like how much expectation there is around how much you should be tipping when you get a meal or a drink or whatever. That may be right in the um hospitality industry oh my, it's becoming.
Dave:It's becoming like everywhere, like even when you're self-serving and you're going to check out, it says would you like to add a tip? It's just crazy.
Duarne:Yeah, sure, I'm just going to give myself a tip for packing my own bags.
Dave:Yeah, the person literally just paid. I handed my money to them. It's like oh, would you like to add a tip today? I feel like, Like you said, tipping is becoming out of control in terms of what the expectation is.
Duarne:Yeah, I've heard that in the US, here in the Philippines it's considered some businesses will charge service tax and that gets divvied up and paid out as effectively as an alternative to tips in the Philippines. But the other thing you do is you have physical tipping. So we tipped this evening. It was probably about 50 cents for a 20 dollar meal. So that's and you know that that's actually still reasonable because that's a trip home for somebody. They can pay for their transport home with that because the you know the economy value again, like again.
Dave:We say this every time, like we talk money for dwarven too, and just as a caveat like 50 cents for you is like maybe five to $10 over here.
Duarne:You know, you. I mean, you think about this how much does it cost you for you to get a bus home? Right, that's the sort of value, that's the value that we've just tipped today for that particular meal, right? So I mean, and that's the, that is the caveat and that is the difference. But I mean, at the end of the day there's no pressure. It's like tip what you want, but if I get bad experience, do you think I'm going to tip? No, but there's an expectation that, regardless of the experience you get, that what I'm seeing in the US a lot through friends and media is that you should tip anyway. And I think that's the problem when you start looking at a customer service related roles, like the gas station guys, maybe they don't get many people tipping them for anything, so there's no reward for doing good. Maybe their training doesn't go through and rehash. That I know personally.
Duarne:I've had my sales team here in the locally in the Philippines. They were dealing with customers and I expected and trained them in a certain method of communication and I remember going through and reviewing on Facebook messages one time we were getting inbound messages and then we weren't converting into sales. So I went out to look and I was looking at the messages and at some point point my sales guy had become so lazy he was just going oh, send me an email with what you want. Here's the email. And I was like, holy cow, not. Hey, how can I help you? Do you know when's a good time for me to call you? What number should I call you on? Or should I just call you here on messenger, which is what our normal protocol was? Let's have that first discovery conversation, discovery call. He'd gone and just like, oh, just send me an email. And I'm looking. It's like, oh my gosh, I've gone and reviewed and he'd done it about 20 times over a period of a couple of months.
Duarne:And I'm like well, that explains why we're not getting any throughput. We're spending money and effort, marketing and getting these leads coming through, thinking that we're doing the right thing in one department, only to find out the person, the customer, ruined the experience, 100 ruined it. And I was like, wow, isn't that crazy? And that's a reality. Call as a business owner, because you think about cost of acquisition of a new customer and we see it all the time, we hear it all the time from when you and it can cost 20, 30, a hundred $200 to get a client, sometimes depending on what sort of business you're in. And if you're a big ticket item, that's really painful. If you're a small ticket item like, let's say, you're, you know, a higher company hiring out cars, bins, trailers, whatever that might be then you might have a lower acquisition cost for customer. It might be three to five dollars. But can you afford to lose every second customer because of bad customer experience?
Dave:well, and there is also a differentiation between, you know, obviously, cost per lead versus cost for customer right, and I think you as a business owner should be paying attention to those two costs combined with what is the lifetime value of a client, because those are going to, you know, kind of give you the insights of where you need to be spending your marketing dollars.
Dave:So if you just look at cost per lead, you know, and it's $3, you may think, oh great, let's just keep going. But what you don't realize especially let's just use your example here of a trailer company. Let's say they rent out a trailer and let's just say it's $50 or $75 a day, 50 bucks or $75 a day. So they're paying, you know, three to $5 per lead, but they only are closing because their sales team sucks One out of 20 leads, right? So they only have a 5% close rate. Okay, so if they have a 5% close rate, you don't have to add up that cost per lead by five. So if they're, you know, if they're paying, you know $5 per lead, then their exit, their cost per customer is actually $25, right, not five, which is what they may be looking at Right.
Dave:And then. So now that $25 goes into that $75 daily rate, so now you're only making $50 after bringing in that new customer and then if you have other costs like fuel and delivery, right, that's maybe 40. Now you're going to make $10 on that daily rental per customer, where before, like if you could get it down to actually $5 per cost of lead, you would make a lot more. And so this is why, understanding cost per lead, cost per customer, customer acquisition costs, and then what's that lifetime value Like how often do they come back? You know, how many times do they purchase from you throughout a year? How long are they typically kind of, you know, with you as a customer, whether it's a year, 18 months, whatever it may be, and then multiply that out. The ratio that you're looking for is you're looking for a ratio of about three to one customer lifetime value to customer acquisition costs.
Dave:three to one or greater. Um, so if you spend a hundred dollars to bring in a new customer, you want to at least have that customer be worth three to five hundred dollars. Gross profit, right, not not just gross revenue. Look at gross profit. That's the ultimate goal of your ratio there. So you know gross revenue minus cost of delivering that product, and then that gross profit needs to be at least three times greater of the acquisition costs.
Duarne:See, and that's an interesting point, isn't it? Because when you start looking at products, some people, when we start working on our product price, we go, look, we're going to make 20% on that, oh, that's great, we're making 20% profit. We fail to look at the cost of acquisition. We fail to look at things like what's the potential. Or we go well, we're paying $3 an ad, but that's getting us 20 inbound leads, and of those we close two.
Duarne:And if you've got a customer experience which is very, very poor at the beginning of that and that loses you that experience very, very poor at the beginning of that and that loses you experience. Or maybe it's worse, maybe they've signed up and started doing business with you and then they get a bad customer experience and then they stop being a customer, so they go from being a recurring monthly customer or a return customer and no longer interested in doing business with you at all. I mean, that's a huge cost to your business again too, because you're getting such a huge drop off, not to mention each one of those people you lose from a bad customer experience is one more chance for reputational damage in the future.
Dave:Right. And this is where I feel like it's important Not feel like I know it's important for for business owners to be regularly following up in terms of their clients Right and giving surveys or asking like how things are going. To be regularly following up in terms of their clients right and giving surveys or asking like how things are going and, you know, having that sort of regular interval set up where you know email can just go out, you know create a survey and then you know you have a automation that sends the survey out after you know, let's say, 60 days and then, uh, you know, 120 days and then 180 days and then you can manage right and start seeing and tracking that data to see like where are people having the biggest issues in your business.
Duarne:And if you can't track the data and you can't track the outcome, you can't manage it right, you can't properly actually manage that information and that stuff you know, one of the the best examples that I've witnessed was actually with a car dealership back in australia and they were one of the largest car dealerships in the region that they operated in, looked after about I don't know six brands of vehicles back there in Australia and they were selling huge numbers of cars all the time. Big service center had five locations across the area and I remember sitting there talking to them one time and they were explaining because we're talking about it there I bought a car from them previously so I'd witnessed first hand how the experience was. But then I was also working with the company where we were providing um I think I'm not sure what it was website or phone system, I can't recall what it was opportunities to them and what they were explaining to me was their process and they had this huge process. They'd go through after us for an after sales support and that process would be following up with phone calls, physical letters, emails, smss. There was this whole technique they'd use over a period of a couple of months where they would check in with you and they'd get the experience and they'd find out what were the things you liked service center as well to make sure, because they knew that they weren't gonna make huge money on the sale of the vehicle but the aftermarket service, the servicing industry, was a big part of their business and they were yet a customer who might buy a brand new car and then service with them for the next five to ten years. Um, if they looked after them and they couldn't rely on the scare of you avoid your warranty if you don't bring it back to us because there's other dealerships for that brand who could have serviced the vehicle under the warranty based on australian legislation. So they had to make sure they had really good customer service.
Duarne:And I remember sitting there one time saying um, you know why do you go to so much effort? There's so much work, you must have so many people doing all of the follow-ups and the sit-downs and they're like well, it's worth it. We get so much return business, it is so worth it. And then I go look at other small business owners and I'm thinking that's a lot of work for our small business owners to be able to do that sort of level of work.
Duarne:You know, unless you're doing something like you're referring to an automation system where you can automate it, or maybe there's a call, maybe you sit down at your desk and you're a business owner. You call five customers each week in a one, two hour period that you block off and you spend five to 15 minutes on the call with them, just having a chat, seeing how things are going, seeing how things are working. Surprisingly, a phone call is still one of the most effective ways to communicate with people in a busy world and people feel connected and it just connects so much better than what an email ever will.
Dave:I agree, and it's that personal touch. I believe it is. Yeah.
Duarne:I would actually challenge business owners if you have one more thing on that, sorry if you have a team who regularly deal with your customers, challenge them and ask them the question when was the last time you got on a call and just called one of your customers just to ask them how they're doing, ask them how business is, how they enjoying using your product or service? Do they have any concerns? Most people that I've asked that you know that I've done that with in teams. They've come back to me and go well, no, they've signed up. I never talked to them again. I just hope that everything's okay. It's a fairly standard response.
Duarne:So I would challenge business owners to do that. You know, if you've got a client who's paying monthly recurring, get on and have a chat to them, because you might find that they might be looking elsewhere because of whatever reason, or they might have a problem, but just don't know how to ask the question or are waiting for somebody to ask them if everything's okay. And if you get a competitor, call them while they've got a what and tell them that that problem is solvable if they come to them. Well, you might lose them over something as simple as and so many people are going to be like well, I've done that.
Dave:They should just be reaching out to me. It's like no, you have. You, as a business owner, have to take the initiative. You have to be pushing things forward, not only for yourself and the business and internally, but, you know, with your customers. Yeah.
Dave:So so many times people they're busy, they have lives, they're doing other things right, maybe they're, maybe you're, b2b and they're doing right their own operations and they're looking at you to provide a solution for them. And if they have a question, you know sometimes they forget about it. So but by prompting them and saying, hey, what, what's going well for you, what can we do better for you, that gets them into that sort of mindset to think of like, oh, let me, let me kind of think through the relationship a little bit and actually put that down and then you act on that. So when you get that information back and you get that feedback back, make sure you're acting on it and you're not just letting it go by the wayside. Um, because just going through the motions isn't going to make you and improve your customer service. If you actually have to, like, put the you know the the feet to the fire per se.
Duarne:Right, absolutely. And the other thing I think we were talking about pricing your products and services a few episodes ago. When you're doing that, make sure you're factoring in these administrative costs, because if you one of the things that I've heard too is like, oh, we can't afford to do that, it's because you don't factor in any additional administration costs. You're looking at this coming straight out of your profits because you've only got a 20 margin. Maybe you need to be running a 40 margin on your product, a 50 margin on your product, so you can give better customer service experiences, give better post customer service experience, post delivery services experience, and that could be just a standard protocol that you go through well, that's where I think a lot of people they they definitely underprice themselves because they don't understand.
Dave:You want to have a gross profit margin of at least like 50, 60, upwards of 70% If you're a service base, like you know you're, you're like a consultant or you're you're like a you know mentor or coach, whatever it is. Like you should be upwards of like 80, 90. Like you should be upwards of like 80 90 gross profit margin in order to cover a lot of these. These costs, right. And then also understanding, like how much do you want to do inter? And also like what is that number right? So like, obviously, having an 80 gross margin of 500 a month is way different than an 80 margin on five $5,000 a month. You have more opportunities to do more with the 80% of 5,000 than you do 80% of 500. It's just obviously math.
Duarne:Yeah.
Dave:Your goal for pricing yourself is the more you price yourself higher and you believe in yourself that you can deliver a service at that level, then you're giving yourself more opportunity to grow and have those much more opportunities. Because the more you can charge a service at that level, then you're giving yourself more opportunity to grow and have those much more opportunities. Because the more you can charge a higher price, the higher worth you are, the higher as long as you're providing the outcome and it's worth that for your, for your clients, and you know um, you'll get paid it. And if you price yourself low, you're only going to get those people who are. We all all know who they are.
Dave:They're always asking like, where where their money going? They're always at you know, trying to micromanage you, and that's going to take up way more time than they're going to pay you for for that $500.
Duarne:It's what we talked about, right, it's about knowing what your value is, knowing what your products and service value, and choosing the customer that understands your value, because it's much better to have three customers paying you at a higher rate than 30 customers paying you at a lower rate, because you know what you can get on a call and spend 30 minutes a month having that conversation about how they're feeling about the service, what's going on with their kids, having that conversation that makes them feel important, so that they know that there's a huge value out on top of what they're getting with you. It's not just you're solving a couple of problems and sending them an invoice and you never hear from them ever again.
Dave:um, and that I think that leads great into what I wanted, what we were kind of initially talking about. We're at the end of june and these are things, one or two points that we're making right now that you could really begin to focus on for the second half of 2025. Uh, because we're getting into, you know, obviously july, and so we're about to start the second half of the year and I for many business owners in my experience right, we would be looking at report casts, right, what?
Dave:what happened in the first half of the year that needs to be improved, needs to be corrected. For the second half of the year we would actually probably start that more towards the beginning of june. But if you're listening to this now and and you haven't started at all, you're not too late, you can, you can restart. Yeah, right now. Right, that's the beauty of the best time is obviously, you know, yesterday, right, but the second best time is right now.
Dave:So, pricing, looking through your pricing, looking through your gross margins like taking a look at your financial statements with your, with your bookkeeper, your accountant or whoever you're working with, you know, looking at those things on a regular basis is your start.
Dave:Understanding what is my gross profit margin, understanding what is my gross profit margin, what are all my other expenses, make a list of all your recurring expenses and figuring out what do I need to continue on. That helps me with not only client delivery but client acquisition, and if it doesn't lead into one of those two things, you can probably get rid of it temporarily, especially if you're not where you're at, profit margin wise, but for myself, like re-forecasting, working with some clients through re-forecasting as well. What happened in the first half of the year, what's changing? All right, what are we planning on doing in the second half of the year because of those changes? And then planning those things out in terms of your, your metrics and your financials? It's, it's in a vital, you know, importance. I think so many people get caught up with, you know, oh well, I'll just wait until tax season, especially smaller business owners, and they can't make the best financial decisions that way.
Duarne:Well, the other thing is too. I mean like, how busy are the accountants and the bookkeepers going to be during that season? They're not going to take, they're not going to be able to give you as much time to help you with those questions and strategies, so do it in the off season. It's like a football team right.
Dave:A lot of their best training happens in the off season to get ready for the main season so I can't tell you how many, how many bookkeeper accountants that, especially the ones that do taxes as well, like they're just like, oh well, we'll get around to your bookkeeping, like in april when things get caught up with taxes. So, and it's like, oh yeah, we, we get caught up, you know, with with everybody's bookkeeping in april. It's like okay. So basically, what you're telling me is is that you're not giving them any advice for the first four months of the year, which is, you know, also vital, like in terms of understanding. Did things change? Like I couldn't understand why you would do that. You, you know what I mean.
Duarne:So it's like if you're going to do bookkeeping that's that.
Dave:Yeah, it should be every month, not. Oh, we're just going to catch you up in April and then we'll, we'll, we'll, hopefully help you do some things throughout the year. You know, see, that's a bad customer experience right there.
Duarne:Isn't it Like? Because I know like, if you're a business owner, when are you doing your annual budget, when are you planning your budget? You?
Dave:should be doing your budget in like October, november if you're a small business, right yeah, if you're a business owner solo, small, you know October November you could probably get it done in enough time to plan. Now, when I worked for bigger organizations like you know, the over the nine figure, you know kind of kind of types of organizations we started our budgeting process in the end of July for the next year because there is a lot of input that we had, you know, a lot of stakeholders that we had to, you know, get some information from planning out, developing those KPIs, and so we would start end of July and probably end of September, october, where it finally got approved, which gave us the time to start implementing what we needed to do in order for that January sort of budget to hit. Right yeah, and here's what we did from. There is we. Then we took that budget and we reviewed it against actuals. You have what you call a budget first actual report where you could see, okay, in January we budget revenue to be a hundred thousand, it came in at 110.
Dave:Perfect, why, like what happened and understanding the metric behind it, it, did you add an extra client that you didn't think was going to happen. Did you, you know, did something? Did you decide to up your, your fees in december?
Dave:whatever it may be, safety was your homekeeper busy doing someone else's taxes and unable to give you advice during that first part of the year right, and so you do that line by line, obviously the high level, and then you know anything that has a variance of typically what we would say is like 10% or more. We'd actually deep dive in a little bit further. And then what that does is it allows you to be up to date with the information that you're looking at as well as what were you thinking it was going to be versus what it actually is. Then starting, what I would say is starting from like March, april on. Now you're re-forecasting for the rest of the year.
Dave:Okay, what happened in the first two or three months that you know isn't going to continue, that you were planning on continuing. So maybe you had a 10% reduction in clients that it's going to take you nine months to get back up to that level. But in your budget you were budgeting an increase from your, your past level of like two clients. Well, obviously you're going to be off now by a significant number. Now you re-forecast your budget to actually match right, the new scenario. Um, and a budget we always say this a budget is really only as good as the moment that you print it and you finalize it. From then on, you know things are going to change. You know everything's going to happen. That's why, like, budgets aren't meant to be like the end-all be-all. Like the budget is just a general guide of where you're heading and then you re-forecast that as you're, as you're moving forward um, which makes sense.
Duarne:Why small businesses should do it later in the year as opposed to earlier in the year? Because they're going to have more flexibility to move anyway and they're probably going to have a better direction later on to be able to do that, whereas a large business is so many more stakeholders they're going to have to go and get a.
Duarne:So much tape right, yeah, they're going to make sure they get a lot approved by the right parties, etc. Um, how many times have you been in a room sitting there talking about a proposal and they go well, we're going to have to get that added to the budget. And it's like when's the budget getting approved? Well, what's going to happen next year?
Dave:it's like, oh okay, so you know, we've all been there with these large corporates, whereas a lot of small business owners they can make decisions on the fly, they can make decisions, but here's the thing like when you mentioned that, with that one scenario, right where you go to, let's say, you go to a corporation and they're like, oh well, it's not in a budget till next year. It's like, oh so, like this impact that's going to generate, let's say, $20,000 a month, you're willing to wait six months till the funding comes available in the budget, like, is that, is that really what your president, your CEO, wants to do? Like that's $120,000 miss.
Dave:You know, you know, it's like there's ways to work around to make that happen.
Dave:Like, obviously, when you guys created your budget, you didn't know that you needed to make this change and you didn't know that you needed to implement this. Well, you know it's going to cost you, let's say, $40,000 to implement and if we started now, by the end of the year you could have $120,000, like it would pay for itself. Like, don't you feel like you could move funding around and use the words like funding, not like budget, because budget's limiting right Funding means you have other ways. Maybe they have a line of credit available, maybe they have liquid investments. There's other ways to kind of, instead of saying it's not in the budget, which very limit, say what funding do you guys have available or possible adjustments that you could make to actually take advantage of this impact in your business?
Duarne:That's a really good point, isn't it? Because I mean, how many times have you gone into a business, pitched a concept or an idea or a product or a service, had that feedback going well? We're not in a position to do anything right now about it. There's no budget for it, but you know that if they were to stop doing what they're doing already and change to what you're doing, there'd be a little bit of pain up front but be massive ongoing savings made by it. So therefore, you're talking about their operational expenses going forward, becoming far lower for a little bit of a capital investment now.
Dave:And.
Duarne:I guess is the key.
Dave:Well, we've talked about it outside of, like recorded sessions. But we've even mentioned on recording sessions, like the neuroemotional persuasion questioning model Right and Jeremy Miner was seventh level great teacher trainer on that sort of questioning model. Right, and Jeremy minor was seventh level great teacher trainer on that sort of questioning model. But in terms of that, like if you've practiced right asking the right questions, when you get to the point of that investment level, they should have already persuaded themselves that they can't wait any longer. Right, they've told themselves the consequences of waiting. They figured out that it was 120 000, that it's going to impact their business, not you telling them that. They've.
Duarne:They've mentioned it well, you know, and, and so you just need to remind them at that point yeah, let's remind them like so it's only 60 000 to invent, to do it now, but that's going to save you $120,000 over the next 12 months.
Dave:Well, I'm a little curious. You mentioned previously that you would save X amount whatever that comes up being or increase revenue X amount, whatever it ends up being, and you said that it's really limiting Capacity's taken up right now, and you mentioned that this is what you need. I guess I'm a little confused right now why you're willing to wait six months to implement that, when we could get started now and start making that improvement.
Duarne:Well, that's exactly it, right? I actually had a conversation just yesterday with a client back in australia and one of the things we talked about was changing up the website, getting a refresh of the website, um, starting an seo campaign. They're already very successful, they do very good business. And I said to him so what's the, what's the concern? He goes I'm really worried about getting too many customers on board too quickly. And I'm like he said, I don't. I don't know how I'd handle it if it happened. I said well, look, here's the thing building a new website and starting an seo campaign is not going to just turn on a tap that magically sends customers to your business. All right, you've got. You'll get at least three to six months of ramp up before you're going to start to see any serious customer acquisition from these two things we're talking about. This is not like sending a guy out onto the side of the street spinning a sign saying get your pizzas here for a pizzeria, right, it's not going to get people flooding in.
Dave:So you're saying there's no like virtual, like light switch, I can just turn on and each would just flood me and like a customer's no, unfortunately.
Duarne:No, not, not, not on this case. So, but why do so many people promise?
Dave:that they promise that you're immediately going to get all these leads and we're going to flip our switch and implement our service well, what we're talking about is effectively giving people roadmaps on how to find your location right online.
Duarne:It's like setting up a business inside off a main street and then expecting everybody to know it's there. You need to put a little SEO out there to show them the direction of how to find you and eventually they're going to find you and eventually that SEO is going to get better and better and better and get better results and it's going to be more organic and natural and show up in the results. Well, we talked about this and he goes. You know what? You're a hundred percent right. My fear is irrational. I need to be making a better. I need to be making a decision. I'll get back to you next week and we'll talk about making this happen.
Duarne:And it was just a case of challenging what he felt the problem was. And even he said well, I don't think it's really a problem. I think I've just made that up in my mind and that's how. And I'm like well, if it did get really busy, do you think you could handle it? He goes, we'd find a way. I said worst case, you might have to hire somebody else. He goes yeah, and that's not a bad thing. So you'll find a way, and this is the key. Um, people hesitate for so long over the silliest little things, but it's not silly to them, for everybody else listening. We think it can sound silly, it can sound petty, but on the outside, absolutely on the outside but the reality is, take a second to realize that it's not petty for them.
Dave:It's something really important to them, it's something that's genuine, it's something keeping them up at night and that's why it's like our job right when you are or salesperson, you know, their job when they're on behalf of your organization is to you, we are the ones with the problem right, we're the ones with the solution. You really have to care about your client to understand like it's their problem, like we're just helping them get to that point of when they're ready to solve it, yeah, and how we can help them do that. And with that it's deep diving and asking like the probing questions and not taking their first answer. As you know, the deep dive answer it's more likely a surface level answer. So you're saying, well, just like you did, tell me more about that. Like what do you mean when you say you know you're, you're afraid that there's going to be too many clients coming out at once? Like, tell me how you see that happening if you were to implement this?
Duarne:because they would. Yeah, and how would you solve that problem? Because what you'll probably find is they probably already thought about it a thousand times already. They've already got an implementation plan. They've just never said it out loud.
Dave:And they're afraid to implement it because they don't know how they're going to get the clients to come in. So it's all about us, as business owners, getting comfortable with the fact that we aren't the ones with a problem our potential clients and if they have the problem that you solve, that's when they become a potential client and realizing that not everybody is a potential client because not everybody has the problem that you potentially have. You're kind of your only responsibility, or your sales team's only responsibility, is finding those prospects that do have that problem that you can help them solve and, from there, help them solve it exactly.
Duarne:And the other thing is just remembering that if your front person if it's not you and your front person is the one out there trying to solve these problems get the sales through for your customers and they're not going through these processes, then, like we talked about before, it's going to give a poor experience for a customer service experience. It may come across as a really pushy sales technique or it may come across as you're not really here to solve my problem. You're here to just get the sale and move on to the next person, and you can't have that sort of you person in your organization and think that that's going to be okay. And this is where I think a lot of small business owners try and hold on to all the processes in their business because they think that they can do it better or they know that from previous experience they do it better. So, and I think you just got to get to that point where you train people up, you get them to the point where they can do things in the way that you want it done, instead of budgets getting in and actually, um, helping them under.
Duarne:People understand that what you're offering is a solution that can solve a problem and why it's so important for them and why taking, why inaction, is a bad decision for them as opposed to taking action, maybe having a solution in place where you could take incremental action over a period of time.
Duarne:So it's not such a you know problem asking more questions to identify is it a financial related problem, or is it a actual, you know, implementation, operational related problem or a staffing problem? There's always going to be some sort of kickback and it's just understanding and asking those right questions to be able to effectively understand where you can move forward and work with somebody. And I think one thing that becomes very evident if it's you as a business owner, you'll take the time, energy and the effort. But if you hire somebody, unless it's the right person, they're not going to give you necessarily that much time because they're going to look for that next sale, that next deal, because that's what they believe is going to keep them in a job. Um, well, then maybe they're not offering that right customer service if you haven't trained them up, if you don't have the processes in place to make sure they understand that the customer experience has got to be at the level that you would do it at.
Dave:Well, and the one thing I wanted to go back to that you had mentioned too was, um, if you are having the conversation with a prospect and it does come down to funding, and maybe they're they're like, hey, I would love to do this, but I want to do it at half off don't just take that.
Dave:I think the biggest thing that you can do is, if the funding is an obstacle, adjust your scope.
Dave:Don't adjust your price of the main service, because it devalues that main service. So, for example, let's say your main service is 10 grand for a project or 10 grand a month, whatever it ends up being, however much you're providing for them. But they say, well, I only got like 7,500. Don't give them the full package for 7,500. It's like, well, here, what's most important to you, let's see what we can do for the 7,500 that you have.
Dave:That's still going to get you some results, but it's not going to be what we were just talking about, which is our guarantee right, our practice. But we're willing to kind of work with you to start getting things rolling, and then we can always expand it or add on later down the road. That where I think so many people negotiate on price, they don't negotiate on scope. And the biggest thing that you should be doing as a business owner is if somebody who does want to negotiate on your pricing, also you should be negotiating your scope as well, so that you're not giving them the same level of service that you know your main level or your your number one project or your your pricing, you know 100 downsell down, sell them on a solution, because what you're doing is devaluing your services and yourself too much in a lot of instances.
Duarne:I think one of the discounts yep, exactly right. And you know, as business owners, we uh there's two times. You're going to find yourself in a negotiation point. You're going to find yourself, when you're looking for investors, negotiating the value of what you feel your business is worth. And that's one thing, and never forget that when you're dealing with your products and services with a customer, you can't negotiate in the same way as you would with an investor.
Duarne:An investor is a completely different technique and, yes, you may find investors come in and devalue your business, but you know what they're an investor and if they're helping you to grow that business and get it to where it needs to be, then that's something you have to decide at the time. That's a whole nother conversation. But when it comes to the products and the services that you're offering, you would imagine going into a Ford dealership and buying an F-150 truck and you just saw a guy walk out with that truck for $45,000. And you wanted to get the same truck in a different color, right next door, and he says no, it's $60,000. So why did you just let that guy walk out with it for 45? Well, you know he was negotiating with us and the truck's still worth $60,000, but you've just lost $15,000 on that truck.
Duarne:Now the alternative, because everybody's going to want that same deal Exactly Downsell the truck, go and sell him a small, you know used F-150 for the 45, because that's what his budget is, you know. Offer an alternative that might solve the problem, but don't just jump straight into yeah, I'll take your money, move on. Because if you're coming at a point of desperation and taking the money at that point, you're not only devaluing yourself but you're going to create yourself a world of pain moving forward as well, because it's going to require a lot more effort than what you wanted to do that work for and you're going to have resentment.
Dave:You're going to be dreading the fact that now you're working with this client and maybe you're not going to give them the same results that you promised because you didn't get the money. But you didn't negotiate down with them and you still have to give them the results. So it's a long drawn out spiral that you get yourself into. So, ultimately, negotiate scope if somebody wants to negotiate price. If you are going to set the line, they both slide Exactly, if the investment goes down, so does the scope. You have to follow that and have that in your mind. Otherwise it's going to be a long sort of drawn out process. You're going to have resentment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Dave:But man so we had a couple other things that we were initially thinking that I was initially thinking we were going to cover, but, as always, it's unscripted so we are not going to get around to those other things. So of course, we'll talk about them in a future episode, but I just want to remind everybody. Dwarren and I are revamping our Triumph Mastermind program group coaching, support, daily Q&A sessions Monday through Friday, along with a weekly strategy call. So if you are interested in learning more about the Mastermind, we're going to share some information. A link down, take, check that out. You can sign up. We got some founding uh member specials right now where the group is going to be 199 a month but, uh, as part of the the founding members, you're going to be able to get in for 59 a month lifetime.
Dave:So you're going to get a crazy discount for being one of the the founding members, so we're looking forward to seeing everybody in there, uh, and, as always, we're going to go live every Friday morning, so if you love listening to us, we'd like you maybe to hear this far, whether it's on a replay or live, we truly enjoy you. I know, dorn, and I love having these conversations, love talking to you about our experiences, what's going on in our business, and things and lessons that we've learned and sharing them with you.
Dave:Dorn anything, any take. What's your takeaway that you would want somebody to you know, at least hope that they took away from today's episode.
Duarne:I would say, if you're unsure what the customer experience in your business is like, ask a friend to try the experience. Ask them to do a mock sale trend, know, call whatever that, drop by whatever that might be and just check it out. Um, because everybody at your employees will act differently when the boss is around, and it'll be not. It's nice to know what they're like when you're not around. Um, and just get a bit of an idea and just see if they care as much as you do and maybe just consider if you do get a negative result.
Duarne:Um, what sort of attitude and cultural changes can you make and training can you offer in your business to improve that and have everybody operating on the level that you want? Because, as we discussed, I mean return on investment. We all work too hard and spend too much to get customers in the door, to lose them on the way out. Um, the lead acquisition is expensive, it's a lot of work and you're competing with a lot of other people out there. So the higher the conversion rate, the better that is, and for a lot of us it starts with that first interaction, that customer experience a hundred percent, I would.
Dave:Um, you know, for me, my takeaway I'm going to kind of play a little bit on what you were saying is that you should not have the expectation that your staff, your employees, right, an employee owned business there, they're just not. So you have to lose that mentality, right, you should not expect them to give a shit as much as you do because, right, more often than not, they're just not gonna. It's there and they're there as an employee, you know now, granted, you can do things to improve that that, but they're never going to give as much, you know, effort, etc, that you are, because it's, it's our baby, right, it's our business.
Duarne:Yeah well, they look at you as the owner is the one making all the money. What they fail to see is all the risk and the stress and the drama that we get being business owners, but at the end of the day we don't pay ourselves all that stuff.
Duarne:yeah, but from their point of view is you know, you know they're getting paid every week regardless. So, yeah, you're right, you can't expect them to just act and like a business owner, because that's not what we're training them to do. Um, I've got one client back in australia who's actually got a process where he's already got a secession plan that when he retires, his main employee will take over the business, and that's a plan. So that's huge motivation for this individual who works for him to do well in his job. And that's not going to be the case for everybody, but that's a great example of having that employee giving us stuff that, um, you know, employee giving us stuff and I do.
Dave:I do like the idea as well of, as you're growing or, you know, maybe even as you're bigger, kind of turning it into an employee-owned organization because, you are going to get those people right now, that now they have an incentive right because they're, they have stock in the company, they have ownership in the company, not only to hold themselves to a higher level but to hold, to hold each other to a higher level. And granted, this is a whole other topic how you set it up and doing all that stuff, but it's just. It's always something to look into because for yourself, you could still own 50% of the company and the employees own the other 50%, but everybody's invested and 50% of something great is better than 50 of something small.
Dave:Because you wanted to get 100 of something small because you wanted to keep it small, uh, so it really just you know your goal, what's what's best for yourself moving forward, and that changes every day. You know which we talked about. You know, uh, you know our. We're different people than we were six months ago. We're different people than we were six months ago. We're different people than we were a year ago. Everything changes rapidly, so we hope you got something out of today's episode that you could take with you. Begin to implement in your business, learn from. If you have questions, drop them down below. As always, we'll answer them in a future episode. But, dwarin, thanks for joining me on today's episode and if you made it this far, do all that fun algorithmic stuff right. Give it a like, give it a share, make sure you're subscribed and you're getting notified every time we go live with a new episode. Duaron, have a wonderful week, everybody, have a wonderful week, and we'll see you in the next one.
Duarne:Thanks for having me, dave. See everybody, bye-bye.
Dave:Bye-bye.
