The Path to 80 NPS & Revenue Growth w/ Brian Hodge

Have we been able to show that higher NPS franchisees actually do grow more? And I was like, that's a great question. Let me go validate that for us. And so here's the net net of what it was 78% of franchise partners that had a higher than average MPS. This was the average NPS for the system was 73 a few years ago at the time. It's grown since, but they had higher growth. And so this is like the one stat that, yeah, they are growing faster.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Account Experience podcast. And today we have a special guest. And that's not to say our other guests weren't special, but recently we welcomed Brian Hodge to the show. Brian is a leadership consultant at Dame Management Strategies, but also just happened to be the previous champion at Soccer Shots, one of our customers. While at Soccer Shots, Brian was the director of Franchise Operations Specialists and he ran their NPS program for the entire brand across the United States. This talk was a killer example of a champion using data and tying it to financial outcomes. He literally correlated profitability and growth to hitting a specific net promoter score. It is fascinating stuff, guys. So I can't wait for you all to hear it. Let's dive right in. I'm here as always with my co host, Kerry T. Self. Say hello, Kerry.

Hello, everyone.

And today we have a special guest. So Brian Hodge. He's the leadership consultant at Dame Management Strategies. He's a former director franchise operations specialist at Soccer Shots, one of our customers. And we're really excited to have him on here. And he's going to be talking about the path to 80 NPS, which is a crazy number, and he did it with data. So we're really excited to have him here. Welcome, Brian.

Thanks. Great to be here.

Of course. And I'm really excited to pair you two together, Brian and Kerry, because you have some previous kind of co experience running franchise experience operations, things like that. So, Kerry, I know you're really pumped about having Brian here, so I'm glad we can make this happen.

Yeah. You know, Brian and I have had a chance to talk in the past and the similarities in our background always gets me excited to kind of hear Brian's story. And did I hear 88. Zero? Was that right, Ian?

Yeah, 88 zero. Jaws are up.

So let's use that as our hook. Let's keep people interested and we'll tell them how we got there in a minute. But Brian, what I thought would be great is why don't we. For us to Understand a little bit what is Soccer Shots? I think by us understanding the dynamic of that business and what you did there will kind of help us with this story we're going to tell today.

Sure. Soccer Shots is a franchise system. It's offering intro to soccer programming for children aged two to eight. The franchise system has about 140 owners operating 200 territories across North America. They've been doing this for about 15 years now, experience incredible growth, really great business model and they attract people who are passionate about working with and impacting the lives of small children. And they're passionate about sports and soccer. And so it's a really amazing community of franchisees.

Yeah, I think anyone that has a child playing a sport, especially soccer, I mean, you used the word passion, I think like three times in there and I think you nailed it. And I think that's a natural connection to Net Promoter and adopting that and using that. I know we're going to get to that 80 score. But Brian, tell us a little bit of why Net Promoter and what were some of the reasons you brought it in and why did you think it was a good fit for Soccer Shots?

Yeah, I can't take credit for it. The owners, the founders of the company, kind of initiated the idea. As they grew, they recognized that they had these franchisees spreading across the country and they wanted to have a good gauge of what the customer experience was. And so somebody read a book, the ultimate question 2.0 and that kind of started our journey. I think we might have even started with Survey Monkey or something like that to get it going and to test the questions. And then we had Official Partner one which led us to Customer Gauge. It was a series of events of like, hey, let's try this out. Hey, we're seeing this work. Let's try it in more locations. Let's double down on this. Let's go from this being here's something attest to, here's something we recommend to here's something that we're going to make this official and automated and every parent is going to get a survey with this cadence and that kind of thing. And so along that progression, I was in that tail end and we were just moving towards really standardizing the timing and approach, making sure all parents got one and that kind of thing.

I'm kind of curious, were you there when you guys were doing like the manual Survey Monkey type surveying and reporting and all that stuff?

No, I got there soon after we had adopted Customer Gauge as a platform.

I was just curious because Kerry and I Did an episode about our. I also used to do that. So I was there when we did like manual analysis. And so was Carrie initially. So we have horror stories. I was just kind of curious if you had your own. But good for you.

I think Ian and I had the same question lined up there. I wanted to hear about it too. But it's interesting because, you know, we've talked about kind of running our own programs and piecing it together kind of, you know, scotch tape and a piece of gum kind of thing. But it sounds like you already had a tool in place. So let me jump to that then. So what were some of the challenges of automating this? And you said something that really stood out. A survey for every parent. I mean, that's bold. That's bold to say. We're going to ask everyone how they feel. So talk to us a little bit about how did you accomplish that and what were some of the things you ran into around that?

Yeah, it was progression and I think we're on the path to that. And I think it was a series of validations and it was a series of building confidence. And it was a progression from we're just doing it with one or two franchisees to we're doing it with a bunch of franchisees. But then we had. And as we looked at. I think I did the math. I think only about two thirds of the time did a parent get a survey at its highest point. And we knew we wanted a true 80 MPS system wide. And the only way to get there, in fairness, is to make sure we were surveying all of our parents after each season. And as we built more and more data, we could see the business case. We could see that indeed, you can read all the books you want, but until you see your high NPS customers buying more and referring more parents, and until you see the franchisees who have higher NPS growing and being more profitable, you need to build that business case to be able to make the determination that, yes, we're going to in the future do two things. Automate it so that it's no longer just up to franchisees to get the survey list together, upload them into the system, that kind of thing. It's just automatic. Now. There's some technical things there that customer Gauge was super helpful with and working with what was a brand new system backend system for us. We did an IT migration and that was a bit of a challenge for us to work through, but much bigger because we were changing our whole online ordering platform. But we built the business Case we started to round out the the technical requirements to make it automated. And we were also backing it up with data that we found the response rates were higher when the survey came out at a particular point. And the spoiler alert there was the sooner that survey could hit. After the last session of what we call a season, which is several weeks of soccer shots, the response rate was higher. We also tuned the subject line, the text of the email, and the customer gauge Support team was super helpful in helping us build those things out so that we could look at our franchisees and say, listen, we've proven that higher NPS is good for you, it's good for your families, it's great for the brand overall. Automating it makes it easier for you and a lot less headaches for you to worry about. And it just, it makes sense. It's important to do. Now I think the other thing that, that's really key here is our CEO was the champion of like, you know, it was a very much a Kennedy esque, you know, put a man on the moon. We're going to hit 80 mps overall now. It's a crazy high number. But that was only established after we had seen several franchisees consistently hit it. And so we started digging into how they do that.

That's a lot to unpack. Okay, so let me first off, I love the fact that you talked about starting with a few and then growing from there, you know, and I think you. One of the questions I had was what were the things that you were seeing that made you want to go, okay, this works, this we have to fix. Is there anything that stood out to you in that? I have like a hundred questions after that, but for me, let's start with that franchise piece. Starting small and growing and scaling. What were some of the things that you saw that really excited you? Like, okay, we have to replicate that and scale it up. But also what were some of the things you're like, ooh, you talked about. Right. Timing and tweaking the subject line. Was there anything else that really stood out to you in that process and that exercise?

Yeah, there was. Because when we had these, you know, we had enough to say, yeah, it's doable, these 80 mps. But not everybody was hitting it. We're just like, why? How is that possible? And so I'm a bit of a nerd and an Excel geek. So I started downloading, you know, transactions and taking a look at it. The quick thing about soccer shots is that you can take soccer shots programs and put them into two Categories. One category is in childcare centers. So the coach goes to childcare center or the school performs a soccer shot session for children at that school and rinse and repeat for eight to 10 weeks. The other program is what we call the public program. This is in a park or in some other public space on a weekend in a weekday evening, and the parents are standing around watching it. Now, the public program is actually the minority of the business in the business model, at least up until Covid. So what we found, and it was the most exciting thing in the world, is I started plotting a correlation between the PARCC program, the public program, and the overall data. And what we saw is that there was a huge correlation and that franchisees who had a higher public program were generally able to achieve a higher mps, even though we were looking at a minority of the customers involved. If you want, I got a slide that I geek out on.

Yeah, pop it up.

Okay, so sorry, let me get back to here. Share a little screen.

So this will describe it for you.

Yeah, well, we'll describe it here. So it's. People laugh at me because I get so excited about it. But it's just a bunch of dots on a screen. But what you can see if you were able to see the slide, is you would see a cluster moving from the lower left to the upper. And on the Y axis we have the public program nps. And on the x axis, an overall nps. And I get, I get really excited about this because there is this blank area where there's no dots and it's on the far right. And basically what this shows is no one was able to get their Overall NPS over 80 without having their PARCC program, their public programming, above that 80 mark. And so this is my mic drop moment when I'm talking to franchisees about how do you get to 80 mps? You got to get your PARCC programs up. And you know, we get some other fellow nerds in the presentations and they say, ah, well, you've shown correlation, you have not shown causality. And so the next slide here, I actually plotted these little movements of these franchisee scores and I can show that they went from lower than overall 80 NPS to above it only by getting their public program over 80 mps first. It's like a salmon ladder. And that 80 nps for a public program is the thing that they had to leap over. And so I always have to remind myself to shut up because I can babble on about this slide, but this was one of the huge aha moments. And so we get the question like, okay, how do I get my public program that high? Two things, first of all, the quality of the coach. Second thing is the communication with the parents. And so what we were able to show is that that coach who's on the field has got to be great with children but also good with adults. Has to be able to do that adult to adult dialogue, greet the parents warmly, check in with them throughout the season. In addition to the huge challenge of managing 8 to 102 year olds in an open space on a Saturday morning, not easy to do. But when you can get that coaching quality up, when you've built the training program to get the coaching quality up for a few coaches, that floats the boats of all the coaches in your system. And it just proves you've got your hiring down, you've got your training down, you've got your coach management down. So coaching quality is number one, communication is number two. That rapid response whether it's a director of a child care center or whether it's a parent inquiry, the ability to quickly get back to that parent, get them their answers, communicate schedule changes when there is weather delays. Those two things, coaching quality, communications with customers are the keys to getting that up.

Kerry, you know what I love about this thing is that it's data driven. I mean you literally pulled up chart with scatter plots. I love that because I think that's, honestly we talked to a good amount of CX professionals and I think this is the type of thing that people have when they're, when they're crushing the game. So if they're really growing their program, they're growing their business, they have this type of supporting documentation because data driven is really the X factor that I think I've found. You're talking about testing subject lines. You were testing. It sounds like you tested when to send the survey. I mean that's very, very important. I mean it's all about data. Kerry, what are your thoughts on that?

Well, first off, bravo, you got a couple of geeks on this with you too. We get excited about data and tables. But the thing I loved, really love that you said Brian, because my next follow up question was, okay, we get this argument on NPS all the time. It's too simple. There's no way you could take action on it. What's really going on? And you know, you, you spoke to that so perfectly and then you took it a step further. These are the drivers behind the score. You have no doubt the top three things that your franchisees need to act on to improve that score. And you know, to me, that was the biggest, biggest takeaway from what you said. It's you're giving people actionable data, something that they can do with it, go out and make a change for their business. Because at the end of the day, how well they do is how much they get returned on that investment. Right?

Yeah.

And you're empowering them with that simple MPS question. It's not so simple, is it?

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Highly dynamic. Love this table. Yeah. Yeah, this is.

Yeah, no, it's. It's awesome. It was one point. I downloaded 1.3 million transactions of soccer shots orders over a multi year time period. And so I tracked the results of parents of franchisees who had higher NPSs, higher NPS scores than the average system. And what we found is that the families of high NPS franchisees bought 50% more orders per family than other franchisees. I mean, that's massive. When you talk about, like, the ability for a parent to maybe participate in two seasons and they end up doing three seasons, and you apply that across 10,000 families that you're serving, it's a big deal. But you know, Kerry, to your point about arguing the case for mps, I've heard all of it, right? I've heard, you know, oh, NPS doesn't reflect my business. I have a slide for that. You know, and I think it comes down to, like, you got to get familiar with, like, cognitive biases because these are where most of the objections to doing nps. And I think it just results out of fear. Like a, I don't understand how to get. I'm fearful of how do I get my score up. I'm fearful of those low scores coming in. I'm terrified. I mean, I got into this to positively impact kids. I don't want to hear complaints. And so it's easy to kind of stick your head in the sand. One of the things I try to explain to people is that the net promoter score question does have an Achilles heel. And it's called sample bias. And what that means is that you can't extrapolate the mix of responses that you get in the response rate to people who don't respond. So in other words, I have a slide up here for people who aren't, like, able to see it. And it just shows a pretty basic NPS score. You get 60% promoters, 30% passives, 10% detractors. And it's showing this is what a 20% response rate looks like. Now, in traditional marketing research, we would say, okay, well, that's a good representation of our population and that we can assume that the non responders look just like the responders. And that's the thing that you can't do. With nps. And that's because it's sample bias. And the net net there is that the person who responds has a different perspective generally than somebody who doesn't respond. It's that emotive interaction that causes this next slide. And this is what reality really looks like. And this is why it's so scary is that your population of detract is generally much higher in the non respondents. So people who don't give you a response, you've got a higher concentration of detractors. Which means it's all the more important to find the detractors that you can get a response from. Study those sentiments so you can have a larger impact across those that haven't given you a response rate.

Just to paint the picture real quick, guys, we're looking at a slide that basically had. Before you track down all those non respondents, you had a 55. I think it was NPS. And what Brian's showing right now, yeah, it was a 50 NPS. Sorry. And once you got that remaining group of people to respond to you, he's basically saying the detractor amount is much higher in that group because they didn't necessarily respond initially. Your actual overall nps, when you take the whole picture into account, is a minus 22 NPS. That's quite the swing from 50 to, to minus 22 and that. Thank you for bringing that up, Brian. We've talked about this a lot at length. We talk about account coverage, we talk about revenue coverage. So making sure that you get respondents from a large portion of your revenue. This is one of the most misunderstood things in nps, period. I think you are spot on with bringing this up. What do you think, Carrie?

I love the visual of it too. Just the whole absence of signal we talk about all the time and we say it's probably. And you said it well, Brian. It's the most dangerous part of a program. Those that you're not hearing from, that itself is a statistic that should scare you a little bit, that non response rate. So let me ask you this then, Brian. What did you guys do to overcome this? If you have an absence of signal, you're not getting a response rate from X number of your audience. What did you guys do to kind of pull. Pull them in, to entice them? What did you do to increase that number?

Well, we tried some things that were helpful and some things that we found didn't really help the needle move the needle overall. But I mean to go back to like answer the quick question for anybody who's Wondering, why is that so far off? Why are there so many detractors and non responders? And it's just easy. I mean, if you think about what's the opposite of love, it's not hate, it's apathy. Okay, so if I really can't stand you and you've ticked me off, I'm not even going to open your survey, let alone help you by giving you constructive feedback because I can't stand you. Anyways, to get back to your question about how to get, you know, ensure that we were getting the responses, so we did use a reminder survey that went out found that the reminder survey did give us a big bump response rate. We talked about testing some of the subject line, the timing to get that response rate up. We actually did an experiment to see if we did a mid season NPS if that would help us catch families that were not having an awesome experience and convert them before the end of the season. And while we did see that the end of season survey was much higher than the mid season, we also, I looked at all the data and I was able to see that the mid seasons overall were a lot lower than they usually are for any particular franchisee. And so, you know, it was a question of like, is the parent not able to give us a full evaluation because they've only seen half the product, half of the program? Maybe. I think we were legitimately catching some issues before they became issues. But one thing that was definitely clear is the response rate of our end of season survey was lower when we were doing that mid season. And so we counted that as like that was evidence of a little bit of survey fatigue. And so we didn't want to perpetuate that. So we found that that was not a good way of raising the response rate.

That's interesting. It was almost a transactional approach midway through a check in to figure that out. But I like the model of using the survey itself to figure out what's good and what's bad about the survey. It's a smart model.

Yeah. We also moved from a progression of we didn't have drivers installed at first and Justin, the CEO of Soccer Shots, was a proponent of like, let's get drivers in there. We had loads of comments like the Soccer Shots customer comments more than average. I think we were getting somewhere around 60% of responses came with comments. And so I would try to analyze those. But when we got drivers in, that was a way of really qualifying and quantifying the feedback in a much more reliable way than reading through hundreds Thousands of comments. And then also took a look at the text analytics tools that you guys have, which I think are absolutely phenomenal and super insightful for that question of like when you're running a franchise system and you've got 140 owners, probably 120 different pricing schemes across various demographics across North America, it's tough to answer the question, is our pricing correct? Is the pricing too low, too high and that kind of thing. The new text analytics capabilities helped us zero in on that so that we could show any franchisee how, for example, passive comments regarding pricing were positive, negative compared to nationwide. And so when I could look at a franchisee and say, you are not getting the complaints or the negative feedback around your pricing that we're seeing the rest of the system, that's dollars, man. That's data based, direct sentiments from your customers and how they compare to the nation, which tells you you've got a lot of room to increase prices before and you can get some more complaints and still be better than the rest of the country.

I like that you segued into because that was my next big question. Now that we've got this campaign, we're engaged with these parents and the franchisees are bought in, the next step is kind of okay, so now what do you do with all that information strategically? And so I like the pricing explanation. Most people would say, hey, we're getting negative feedback here, we need to lower our prices. You used it as a catalyst to say we've got more room here to grow. Like we are underselling our solution. They love us so much. We can do more with that. What other things strategically were you guys pulling from this that as an organization you guys were able to leverage and use?

I think we were in the beautiful seat of just being able to look and kind of dispel myths of like, oh well, the people in fill in the blank region are just tougher to please. Like, no, not so much. That's not true. I think another thing that we did is we used it to celebrate. I mean the comments that we get are just amazing. And Justin asked me at one point, he said, why do you think it is that our customers comment so much more than the average? I was like, well, no offense to the greatest coffee in the world, but your barista gives you an awesome latte that really did make your morning. But it's not going to have the impact of a coach making your three year old come out of their shell, smile and giggle and talk for the next three days about it. Totally different thing. So the emotional impact we had got those comments, we were able to use those in a bunch of different ways. First of all, at the franchisee level, they were using that to recognize and reward their coaches and their staff and really just forget the marketing play on it just for staff engagement and to recognize them internally. Did that. Yes. There's a marketing side for using the promoter comments. There's also opportunity at the corporate level. I mean, there was this one part of what we call operator training for kind of new franchisees. I was able to like print out a full page of comments for every person. And sometimes we had 20 people in the room. So I got 20 pages just from the last 30 days of these promoter comments. And every page is different. And we would have people sit down, read the comments and just highlight a couple that stuck out to them and we talk about as part of the. Part of the exercise. But that is. That was like highly inspirational. It was informative and a great reminder of like, I'm the trainer, but forget what I tell you is important about running your program. Listen to our customers. And it was also really important, you know, for how we use the data. Going back to the comments and the sentiments, we have this challenge in providing instruction to young children that the doctors who tell you about early childhood development will say, you got to have repetition. For the parents sitting on the sideline, they have a different perspective on that repetition. They're like, it's just the same thing over and over again. And we're like, oh. But the PhDs say it's this. And the parents are like, I want more variety. So we were caught in this. How do we deliver excellent programming that's based on all the best research on early childhood development and make sure that what is being shown to childcare center directors, to park program officials and to parents is appealing. And so the feedback that we were getting about session length, about variety, about the different games that we put in, all went into the product development side. So sorry, went on a little bit there. But you've got marketing, you've got internal staff inspiration, you've got product development things. And I just, I think it's so key. I again, I credit the owner and leadership team because they've read the detractor comments, they've read the promoter comments to really make sure we had a good pulse on how is soccer shots being delivered out there across the the continent.

So, Kerry, I'm going to jump in. You keep talking about Justin, which is, I'm assuming, the founder and CEO, right? Yes, so how do you get it sounds like Justin read the book, which is great, so he understands the concept. But how do you communicate and manage the program with Justin and keep his ear to make sure he's bought into all of this and getting that honest, brutal feedback from your clients? I mean, how did that go? I'm just kind of curious. From your side.

Yeah. I mean, I give Justin credit for this being high on his priority list and clearly, you know, he got it from the intellectual side. But I think it also hit his heart too. And that's why experience ended up in the vision statement that he crafted. And 80 NPS overall became a long term goal for the organization. And you know, and so he had his own internal drivers. And I think, and Kerry, you'll probably back me up on this, but when you're managing a system of franchisees, I just got to take a moment and explain. For anybody who's not familiar with franchising, it is a totally different animal. Okay. In other industries, you've got employees and you hire them and you fire them. And you know, it's most states, it's at will. You've got clients who there's this exchange for money. You're going to give me money, I'm going to give you this thing and we're going to try to keep that going as long as we can. Then you've got weird things like suppliers and the service providers and distributors and that kind of thing. Franchisees look a little bit like each one of those groups, but they are none of those groups. And so there's a certain amount of influence that you do have with franchisees where you can say, this is what our orange is, this is what our product is. You're not allowed to make up your own flavors. Okay? You got to use our flavors on one hand. On the other hand, there's certain things that by law you can't go anywhere near, you can't touch with a ten foot pole. Things like staffing decisions and hiring decisions. So it's this very interesting thing where the franchisee has a certain amount of autonomy. And as you're rolling out new systems, even in cases where you can kind of come down the mountain with here's the new system, there's a certain amount of selling and a certain amount of objection overcoming that you have to work through so you can keep your team cohesive and everybody on the same page. So I'd say that's where our challenge, not just with nps, but with any sea change that we were looking to accomplish. Was advocating and selling the new thing throughout the franchisees. And that was always. And that's why it took years for us to go from survey monkey to embarking on game ready to make it standardized.

So, yeah, I just broke out in the sweats when you franchisee thing. And you described it perfectly. There's certain things you can influence, there's certain things you can dictate, and there's a whole lot of gray in between sometimes and making sure that you can trust your data, trust the feedback, get it in a timely manner. Those were all things that kind of empowered us, Brian. Right. To kind of be the champion for that. But I'm interested because Ian asked a question. Normally when I asked this question, I'm saying, how do you impact the C suite? But it sounded like you had that leadership buy in you. Like myself, we had to impact a different group to be bought in. So I wanted to ask this question. Let's go beyond just nps. Was there other metrics that you were using to influence? Were there other metrics that were giving you insight and did you tie any of that to your NPS into your program?

I think there were some. Certainly. We were looking at growth. We're looking at size. We have really great demographic information for each one of the areas that we serve. Because when franchisees buy a quote unquote territory, they want to know, you know, how many parents are in that territory, how many children within a range, what's the average median household income, etc. Etc. So we studied that. I think one area is kind of answered to your question. One area that we didn't do, which I thought, which I think I would encourage anybody to do, is to start overlaying NPS with employee engagement, with the financial performance of the organization. Now, this is like, again, I didn't do it, but this is like, if I had more time, if I had more research and longer Runway, I'd want to do this. To just paint the picture that your more highly engaged employee is going to get you greater nps, which is going to get you greater profit growth over time. And then like, that's like the ultimate holy grail of business metrics of like, really painting the picture of this holistic good. Like, it's not just about growing profits. It's not just about customers who are going to refer you to friends. You're actually accomplishing a positive impact on the lives of the employees who are doing this. And when they're more healthy and better engaged, they're going to drive customers. I was sitting at lunch last week with a CEO of a staffing company who is a huge fan of culture, huge fan of nps. And he was just like, it was just obvious that highly engaged employees delight customers, period. So he's got this whole strategy of driving culture in his organization with the expectation that it's going to have this amazing MPS component. I think one other thing to the organization, it applies to his and also to the soccer shots organization. It's kind of like this healthy rivalry, healthy competition that you can get between franchisees, between offices, between departments for how they're, they're, how their scores are coming in.

I did not prep Brian whatsoever on that, but I just, I love it because I think a lot of us that do this and have done this for a long time, I think some of these things become very obvious. And you know, happy employees, happy customer. We've all heard that and just love hearing you speak to that, Brian, a little bit.

One of our collaborators at MIT a few years ago did a small one page, or it might have been two pages paper that basically they ran some data and correlated the employee experience to the net promoter style, customer experience and growth of companies. So you're spot on, Brian, when you say, I mean that's from a research side, right? So it's a different thing to do in real life. But the research definitely supports that. If you create that amazing experience for your employees, spills over to your customers, and then it fuels growth for companies. And you mentioned that some of your franchisees, you knew that the ones that had a higher NPS score grew faster or had more profitability. Can you speak to that a little bit real quick?

Yes.

So.

One of the founders, as I was geeking out on the NPS data and getting all excited about, was like, well, hold on. Have we been able to show that? I'm just getting the slide ready to show you. Have we been able to show that higher NPS franchisees actually do grow more? And I was like, that's a great question. Let me go validate that for us. And so here's the net net of what it was. 78% of franchise partners that had a higher than average MPS. This was the average NPS for the system was 73 a few years ago at the time. It's grown since, but they had higher growth. And so this is like the one stat that, yeah, they are growing faster. And that was, you know, I mean, back to the earlier point, we can read books all we want, right? But until we show that these concepts in the book are Manifesting with our customers. You know, it's just a book.

Well, and think about new franchisees coming in. Not only are you selling them on the data from the past, but now you have almost a magic crystal ball. It's not even magic, right? It's, it's, it's data. But once they hit this threshold of scoring, you can say, this guy's going to grow fast. You know, this group over here is going to do phenomenal, and we have to worry about this group. But now you've got that data to give you a prediction of where they're going versus it being after the fact. The following data points. So I just, I love that.

Yeah, we reported the NPS scores on a monthly basis, and we're able to just really gauge, you know, movement. So if somebody's moving up, moving down, we always tracked. And this goes back to one of the earlier questions, what do we track? We tracked responses and response rate. So we wanted to make sure that as many parents as possible were being surveyed. We also wanted to make sure that we were getting a good response rate from that. And it's interesting to watch the rivalry amongst franchisees really become a healthy thing, because in metro areas where there's multiple franchisees, they want to beat their neighbor, but they don't want to see their neighbor have a low NPS because that's going to hurt their brand eventually, if not immediately. And then the other thing, I would have franchisees call me up and be like, listen, there's no way. He only got like 200 responses. He's not surveying everybody. It was just this really helpful accountability of like, hey, we're all in this together. We're all trying to achieve this thing. And we want a level playing field for, you know, comparing each other.

I think that really speaks to creating champions in the field. And ironically, you know, you're in a very competitive industry when you talk about soccer, but you throw in there this, this, this other score that they can score on, and they compete with each other, but you want to play against the best. I think true athletes, people are truly competing, don't want to go in and just crush the competition. They want to go up against the best so they can come out on top. And I think that plays really well into this.

It does. And, you know, again, in line with, you know, we pursue excellence was one of the core values. And so you can just. When you can draw vision, core values, mission engaged employees, and a product that lines up with that, it's powerful. I mean, going back to the Engagement thing. I mean, just for anybody who's maybe heard the term but not super familiar with it, what is employee engagement? Employee engagement, very simply is employees emotional connection to the company and their willingness to give discretionary efforts. And so it doesn't necessarily mean they're working late hours in the evening because we got hourly employees. That discretionary effort is that little bit more of energy and enthusiasm to delight a customer when they could just get by with a little bit less energy. That little extra energy is that discretionary effort. And that's what we're talking about when we talk about employee engagement.

Wow.

So, Ian, I don't know how much time we have left or if we want to wrap this up with a. With a big question. What was on your mind? I see your eyes dancing a little.

Yeah. So I think you've done a great job, Brian, of painting the path to ADNPs with data. I think that's very, very clear from everything you presented. So thank you for that. It was really, really insightful. Tell us a little bit about day management solutions or strategies.

Oh, thanks. Yeah. So it's founded by John Dame, who is a management leadership consultant. He provides strategic planning peer groups such as Vistage Groups, which is a peer group for CEOs. It's international organization. John chairs a couple of those. We help leaders with executive coaching and then we've got this other bucket of other services like assessments and events and other customized engagements where at the end of the day, we're looking to help leaders become better and to leave their greatest legacy. And we do that through a bunch of different things. And every leader's situation is a little bit different. So sometimes it's a blend of coaching and a peer group. Other times it's a strategic planning session. But it's super exciting. I Met John in 2011. I was on the client side. He was the unknown consultant coming in who probably got a little bit too much of my critique. Then I was on the client side for several years until joining the organization just a couple months ago.

It's another thing you have in common with Kerry, previous customer, now a CG employee. But yeah, it was great. Brian, thank you so much. It's been, again, really, really amazing to have you on. I think the data and just the, the strategies presented are invaluable to the audience. So thank you again, Kerry. Thanks for being here as well. And this is the Counter Experience podcast. Please share with friends, subscribe and we'll talk to you guys all soon. Thank you, Sam.