E04: Legendary Leaders: Shep Hyken

Thanks for joining us today on Street Smarts with Harvey Mackay, where the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement. And now here's your host, managing partner and co founder of harveymckayacademy.com, cliff Jones.

Hello, everybody. Cliff Jones with Harvey McKay Academy. I'm delighted to have chef Jaime hiking with a shep. Customer service experience expert extraordinaire. Is that the way to put it Right.

I think it's a good way of putting it.

Welcome. Nice to have you with us.

Thanks so much, Randy. Cliff, it's good to see you again.

Thank you.

So, saw you last in Dallas. Nsa. I should tell everybody you're a hall of fame speaker. What else does everybody want to know about you and what they're going to learn for Street Smart's takeaway value today? Above and beyond. Your new book, we can't wait to talk about. Sure.

Well, Ike, Harvey is a New York Times Wall Street Journal mega bestseller. I've been very fortunate to be put in that camp with one of my books. And this is number seven, the Convenience Revolution. So these are the things that make mom proud when I come up with this stuff.

Great titles. There's a subtitle and what's it all about?

Sure. The subtitle deliver a customer service experience that will disrupt the competition and create fierce loyalty. And. And my premise about it is simply this. It's expected that a product does what it's supposed to do. It's expected that you're going to deliver it with a good level of service. And now how do we differentiate ourselves? Well, if we can be easier to do business with than our competitors with those other two in place, because to me, those are table stakes. We've got a chance to win over and own that customer. And so I'm going to flip it around and ask you a question. And we did not set this up. You might give me the wrong answer. It's okay if you do. It doesn't matter. If you were to be asked, and you are being asked, what's the most convenient company or business that you have ever done business with, that you've ever bought from, that you've ever any type of business, what would that answer be?

Amazon comes to mind.

Bingo. Ding, ding, ding. You have. Thanks for playing the game. That's the perfect answer. Like 99% of the people say that they have won the marketplace with convenience. They're not just an online retailer. They're. They're the most convenient company in the world to do business with. Years ago, they started out 247 on site website buy books from us. Little less expensive than the regular retailers. They disrupted some of the industry. They started adding more and more items. Then they started adding the ability to do things easier and better. See, part of convenience is about saving time for your customers. And if you can go online, find what you're looking for really quickly by just typing in some, some words, agree to the price and in one click. Because once you put your information in there, they have the one click purchasing option. Boom, it's delivered. You don't even have to go out of your house. Imagine that around holiday time they have two hour delivery for some items. If I say, oh my gosh, it's the day before Christmas, I can get in my car, drive to the mall, terrible traffic. It's at least 45 minutes to an hour before I even get in the mall, find the store, buy what I'm looking for, go home, that's two and a half hours. I could have gone on Amazon, clicked on the item and it would have been there in less time than I would have done it myself. They have a little button that looks like a doorbell. You put it on the side of your washing machine, you're running low on detergent, push the button, delivered the washing detergent. And then they have hundreds of items that they do that with. So they have become in my mind, like the poster child for convenience.

To your point, in the early days, I don't think many of us took them seriously. I bought a few books, I thought, okay, this is kind of cool, we could buy stuff online. Now everybody's worried then about getting their.

Credit cards stolen and now we really have something to worry about. But look, Amazon is almost too good to be true. As a prime customer now it's convenient. But I also have a conscience because I want to be loyal to the local merchant, the small business guy. As you know, Harvey McKay Academy, we have tens of thousands of small business owners, leaders here.

And what they're focused on is better.

Leadership, better sales, better marketing, providing better customer experience. It's almost as if Amazon has screwed everybody else because the expectation we have now is out of whack. So you consult Fortune 1000 companies, CEOs, small businesses, individuals. What are you telling them about the customer expectations? They're up. We're all up against today.

Sure. Well, here's the thing, And I agree 100%, except I don't believe that the little guy's getting screwed because there's a big guy around. There's always going to be a Disruptor. And by the way, there is a great article recently about how Barnes and Noble is like, all of a sudden are they making a comeback? The independent bookstores, all of a sudden, are they making a comeback? No, they're finally figuring out how to compete against the big guys. It's a David versus Goliath story. Ace Hardware, which was a role model case study in two books ago. And actually I have included them in this book as well because one of the convenience principles, and there are six convenience principles is to reduce friction. And Ace Hardware says, hey, you can go to the big box store. You come to our store, our little store that's like one tenth the size of theirs. We've got rockstar parking. Every spot in our parking lot is like a rockstar parking spot compared to what you're used to with those big stores. And that's just the start of being more convenient. It's funny, I contacted the CEO of Ace Hardware and I asked him, would he look at the book, read it and endorse the book. And after he read it, he said, are you like reading our minds? Our next commercials are going to be like, we're the convenient place to do business. But let's take it to another step to the concept of delivery, which is one of the six convenience areas. My car dealership, a single solo owned car dealership, small compared to the huge one that I used to do business with, that had multiple brands, owned by a national company that just happened to own the eight or 10 dealerships that were in this campus of dealerships, who by the way, I did business with for 22 years, was less than a mile from my office. If I couldn't get a loaner car, at least I could walk to the office, right? One day I'm driving down the street, I see a car in a window. I go, that's a beautiful car. I'm going to stop and look at it. And I walk in and the salesperson comes up to me, I go, no, just looking. What do you mean you're just looking? Well, you're so far away, I'm never going to buy the car from this dealership. He said, if you buy the car from me, I will deliver the car. Every time you need service, I will drop off a brand new loaner, I'll pick your cup, drop your car off when it's done, no extra charge. I'll make the deal with you. You don't have to agree to anything. Go shop it around, make sure we're competitive. And then you come back and you're going to say, I love this place because the next time you step foot into our dealership will be to buy your next car. I went, wow, now that's a compelling value proposition. And guess what? I bought the car. And then as they're bringing out these new cars one day I slipped and I told them, yeah, my wife's interested in that station wagon. Well, what car do you think they brought me? Right? Guess what? We ended up buying that station wagon and we get ready to buy another car. So these people are pretty smart. And you know what? They're not a big company. Sure, a car dealership is smaller than a solo entrepreneur, but solo entrepreneurs, small businesses, I mean, this convenience strategy, reducing friction, using technology. If you've got an app of some kind that you can use, self service is a great. Put the customer in charge of it. Create a subscription model, which is something that you're doing with Harvey and the Academy. And then, let's see, delivery. We just talked about an access. A website's open 24 7. Maybe you're a small store and you want to be open longer hours to be more convenient to your customer. Maybe you want to add another location to be closer to a certain segment of customers. That's about access, by the way, Walmart competes head to head with Amazon. And did you know that 90% of the citizens in the United States are within 10 minutes of a Walmart? That's an incredible statistic that's about accessibility. You go into a big major city, Starbucks, just, oh, I want a Starbucks. Just walk to the next block. It'll probably be there.

Catch everybody up to speed, give us a few bullets. Street smarts, takeaway value. You're talking about convenience. You touched on delivery and access. What else is there?

The first of the six convenience principles is simply reducing friction. And all six of these principles have some element of reducing friction. But some companies have made it like their mantra, their value proposition. And while I have five case studies under each of these six concepts, and of course, I have a major Amazon that covers all six of them, Uber is who I chose to use. Now, Uber is a big company, but I want you to think about what Uber did. They disrupted the taxicab industry. I used to live in a home. If I wanted a car to pick me up and take me to the airport, I called the taxicab company. This was before Uber. They'd say it'd be there in 15 minutes, maybe 15, maybe 20, maybe. I'd have to call them back and say, where are you? And Then the driver would show up. The driver would say, where are you going? I would find out how much it cost when I got there, although I knew about what it would cost unless we got stuck in traffic or had to veer around an accident of some kind. Anyway, I then reached in my pocket and pulled money out. Pay it. This has completely changed now with Uber. I want a car. I just open up the app. I can see how far away everybody is. I type in a few letters because intuitively it knows to fill in the blank with where I'm going. I agree to the price. I hit the yes button and confirm it. And I can watch the driver coming down the screen, my phone going, okay, he's two minutes away. Oh, he made it. He's circling around. There he is. And then I get in the car. The driver knows my name. I get out of the car at my destination. It costs what they said it was going to cost. But I don't have to reach in my pocket and pay for it. The only friction that Uber has not figured out is how to get me from where they're picking me up to where I'm going without using the car. In other words, beam me up, Scotty. The only friction is they actually have to drive me. It's the easiest thing. They reduce friction to the point of disrupting not just competitors, but an entire tire industry.

So you're talking about reducing friction, improving convenience. To your earlier point, I couldn't agree with you more. Amazon and Uber, the brands you're focused on, your case studies in your book, they're raising the bar consumer expectations, which for hungry fighters like our network, our community. Right. We're motivated to meet those expectations. So you've cited a couple of examples. Large brands and then small companies, the auto dealer, small businesses, solopreneurs, we can all reduce friction for customers. So basically your book's applicable to anybody who's dealing with a customer. Uber, Amazon, we talked about. Give us a few other compelling reasons, case studies, things you're going to deliver for value in the book.

Sure, and I try to. I mean, the recognizable brands are real obvious because most people have used them. And like I use my car dealership. Most people have bought a car before at a dealership. And just so happens that mine's a small business, a small single owner dealership. By the way, a point you made earlier that I don't think I addressed. You are being compared. Everybody is being compared to the best customer service they've ever received from any company. And it could be someone like Amazon. Or it could be the guy down the street at the little shoe store that just sold me a pair of running shoes that were on sale and that were marked down from $60 to $25 or $30. He was so knowledgeable, so helpful. Why can't everybody be as smart and as nice and as good as him or her, you know? So it's really, we're compared to the best service. We're no longer compared to just our competition. And as I mentioned earlier, product does what it's supposed to do. Table stakes is deliver a decent level of service, bump it up with convenience. So, boy, there's so many case studies that are in here. One that, well, with technology, there's a little app called the no Wait app. Now, not a lot of people know about this because it's not in every city, but no Wait is exactly what you would think it would be. If you're waiting in line or on a list to go to a restaurant and you're waiting to be seated, they get you to eliminate the wait. The way they do it is you open up the app. The restaurants that subscribe to this app, you say, oh, wow, it's an hour long wait. But you know what, I'm still at home going to put my name in and I'll watch my name move up that list and I'll get to the restaurant right about the time they're going to call my name. Hence, no Wait. And it's just a little company. Somebody probably just started this and maybe has one or two people that they work with and boom. The no Wait app. I love it. Then there's some really cool, what I would call way out there. Well, how about who competes with Amazon? There is a grocery store that actually shows a video of the Amazon Go, which by the way, that's going to explode. Amazon Go is the store that you walk into, you just pull things off the item or off the shelf, any items that you want. You don't see a cashier, you don't check in any. You just walk out the door, done. It's that easy, that simple, that convenient. So there's a grocery store that says, well, we don't have that technology, so how do we beat that? Tell you how we beat it. You take the cart, you go around the store, you pick out what you want, leave it in the cart, you come up and we know who you are because you know, you're in our system. And go home. And what we'll do is we'll check you out, we'll get you the itemized list, we'll bag your groceries and then we'll bring them to your doorstep so you don't even have to carry what you're walking out with. And they say that's their version of competing against Amazon. Go. And you know, Walmart, they would come into a small town and disrupt local small stores, which is something that you mentioned you were concerned about. Do you know that Walmart used to have workshops or seminars whenever they went into a small town to teach the local retailers how they could survive and even thrive with the Walmart coming to town? I didn't know that at all.

That's a great point because the media tends to portray these big companies as crushing the little guy.

But the truth is disruption happens all the time. It's a good thing and consumers benefit. I mean, look at the choices we have today. I'm just curious, do you ever think there will be too much convenience for us? I mean, where are we going with all this convenience? I'm beginning to wonder.

Yeah, I think the convenience thing is it's like we're going to have to be forced to choose who we want to do business with and the vendor of choice, so to speak. And that's why I believe acquisition is really great. But retention, somebody once said. It wasn't me, but I love it. Retention is the new acquisition. So if you can grab a customer and retain them, and in certain businesses you're not just grabbing market share of customers, you're grabbing wallet share in the financial services business. And you can take wallet share and run it across a number of different industries. But a financial advisor would sell you an investment. But that client might have investments with another financial advisor. Maybe they have something at the bank where they bought some type of an investment, some type of a CD or whatever.

That's a great point because I used to be in the industry, sold a business. But if I had your banking business, I was your private banker, I had your retirement plan, I had your estate planning attorneys on my phone.

You had 100% wallet share.

I was the quarterback, I was the trust advisor. They're not going to leave unless something goes really wrong because I made their life convenient. Now you're talking about Walmart, one of the biggest, most successful companies in the world, coming into new markets, teaching small business owners how to benefit. You said survive, but can you, can you cite a few examples for the small business owner, which is a huge part of our community?

It's been quite a while since I don't know if they still do that anymore. But that was something that they were doing is they were expanding, gosh, 20, 25, 30 years ago and hitting all these different markets and people would shake. Well, Ace Hardware, I'll use them because I wrote an entire book, as I mentioned, it uses them as a case study throughout the book because it is David versus Goliath. So here's a great something that was just brilliant. So I'm trying to. I think the gentleman's name is Brennan. They own like the Brennan Ace Hardware store up in Boston. I could be wrong with his name and I apologize if he's watching and I'm wrong. He. But he's up in Boston and literally next door to him goes either a Home Depot or a Lowe's. And within six months, another big box store starts getting built on the other end of his parking lot, literally in the shadow of these. And he has hours from 7 in the morning until 6 at night or maybe 7 at night. Meanwhile, Home Depot comes in and goes from 7 in the morning until 10 o' clock at night. And what is he going to do? He goes over to the store, the big store. He has to speak to the manager. Let's go to lunch.

Really?

Yeah, let's go to lunch. I want to learn what you're doing because you're obviously selling a whole lot more than I'm selling. So maybe I could send some of my customers to you and you can learn more about us and you can send some of your customers to us for the things that you don't do. And they sat down and his business just exploded in a good way. It didn't implode, it exploded in a good way. And he didn't change his hours of operation because he recognized his core customers were going to continue to come when they came. And he knew that was right. I think that's an important point. But what he did is he. The strategy is keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Somebody said that. It was originally said before the Godfather, but that's one of the strategies is learn so much about your competition that you can actually help them and maybe they can help you.

I'm just curious. We should have started at the top of the conversation. Why are you so into the whole customer experience thing? How'd you get going on that anyway?

So I'm 12 years old. I started a birthday party magic show business where I would perform. I remember my mom picking me up after school, taking me to this lady's house, his parents house, for this little kid's birthday party. There were about 20 screaming kids. And when I was finished, I went home and my mom said, go write a thank you note. Oh, great idea. My dad said, really good idea. But a week from now, I want you to call them, I want you to thank them again, and then I want you to ask how they like the show. Great idea. And when you find out if they liked it, ask them what tricks they really liked. Oh, great idea, he said, because if they don't talk about certain tricks, get rid of those tricks. By the way, my parents were teaching me, show gratitude to your customers, get feedback and then execute on the feedback. Process improvement. Then my dad started giving me sales lessons. He would say, you know, if they like the show, there were a bunch of parents in the back of the room. Ask for their names and numbers because if they were really happy, they'll give you the names and numbers. And then you should call those parents and ask when their kids birthday parties are going to be be. And within a year, I'm doing like eight to 10 magic shows every single week. And I'm making more money than my teachers at age 13, 14, 15 years old. But I learned that customer service was so important, I didn't realize how passionate I was about taking care of that customer till I did all kinds of little entrepreneurial ventures. I bought a Jeep with a snowplow, paid $900. $700 is what the snowplow was worth. $200 for this hunk of junk that was pushing this snowplow. And it was back in around, oh, I was about 16 years old. So long time ago. The Jeep was obviously very old. It worked great for the first snowstorm. The second, I had 15 accounts. Third snowstorm, 4:00 clock in the morning, I go to start the car. Nothing and a jump's not going to fix it. Something's wrong. Probably the starter. Well, I didn't know what to do, but I only thought about one thing. I never thought, oh my gosh, I'm missing all this money. No, I thought, oh my gosh, how are my customers going to get out of their driveways? I have 15 driveways to plow. There's no way I can do it by hand. I called a friend of mine that had a brand new Chevy Blazer with a huge snow plow. He was plowing like football fields at schools and shopping centers. And I said, I know you're probably getting ready to go out and do your accounts, but if you have just a little while, I'll give you all of the money. Just help me plow these driveways. His big plow could go up and down, like in two or three swipes. And it's done. We got it all finished. My clients never knew that there was a problem. And I made nothing during that snowstorm because it was more important to take care of that client than it was to take care of my pocketbook. And I figured that out, and that's my passion. And here I am today teaching about it. I'm still an entrepreneur, so to speak, but I just love helping companies be amazing for their customers.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, if you haven't had the pleasure of hearing Shep Hyken speak from stage, I had the pleasure when I was with Harvey at the National Speakers Association Convention in Dallas this year. You did a phenomenal job. You really wowed everybody. So, Shep, tell everybody in wrapping up here where they can get your book. The Convenience revolution, coming out October 2, 2018. I'm timestamping this video. So much for evergreen content.

It'll be appropriate 2 years, 5 years, 10 years from now.

You're always relevant. Convenience is always relevant. So how do people find out about you, Shep Hyken? And how can they tee up getting your book when it's ready to roll?

Sure. Go to hyken.com, h y k e n hyken.com there you'll find information about the book. But also, let's make it convenient. Go to Amazon. You can buy it straight from there as well.

Ladies and gentlemen, Shep Hyken. Shep, will you come back and see us?

I'd love to be back. How about tomorrow? What are we doing tomorrow?

Well, maybe not. I'm taking tomorrow off. Sorry, buddy. I need a little break. I work with Harvey McGay. I can barely keep up with a guy. I don't have half his energy when I'm his age.

My goodness, he looks good for a guy that's 106 years old.

Exactly. I'll make sure he hears this at the right to the end.

Thanks, Chef. I love him when I grow up. Thanks so much for having me.

Thank you for listening to Street Smarts with Harvey McKay. If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Play, or wherever you consume your favorite audio. Don't forget to leave a positive rating and review before you sign up for your free membership at harveymckayacademy.com. to learn more about Harvey McKay, make sure to visit www.harveymckayacademy dot com. Thanks for listening and we'll be back soon with a new episode.

Sam.