Customer-Centric vs. Customer-Driven: How to Grow Your Business| Ideas by Mike™ EP59

Here's a question for every entrepreneur listening today, and, uh, even my team at One Oak Financial with the team at One Oak Collective. Is your business customer-centric or customer-driven? You probably think those are, uh, in essence the same thing. Today's guest though wrote an entire book on explaining why they're not and why that difference decides whether your business grows or quietly breeds out. Dr. James Killian. He's an organizational psychologist with 25 years experience in Qualtrics, S&P, IBM, and Hogan Assessments. He's taken startups through IPO and 5 acquisitions. He's advised leaders at some of the biggest organizations and the biggest brands in the world. He teaches at Michigan State's, uh, in Michigan State's Business School, and his new book is called Obsessed: Cultivating the Customer-Driven Leader. This is the Ideas by Mike podcast. I'm Mike Milligan. Let's get obsessed and welcome in James. This is the Ideas by Mike podcast where your future starts. James, uh, welcome, uh, in today. Uh, I want you to picture one specific listener. He owns a business. Maybe it's a 5-person shop. Maybe it's just him and a laptop. He works hard. He loves his customers, and he'll tell you customer service is everything. And yet clients leave, employees still quit, and he can't figure that out. So let's teach him. What is customer-driven? What is a customer-driven leader? And what's the difference between saying you're customer-centric and actually being customer-driven?

Yeah, thanks for the question. And thanks for having me on, Mike. It's a real privilege to be here. I think this is a great question that you're asking, and it's not really hypothetical, right? I mean, there are, So many small business leaders and owners out there who are trying to grow and scale their business and to become successful. And the reality is nobody starts their day thinking, hey, how can I ignore a customer? Or how can I screw over a customer? Right? I, I think everybody generally has good intentions as leaders. They want to actually do right by their customers. They want to do right by their employees. But in a lot of cases, what happens? They get very, very busy. They get overwhelmed. And in today's era of AI disruption, everybody is feeling overwhelmed. And so these leaders will default to certain behaviors or characteristics that are more natural to them. So what do I mean by that? More natural to them. So over the course of a long career in studying human behavior in the workplace, and my background is I'm an organizational psychologist, so that's what I've done for 25 years. And in teaching and researching and coaching over 1,000 leaders globally, what I've started to see are some very simple but very important patterns. So you asked about what is it to be customer-driven? Well, that's really important to start with what's the antithesis of that. And so through research in the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University over a course of several years, we actually identified 4 different leader and culture types. And these are from order of least desirable to most desirable. So least desirable is going to be customer avoidant leaders, teams, and cultures. And these are the types of folks, and we'll just put it maybe in terms of financial planners since this is something that you're obviously focused on. These are the advisors that lose trust very, very quickly. A little bit better than being customer avoidant is what we call customer tolerant. And that's exactly what it sounds like. So these leaders, teams, and cultures recognize the importance of customers, but oftentimes they're really just doing the minimum. So these advisors would be those that are mostly focused on protecting revenue. Better than that is customer-centric leaders and teams and cultures, and they're really trying to retain customers. They have good intentions in mind, but they're still just kind of doing the minimum in order to make that happen. So when you get to becoming a truly customer-driven leader, these are the folks who are really going to work on compounding trust. Because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you're a small business owner with 5 employees who has customer and employee churn, or you are the head of a big multinational bank. If you're not politely challenging your customer to do better, to help them think more critically about mistakes that they've made in the past, to show them a mirror to reflect on what it is that their goals really are, then you're really just kind of doing the minimum. And the reason that I think this is so important right now, today in 2026, is customers will switch brands In a heartbeat if they feel like they're not getting what they need or what they deserve. There are lots of choices out there, and it's what I refer to as the war of the brands. So every advisor out there has somebody else who's willing to go a little bit further, do a little bit more, politely challenge the customer a little bit more so that they're actually helping them build that wealth in this case. And trust compounds a lot faster than money does. And so really at the end of the day, if you think about it, every single business leader, every single business owner, at the end of the day, all they've really got is their reputation. And that reputation has to be built on trust. And trust is something that customer-driven leaders are very, very good at. They're not going to just be satisfied with the status quo. They're gonna push themselves. They're gonna push their teams and employees to help push the customer to do better.

As I, uh, as I coach our team, as I coach other advisors, uh, as I speak on stages around the, around the country, one of the things that I have that, that I, I wanna drive home this point that you made, because I think trust is the number one product that any small business sells. And, uh, you even, you, you, when you talk about the war of brands, how people will change and go even Even, but where they feel like their needs are met. I think it goes down to communication. Not like, so like for instance, our brand, for instance, One Oak Financial, we help people with taxes, retirement income, investments, long-term care, and legacy. And I put that out there in podcast form. I put it out there in a daily podcast. We do videos and webinars. I wrote I've written the book, The One of a Kind Financial Plan: Retirement Déjà Vu, yet it still gets lost in message. Why do you think a business that is trying to be customer-driven, and I think that's where we are, we're trying to be customer-driven, trying to meet people where they are and take them where they want to go and solve the problems they don't even see that they know they have. Where do you think the message gets lost between the consumer and the actual business who's trying to be there? Why would somebody leave a customer-driven business? From that standpoint.

Yeah, it's a great follow-up question. And maybe I'll just insert something and make it even a little bit more personal, right? Because I just recently actually listened to your episode where you talked about why, the why behind One Oak Financial, right? And I thought this was a really great story because you really drove home in that episode that You didn't just want to be part of the big machine that was just pushing products on people that really didn't need them. And so your focus has become really how do we actually provide that very unique, very white glove, very hands-on, caring service to those clients who you work with? And I think that's really important because if you look at the world that we're in right now, which is pretty volatile in a lot of ways, you know, markets go up and down. The difference is that, you know, you would see a, if let's say the market takes a 25% dip, that's really, really scary for any of us. A customer-tolerant advisor or business owner is going to say, you know, when the client calls and says, sell everything, they're going to say, okay, I'll get right on that. You know, a customer-centric advisor is gonna say, are you sure? You know, markets do recover. The customer-driven leader is gonna say, I hear you, but before we do anything, let's actually revisit why we built this plan in the first place. You know, help me understand what's really happened in your life, not just what's happened in the markets. Now, that is an example of politely challenging the customer like I talked about, and this is very important to me. You have to challenge your customers to do more, to do better. Are some customers actually going to leave from that? Yeah, of course. Of course they are. I mean, that there's always going to be a natural attrition. But again, this, this point about trust compounding, the customers who you do retain, they're gonna tell their friends, they're gonna tell their associates, they're going to tell their neighbors about what it is that, that you're providing to them that is different. From that customer-tolerant planner who, you know, has maybe a twice-a-year review and it's 5 minutes long and then you're just done. So having that deeper relationship and engagement really creates that compound value over time. So you're, you're gonna see some attrition in business. That's going to happen. But the odds of you retaining and growing customers and compounding them are far better if you're taking that customer-driven approach.

Before we go on, so educate was kind of the theme of this first segment. I don't want to leave this though before we talk about Obsessed, right? The book you've written that's getting attention out in the business community. Give us maybe a couple minutes of why you wrote the book and what you hope people— it's meant for business owners. Let's be very direct about who the consumer is. It's business owners, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, enterprise entrepreneurs. What do you hope, or what was the reason you wrote the book and what do you hope somebody who reads it gets out of reading the book?

Yeah, thanks for the question. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it. It's been a 2-year passion project and I'm glad to say it's finally coming to print next month. The book started with a question that surprised me to an extent, and that is, Why do some organizations become exponentially more valuable than others, even when they're selling similar products, right? So after studying leaders across industries, I realized that the difference wasn't really intelligence or strategy or even innovation. It was whether leadership treated customers as transactions or if they treated customers as the organizing principle for every single decision that got made. That's really what Obsessed is about because customer-driven leaders, they don't tell people what they want to hear. They tell people what they need to hear. Even, you know, and that means you have to earn the trust to be able to do that. So, you know, I would say in this case for your audience, you know, if you are an advisor and you don't feel comfortable politely challenging your customer, then you need to ask yourself some serious questions. And if you are the consumer of an advisor and you don't feel like you're getting politely challenged, you also need to ask yourself some questions.

Wow. That's a, you know, so thank you. I mean, most people, I've written 2 books now and I've got a couple more in the pipeline. Most people don't know how hard it is to write a book.

Oh my gosh. I have to say, I've now, I've written and spoken for over 25 years, right? And I guess technically I have a book in the form of the dissertation for my PhD, but not the same by a long shot. I have to tell you, Mike, I learned very quickly that writing a book and publishing a book are 2 very different endeavors.

Yeah. And that, that, but that's where I am right now, right? So the One of a Kind Financial Plan's out there. Retirement Déjà Vu is just launched at the end of July. Retirement Déjà Vu was done 4 months ago, but to get it from you know, the, my writing through editorial review to, to the, to the market. Crazy, right? You would think it's just pressing a button. It's not. It's not. We haven't, we haven't gotten easier there. So, you know, I, you know, obviously we want people to realize that your book Obsessed is available to purchase. And, uh, if you're looking for, you know, a manual on how to become a customer-centric leader, we invite people to To find that on Amazon or anywhere books are sold. I'm not sure. Yeah, no, I can't. I want to go to set— it's kind of our segment 2 now. Let's coach people. I generally like to, in this segment, share one play or pattern that helps entrepreneurs become customer-driven leaders. People don't need 17 frameworks. They need one play they can actually run. So I want you to put your coach hat on. You've been interviewed, you've, like you said, you've done this for 25 years. I want you to assign or instill one play in an entrepreneur's business today that would move them from customer-centric talk to customer-driven action.

Yeah, great question. So, and by extrapolation, I'll say based on your last comment there, One of the advantages that you'll find in the book that I have written is it is intended to be very applied and very practical. Yes, there are case studies. Yes, there is education. There's also a playbook and an assessment. And part of this is you have to be honest with yourself. And this isn't about accusing, right? It's about appreciating the realities of the situation. And so there's all kinds of assessments that are available out there. For every individual as a leader, for every business as a leader, for every team. But very important to just take an assessment, realize this is where I am, appreciate the realities of the situation, and then make the decision of, okay, what do I need to do to close the gap on that? And it doesn't really have to be that hard, right? To your point, you really just need one framework. And there are definitely a lot of different good pieces of advice that I've crowdsourced over a number of, across a number of really great industry experts that you'll find in the writing. But I would say in order to keep it simple for the listeners today is, as a leader, pick your head up. This is, this is it. Just pick your head up because as you build a business and you grow it and you scale it, What you will find is that you become a victim of your own success and you start to get further and further removed from the customers, right? We've seen this happen. You're the 5-person shop and you're doing really well. You gotta hire a few more people. Wow, we just doubled our revenue. We gotta double our headcount. Now we gotta get divisions in place. We gotta get division leaders in place. And now all of a sudden, are 4 levels removed from the frontline associates who are actually having the conversations with the customers. If there's nothing else that you take from all the writing and research that I did, it's continue to be engaged and involved with your clients and listen to them. Don't talk at them. They will tell you what they need. They will tell you the path that you need to actually create to help them be successful if you just listen to them. Easiest piece of coaching advice I can provide.

Well, coaches, unless you're coaching T-ball, right? Baseball, or you're doing like a little 5-year-old soccer program, coaches have to focus on the scoreboard because that determines if you win or lose. So what's some scoreboard metrics that a small business, medium-sized business should be looking at when it comes to measuring if they are customer-driven leaders?

Yeah. Interestingly enough, there are a lot of metrics out there, right? We hear about Net Promoter Score, NPS. We hear about CSAT. I actually tend to steer people away from those kinds of metrics. And in fact, I even interviewed Rob Markey, who is the creator of the Net Promoter Score. And he's a fascinating guy, Harvard professor and Bain alumni, and he'll even tell you, you know, the NPS was never designed to just be a single vanity metric. It was intended to be part of a broader system. And so I do think you have to take a systems headset to this, but honestly, the simplest metric is how many customers did you talk to in the last month? And just watch that. If you watch that, you're gonna be able to gauge whether, you know, all the other metrics that may be important to you are actually landing. The other thing that, you know, maybe a little cliché here, Mike, but I'm still a big fan of this. You don't have to do it completely in practice, but, you know, Howard Schultz had a really great method that he would use for any internal meeting, and he would have the— You probably heard about this with the 2 empty chairs, and one chair represented the partner, which is what Starbucks calls employees, and the other represented the customer. And so any decision that was getting made, the question would be, is it good for the partner and is it good for the customer? And if it wasn't good for both, then it was back to the drawing board. And you don't have to put 2 empty chairs there, but you definitely should be asking, hey, is this good for us and is it good for the people we're serving?

That's really good. So thanks for helping us put something that could be measurable on the scoreboard. Our, you know, my team who listens to this, right? I always think about like, who is going to hear this podcast? Who's going to implement something? My team, right? At One Oak Financial is going to hear this. And guys, you know, we measure the scoreboard like in our own ways, but if you're an entrepreneur and you're also a client of One Oak Financial, You should ask us one time, what do we keep score on? Because even though, even though we may be managing your money, doing tax strategy, helping you build a better retirement, focused on a long-term care strategy for maybe your family or even building legacy plans, it's okay for us to open our playbook to you every once in a while because a business helping a business is what we're about, right? We are B Corp certified businesses together growing for the greater good. So So James, let's go over a little bit and let's talk about the plan. Okay? It's where I live. It's where we at OneUp Financial help people build one-of-a-kind financial plans for your one-of-a-kind life. But let's say an entrepreneur reads Obsessed, reads it on a flight, lands, and is fired up. They're at the beach house, maybe the weekend they listen to this podcast or the book, they read it on a week's vacation, then come back ready to put this into motion, right? I want to be a customer-driven leader. They're like fired up. What are the priorities and what's the rhythm that people have to have to put the plan into motion?

Yeah, that's a really important question because even though the book is intended to be very practical with a playbook, again, it all comes back to the assessment of where are you now? And where do you think you need to be? And what is that gap that you need to close? And really important there too, because you cannot do 10 things, right? Any coach who's worth their salt is not going to tell you to do 10 things. If you think about a golf coach, right, they're not going to tell you, you know, here, try 32 different, you know, shifts and pivots on your feet and your hips. And no, they're going to say— Move your feet 1 inch apart, and then let's hit 30 balls and see where we are. So smaller is better. Don't try to boil the ocean all at once. And I know that's very simple advice, but the reality is you have to understand that if you want to actually build a legacy, right? Not a career. You know, a lot of leaders out there, they'll build a career and then they retire, which I know you had my my friend Dr. Gary David on just recently as well, and he talked about retirement. He's a great guy. You know, you retire with a career and then what? You're just done, right? Okay, well, now I don't know who I am or where I am or what to do with my life or what my purpose is. But if you build, you know, a legacy, if you build systems, then your reputation can continue through others. You build something that's actually Potentially generational, right? And so it all comes back to the system. So the reality is don't make it the flavor of the month. You have to start with what's the first component of the system that's going to close the gap the fastest, and then do that really, really well for 6 months before you make any additional changes.

Right. That's, that's really good, plenty of advice right there. Let's close today on the podcast, and I want to talk about AI. We've had some guests on recently that talked about AI, and AI is the future, right?

Yeah.

It's here. It's, you know, we've seen crazy numbers come in from these mega-cap companies, Facebook, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Google, Nvidia, and they're talking about how much money they're spending on AI to try to, but their spending has to eventually turn into revenue. The small business owner, like in AI, let's talk about, is, does, do organizations need AI and where can AI help them be better customer-driven businesses?

Great question. Very timely, I think, given what's going on today. I think, I think that the answer is yes, organizations need AI, and that's regardless of their size, right? I think that the potential impacts are much, much bigger on the smaller organizations, just like when you have, if one person, if one employee leaves and you've only got 5 employees, the impact of that is far greater than if one employee leaves a 5,000-person organization. So I think that the impacts of AI, both good and bad, are far greater for the smaller organizations. I also think that the smaller organizations are not as educated about what AI really is, what its capabilities are, or how they should be using it. There was an interesting report that came out, it's probably a couple years now, Mike, but it was, the statistic was 67% of US white-collar workers are using AI in some shape, form, or fashion in their daily work. And the same number of respondents indicated they'd gotten exactly zero guidance from their employers on what to use, how to use it, when to use it, what's the right bumper rails, right? I do think that that's getting better, but if you're a small business owner, you really need to be thinking hard about educating yourself far more deeply and how to set those parameters for your team because there's all kinds of crazy stuff. I mean, as part of my own website using vibe coding, I built an entire website, an entire suite of proprietary tools and assessments in days, not months. It was just amazing. And with Claude, you can create agents who have a digital twin of yourself, a chief operating officer, a head of marketing, a head of sales, a head of prospecting, and actually just turn these agents loose and have them start going and prospecting out in LinkedIn or using HubSpot or whatever your favorite CRM is. You can do those things. I'll tell you that I don't have AI actually pull the trigger on sending emails or doing outreach to clients because I still think human in the loop That's a very important term. Human in the loop is really, really important. Why? Because AI is awesome, but a fool with a tool is still a fool. And it's really important that we're, that we're thinking about how we're using this tool to engage our clients. If you're using it to replace how you would engage your clients, then that is customer avoidant. That is not customer-driven. To be customer-driven means you're using the tool to its full extent that is supposed to give you more time with those clients to have richer dialogues.

I was going to ask you about human stuff when it comes to AI, but how can I? A fool with a tool is still a fool.

It's not mine. It was actually somebody who I had on my podcast and he said that. I just, and I was just, yeah, I'm stealing that. Thank you.

We should make that, we should put that everywhere out there because that's what AI creates. A fool with a tool is still a tool.

It's so true, Mike. And, but here's the thing, right? I mean, so like I was working, I was employed in the 9/11 dot-com bust or in the mortgage meltdown. Obviously the pandemic. Now we have AI and there've been all sorts of ups and downs and back and forth with the market across those number of years, right? And there's always been layoffs.

Right.

Always, right? But here's what's really different this time. This time is the first time in history that I'm aware of that CEOs are actually bragging about the fact that I've been able to lay off 14% of my workforce in the name of operational efficiency brought on by AI. Why do I bring this up? Because that is a very customer avoidant kind of an approach. That's derailing behaviors. Because here's what's going to happen. You may gain operational efficiency, but you just killed your future employer brand. How are you going to actually attract future talent when they think, I've got a shelf life the second that I walk in the door? That is myopic. That is playing the short game. That's what being customer avoidant or customer tolerant is. It's certainly not what being customer-centric or customer-driven is.

I laugh at some of the numbers coming out from these big mega-cap companies. One company reported, I'm not going to throw names out, but if you listen to the One of a Kind Financial Show daily or listen to me anywhere else, you'll know this company. They just announced they're increasing AI CapEx, capital expenditures, to $200 billion this year. Do you know how many jobs, do you know how many jobs that could create? $200 billion.

That's huge.

$200 billion if everybody made $100,000 a year, right? $200 billion paying employees $100,000 a year. We are talking about 20,000 jobs or 200,000 jobs. It's crazy, right? And we, so we're moving to this world like, yes, where these big tech people are talking about and raving about AI technology. AI still costs a lot and it's hurting and it's hurting business. And so You know, with tokens and the cost, you just gotta be careful that you don't replace somebody and end up spending more money along the way.

That's right. That's right. And, you know, to that point, you know, back to my point about employer branding and the future of playing the long game, right? Very, very important here because in the war of the brands, if you take Company A and Company B and Company A decides, We're gonna riff 40% of our workforce. Hello, Jack Dorsey. And then Company B says, you know what? We're not gonna do that. We're actually going to empower and enable our teams to be able to use this as a force multiplier so that they can add compound value for our clients. I'm telling you right now, Company B is gonna be the one that acquires Company A in 5 years.

Right. One of the other companies that announced earnings back at the end of second quarter, they had this, they had an efficiency ratio of over 50% for the first time. And it's somebody who delivers boxes to your house every day. And they don't, and they own a few airplanes, but they're not FedEx and UPS. It's another company. 50 cents, you know, 50% margin, which means that if you give them a dollar, they're making 50 cents. That's crazy from an efficiency standpoint. That's absolutely crazy for a company that size. It's, that's what, that's what they're trying to do with AI. They're trying to become more efficient, less dollars, more profit. Shareholders, shareholders, board members. So shareholders, board members, senior executives, stock. That's what they're, that's what they're trying to do with AI. They're trying to make the investor community more money, not necessarily create and stabilize. The job force of America. Yeah. And that's, and that's the role, and that's the role of the small business owner. That's like, like, like your book, Customer-Driven Leadership. America's jobs will be created by small business owners who are customer-centric, customer leaders.

Totally agreed. And, you know, kind of bringing, bringing all this full circle to, you can't just AI things, right? Like, again, it's a great tool. Use it, learn about it, become an expert at it, for sure. But you can't just AI things. I mean, I had a conversation with a COO of a major organization I also won't mention, and he actually says, now that we've got AI stood up, when can we lay off all our developers?

Oh.

Wow, that's a really myopic perspective about things, right? And again, it is a tool, but it is not foolproof. In fact, and this is published so I can mention this. There was an article that came out just yesterday, I believe, that showed that both PwC and Deloitte have published thought leadership and research that was 100% generated from AI. They got busted and there were facts that had not been verified. There was data that had been hallucinated. Wow. That's a problem.

That is something else. All right, let's lay the plate here on this episode of the Ideas by Mike podcast. The book is Obsessed: Cultivating the Customer-Driven Leader. Where do people grab it and where can they find you?

Yeah, it's going to be coming out in print in September. I'm still waiting on the exact date, but it is going to be in September. So you can just go to Amazon is going to be the easiest way to find that. It'll also be available at at Target and some other global distribution channels like in the Middle East as well. But Amazon's probably the easiest. You can also find me on LinkedIn. It's James Killian, PhD. No, I'm not pompous. You don't have to call me doctor. My mama named me James, so please call me that. But also, if you just Google me, James Killian, customer-driven leadership, you'll see me pop up on The first page of Google, and you can actually go to my website. You can see my podcast there as well as actually fill out a form if you're interested in getting in the early reader list, and I'll let you know when the book is available.

Today, guys, we— James educated us. He talked about how customer-centric is a slogan, customer-driven is a system. Uh, he coached us a little bit and he's like, you don't need 17 frameworks. Just start, put one name on the experience, measure what matters, you know, create a scoreboard. And then the plan is, you know, you talked about culture isn't a vibe, it's a document. You have to write this down. And that's a very good analogy to like, because if you don't write something down, it's a wish. But if you write it down, it's an action. And then the future, Man, he talked about how AI is out there. It's around us, but you cannot, cannot copy how you make people feel. And that's the takeaway for me today. You know my motto. My motto is never miss a moment. So I'm Mike Milligan. This has been the Ideas by Mike podcast. I'll see you next time.

Bye.

This has been the Ideas by Mike podcast with Mike Milligan. I'm an investment advisory representative with Advisory Alpha LLC. Ideas by Mike and Ideas by Mike doing business as Wood Oak Financial are unaffiliated entities of Advisory Alpha LLC. Do not use this content today to make any investment or financial planning decisions. Consult with a licensed financial professional. To reach out to One Oak Financial, go to www.oneoakfinancial.com. That's oneoakfinancial.com. And, uh, get to know us and then reach out for your complimentary call. If you've missed past episodes of the Ideas by Mike podcast, it's available on all major platforms and our YouTube channel, which is One Oak Financial. One Oak Financial. YouTube channel. Subscribe, like, and share this podcast as we only grow from our listeners sharing the show. We'll talk soon. It's the Ideas by Mike Podcast.