Create an Amazing Customer Service Experience with Shep Hyken

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All right, let's get down into it. Welcome to the Todd Hartley show, where I show you what remarkable people are doing. Not to, like, brag at who my remarkable friends are, but to extract. I like the extraction process surrounded by success. I want you to look at anybody that's on this show and what and like, the key differentiator that I want to bring to you is I want you to realize that success is actually pretty damn easy if you're willing to learn from people and evolve. Like, learning and evolving is one of the most important elements to getting next friggin level. And Shep Hyken who's joining us, he's, by the way, a hall of fame speaker, somebody I deeply admire.

He's a dear friend.

There have been many moments where I have reached out to Shep where I am frustrated about something, and Shep has set me straight and guided me along the path you should also. Not only is he a remarkable friend, but Shep Hyken is also one of the world's leading experts in. In customer service. Now, customer service is the foundation of every type of business. I was a fine dining waiter when I was in college and got so good at it, it was hard to leave. But once you get into the rhythm of serving people and recognizing what their needs are and where their pain and frustrations are, you, you could actually serve anybody if you just listen to what they're asking for. Provide it in a very efficient way at an affordable price. Oh, and one more thing. Do it with a great attitude, a cheerful, loving heart. And the person who's on a mission to please is the person who is always kept around. This is Shep Hyken in a nutshell. I was with him with a bunch of friends in Cabo. We were eating dinner, having sushi, and all of a sudden Shep said, I want to buy everybody dessert at my favorite place within walking distance. Can we do that? And everybody was like, yeah, okay, we're on vacation. We'll have dessert.

So we walked out the door, and.

Where did we go? Shep took us all to Dairy Queen, 15 of us. And we all stood there in the middle of Cabo after a couple of cocktails, and we had, you guessed it, Dairy Queen desserts until our tummy was full. Listen to Shep Hyken. Understand customer service like nobody else can explain it, and extract what Shep Hyken does brilliantly. Pick it up like a blueprint, apply it to your life and how you can serve people, how you can listen to what their needs are their pain and their frustrations and how you and your business can respond appropriately, like a Hall of Famer would like. Shep Hyken. But first, a word from our sponsors. This podcast is brought to you by the Wire Buzz team. Now, if that name sounds familiar, it's because I've spent the past decade growing Wirebuzz into a digital marketing powerhouse designed to maximize clarity in complex sales processes so we can help accelerate revenue. And we do this in three phases. Phase one, we transform your website to function like your best salesperson and then also incorporate persuasive on demand sales videos. Now, your entire team is aligned on messaging, and they're injecting massive clarity into your prospect's head. So your site looks great, but it also has engaging content that helps your team sell on demand 24. 7. The next phase. Phase 2. We train your sales and marketing teams to sell remotely or in person to expand the impact of your sales team. And the third phase is we develop and run targeted ads to your prospects. Scale those ads to help you achieve more business results. Sign up for the Wirebuzz Company newsletter to learn more about effective and simple ways to improve your company messaging, attract more digital attention, and ultimately make more sales.

Hey, man. Very nice introduction. Thank you.

Oh, my. We always have fun when Shep and I are together. But, you know, I've. I learned from Shep all the time. For those that don't know, it's common for me to fire off a call to Shep when I'm up a creek with a paddle, and Shep gives me some guidance that helps me get on track. Now, one of my goals is to make sure that I can extract some of that Shep wisdom rolling around inside of that big, massive dome of his and help you get to your next level. Now, Shep, clearly you haven't always been one of the world's leading authorities on customer service, right? And there must have been some.

I didn't start out that way, and I'm honored that you consider me that. Thank you. I'm lucky. You know, I'm on a lot of great lists, and that's valid. But, yeah, you don't start out by being at the top. Never do.

So was there some type of, like, magic moment in your career where you stumbled into understanding that there was this, like, magic to customer service that you wanted to wrap your heads around?

So I'm going to ask you a question. Do you use that term magic moment often?

Just for you?

Just for me. You know, because that's the title of my first book, moments of Magic, how to be a star with your customers and keep them forever. And when I wrote that book, I had been talking about creating these moments of magic for customers. And the reason is, is because my background, if you go way, way back, was I was a magician, and I have a passion for magic, and I still do to this day, and I still will incorporate sometimes even a couple of fun things into my speeches. But I thought, well, this is it. This is what I'm going to talk about. This is the word I'm going to use to describe the great experience that customers should have, and that is what we want to give them. A moment of magic versus a moment of misery or a moment of mediocrity, which is really average at best. So that's where it all came from. So what got me excited was, number one, I had the ability to perform. I worked in nightclubs. I'd been doing corporate events through high school and college. I saw a couple of motivational speakers, one of which lives not too far from where you are. Tom Hopkins. You know Tom? Yep.

I don't know him personally, but, I.

Mean, everybody knows him.

Yeah, Tom Hopkins. Great. Probably one of the greatest sales trainers of all time. And Zig Ziglar, the late and great Zig Ziglar. I saw those two guys and I thought, wow, that's what I can do. Because I was really kind of bored doing a magic show, because when you do a magic show, a lot of times you are hired to do the same act over and over and over and over again. And granted, I found there was great value for me in entertaining an audience, and I got a lot of good feedback with applause and laughter, and every time you're interacting with a member of the audience, it changes the show a little bit. But I knew there was something more than I wanted, and it turned out it was business. And if I could marry business with magic and performing, well, there you go. So, granted, I don't do a lot of magic in my speeches, but I do enough to keep me interested and entertained. But also it's the ability to get on a platform and speak, talk, entertain, motivate, whatever you want to call it. That came as beckra, so that was really kind of cool to be able to take a passion and turn it into something that's a livelihood.

Now, speaking of magic for a moment, Shep, his wife Cindy and I, and we're all in Cabo together, and we went to dinner over the ocean, and Shep did a magic trip trick that I'm still upset about today. Does good magic leave the audience in awe, but also frustrated, trying to figure out how it was done?

I hope they aren't frustrated. I hope they see it for what it's supposed to be, which is just entertaining.

So frustrated over that.

That's because you're. That's the. Certain men. You know, it's like my. My. My aunt slash cousin. She's got to be, like, 85 years old. She goes, I hate magic. I go, you always ask me to perform it. Well, I like to watch it. But then I start thinking about it. It keeps me up at night, and I go, chill out, babe. Chill out. No.

Okay, go ahead.

I don't do it to fool you. Like, hey, I'm better than you are. I do it because there's wonderment there, and it's fun and it's interesting and quirky and. What trick did I do? Do the trick.

Oh, yeah, you did the one where you called the restaurant.

We did a call.

Yeah.

Yeah. And the guy guessed the card.

Yeah, the guy cast the. Called anybody's phone number, and the guy guessed the card. And I'm. That you had in front of us. And I'm still upset about it. Yeah, go ahead.

I don't know if it's going to work, and because you're going to dial somebody, it's sometimes like, I wasn't even sure it would work from Cabo, because I know that you can dial a us number from your cell phone. And I'm glad because otherwise, without extra money in charges. But we got somebody. You don't know if you're going to get, you know, like, somebody's answering machine or maybe, you know that song, that sound that goes, your call cannot be completed, you know, because you're dialing this random number, and then you finally get somebody on the phone and you say, hey, can you just take a wild guess? Just name a playing card. And once in a while, they say some really nasty words to me and hang up the phone because they think I'm a prank phone call. But no, I'm really. I'm trying to do a show here for my friends. Would you just name a card?

And all this happened at dinner. The guy who answered the phone really wasn't that happy to be answering the phone in the middle of somebody's magic trick. But he nailed the card.

Yeah. And so I, you know, we get. I love it. Sometimes we get great. Sometimes we could FaceTime the people if they're willing to do that, because I like to see their expression when they guess the card, and it's the right card. It blows everybody away, including the person that's naming it out loud.

Now, in.

In your career, were you. You were a magician, but.

And you did.

And you could perform in front of people like nobody else. But was there, like a aha moment where you thought customer service could be the wheelhouse, that I could add so much value into people's lives, that I could help them get a better, you know, better build a better company, create the right culture? Like, what was that moment for you?

Yeah, well, you know, first of all, growing up, my parents made me do the right things for my clients that I did birthday party magic shows for and eventually working adult and nightclubs and corporate events. When I graduated college, it wasn't even a year out of college when I saw these two guys do their presentations, Tom Hopkins and Zig Ziglar. And I decided this is what I thought I could do. I went to the bookstore and I said, okay, there's gotta be some books that I can read and get better and come up with an idea for speech. And I was attracted to everything related to the customer. There was a book called In Search of Excellence. This came out in 1983 by Tom Hopkins. I mean, not Tom Hopkins by Tom Peters. And that was a. I went, wow, this is exactly what I want to talk about, how great companies do what they do. So I always had it in me. I just. It took going to the bookstore. And see, by the way, back then, you don't get racks and racks of books like you do today. When you go into a bookstore in the business section, you get, like, one shelf of books. So it was much easier to choose what I wanted. And it was. I got In Search of Excellence. I bought a book, I believe it was called Service America by Carl Albrecht and Ron Zemke. And another customer service book, I believe it was also by Ron Zemke. And I read these and I said, this is it. This is what I believed in my whole life. This is what my parents taught me when it comes to taking care of people in business. I'm going to write a speech about this. And that's how it all started. And really, I think that's so important. My mind is a mind that is willing to be grateful and appreciate everything that comes my way. Even on bad days, I find good things that happen and the ability to have breakthrough moments when you are grateful for what you're experiencing is far greater than you go through life with blinders on.

So you have to be open to it, you have to be open to look for the next level. Were you like me? Were you a speaker in search of a golden topic.

For about a day or two? Because when I decided I wanted to be the speaker, I knew I could speak already because I'd done the magic shows, remember, and then just wasn't sure what the topic was. But by going to the bookstore, I immediately figured it out so I didn't have to like. And what's really interesting, if you look at my very first speech that I ever did, okay, there were two companies. One was Anheuser Busch. They were the first contract that I signed. And the second was Enterprise Rent a Car. We all know who both those companies are, proving that drinking alcohol and driving a car, you can do both. That's a bad joke, a very bad joke. Okay, but as far as two great clients, they were great. And the first speech was called the Magic of Enterprise, where I was brought in to talk about this incentive of doing better. This is early on in the Enterprise Rent a car world. So there weren't a lot of branches, there weren't a lot of managers. And I talked about what it takes to create that magic, to get the customer to come back. With Anheuser Busch, we titled the speech Back to Basics. And it was the basic skills of customer service, doing what you say you'll do, say thank you, those types of things. I was doing that from the very beginning. And if you see my speech today, I'm not going to tell you nothing's changed because a lot has changed. But if you said, shep, do your basic speech for a general audience. A lot of what I talk about today is the same thing I talked about way back in the 1980s, because some things don't change. But I'm excited still about it because I'm always learning new ideas all the time that get me fired up about my business.

Right. I totally get it. I'm the same way. We are born from similar stock. When you were looking for your niche, this customer service niche, how important was it? And for those of you that aren't speakers, of course, what I'm really doing is I'm walking you through a blueprint in finding your niche for your business, regardless if you're a speaker or an entrepreneur, you're creating a SaaS product. So, Shep, as you were trying to land on the right topic to create your gurudom around, how important was it for that niche to be in high demand forever?

Well, I had no idea. And keep in mind, in the 1980s, there was no Internet, so you couldn't, like, go do a search on something. At least not in the early 1980s when I started. It was in the later 1980s when you could build a website, you can start doing a Yahoo search. Google was not even around back then, or if they were, they weren't very popular. But that's. I wanted to look for something that I would be excited about first, because if I'm not going to be excited, no one else is going to be excited. Number two, I wanted to make sure that what I was excited about would be something a customer would buy from me.

Okay?

So that was two criteria. And I always said. And I said it for years and years and never really made a change as a result of what I said. I said, you know, I don't really care if I'm a professional speaker, work in an ad agency, or, you know, do what you do, Todd, anything, it doesn't matter, as long as I love what I do and I can make a good living at it. That was really the criteria. I had to love it first and make a living at it. And I found out. Go ahead.

I'm sorry to interrupt.

I want to hear.

I found out.

Well, I found out real quickly that I obviously, I love being on stage. That was a passion. I loved the ideas I was learning in customer service. And what I also was able to do was take standard, basic, simple ideas and interpret them in my own way, create new words to describe it. And then as I got better and better and learned from all the clients that hired me because we do a lot of pre work to understand the audience, I was starting to learn how they were doing it. And over time, I amassed this huge amount of information. You know, clients tell me what they do, I read every single day. I'm passionate about constantly upping my game and getting better and better, but over a period of time, you know, you start to recognize. Well, my gift, I think, is that I take sometimes what seems complicated and make it very simple. Now, customer service in its rawest form is not complicated. But when you start looking at artificial intelligence, machine learning, all the stats and facts that drive a better experience, that can become complicated. I need to create a simplistic example, a story and a teaching point around these complicated ideas. That's what companies are hiring me to do.

To take something complex, simplify it so anybody on their staff can not only digest and process it, but put it into action, Right?

And that's the key. I make it simple and understandable and actionable.

Okay. I Love this.

Okay.

And because one of. Because you had the essential ingredient of passion, you've been able to devote yourself into being a passionate, hungry learner, which allows you to stay ahead of the game. Do you get a feeling inside of you when you aren't regularly learning that maybe you're falling behind and that kicks you back in?

Well, let's talk about COVID 19. Let's talk about how that took the whole concept of going to a meeting to the virtual platform. Now, I don't mind doing virtual events. I actually kind of enjoy them. But what I realized real quickly that I was missing is I was being called to speak at major events. And you know, for gosh, I mean, if you name the major companies, whether they be, you know, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, all these different companies have these huge events. And I was getting invited to some of these. And I would, you know, my speech would. Maybe it was during the main session, maybe it was later in the afternoon. I sit in and listen to the executives, I listen to the case studies that these customers are sharing, and I'm thinking, this is gold. And I would write articles about them. And I loved learning. And the moment I couldn't go to a live program like that, I realized that was where a lot of my learning was coming from over the last 10, 15 years, was listening to the true case studies that were being, you know, shared on these stages. So the good news is we're now getting back to where I'm being invited to speak back in these big events again. And I'm getting to see and. But otherwise I read half dozen, 10, 12 articles a day, every day. I have Google alerts that alert me to different topics that are of my interest. Customer service experience, employee experience, anything related to those topics. And then I also have this magazine that I created. Even though you can subscribe to it, I created it for myself. And basically it. What's the word I'm looking for? It consolidates. Maybe that's the right word.

Or curates for our.

Curates. Curates content. Right. So what I've done is I followed 50 different people or publications where the keywords, customer service experience, all the same keywords I mentioned before and more are in there. And anytime one of these publications or people post or share something with these keywords, it. It curates into a daily magazine for me to look at. And so love it. Yeah. And that's the way I start looking and reading, reading about what I do. And if I ever find myself having a hard time coming up with something to write about, I just go back and look at all the titles that other people are using. I don't even need to read the article. I go, oh, I can write about that. And then I just start and riff on it. Sometimes it completely changes into something completely different, but a lot of times it's that title that gets me started.

Okay, I love this, Shep. I think our process, yours and mine, is very similar. I look at news, I take that information, and I go, if this works there, it would work here. And then I start to formulate a story and use that to help elevate people. I mean, ultimately, what you're doing when you're reading is you're working as a trusted advisor right in your head. You're like, how could I pull information that would be valuable to my existing clients or my target prospects to make their lives better? And then how do I share that? So not only does their life get better, but they recognize the unique value that I'm bringing into their lives. Are you doing something similar to that?

Yeah, we want to just keep it simple. When I write my articles, I don't believe I write on anything other than common sense. But common sense is not always so common. And sometimes you have to look for that common sense inside something that's really complicated. You know, if you look at the computer and artificial intelligence today and how it's driving the customer experience, you can become overwhelmed. But when you break it down in its most simplistic experience and what the outcome is, it's really not that complicated. You know, I always say, nothing's changed in customer service. It was the same 100 years ago, and it's going to be the same 100 years from now, a thousand years from now. Because, you know, people go, yeah, but what. I mean, all this, you know, you go on, you can chat, you can. You can use your thumbs on a mobile device, you can zoom, you can use. You know, there's so many different ways to connect. It's become really complicated. I go, no, it hasn't. Customer has a problem, a question, they need to talk to somebody. And whether they're actually talking to somebody or doing it another way, at the end, they're happy. So they start out with the question or problem, and at the end they're happy. What's changed? Nothing. It's just how we go.

Mechanism or the interaction technique.

Yeah.

Besides that, it's still the core. Right.

And it all the same thing. Yeah. So when people realize that and they start to recognize, okay, we want the end result to be this. So we want to get rid of friction, eliminate extra steps, get them to the answer that they want easily. A lot of times we train our clients. I wish our customers would use the digital, like go online and use our knowledge base that's on our website so they don't have to call us. All of it's right there. I go, well, have you told the customer that it's there? Yeah, no, I guess not. Otherwise, the next time that customer calls and you answer a question, tell them, hey, is your computer open by any chance? Let me show you. The next time you have a question, what to do, and guess what happens. It's not that you don't want to ever talk to the people. You want to get them their information quickly. And you want to give people who have real, like higher level problems to be able to call and have access to somebody in support quicker without having to wait on hold because they're dealing with some fundamental question that could have been taken care of, you know, a much easier, more digital way.

Now you bring up training and you also are speaker. How do you get from the training part for the speaking part to the training part, like, at what point in.

Your career this is a good one.

Realize that that's another way that you can serve people at a deeper level so they can get better results in working with you.

Right. I want to answer that question in a moment. I want to tell you something that happened to me probably about a year to two years before that moment that made me realize how important it is to do exactly what we're talking about, have these breakthroughs. But how do you find the breakthroughs? Do you just notice them when they're happening to you? Many times it can happen that way, but there's another way. I signed up for a program called Strategic Coach Dan Sullivan's Program Program. He teaches it. He's out of Canada, but he also has a place in Chicago and he has classes around the world, actually. And in the fourth session, we did this unbelievable exercise. And I repeat this about every. I was doing it more often. I realized you have to let time go by. I had not done it before. I was in business for not quite about 15, 16, 17 years. And it was go back and look at all of the milestones that you can remember in your business. Like what, what great thing happened that might have propelled me to the next level. We probably knew it was happening when it happened. But when you start looking back and you start looking at all these different milestones, you go, oh my gosh, there were eight, 10 things that happened in the last 15 years that really bumped my career up. So the question at that point is, what of these could I repeat and do again? It just, we do it today maybe a little different than we did it 10 years ago, but if I did that again, I'll give you the most simplistic example. I hired my first salesperson and it's like, wow, look at, all of a sudden they're making sales and I can sit back and do what I do best, which is create and speak. What would happen if I hired another salesperson? Ah, that's that, that's that way of thinking. But now this. So let's jump now to a couple of years later. It's right after 9, 11, 2001, the speaking business could have potentially disappeared with one more terrorist attack. Nobody's going to send their employees to a fancy hotel in an airplane if it's going to potentially get shot down or there's going to be some type of a terrorist attack. And I thought, wow, what am I going to do? Well, I know if I took it to the company, they won't necessarily be having everybody together in a big sales meeting. But that would be training. I'm going to turn my, all of my content that I did in a speech into a training product. Let's see what that looks like. And then I can call companies and say, I'll come to you. You don't need to come to me. Put me in a break room, put me at a hotel down the street where you, you know. Because that's different than putting people on an airplane.

Right.

So that's what I did. I hired a course designer who helped me take my content and redesign it into modules so that I could do a two hour training, a four hour training, an eight hour I could do. Multi days I can do. So we did this and it was quite a fun experime. And then I did my first training date, which by the way, I didn't realize you're not supposed to typically charge as much for training as you do for speaking. But that didn't stop me from charging the same thing. And when the client said, yeah, we want you for a full day, I charged them more than I would for a speech and they didn't balk. But at the end of that day I just said this was not fun. And I'll tell you why. I am better at talking and doing a little bit of interaction. But what I don't want to do is throw out a concept, let them work for 20 minutes on their own, while I look around saying, can I help you? Do you need it? And then come back, and that just wasn't me. So then I started hiring other people to do this content that I created because it was all laid out perfectly for somebody to pick up a book. And my facilitator guides, which I know we're on video, they basically, here it is and open it up, and I've got all the content in here, all the pages, everything. So we made this available to trainers that I approved, and then I would go ahead and turn around and sell to a client a training product. And let me tell you what, this is great, because now I've got two really strong offerings in my business. Before, it was just me, and that's a dangerous place to be. That's a practice. Like, you know, if I'm cutting hair, imagine me cutting hair. But if I'm cutting hair and I decide to take the day off, I'm not going to have any clients sit in my chair. I don't make any money. Okay. But now I'm starting to book other speakers or trainers to do my content. So that's great. And then, you know, other things rolled along. We have on demand training. Now that's virtual, that you do through the computer. We have hybrids. But all this is really important because your business can ebb and flow. The economy. Economy can ebb and flow. And by having several different offerings that you can create and take care of your clients and customers with, I think that gives you an opportunity. You know, the last couple years with the Pandemic, you know, I stopped speaking on stage and I started speaking virtually just like we're doing here today. It was either do a speech, a fireside chat. My trainers would deliver training virtually the on demand. It didn't even take. A trainer meets. It's. It's done. We started looking at other ways companies can use me. We came up with seven very specific ways that clients can potentially use and hire me, as opposed to just speaking and training. That's it. So that's. That's how it all happens. Just kind of comes together.

That's like. Those are a lot of acceleration moments. Some of the takeaways there is to look back into your career, identify moments where you accelerated, and then see if you can recreate those. Now, there are a bunch of examples that came to mind when you were explaining this. I'll share them with the audience, but. But I love extracting that and then seeing how it works. Like, if it works for you, you could pick it up like a blueprint and then see if it applies in somebody else's business or.

Oh, yeah, 100%.

Like, that's uniquely valuable for me to be able to see. I was a fine dining waiter, and I was trained in how to enhance the customer experience, and the waiter training helped me find these key moments to delight my digital marketing clients and prospects. We, in our 12 years, we've lost one client, and we deserve to lose that client. But for every other company, we've been able to delight them through these, like, moments. How can companies elevate that customer experience, Shep? And how do they get that kind of ownership mentality down through the whole organization? So everybody is creating these magic moments, right?

So, great question. Boy, there's a lot there. But let's start with this. Customer service is not a department. It's a philosophy. And it needs to be grasped by everyone, from the CEO to the frontline employees and everybody in between. So that's, number one. It's everybody's job. We have a client right now that has 600 employees, and they keep asking, do we really need to. To train all 600 of them? And what you do? I go, you do. But not in the same way. I mean, your people in the warehouse need a small amount of training where the people on the front line need larger, but they need to be speaking the same language, and it needs to be reinforced all the time. Now, I know I'm getting off the topic, but number one, embrace the concept that it's a philosophy, not a department or not a tactic. Number two, when you're hiring people, you need to think of it that way. You need to think, am I hiring somebody that's going to fit the personality of what I need, not only for the customer, but for. For my organization? Would they fit into the culture? Number three, train, train and train some more. Training isn't something you did. It's something you do. And you don't have to spend a lot of time on it. You can do an initial immersion in the customer service. That might be a short course or it might be a book club. You have everybody read a book and then you talk about it. But then what you do is on a weekly basis, and I recommend it every week, is you take five minutes at a morning huddle or a meeting and just say, hey, somebody, share an example of when you created a magic moment for one of your customers. Give me an example of when we turned a moment of misery into a moment of magic. And you start telling these stories at each meeting, just Spend three, five, seven minutes at the most. And you do that on a regular basis, and you start to create sustainability, because people are always thinking about it. Because what you want is for everybody to be what I call service aware, which means they're aware in the moment, in that actual moment, that they're doing the right thing for that customer.

Beautiful. I absolutely love that. As a business owner that grew up as a waiter, I identify with that so strongly. And I also recognize that the key differentiator between one company and another that provides very similar services is how they create that experience and how they work from their heart to serve people, to make other people's lives better. I just think, like, I'm. I love the customer service topic, and I'm so grateful that you're out there preaching the good gospel to help businesses identify, because, one, I know it's a game changer. The second thing I recognize is every time I go out to eat, when the experience isn't great, my poor wife has to hear every little detail. We went to a restaurant the other day, and as I mentioned to you, we just moved out of Scottsdale slightly. And the. My expectations need to be modified because we sat down for dinner in the gap on the table between the table and the ledge or the lip of the table was duct taped all the way around the table. And I said to my wife, I go, I don't know if this is acceptable to do this. And she looked at me and said, once again, you need to change your expectations.

You'll have a much better meal.

And, you know, it's like. But like customer service, when it's ingrained in you, you recognize it, you identify it. You want to get up and start teaching people how important Shep is, is the passion. And refueling that passion for you, because you've been on the topic for a long time. But how you refuel it for somebody else is also an opportunity for them to learn. Like, what is the Shep Hyken process to get yourself motivated and inspired to serve?

You know, first of all, I have high energy. Call me, ADD whatever you want to call me, it doesn't matter. But I have a lot of energy. And I get up in the morning and I go, I don't sleep late. I enjoy it. I need a good night's sleep. So I usually, you know, some people want to work late, that's fine, get up a little bit later. Me, I get up early, come to the office, I go work out a lot of mornings after I've been at work for about A half hour to an hour. I'm feeling great. Come in. You know what fuels me is I love what I do, I get paid for what I do, and I'm able to make a living with what I love. And when you do that, it's not like you're truly. I mean, I am working and I work hard and I'm tired at the end of the day, but I don't know if you'd call that laboring. I think it's a career versus a job. I always talk about today, companies are struggling to keep employees. And I said that's because a lot of your employees are simply working for money and not working for the company. I kind of feel the same way. I don't work for money. I work for my passion and I get paid well for it and I deserve to be paid well for it. And I've learned if I'm not paid, like even when I sometimes will do events at no charge, if it's the right event, never in a moment do I think about, hmm, I should be paid a lot more for this. I shouldn't do this. Next time. No, I will tell you. Years ago, I used to do magic shows for General Motors. They would hire me to do the auto show circuit and there were sometimes 10 days in a row of doing auto shows. What was fun is I got to combine my passion for speaking with magic shows. Because in the morning I would talk to salespeople at dealerships and then I would go, like, if I was at the LA auto show, I do that in the morning. I maybe would talk to the dealers that are getting ready to go out on the floor that are going to work the auto show floor and sell cars to the public. But then I would go and they would have me entertain the public and talk about the magic, or I do magic and talk about the cars in the match. I'd weave it into the show and it was a lot of fun to do that. It was a job like a dream, dream, dream job.

Yeah.

And somebody said, I did 12 shows a day. Think about it, 12 now, not including the speeches in the morning, but from an eight hour shift every 45 minutes, I would do about a 15 to 20 minute show. Okay. And at the end of 10 days, on the 120th show, one of the clients I was working for came up. He says, how do you do it? I go, what? You are just as enthusiastic and energetic as you were on the very, very first show. I go, well, there's two reasons that this works. What's that, number one, I love what I do. And when the audience is giving me feedback in the form of laughter, applause, whatever, that tells me I can keep going. Number two, you guys pay me really well to do this. I don't want to blow it. Even if I were to take. And I told them this, even if I take what you pay me and divide it by 120 shows, that's a lot. I'm not going to mess up even one show. Maybe money was a little bit of a motivator, but it was really. I was being paid to do what I love, and I didn't want to lose that opportunity.

Shep. This reminds me of the worst speaking gig I ever created for myself.

Yeah.

And I signed a day rate. And. And I was. I was supposed to be there for the full day in Vegas at the convention center. And little did I know that when I arrived that morning at like 8 in the morning, that they were going to put a new audience in the room for 11 straight hours. And I gave the same speech 11 times.

It was so hard.

40 or 50 people. And I was emotionally after the fourth one, already starting to crumble because I was experiencing really bad deja vu. Like, didn't I just say this story and screwed up my whole context? Right.

Yeah.

I hate when I had to coach myself and say, when you get to the 11th one, it's going to be the best version you've ever done of this speech. And when I was done and I went out to dinner that night, I couldn't say a word. Like, the brain was cooked.

Right.

But it was great exercise. But there's something to be said about having passion and enjoying what you're doing and working in a sphere of topics that you could get up every day and be fired up to talk about, and that's what you get to do. He's customer service and experience expert, hall of fame speaker, New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. He's my friend, Shep Hyken. And for more information, you could go to hyken.com I'll spell it. It's h y k e n dot com. Shep, thank you so much for coming on the Todd cast.

It is my honor and pleasure. You're a great friend. I'm glad to get to know you and get to know you even better as.

Yeah, I feel the same way. I'm excited. I know we've got another retreat coming up, and I'm looking forward to seeing you there, my man.

Can't wait.

Yo, that was a powerful episode. And from what we just learned, it should be obvious how you can now implement these lessons in your life to get to the next level. Now, before you bounce, I just have three quick thoughts. First, thank you for taking me on your incredible life journey. Second, if you receive some value from me and you want to pay it forward, it would mean the world to me. If you left an honest rating and review at Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, I'd be incredibly grateful. And lastly, if you share this episode, whether it be a screenshot or a photo from where you're listening, anything via Instagram stories or LinkedIn, Facebook, or any of the social media sites, just tag me and the guest. I'll repost your content and I'll reply back in the comments because I love mixing it up. In fact, I'd love to share your shout outs in my feed too. Not only are these shout outs really good for you and for me, but they also help us book more amazing guests because they'll be able to see the reach that you're helping to cultivate. This is a way for you to help contribute to the show. So thank you again for listening and I look forward to earning a regular spot inside that ear of yours. Let's grow.