Ep 9 - How We Make Them Feel In The Process

0:02 Welcome back to another episode of the MRM Podcast. I'm Chris. And I'm Brandon. Join us as we discuss business, life, and legacy. It's business time. Hello. I am so hungry, dude. You're still hungry? Well, you know, we're doing this intermittent fasting thing, man. And it's like we were talking about. Do you need to power down? It's ravenous. It's part of the... It's ravenous. All we'll hear during the opening is... But I got these beef sticks that are sitting there. And I thought, well, I'll save it for after the podcast. But boy, they're calling my name. So anyways, if you... Maybe I'll eat them while you open the show.

0:43 Yeah, maybe. Yeah. So what are we, let's see, what are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about, so customer experience is a theme. It's been a theme for us. And I feel like, I don't think we'd be overstating ourselves if we said customer experience has been a major key to our success. Like spending the time, investing some effort and some real thought into customer experiences brought us a lot of rewards. Oh yeah. Without a doubt. Yeah. And, I want to spend some time on that. It's been an area of focus for me and our work together and in past businesses. And it's just something I'm passionate about. So far as when I came, when you and I first met, that was one of the things heavy on my mind.

1:25 In fact, when you hired me, I said, okay, I'm down. I'm in. I'm in it to win it. And I want you to send me the Rhodes Carlton Leadership Institute. Yeah, you literally negotiated it. Which was not the first time where I'm sure you're like, who in the world are we hiring this dude? I thought it was quite brassy. Yeah, I thought it was quite brassy. But I think you guys initially, you very quickly connected the dots on the why. But I think initially it's like, okay, what is Nordic doing here? Yeah. The luxury hotel workshop. We're in the restoration business. What's this about? But I think, you know, ultimately what we kind of figured out is a lot of what we do or what we say we do is all about hospitality.

2:11 We're helping people recover from the unexpected. I've said it a gazillion times in my sales and marketing roles to clients and public-facing comments that the retail construction industry has the benefit of nearly everybody that comes to them and, is in some state of excitement, curiosity, fun, because they've been planning to do this kitchen remodel or they're building a new addition for their business. There's something positive that's underway. Yeah, it's thought through. Yeah, they planned for it. They maybe even have some money set aside. And so they're not stressed about that. And it's just like, you know, this is cool. We build things for people. It's great. Well, you know, of course, every single one of our customers comes to us in some state of, Fear, anxiety, stress, confusion, you know, all of these negative emotions.

3:02 And there's fairly rare exceptions to that. And we realized that that's an opportunity area. And especially, I think, because I was coming from outside the industry, from insurance, and one of the things that was driving me is I would have my hands tied as an agent in terms of how I could enhance my customer experience financially. on the claim side. Because those in the industry understand, right, agents have to remain at arm's length. I mean, they have regulations, they can't buy gifts beyond a certain nominal amount, and all this kind of stuff. And I was the kind of agent, just the way I was wired, where when somebody had a claim, that was my chance to perform. All I did was sell promises. And now I always felt driven to engage in at least structure claims.

3:46 I mean, I wasn't super worried about windshield, you know, auto windshield claims. But when it came to structure claims and fire damage events and that kind of stuff, I wanted to be there for my client. And yet there wasn't a whole lot I could materially do. And so when I came to the restoration industry, that was on my mind. It's like... wait, this industry has zero regulation as far as what they can do for their customers. Wow. There's a potential for us to create some amazing experiences for people. And so then we went to this Ritz call and I'm so grateful that you guys said yes. Like, oh, sweet. And going to Marina Del Rey. They bought it. They bought in, you know. I'm taking my wife to Ritz-Carlton. And so we went to this. And I think this is where you get to see how the sausage is made are these workshops.

4:30 And you pay a couple grand to go to it for a day. But you're paying for that experience of seeing how the sausage is made. And they actually, one of the things they do during the workshop is they'll bring in one of their teams at Shift Change. into this workshop, you've got people from all over the world that are in Marina Del Rey for this. And they just waltz in their AM housekeeping team. You know, they got 14 people. It's a 100-room hotel. They got like 14 people on their housekeeping crew. And they do their morning stand-to in front of the workshop. And I'm like, well, first of all, just the level of intention of them doing this process with people. I'm like, wow, there's really something I think we can adopt here. And just the level of intention that we put on that first interaction with our teams when we're activating during the day.

5:14 And you and I have adopted some of those principles within our past companies in terms of the battle rhythms that we deploy. Absolutely. Yeah. really flowed out of some of those examples that we learned from Ritz-Carlton. They had this thing called the Credo Card, where it was basically a part of all 50,000 of their employees' daily uniforms. A little fold-out card, the size of a business card. And it has some of their corporate values and some of their brand behaviors. Some of those statements of, we always do this. As ladies and gentlemen for Ritz-Carlton, this is basically how we behave as a global team. And during that stand to, everybody would pull out their credo cards and each person would read a different one.

5:56 And then they would give an example of how they either exemplified that behavior the previous day or an idea for how they were going to live out that behavior during their upcoming shift. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. And the most amazing thing is you think of Ritz-Carlton that these housekeepers are getting paid 40 bucks an hour because they're at Ritz-Carlton, where it's 500 to 5,000 bucks a night. But no, it's a hotel. It's a luxury hotel. So it's fancy. It's expensive to build, but the housekeepers still make about the same, 13, 14 bucks an hour in Southern California. This is the same story at many other hotels. And yet the level of execution and adoption and engagement with the employees was just infectious.

6:37 I'm like, we have to adopt this stuff. So one of the other things too was that empowerment deal. I read about that in the Fortune magazine article years before. And it affected me, you know? And then periodically, I'll see that re-shared on LinkedIn and stuff like that. They empower every single one of their global employees to spend up to $2,000 per day Per guest. That's a wild number. That is such a wild number. And we're not talking about the general manager of that hotel that has significant responsibility and experience and whatnot. No, we're talking about the day porter that's sweeping in the lobby to the housekeepers that are turning over the rooms to the director of banquets and restaurant.

7:21 Like anybody... is given that authority, not just to save the day, not just to avoid losing a customer, because every single business has those moments where just everything goes sideways. Fall on the sword and do what you gotta do. Yeah, yeah. So it's not just that, although that's a great place to start, is empowering your people to save relationships. But no, at Ritz-Carlton, it's like, hey, if you have a chance to enhance somebody's experience, so maybe that is taking them from a negative perspective to getting them back into a positive experience, but also includes just spotting opportunities. And wowing them. And blowing their mind. Yeah. Giving them this outsized experience with your brand. Yeah. And one of the best stories, I've told it a hundred times, but I just have to tell it again because it's so meaningful, is one of the stories from their Dubai location.

8:08 And you can look up Ritz-Carlton stories. I recommend you do it because it'll stoke you with all kinds of creative ideas. Yes, even within the restoration business. Yeah, exactly. So much of this stuff is transferable, you know. This husband and wife in their 60s were at the Dubai Ritz-Carlton. And they were there for like their 30th or 50th wedding anniversary or something. They were an older couple, so probably closer to that 50th mark. And wife is in a wheelchair. And the story is that they were walking out on the patio and out towards the beach and And he was pushing her, you know, walking behind her with the wheelchair. And he made some comment to her to the effect of, man, honey, I wish I could somehow wheel you out to the water.

8:52 You could put your toes in the water. And one of the stewards or waitresses or whatever that was out on that patio had the presence of mind. They heard that conversation. Maybe they were sitting on the steps and they were in the middle of a break. Who knows how they heard that. But they pass that information. So this is the power of communication, right? They pass that information to somebody who could take action on it. Probably their supervisor. Hey, I have an opportunity. Here's the idea. You know, they said this. That person goes to the director of maintenance. And the outcome is this. They get that information to the maintenance department. The maintenance department is like, you know what? We could make a little boardwalk from our sidewalk out to the surf and And like, you know, we were doing some reno on several rooms this last quarter.

9:41 We've still got that in the woodshed. We've got enough stuff for it. And so this guy got his maintenance crew of however many dudes on their next break. They all gave up their next smoke break. And they used that to go grab those materials and create a temporary boardwalk. And so after they did that, they went to the general manager, let the general manager know what was going on. The general manager wrote a little card. He called to congratulate them on their anniversary. And then he had the idea of, wait, let me talk to the food and beverage manager and Maybe we can set up an anniversary dinner for them. So then they collaborate. So after that gets set up, then he changes, writes a different card inviting them to dinner at 6 p.m. that night.

10:24 And they meet him out on the patio. They think they're going to be tabled at just the patio for a special gift from the general manager. But no, the general manager walks with him down the sidewalk off the patio to the boardwalk that his team created. At the end of the boardwalk was this tent that was set up They already had a case with champagne and ice. The whole thing was set up. They had a waiter that was waiting there to take their orders. And it was positioned right at the edge of the surf based on the tides so that she could take her shoes off while she's sitting in her chair and feel the water through her toes while they had an anniversary dinner together. How over the top is that?

11:04 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so there's so much in this story, right, that I think is instructive for us as restoration owners and any service company that's creating experiences. What went into something like that? What was the cost of something like that? Well, what did you have? You had somebody who took a moment. They heard this conversation. They took a moment. Maybe they have little radios. They radio their supervisor. Hey, I think I have an opportunity. These people, yeah, she's in a wheelchair. I just wonder if there's something we can do. That supervisor calls their peer in the maintenance department. Hey, I got this thing. What do you guys think? How can we do this? They're like, yeah, I think we could do that. They gather their resources.

11:45 They communicate with somebody else who has different resources. There's this whole chain, but it's all birthed out of this conversation. common responsibility of it's all of our responsibility to create guest experience. And then you, so there's a lot of orchestration here, but what I learned at that workshop was it was not necessarily complicated. It was just communication. It's like, hey, we have this opportunity here. Who would we need to get involved to do this well, to pull this off in the necessary parties or get together and they do it. And what is the cost? Well, granted, we're talking about different business models. But there, something like that makes perfect sense. Yeah. Because, you know, these people are paying $500 plus a night to be there.

12:26 It's a luxury hotel, right? So the idea of giving people up to $2,000 to spend on a customer like that, it makes sense. But what was the actual cost even for Ritz-Carlton? Well, I read a recent article... where they talked about this, the average cost they spend per guest on that, like freebies, those special acts of kindness. Yeah. Yeah. Those moments that employees create, ladies and gentlemen create. Yeah. Is $56 per guest stay. Yeah. That's the average of what it ends up costing. It's not this rampant gross spending of... No, that's real cost, right? So I don't know how they factor that. But my guess is there is an overhead and all that kind of stuff into it. But let's think about this one scenario, right?

13:07 You had people that were already there. They already had spare wood parts. So they didn't have to go out and buy a bunch of stuff. Right. They already had food services on site. So they're using the resources they have. Their actual food cost in that really cool meal might have been a hundred bucks. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Their labor costs for a non-paying table to have a wait staff or something, maybe 60 bucks in labor for that evening. Maybe 30 bucks in wine if they get really drunk. So there was very little cost actually associated with it. It was all about that communication. Yeah. It's really the bigger picture behind that was... this cultural sense. And you use the term common responsibility on guest experience.

13:50 And I think that's the ticket here. Yeah. Is that what you're referring to is actually this broader picture of everyone is on the same page in terms of a prioritization of customer experience. Yeah. We're not banking on the fact that we're professionals and can dry the structure. That's what you're paid to do. Of course. That's like when a carpenter wants a tip for being a carpenter. For doing trim work. Yeah, that's your skill set. That's part of what you do. That's what we do, right? We've said we're a professional company and we're going to charge for our time. So we get paid to be a craftsman. We get paid to be skilled labor. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. What you're talking about is the only real way for us to differentiate amongst our competitors is by managing and controlling and delivering a really wildly great customer experience, right?

14:42 Because hitting the minimum professional mark is so what? Everybody should be doing that as a professional. but how you execute, how you make them feel in the process, could be the only real differentiation between you and your competitor. Because aren't they using de-hues and air movers to dry the structure? Aren't they IICRC certified? Right. I mean, there's not a ton of trade secret when it comes to dry craft. Okay. Yes. Some teams are more competent at dry in place than others, as an example. But really, at the end of the day, it's the same stuff. We're all doing the same work. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's the thing that over time we became really passionate about is we are not really in the restoration business.

15:27 That's the tradecraft. That's the nuts and bolts of what we do. But the real magic, the reason why we get referred, the reason why we have so many advocates and referral partners is because of how we make people feel in the process of delivering those services. And that just so permeated everything that we learned at Ritz-Carlton that's, But I think that idea of having the whole company take ownership over that experience is really important. Because without Ritz-Carlton providing that empowerment, but beyond just the empowerment, and we learned this, it was not like just turnkey. Like, hey, we just give this idea to the company and everybody just ran with it. And all of a sudden, we became a different kind of company.

16:07 That wasn't how it happened. But one of the things we implemented when we came back, when I came back from the workshop was... We actually wanted to do a version of that empowerment, financial empowerment, to enable people to make those calls, to take advantage of those opportunities. And so we presented it to the owners. To my surprise, it was a bold move by the owners because you think about a construction company, quote unquote, right? Issuing company credit cards. across their whole roster. Yeah. Seems scary. Because everybody who was a permanent employee once, you know, because we hired people through temps, they'd go through their 90 days, but everybody who's a permanent employee was issued a credit card. Yeah. Now we didn't have $2,000 limits.

16:48 Yeah. We started with $250, but even then we were scared. But anyway, owners fully embraced it. We deployed it. We anticipated, like smart people would, that it might get abused. Yeah. you know, you're putting new privilege, new responsibility, power in somebody's hands that maybe has never been given that kind of empowerment before. And, you know, sometimes people don't know what to do with it. And so, you know, a little bit concerned about costs and whatever. And I think we budgeted 9,000 bucks for the year. I think, yeah. I don't know if it was that high, yeah. Might not even been that high. But I think our actual spend, It was like 4,400 or something like that. Yeah, it was less than half. But the curious thing we found was there was almost no abuse. No. Instead, I think people, because they've never been given that creative freedom and the ability to make a decision like that on the spot without engaging their manager or something like that.

17:39 is they wanted to make the safe choice. They didn't want to spend too much, too little. So we saw a lot of people buying Starbucks cards for people or that sort of thing, gift cards, things that are nice. And they certainly, I think, were received well by the customer, but they weren't quite... It wasn't what we were looking for. It wasn't the Ritz-Carlton story. Yeah. And so we found we really had to coach people, not just in the creative part of how to really meet the customer where they're at, do something that's special for them, but also to just do it. Mm-hmm. To actually spend the money. We had to coach people to spend the money because they were actually way more cautious with the company dollar than we expected. And so that was interesting is that when you empower people, sometimes you have to really go overboard to educate them on, hey, no, we really trust you.

18:25 Yeah, you really do have the authority to make these decisions and calls that you think will benefit our customer. No, really. No, really, we trust you. Yeah, go for it. You know? Can we dive into that a little bit? I'm wondering if it's a little loose still, the theory here. Okay. And I, from a GM's perspective, watching kind of this idea start to unfold amongst us, I remember just trying to identify or hone in on this language that we could use. And I remember right out of the gate, and I believe this was language that actually Ritz Carlton used, was this idea of teaching their people to have their radar on and their antenna up. And I just love the visual of that because you could very easily say, okay, I see this.

19:06 This is a visual representation of having your head completely pulled out of your ass is the idea. So it's this idea of empowering our team. It's less about the spend. It's less about even the item, but it's the principle of it. reshaping the way that our people approached their job when around and in our customers' homes and place of business. The idea was to show up present, to be listening for the unspoken needs. And we spent a lot of time and energy equipping the team from a training perspective with that.

19:46 What are we talking about here? What's the why behind this initiative? It's not... And I think that the example that you gave where some of them started to default to a cup of coffee and some of these things, they didn't know necessarily how to be creative with that yet, but they did develop it over time. But it was more what we were shooting for was the development of this posture that an employee was in on a consistent basis of... be aware, be present, be paying attention. And what was crazy about this is that I believe this moved far beyond our customer experience. And it really became part of the backbone behind our internal company culture too. Because the idea that we introduced through this methodology, which to this date, I'm so happy that we did...

20:34 was really became the foundation that we started to build on awareness, social awareness, personal awareness, like how we could become stronger and better team players if we showed up present. Yeah. If we were paying attention to our co-worker. We were reading between the lines. We were doing a better job of reading between the lines. And so really what's interesting about this play is that I believe it actually has a far more profound impact possibly on someone's team than even the face value of changing the way that your customers experience your company. Internally, it's very profound too, or can be if you maximize it. So that whole idea of radar on antenna up was the foundation of this.

21:19 So the point was our people were showing up at a loss and they were being aware of the fact that they have a client that's stressed. Their normal life is in full swing, yet they have this experience, right? Being slammed on top of them. And then that should change the way that our employees, our team members approach the situation, right? And really, even though it took a little bit of time for them to get some momentum in terms of how they were executing on it, Really from the very beginning, it gave us just such an awesome conversation to have with our people to help reshape the way that they just even approach their job. It was cool, man. It was an exciting time in our business when we were rolling that out and developing that idea.

22:01 Absolutely. And the concept. I mean, it was really fun. Yeah, I think it's one of those things that we thought would have a much longer tail than it was, but the word got out really fast. It actually, customers noticed that. this stuff and our referral partners gave us an interesting story to share with referral partners of how we took care of their people in really personalized ways. You're right. It allowed us to engage in a different conversation than just filling candy jars. Oh man. Like when you can tell a cool story that you created for somebody like case in point, we had this major fire, just one of our senior project managers. it was one of those fire projects that just really gets drawn out, right? Like many do. You have so many moving parts and people that have to coordinate and so forth.

22:43 And we're getting to the end of this long process. It's like a three or $400,000 rebuild. I mean, it's a big job. And we were in the process of rolling out this whole Ritz idea. And I remember this project manager coming to a meeting and saying, Hey guys, I'm getting ready to wrap up this project. I really think we should do something special for this customer. It's been especially stressful on the wife because the kitchen's been out of commission, all that kind of stuff. Well, what do you think we should do? Well, I think we should go to this one restaurant and it was a cool restaurant in town. They cater and it looks like it's going to be about 450 bucks or so to bring them in and not just bring the food, but for them to bring all the dishes. So their first meal, meal at home is going to be awesome and they don't have to do any cleanup.

23:30 Like how cool would that be? Yeah. Cause this is literally night one. Yeah. And so first time at home and after many months and all of us on the leadership team were like, oh man, that is rad. Yes. Okay. Let's do this. And predictably that customer was blown away. Yeah. Yeah. And it was a special experience, I think, for that project manager to be able to provide that. That's the other thing we learned too, is it's a point of pride on the team. Absolutely. We take care of our clients at a special level. Special is different than best. Special is different than better. Like when you deliver something that you're like, man, unique. That was what I just did. It was special.

24:10 Yeah. That experience with that customer, that was good. Yeah. I feel pretty confident they would not have had that same experience with some other company. That feeling, there's a lot of pride in that. I think so. And I think it ties, again, all of this ties into the larger picture, the 30,000 foot view of your company. And when employees or team members get to participate in something that prioritizes that, It really does change the shape. It changes the way that you look at your brand. It changes the way that you see your part on the team. I mean, it has a profound impact. Dude, I have one actually that I did. Really? Yeah. And I got to share it because I... Dude, this was funny because as leaders, you're putting these things into place.

24:54 And at this point, I got to be transparent. I wasn't doing a lot of at the job level interaction at this point anymore. We're a pretty large team. Yeah. we were over 40. Oh, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, our head count at that time was probably 35, 40. Yeah, so a pretty good shop. You know, nothing world-class, but we're certainly pretty good size. Anyways, long story short, we had another one, Fires. I think these showed up a lot on the Fireside just because of the impact. Yeah. It's a woman who their property was located in a region where gardening and things like that profound. And she had developed in her home, in her backyard, retired couple, she had developed just quite an amazing garden setting to include all sorts of ornamental trees and shrubbery that she had spent years maintaining and tweaking and shaping.

25:45 Anyways, long story short, the fire was very devastating to their property. Then we are building a new house essentially on this property. So we're tearing it up. It was rough. Well, they were displaced that whole time. They were in a local situation, pretty nice little setting. Long story short, man, I went out and I bought a bonsai tree and brought it to this place where she was living that had no gardening, had none of these things were available. And dude, we're talking 50 bucks. Yeah. But dude, I remember when the door knocked and she answered it and I am holding this bonsai tree out for her, the emotional response from her was unbelievable. I mean, she just lost it, right?

26:26 Because what we did, again, going back to this radar on antenna up concept is that... What were we picking up? She didn't tell us about her garden. She didn't talk about those things, but they were present. You noticed them. They were there. We could see them. We could see that time had been invested, that this was a place that she found sanctuary, that this has been a major part of her day-to-day lifestyle. She's now staying in a place that has no outdoor amenities for her. She's not gardening. And this is going to go on for six months, right? Four months, five months while we do this rebuild. And she worked on that tree, the majority of that loss. It took us a while, right, to get that to her.

27:07 But long story short, the impact on me is where I'm going with this. As an individual, as a leader in my company, as an employee, you're talking about Point of Pride. Obviously, it changed this woman's experience with our company. It set the tone, dude. Yeah. we probably heard her at a level that often even her own spouse or kids are not hearing her. Right. I mean, how many times we just run in and gunning and we don't even pick up on these things that are really important to people. But I just remember the impact on me, even as an individual, I'm like, that felt rad. Yeah. That just felt good. I love being able to deliver a high level of service. I like being able to take care of people. I like being a professional in our industry and doing our job well.

27:49 But man, that added just a whole new level. It feels so good. You know, the other thing, Chris, that stands out to me is that this became... so integrated into our day-to-day life as a team that it actually began to spill out into our spheres of influence as a company. And one of the places I remember seeing that showing up the most was we bought into the whole idea and did CE classes, right? We had a nice training room and we would bring in local agents and we would conduct CE courses and things like that. And you talked about this, I think, in an episode that we have released or we're going to release in regards to how you prioritize alignment with your events and how that represents your brand, stuff like that.

28:34 Well, this is kind of a carry on of that too, where we had... We started having CE agents come in. And it's pretty common is to do some kind of drawing or something for that group, right? It's just value add. Why is it worth coming? Well, we got to the point where we were looking at our experience with CE. And we realized us giving one of these agents or agent representatives a thing, That wasn't really our way. It was our way is radar on, antenna up. How do we create a really amazing experience for someone? So we changed our drawing so that the gift that was available was actually a giveaway for the agent's office.

29:17 Our pay it forward basket. Pay it forward basket, man. It was, we would basically, it was these ideas that we had, our teams had been coming up with as they're doing it in real life with our clients. And then so they would develop this little basket that an agent would inevitably win. And then they would have the opportunity to think through their book of business and give this thing, this gift to one of their households, one of their clients. Right. And we would even teach them like, hey, guys, this is the reason we made this switch. This aligns with our culture and what we like to do. And of course, let's be honest. that stuck out. When we would even just talk about who we were and why we did this, that in and of itself said a lot.

30:01 And we got a lot of business from just that in itself. But yeah, the next thing you know, we had a following of agents that consistently came to our CEs that they were waiting on pins and needles to be the agent that would win that because they wanted to experience going to that someone in their book of business and saying, hey, I know you guys can use this. We've been thinking about you. And there is no reference to our company. It was all about how do we make this agency look like superheroes. Anyways, I don't know. I think what I'm just trying to say with that is it was so less about the individual event and the thing. And it was far more about kind of this I don't know, for lack of a better term, this momentum, this initiative that got started by this mindset that really just started changing the way that our entire team thought about customers and even our own referrals.

30:54 I don't know. That just struck with me. I loved it, man. I loved it. I think it came back to... We're going to refer somebody to anything. I mean, think about the last time you referred somebody to a hair salon or a car dealership or whatever. I think most of us, the only reason we refer something is because there was something special that makes us want other people to experience that. That's why we go out of our way to refer people. a type of ice cream or anything that we refer to other people. We're referring to it because there's something special about that thing or that experience. What's behind it? Yeah. It's what we know they're going to get because we felt it. Yeah. And so, yeah, that was a fun idea. But I think that started to really occupy our culture was, I think as leaders, we started to take it really seriously that if we want our team to make our clients feel special, Mm-hmm.

31:44 we need to be investing into making our team feel special. And we started to become more present to that. Like you're talking about, it really started to permeate our culture where we just became, I think what inadvertently happened, while we talked about this, I think a lot more of it happened subconsciously because of this Ritz thing is, we were essentially teaching them self-awareness. We were teaching all of ourselves self-awareness, right? This whole concept of empowerment and having our radar on antenna up was helping us develop awareness of what we're seeing, what we're hearing, and what we're feeling. What we're presenting. And you know what? I don't think we've defined radar on antenna up. Let's do that real quick. Yeah, I don't know. Go for it. Yeah. So the radar on antenna up radar, this was something straight from Ritz Carlton.

32:28 They talk about this all the time. It's just a mantra. And Brandon and I talk a lot about creating mantras, common language, really important. In fact, Danny Meyer of Union Square Ventures, the founder of Shake Shack, he talks a lot about this, how it's really important as a team to have this internal language, the way we talk about our business, the way we talk about what we do. It's different than the nuts and bolts. Like we all talk with MIT language and resto language. You know, this is common language about how we take care of customers and each other. Yeah. Radar on antenna up, we just adopted it. We're like, if it ain't broke, don't, you know, right? Yeah. This works for Ritz, it can work for us. Right. So we just use that with people. Radar on has to do with spatial awareness.

33:09 Being mindful, whether we're getting ready to go into a crawl space, or we're going into a house to do mold inspection. Who's here? Is there a dog in the house? What's happening? You're just being aware of our surroundings. Who's with me? Who's potentially within earshot, right? It's that spatial awareness of what's going on around me. And that can be relationships and activities, but just that general awareness, instead of just putting my nose down, tuning everything else out and doing what I was hired to do. I'm just doing my job. No, it's like, yeah, I'm doing my job, but I'm maintaining an awareness of what's going on around me. And then antenna up has to do with communication. And you brought it up before, this idea that, Ritz Carlton is going after not just the spoken needs of the guest.

33:55 They want to deliver on those in spades. Like you make a request with Carlton, they're giving you plus one. They're giving you that plus one. Yeah. But really what they're hunting for is what is this guest body language saying they need, what is their situation really crying out for? Like what's missing that we could help fill. It's reading between the lines. It's noticing things. It's like you said, recognizing that there's an emotional need that this woman who suffered a fire damage event has. And there's this really cool, simple, inexpensive way I can meet that emotional need. What a powerful opportunity.

34:37 What? I mean, it's noticing. And all of us learning how to better tune into... Not just observing, not just listening to the conversation that I'm having with somebody, but while I'm doing my job and while I'm working, I just make it a point to be aware of other conversations that are happening around me. Maybe I hear a husband and wife, I'm on site, I'm doing a moisture checks. And husband and wife are in the house, you know, I agreed and I stopped and I, hey, I'm just here to, I'm gonna do this, I'll show myself out or whatever. But then I hear something that has to do with them being upset about something or nervous or scared about something, or there's other thing going on. And I can take that information, provided my team and we can potentially do something really special.

35:19 And meet the customer there. So it's listening for those other conversations Yeah, we have, I remember one of our Resto Techs, one of our trades guys, again, it was like, this just became the way that teams operated. They were working on a loss and they had to go in and out of the side gate over and over again. He just realized, dude, the hinges were all beat up. They're barely holding on the clasp or whatever's not working correctly. And I think if I remember correctly, he called the shop and was like, hey, this is a lot It's going to take me 45 minutes. I just want to reset this door on this dumb gate for these people. It's cool. It won't take me long. So anyways, of course, we're like all in, like make it happen, man.

36:00 So those are perfect little things. Now, what the cool thing is, he didn't say anything to them. So he didn't go for the big accolades. He didn't, hey, look at me. He just did it. cleaned up his stuff, packed up for the day. Hey, thanks. We're good. We're done. See you later. Bye. If I do remember correctly, the customer discovered it and I believe that they did say something to our team. But the point was, it's kind of like the principle behind it was, he wanted to leave that space better than he found it. And so again, it's like, I don't want to try to kind of connect everything possible to this. But I think the key thing to remember when we're talking about some of these concepts and ideas is don't get so stuck on what it means right in front of you.

36:42 But try to understand the implication to your entire team as a whole. Because these are the kinds of things that just begin to reshape the expectation that your company has for itself. And it really starts to bleed into other aspects of the ways that you do business. So, I mean, I kind of wanted to talk about this too a little bit from this perspective of some of this stuff is kind of wow, wow, and it is cool. But isn't the customer experience really driven a lot by the way that we're delivering some of the nuts and bolts things as well? So as powerful as... some of this gifting or special out of the ordinary steps that we can take.

37:23 There's also all these ways that we just do our job the correct way that can also lend itself to this much better, better, much different customer experience, right? Yeah. And so when we would talk about radar on antenna up, we were always pointing that as well to our communication standards. Big time. Or what parts of the process and the procedure would we communicate to a client and why? Yeah. Things like... Dude, we would go as far as building a resto checklist. Yeah. This is a tool. It was carbon copied that a project manager, an estimator would walk your client through.

38:04 This is what to expect. Here's what happens on a normal loss. Here's the silent phases. Here's when we're working with the carriers on negotiations. Here's when stuff starts. Here's the players. Here's the ways that you and I are going to communicate with each other, right? Yeah. That tool, the reason we took the time to develop that was not necessarily to make our job easier, but it was because we were looking at it from, would this help the customer's experience working with our company? We know all the things on this list. We've done it 50 times this week already, but our client has no idea. Yeah. And we can proceed, but we've seen the effect that of better communication.

38:46 We've seen the effect of when we take the extra time to really set a clear expectation, to paint the picture for the client, to explain the roadmap. Yeah. Here's the next four or five things coming down the pike. It always creates a better experience. It does. Dude, do you know how many fire losses I stole from competitors because I didn't take the pat you on your head? It's fine. Don't worry about it. We got it attitude. Mm-hmm. Literally, I'm not kidding you. I've been in Burger King parking lots and successfully taken multi-six-figure fire losses from a competitor without actually ever seeing the client face-to-face prior to contract negotiations.

39:28 And the way that we were able to do that is not me being superpowers. It's because I would ask a couple questions and I would operate with radar on antenna up. And I would just say, what have you experienced so far? What kinds of things have you been told? How's that landed with you? Do you have questions about this part of the process? Has anybody mentioned to you these things to consider? And by just being willing... to talk with somebody changed their experience just over the phone. We're talking about just initial interaction and it earned us work. So this stuff is real. This is not hocus pocus. This is real life, affect your bottom line, affect the way that you grow your business stuff.

40:09 And again, those circumstances, they didn't happen all the time, I wish. But it still just lends itself back to, I wanted to be cognizant of the way that this client felt, even though I was only on the phone with them. And you're just trying to engineer that conversation and that interaction in a way that says... hey, this person has value. They're smart. They're an intelligent person. They've never been through this before. What are some of the things they could be concerned about or fearful about or have anxiety about? And can I do a good job of communicating through those? Well, that totally reshapes the customer's experience. That gave me the opportunity to earn enough rapport to get that job. This is real stuff, man.

40:51 This is everyday applicable stuff. Yeah, absolutely. It was just a game changer for us. And I think the key is consistency. It took a while for us to get to where this was actually a part of our culture. Oh, yeah. And the other thing you bring up, yeah, a lot of this stuff is kind of fun. It has a real fun quality to it. As we talk about buying people things and doing special things and creating special moments, it all seems like a whole bunch of one-off behavior. And it felt like that at first. We were getting in the habit of... of being more aware. But once we're more aware, our whole culture changed. But that wasn't all we had to do. When it comes to customer experience, you and I talk through kind of, there's three different inputs when it comes to customer experience, at least as I've observed over the last several years.

41:38 And this is through all my experience. I was in contract service sales back with Cintas way back in the day. Then with insurance, you know, sales and services. And then obviously in the restoration business, what I observed is there's three components. Yeah. There's the creative, which is what we just talked about, right? It's like, hey, we have this way that our industry does things or the way we've always done things, but what could we add to this process? or take away that would make this experience better, less stressful for the customer. Like how can we enhance our process? That's that creative part, right? And we had a lot of leadership meetings. We were thinking about, we were batting these things around, like, gosh, why do we have to get this physical form signed?

42:20 Why in the world can't we use DocuSign for this? Right, it'd be easier for the customer, it's easier for us. Like it's that creative conversation of, what can we take away or add to our process? Then the emotional, how does this process feel? And you described some of that there with that. There's a fire. It's very confusing for the average homeowner. Like, how is this going to play out? You know, not only do they have all the concerns of how does the whole deductible work? What is our deductible? Do we pay that now to you? Like, or do we pay that later? What happens? And what if we go over budget? How are we? You know, they're afraid of all those things. But then there are also a lot of cases displaced from their home.

43:00 And here, some of the competitors that you were competing against were just like, hey, sign here, you know, no, trust us. We'll take care of you. And yeah. you brought something different to that moment. And it made all the difference to how it made the customer feel. Mm-hmm. And I think what it was is instead of you using all the big fancy terms about toxic residue on the wall and how we got to get you out of here and we need to act now and trying to basically fear her into signing a work authorization, instead you empowered her because you were asking her questions. Hey, you know what you've heard so far. You're smart. And I'm here to fill in any gaps, but what's your experience so far? I mean, you're really empowering the customer rather than making them afraid.

43:41 But it takes practice. It does. And I think the last piece here is compliance. I was like, there's a third thing. Compliance. Compliance. And this is something that we've spent a lot of time. That ended up being probably the hardest work. was putting these new behaviors into a system so we could do it every time. Yeah. Or almost every time, right? And when we didn't do it, there was some way we knew. We knew if we missed it on a, like, Putting those systems in place was a really big deal to actually seeing our team adopt it. Like do it. Yeah, do it over time. Now, in fact, I'm fairly confident if we still have friends that work at that company.

44:24 And so we talked to them. That stuff's still alive. They're still doing the RITs. They still need the radar on antenna up. They're still known for that. But that's only because it took a ton of work of just repetition. and expectation, building it into our documentation, our dashboards. Sure. Is this stuff happening? Right. Yeah. It kind of reminds me of like some of the every job sales things is that we, in principle, we want to be able to just communicate, hey, here's these things. Here's why they're so important. Yeah. Here's the why. This is how they're going to grow our business. And this is why it's good for all of us. But you know what? If you never really take the steps to introduce that into your process, whether it be your written outlines, parts of your job description, part of your evaluation for performance.

45:10 If you're not introducing these ideas and concepts consistently at all company meetings or at morning training sessions, they're not going to go anywhere. Because we're all just... surviving. We all just get busy. We're all just kind of doing what we do. And so as leaders, it's our job to ensure that we make it easier to do these things than not. And the way that we do that is we develop them into, we bake them into our process and procedures for our companies. But again, it's like, no, you're right on the money in the sense that we have these really neat opportunities to stand out. But just as importantly, it's also the way that we handle the beans and bullets, for lack of a better term. Can we also evaluate the execution of those things from the eyes of, are we being cognizant of how this makes the client feel in the experience?

45:58 And I think sometimes, like some of us might right now in our mind be trying to separate the difference between residential and commercial, as an example. For residential folks, it's very personal. It's highly emotional. But for commercial folks, it's all business. It's all dollars and cents. Not true. But well, even if that's true, the way I feel as a business owner about my dollars and cents is really freaking important to me. Right? So maybe the tactics and maybe the language that we're using is a little bit different for our commercial client. Meaning if I'm prioritizing loss of use or business interruption versus maybe the residential environment, some of the different things that my residential client might prioritize, I'm still winning.

46:46 by being cognizant of what is the customer experience I'm providing. Yeah, but you know, more on this whole commercial versus register, because we did, and we wrestled with it a little bit. Does this hearts and minds stuff really apply to the same degree? But what we found... In some cases, it almost applies more. Right. Because. Why? Give an example of what we're talking about. Well, because these are still people, number one. And I think what they're prioritizing during the project is not necessarily what they talk about after the project. And that's kind of a wicked lesson that we learned is that, yeah, they say it's all about price, but then what is it that they tell their friends about and their colleagues about after the project's done?

47:28 God, those people are so hard to work with. Or what do we hear? Actually, what we heard as we were selling is, it's all dollars and cents. But then we talk about, hey, what's your experience in the industry? Tell me about your last loss. We're curious. That's kind of our thing, being humble and curious, rather than the dog and pony show. Right. Right. What's your experience with the industry? Oh, well, you know, it's really cost driven. You know, our owners are really, you know, it's all about saving costs. But then we dig a little bit deeper and what are the things we hear? Oh, yeah, we typically use so-and-so and wow, it's terrible. It's so hard to deal with. You know, the communication's awful. Yeah. constant change orders, surprises at the last minute, scheduling fiascos, showing up with tenants on site when they were supposed to be there three hours early.

48:11 We hear about all these service fumbles. So the reality is if we can write a fair sheet, most of the time when people say it's all about dollars doesn't mean we have to scrape the bottom of the barrel. It means we need to educate them on the invoice and the process typically, right? Yeah. But how we make that decision maker, our contact, whether it's the owner or the broker or the property manager or the business manager, the COO, whoever we're dealing with... They're a person that just wants to go home with less headaches. Yeah. And if you can make them feel more settled, less anxious, less distracted from their daily operations because of the way that you communicate, that's the thing they're going to talk about to their peers, to the people they're accountable to.

48:56 Hey, they delivered on budget. Sure, you still have to do that. Minimize your change orders, all of those best practices. Yeah. But it's the fact that you communicated so well and that person was less stressed out that they're going to want to call you next time. Right. So it might be, that's the difference between commercial and residential is residential in order to produce a great Google review. Yeah, you got to wow people. With commercial, in order to get another job, you got to make people feel better than they feel when the other competitors deliver service. That's so true. That's it. At the end of the day, it's still the same day. Yeah. You know, it's kind of like that whole idea of, oh, we're so busy. Mm-hmm. you know, that people will throw out in commercial, particularly property management, that you just got to slit your wrists in order to get the job.

49:42 Like, you just make no money. And that's more the exception. What we found, you're forced to communicate a little bit differently and you got to learn a little bit different system. Yeah. But we tend to fall back on that excuse of, oh, they're so cheap and it's just all about the money. And it's not. Well, dude, what's one of the biggest little wins, I guess I like to call it, biggest little wins, right? Is this idea of introducing a consistent updating methodology. for our clients. And so in some of our past exercises, let's put it that way, we've developed a template, an email template. The advantage of the email template is we import that into our Gmail or Outlook or whatever. And guess what?

50:22 Everyone that sends an email that uses the email template tends to say at least in broad strokes, the same thing. Yeah. Right? Okay. Okay. So kind of going along the lines of this, when we talk about and introduce this idea of using a 24-hour update or an ongoing job update email template, the point of it is to make sure that we're communicating the best pieces, most critical pieces of information to the right parties at the right time. Again, it's professionalism, right? It's professional level communication is the bare minimum marker that we're hitting with that. But again, what are we doing with that information? Actually, we're being really cognizant about our customer's experience and how they feel in the process.

51:07 So talking about commercial again, let's think about a multifamily or whatever, even a, who cares, right? A multifamily scenario. You've got the property owner You have a chain of command of some sort that exists within the organization that is the property management firm. You have a tenant scenario, whether it be business or individual. You've got all these players. So if I'm Joe Schnuffy, the on-site property manager, and I know I have a portfolio owner, owner and an entire chain of command, regional and otherwise, that I'm responsible for. And I'm on the hot seat because at my property right now, I have $100,000 fire going on.

51:50 I've got loss of use. Potentially, I've got the makings of tenants being frustrated, tenants asking for rent discounts and things of that nature because they're inconvenienced by the fact that there's repairs going on. All these things, all these moving parts. Do you think that individual has some levels of stress and anxiety about what's going on? Of course, because it's on top of all of the payrolls, right? Scheduled maintenance, tenants moving in and out. So what is stress, anxiety? What are those things? They're feelings. Yeah. Right? We don't want to talk about feelings. This is commercial. This is real business. No, it's feelings. They're freaking out.

52:30 And so part of what we teach with our updates is when you send really awesome, critical information to these people, and they can literally take what you sent and they can consistently pass it on to the right powers that be, if you're not including them yourself. Yeah. it makes him look like a superhero. Yeah, and I would just a little tidbit here because there's a pet peeve of mine, or I guess it's just a big opportunity that we all miss. When it comes to these 24-hour update emails, one reality in our business is there's days, sometimes multiple days, where nothing material is happening or nothing material has changed. We've got, it's Tuesday, and the next required step is for the plumber to come in and do their role.

53:18 And the other things can't happen until it's done. And so we've got this dead period of Tuesday through Friday. I think sometimes we underestimate the power of a nothing's going on email. Oh, yeah. We forget that as a business manager who's got a major abnormality on their property, let's take, for example, that property manager, they've got an owner... that potentially, not always, sometimes people have loss of use on their insurance policies, but sometimes they don't. Yeah. Because they want to save money on their premiums. So they have, they're bleeding money. They're not getting rental income during that period. So they've got an owner breathing down their neck and they have just the baseline stress of, where's this project out again?

54:02 Yeah. And or an owner tapping on their shoulder. And so even an email that says, Hi, Ms. Property Manager. I just wanted to let you know, we don't have anything scheduled for today or tomorrow, but Friday the plumber's coming in. And as soon as that happens, we'll be able to get in and do a finish our drywall, etc, etc. I'll let you know. I'll give you another update as soon as we're finished with the plumber. So that nothing update, hey, nothing's going on today or tomorrow. but it's because we have this next thing. Those nothing updates are valuable too because they can check it off their list. Oh yeah, nothing's happening because we have to wait for the phone. This is why. They told me that.

54:42 And then they can forward that to their owner and it's still professional. Hey, nothing's happening, but here's why. Rather than them having to, they get the call from their owner client. Then they're playing phone tag with their project manager. No, it's just a simple phone call somebody could have done from the office. Simple email. Yeah. I think one of the things to remember, and I think we've probably driven the point home a couple of times, but I think one of the things to remember is that often we will watch, right? So let's say we're monitoring that same example. You told them on Monday, right? They already know. So then we get in our perspective of, look, I did communicate this. Well, it's their job to pay attention and be on top of it. So if their owner calls them and wants an answer and they don't remember, that's not really my problem.

55:26 Yeah. Well, that is why you're no different than your competitor. Because for whatever reason, maybe you think you're standing on principle, whatever it is. Well, actually, the more we can do to take responsibility for those kinds of things, we change the customer's experience. And in fact, we make it so hard for them to choose someone else because they're not willing to risk it. what it's going to look like when they use someone else, right? So that same example is like, yeah, if you're just looking at it from black and white perspective, should they know? Could they have easily written themselves a note somewhere? Yeah, they could do all these things. But can't we bake into our process a way that protects us, right?

56:08 And how our team's perceived. And it creates an amazing experience for that individual. So the reality of it is here, guys, and this is, I think, what my point is, is that There are going to be many times as an organization that we're filling in the gaps for people and those gaps may look like performance gaps, their own. But who cares? If we're the ones that are consistently delivering on those and making up for those gaps and ensuring that they don't have a negative impact on our job, all the more reason those people are going to be super loyal to call you because again, you're changing the experience that they have when we deliver these kinds of services, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like this stuff's all mission critical.

56:50 So man, we kind of went a pretty wide... Do you want me to take a stab at it? I do, man. Should I do my first summary? Yeah, dude. I love it. I love it. So we've, man, we've gone all the way from Ritz to how do you communicate? Don't do it for me. Let me learn. Let me learn, daddy. Come on. Remember the phases of training. Yeah. So I'm finally on my own. So we talked about Ritz-Carlton and I think the first takeaway is it's always healthy. And we've said this before. It's good to look outside your business for ideas and new inspiration. Right. I think the key takeaways we talked about from that Ritz-Carlton experience are that radar on antenna up.

57:31 Finding, and steal this. You can use Radon and turn it up with your team. Use it tomorrow, right? But having those mantras that everybody understands the meaning behind them, and they can kind of, we can drill those into our own heads across the company to get everybody thinking a little bit differently about their work and their role. We talked about empowerment. And one kind of empowerment is financial empowerment, giving people the tools that if they have these great ideas, they have the radar on antenna up, that they've got the resource to buy that bonsai tree, right? Or they've got the resource to deliver a pizza to that chief engineer that just never seems to get a break for lunch, you know, and they've observed this or whatever.

58:12 We were equipping them to make those calls in the moment. We talked also about the need for repetition. That surprisingly, when you give people these resources, when you empower them to make those choices, they can be nervous. Many of our employees have never been trusted like this in the industry. It's not common for us to extend this trust in the construction world, service environment. We had to actually coach them repeatedly. This is what it looks like. Here's our vision. This is the experience we're trying to create over and over again. What is it I think Covey says or some famous business person said, you have to approach saying something, communicating something seven times before people actually assimilate that new behavior.

58:58 And then we talked about the importance of compliance in creating systems that hold people accountable to getting those behaviors built in. that create the customer experience. So the Ritz was just one piece of it, but there are all these other pieces we need to be thoughtful about in terms of our rhythm of communication with clients, how we invoice, the expectations we set, what we communicate in the front of the job that make collections less of a surprise to customers, which is a negative potentially, right? It's all these little practices that we build into our system. It's the skeleton we kind of have to build inside. Mm-hmm. to make these feel good things actually work and happen consistently.

59:39 I think that's it. Dude, you killed it. Right on. Yeah, I think you killed it. Fallback plan. Okay. I'm the summary guy now. Succession planning. I could if I had to. All right. All right, gang. Thanks for joining us. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of the MRM podcast. And if you got something out of it, share it with a friend, hit subscribe, hit follow, leave us a five-star review. Thanks a lot.