Roy's Blog: Entrepreneurs
August 21, 2023
Why audacious moves are needed to create stability
Stability is achieved when you are able to maintain high performance in an environment with constant uncertainty and rapid unpredictable change.
Stability eludes you when you play it safe and don’t change.
Change—going with the current in a way that is different from everyone else—is the only strategy that will give you a fighting chance.
If the world around you is changing faster than you are, YOU’RE DONE!
BE DiFFERENT or be dead.
Make a Move.
Keep your feet moving.
Take a chance.
Be bold.
Be courageous.
Be audacious.
Suck as much stability from the chaos around you as you can.
Cheers,
Roy
My 50+ Podcast Shows that will change your life.
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series
‘Audacious’ is my latest…
- Posted 8.21.23 at 06:16 am by Roy Osing
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August 17, 2023
5 crazy simple ways to really take your customer’s breath away
Source: Pexels
5 crazy simple ways to really take your customer’s breath away.
Everyone’s talking about creating memorable experiences for their customers.
Experiences are the new black in the strategy world. Deliver amazing experiences and superlative performance follows.
There’s a great deal of talk about why creating delightful experiences is a key strategic imperative for organizations, but it seems to stop there.
There’s not too much granularity on HOW practically to go about DOING it.
So I’m going to fill that void for you.
These 5 Moves were instrumental in our ability to create and deliver quality experiences for our customers as we grew an early stage internet company to A BILLION IN ANNUAL SALES.
Our goal wasn’t to just make the customer’s experience with us enjoyable, it was to create a set of engagement dynamics that would literally ‘take their breath away’.
#1. Be consistent. — There are two components to Service Quality: Core Service—the product or service that you provide—and The Service Experience—how people FEEL when they engage with you to receive your Core Service.
Lesson #1. You can’t take their breath away if you don’t first deliver your Core Service flawlessly and consistently.
If you stumble in delivering your product, THIS is what they will remember! Anything you do after that to make their experience with you amazing is a wasted effort unless you also have an OOPS! Recovery Strategy in place.
So, to earn the right to be in the Memorable Experiences Game, you need to get your core service right.
Deliver it consistently 24X7X365.
Core Service is the prerequisite platform on which WOW! experiences are built. If your Core Service sucks, you can’t be in the Customer Experience game.
#2. Be surprising.. — Deliver what you promise—your Core Service—AND surprise them with what they don’t expect.
Surprise Me! is the essence of a gaspworthy customer experience.
It’s actually the ‘shock and awe’ of the Customer Experience World.
Surprise Me! doesn’t have to be complicated (probably a statement on the mediocrity of customer service being provided today).
Find a way to Say Yes! to what the customer wants and you’re well on your way to surprising them and earning your ‘I just took their breath away’ badge.
#3. Be flexible.. — Flex to what the customer wants as opposed to trying to jam your stuff—rules, policies and procedures—down their throat.
Conflict is not the playground for creating memories.
Empower your frontline to bend your own rules in favor of the customer when it’s appropriate to do so. Trust that they will not sell you out and that they will protect your position when they are in the rule-bending mode.
Develop Empowerment Guidelines that place most of the power with the people dealing with customers and less power with those that supervise them.
#4. Be caring.. — Boring, right? How non-strategic is that?
Well, you can’t take their breath away if you don’t give a sh*t about them!
And if you don’t leave them gasping, they won’t be loyal to you.
And if they’re not loyal to you, your revenues will suffer.
And if your revenues suffer, your performance plummets.
And…
So, I would suggest that caring and empathy IS strategic and you better find a way to infuse the Customer Moment with as much of the ‘Caring Juice’ as you can.
How? Hire employees who actually like humans. You can teach them your business but you can’t teach or train them to ‘love homo sapiens’.
It’s a recruitment issue. Start hiring people who give you Goosebumps. NOW.
#5. Be easy.. — Have a ‘clean inside’. No Dumb Rules that customers hate, or grungy processes that customers resist following.
Make it easy for people to engage with you.
Remove the ‘pinch points’ in your engagement processes and let them flow with ease.
Enable people to deal with you, don’t control them and force them to comply with your internal systems and procedures.
And involve your customers in designing your rules, policies and procedures to get their input on what your ‘inside’ should look like to make it easy.
You can’t just declare that the Customer Experience is the Center of your universe. You have to put in place the actions to make it happen.
Make these 5 Moves, which successfully worked for me, and watch the gasping that results.
Cheers,
Roy
My 75+ Podcast Shows that will change your life.
My Podcast Show Audacious Moves to A BILLION.
My BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series.
‘Audacious’ is my latest.
- Posted 8.17.23 at 06:02 am by Roy Osing
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August 7, 2023
5 simple things you can do to become an audacious achiever
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5 simple things I did to become an audacious achiever.
The Achievers Mantra: “Doing it is 10 times better than talking about it!”
These 5 Moves enabled me, as a leader, to achieve superlative performance as our organization marched to A BILLION IN SALES.
#1. Be DiFFERENT. — it’s really difficult to make a positive impression on the career decision makers when you’re indistinguishable in the crowd.
Being part of a larger entity with no unique characteristics makes you invisible and that’s a problem for someone who has greater aspirations for themselves.
My simple process to gain recognition and the chance at personal growth:
▪️Identify the things your organization declares are vital to its success. What does it care about in terms of achieving superior levels of performance? What are the key strategic imperatives in its plan?
▪️Determine how you can contribute to these strategic requirements in a different way that no one else does. Be the ONLY one that does what you do in the way you do it.
Key point: achievers aren’t different for the sake of being different. They’re different in a way that the organization CARES about.
Here are ten of my favourite ‘un’ words that describe the behavior of someone who is on the BE DiFFERENT journey:
✔️unforgettable
✔️undaunted
✔️ uncompromisable
✔️ unbelievable
✔️ unrelenting
✔️ unbeatable
✔️ uncommon
✔️ unusual
✔️ unfazed
✔️ unbeaten
#2. Accept imbalance. — Accept an imbalance in your life.
Achievers are usually ‘all in’ to the challenge of standing out and separating themselves from those around them and delivering a consistent high level of performance in terms of meeting and exceeding the organization’s objectives.
And yes, that usually means that their personal life takes a back seat and balance becomes an elusive goal to attain.
#3. Serve people. — The Achieving Leader leads by serving around the workplace, asking “How can I help?”.
Awesome strategy execution depends on employees performing their roles with superb precision and ease, which means the bureaucracy and ‘grunge’ that typically gets in the way must be removed.
Look at the time management plan of any Achiever and you’ll discover that they spend a disproportionate amount of their time with teams who are critical to the execution of the organization’s strategy looking for ways to make their jobs easier.
People notice.
You earn the ‘Achiever’ tag.
#4. Tolerate pain. — The common expression “You’re on the bleeding edge of change.” accurately describes this Achiever prerequisite.
Achievers have learned to absorb and tolerate high levels of pain as they push their envelope of change in the face of opposing forces.
Defenders of the status quo cannot be vanquished with logic and intellectual prowess. They can only be conquered through relentless tenacity and denial of pain.
Without an indifference to pain, a leader becomes an ‘ordinary manager’ who simply cannot move the yardsticks forward enough to achieve extraordinary gains.
#5. Be undeniable. — Achievers won’t be put off their goal.
They move inexorably towards the intended finish line and there’s nothing anyone or anything can do to prevent them from achieving its intended purpose.
Achievers have the ‘undeniability factor’ working for them. When they put their mind to doing something, they simply cannot be denied their intended outcome.
These are the attributes of undeniability ‘masters’:
▪️They are tenacious goal setters with a substantial number of them in the audacious category.
Their goal setting infatuation makes them the antithesis of most people who thrive on activity and business and achieve terribly little.
▪️When they set their sights on a goal, they’re all in. They’re not ‘slightly interested’ in achieving their goal; it’s a drive in their gut that makes them move on relentlessly.
▪️They are brave: they are fearless in pursuit of their end game.
Trepeditiousness knows no part of them.
They understand the risks but nevertheless drive forward often right into the face of adversaries.
Walking into a buzz saw isn’t a pleasant experience for them, but they’re ok with doing it if it’s a requisite to achieving their purpose.
▪️They have a stable of like minded (but different) mentors to draw on for advice and guidance consistent with each unique journey they pursue.
Undeniables hunt for the ‘been there done it’ mentor and they accept nothing less.
These 5 Moves were instrumental in my success in achieving breakthrough results.
They will work for you too!
Cheers,
Roy
My 50+ Podcast Shows that will change your life.
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series
‘Audacious’ is my latest…
- Posted 8.7.23 at 04:53 am by Roy Osing
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July 31, 2023
What is The Storm and why is it deadly for marketers?
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What is The Storm and why is it deadly for marketers?
The Sea: rogue waves - heaving tumultuous water - howling winds - black menacing clouds - deafening thunder - crackling lightning - violent and frightening.
Competition: burgeoning - hungry - desperate.
The environment: random - unpredictable - uncertain - anxious - chaotic - hysterical – angry.
Customers: fickle – demanding - intelligent – powerful - vocal, who speak their truth about how organizations serve them - socially connected - environmentally concerned - socially responsible - technology-savvy - opinionated - price conscious - value-driven.
Welcome to The Storm; the landscape facing entrepreneurs and business people today.
What’s the path to succeed and survive The Storm?
There is no simple answer, but there are some navigation buoys to observe in the maelstrom:
✔️ Stay close to your customers. Open yourself to them. “Attach” yourself to them as they experience a fast moving and uncertain world.
Move with them. Respond to how they deal with their reality. It’s like riding a bucking bronco. Hang on. Go with the forces that drive you.
✔️ Pick a course of action based on the best information you have available to you at the time. ‘Head West’.
✔️ Move from that course FAST, when things change.
Stay focused. Be nimble.
The Storm dictates that customer-obsessed MARKETING is vital to the success and survival of any business these days.
If you can’t market in The Storm you’re either dead or soon will be.
The Storm dictates that traditional marketing practices, on their way to irrelevance, must change.
It’s over. The old marketing pedagogy that guided marketers is done.
The Tipping Point signaling its demise is in the rear view mirror.
Not enough marketers are waking up to The Storm.
And the business schools aren’t doing students any favors in terms of preparing them for it.
They are not actively facilitating the move away from the old marketing ways to the marketing tools that will give organizations a shot at weathering The Storm.
Business students don’t learn Storm Marketing competencies so how can they contribute to business survival when they get out in the real world?
Much marketing these days is BORING in my view.
It’s lazy. It’s forgettable. It’s unimaginative. It’s unremarkable. It’s deadly in The Storm.
Today it seems to be all about pushing products and services with a features and benefits bent.
It’s all about price.
It’s “communications to the masses” approach invades one’s privacy; it’s obtrusive.
It’s about copying what others are doing; infatuation with Best in Class and Best of Breed.
And there is confusion.
▪️Some talk about marketing but what they really mean is sales.
▪️Some talk about marketing but what they really mean is advertising and communications.
▪️Some talk about marketing but what they really mean is brand management.
Hell, even same-old marketing is misunderstood.
What a challenge to start a conversation about morphing to Storm Marketing.
Cheers,
Roy
My 50+ Podcast Shows that will change your life.
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series
‘Audacious’ is my latest…
- Posted 7.31.23 at 05:28 am by Roy Osing
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