Last week, you guys all talked about hiring great people,
and this is using SpaceX strategies for hiring well.
And then you're also training your leaders
how to do this well.
And so what you guys got from us last week
was really a playbook, the step-by-step process,
the four-step process of how to hire well.
And that you also got to interact with Jalyn
who went through that hiring process
with us here at Brilliant.
And so today we're gonna talk about scaling your business
and how to prepare to scale the business to the next level
by avoiding the common mistakes that most businesses make.
And as a heads up,
I'm gonna give you a sneak peek for next week.
Next week is Cheat Sheet Week.
Woo-hoo!
This is where we take a moment
and we get to look at everything that we've learned
over these last 12 weeks
and really realize how far and how much we've taken in
over these 12 weeks.
All right, is everyone ready to dive in?
We're looking forward to what Deanne's gonna share today.
Deanne, I'm gonna go ahead and hand it over to you.
Thanks, Jenny.
Great to have you back.
Welcome back, everybody.
So excited to share with you.
This particular one really goes
with one of the five global trends
that are happening in leadership.
I think right up front
when we first started the training back in January,
I shared with you five global trends
that are changing the way businesses,
organizations are led.
And you know, it's really interesting
if you study the literature in the industry
of leadership management, business leadership specifically,
we expected this change to happen in 2012
and it took all the way to 2023
for us to really start to see it for the first time.
And today I'm gonna concentrate really
on one of those key elements.
I'll mention one that's sort of similar
and then we'll go straight into it.
So the first key element,
you know, as we go back and look through
these global changes or these global movements,
one is, you know, one of the biggest ones is creating value.
So instead of focusing on internal efficiencies
and outputs and, you know, all that stuff,
what we do is we start obsessing
with creating unbelievable value
and outcomes for our customers.
So we're not just looking at our outputs
as an internal viewpoint,
but we're looking at what does the customer actually get?
What are their outcomes?
And that leads us to the big point number two,
which you're gonna focus on today called working backwards.
So today's topic really is the power tool
of working backwards.
So instead of saying, hey,
what do we have that we could sell to our customers?
You know, what products or services
do we offer our customers?
How can we package that up?
You know, who could we sell them to?
We'd flip it around and we work backwards.
We start with what does the customer actually need?
And then let's figure out how to deliver that
to the customer in a sustainable,
financially sustainable way.
So, you know,
cause we can all come up with very cool ideas,
but it may not be financially sustainable.
So this power tool of working backwards
is maybe I should have titled this training
that working backwards might've been even a better one.
But you know, when we talk about scaling a business,
it's interesting that every business gets to a point
in its development,
and it's pretty natural for this to happen.
When we get to a point where we start to sort of stall.
And by that, I mean,
it's like we've hit a certain pace, a certain revenue level,
and we're struggling to push past that boundary.
There's sort of an unspoken glass ceiling to the business,
and we can't seem to get it past that point
and break through and jump the curve to the next level.
So working backwards is one of those power tools
that we can do starting with the customer,
then working backwards.
Now, let me share a little bit of how I first learned this.
As always, we like to give our source.
And this particular one comes from Airbnb.
So when Airbnb, you know,
which is of course a publicly traded company,
I need to go back.
But the last time I looked,
it's about a hundred million dollar company in revenue.
It's got over 6,000 employees.
And it's a fascinating company
because when Airbnb first started,
think of all the natural resistance they had.
Hey guys.
We have an amazing product.
We're gonna give you an app
that's gonna allow a total stranger
to come and live in your house.
But it's gonna be great.
And you're gonna make money.
In fact, you can just give one of the bedrooms.
And then we're gonna take a big chunk of that.
And you have to have all this insurance
and you have to do all this other things,
but it's gonna be good.
So there was an immediate resistance.
So I don't know how many of you know
how much Airbnb struggled.
And if you listen to some of their senior executives
talk about those early days,
man, it was tough when there was just a handful of them.
And when they try to get those first few customers
up and running, they could not crack the code on them.
And so the first principle we learn is sometimes
you have to do unsustainable things
so that you can learn to scale.
Sometimes you have to do unsustainable things
so that you can scale.
So for instance, if we're running a new product
at Brilliant, then we do coaching a lot of,
as you know, professional coaching.
And we do coaching in a broad range of products.
But sometimes we'll go one-on-one
with some of those people and say,
how was that experience?
How can we help you?
Sometimes we'll let somebody stay on after the call.
So if we're doing parenting coaching
or we're doing marriage or whatever it is we're doing,
Brilliant Life Coaching, whatever it is we're doing,
sometimes we go one-on-one with them.
Clearly our small team cannot go one-on-one
and sustain that.
But the reason we do it is because we're trying to learn
what is the customer experience.
And we're trying to figure out what's the key ingredients.
So the same thing that happened with Airbnb
was when they could not get those,
they got a bunch of people listing.
And so there was some initial money and it started moving,
but it just did not go viral.
It just didn't pick up and they were really struggling,
bouncing against the ceiling.
And so the CEO and the CFO,
who also happened to be a great photographer,
went to go and visit some of their customers
and literally went door-to-door, knocked on the door.
Mrs. Smith, how's it going?
Well, I listed on your things and we haven't had anyone
or people came and they left the place in a mess
and so forth and they started scratching their heads.
So what they did was, step one,
they realized that Mrs. Smith was a lousy photographer
and couldn't take photographs for Toffee
and nobody would want to stay in that dark, dingy place.
It wasn't a dark, dingy place,
it's just that Mrs. Smith can't take photos.
It's always amazing to me that people who sell houses
go cheap.
They're trying to sell a $500,000 million home
and they run around with their iPhone
and go click, click, click, click, click.
There you go, there's the problem right there.
You went cheap on the wrong thing.
Instead of hiring a professional photographer,
making your house look absolutely amazing
and you paid them $1,000 to do it
and you made an extra $20,000 on the listing
or the $15,000 on the listing,
which seemed like a rather obvious point.
So they went in and they took the photographs
from Mrs. Smith and put it up for her.
And of course she got a better response.
And then they found that there were
customer behavioral issues about them not feeling safe
or how do we make the customer feel safe?
I mean, it's like stranger danger.
Now we've got all these strangers in our home,
how do we deal with that?
So they literally went person to person
and they knocked these issues off.
Now here's the interesting thing.
It was only about three issues in,
photography being issue number one,
stranger danger being issue number two,
and number three, the whole issue of who pays for cleanup
and the mess that people leave, et cetera, et cetera.
And so when they put up a rating system
where it's not just the person rating the customer,
but the customer also, Airbnb customers also get rated.
And where the host gets to say what the experience was,
they knocked down those three things
and the rest of it is history.
But who would have thought just a few years ago
that stranger danger would have been
a major business strategy, right?
So there is something in your business,
one, two, top and probably three things
that is stopping you from jumping off,
from scaling your business, jumping to the next level.
So today I wanna take a little of a novel approach
and I wanna just speak about three ideas
or three categories of ideas
that can help you jump the curve,
help you break through, scale your business.
And it's really interesting because at Brilliant,
we're going through, you know, you go through this at levels,
we're going through it again as a company.
So this is actually super relevant
to Team Brilliant right now.
So hopefully to you too.
But the other three areas,
one, I wanna talk about product development
from the viewpoint of working backwards.
Two, I wanna talk about user experience
or customer experience from the idea of working backwards.
And three, I wanna talk about dog fooding,
a horrible term, but it comes from eating your own dog food.
Dog fooding, meaning you consume your own products, right?
So we'll talk about that just in a moment.
So when it comes to, you know, loving what you do,
if there's any way that you use your own products,
you know, you want to be able to consume your own products.
So at Brilliant, of course, because we provide coaching
and we provide a lot of developmental materials
for personal growth.
Obviously, if our own people aren't using our own content,
there is a problem with that.
You know, that's what I mean by dog fooding.
Oh, this is great.
You guys should buy this.
It's amazing.
We don't use it though,
because we're kind of above all that,
but we want you guys to use it
because it's really good, we promise.
You know, so that's a problem.
If you can't, if you're not consuming your own materials,
if you're unfamiliar with your own materials.
Now, sometimes it's not that you are a consumer
of the materials,
but that you are fully aware of the materials.
So let me give you another example of dog fooding
is when I ran a software company,
about 80 something people in the team,
most of them programmers,
we started to run into this problem
that customers, we'd ship products to customers
and they were all big insurance companies.
So, you know, a lot of these people are home office people,
a lot of these people are in the field,
a lot of sales people, you know,
insurance agents out in the field,
who tend, the average age of a life insurance agent
in the United States back then was 56 years old.
And back then laptops were a brand new thing.
And we were one of the first people
to put sales tools right in their hands
where they can click the button
and send the whole application electronically
to the backend, instead of it taking six weeks
to get that approved, it got approved in 20 seconds.
And so that sounded so cool,
except getting these 56 year old older people
to get comfortable with that.
And so what we did is we did something very unscalable.
What we did is we sent out our best engineers
on sales calls with salespeople.
And their job was to watch the buttons and the order
and then to help people.
And here's the crazy thing.
It didn't take many sessions for our engineers
to come back and go, oh my goodness,
we make it so complicated.
We put two different icons.
And then on this icon, you double click on that one,
you single click on that one, you do this one.
And it was dumb stuff, all of it.
The window is too small and the font is so small
and they can't quite read it.
So we can just bigger font, bigger window,
break it up, make it work.
And with a bunch of tiny little things
that probably took us collectively a day, maybe two,
and the accessibility, the usability of the software
went to a whole new level.
So what did we do?
Another thing we did was we would send engineers.
So every engineer, no matter how deep in the code you were,
you're an architect, whatever it is,
we had three software architects
who were all very, very capable,
but even them, including them,
they had to go to a home office once a month.
So there was no sit in the home office
and pull the strings from behind the scenes.
You had to go and experience what our customers experience.
You had to go through that process.
And when we were rolling out new product,
and so I remember getting so,
I was so done with engineers telling me,
because the customer would find
it doesn't work on my computer.
And then the engineers answer,
but well, it works on my computer.
And I go, okay, well, I got a solution.
Let's ship them your computer then, since it works there.
I don't know what you'll do for a job afterwards.
You'll have to use some magic to make your code work,
but I'm gonna ship them your,
because the next person who tells me,
it's okay, it works on my computer.
I think I'm just gonna fire you on the spot
because that shows that you have absolutely no clue
or no care or respect for the customer's experience.
Your view is, oh, I'm fine, thank you.
It worked for me.
And that's not what the engineers meant.
What they were meaning was,
was that I can't find the problem.
And it's.
up to the customer to tell me more information so I can help
the customer completely the wrong mindset. So I'd say, okay,
put them on a plane, fly them to where they're to be. So off to
Boston, they went or where a lot of our customers were up in the
Connecticut area, a lot of insurance companies are there,
fly them there, sit down with a person go through it. And when
they when they went through the experience, often the times they
would fix the code there. And then it usually was a setting or
some dumb thing. So when we talk about dogfooding, we mean not
just the use of the product themselves, but being aware of
the obstacles that we've inadvertently put in the
customer's way, which is pulling sales way down. And they almost
always are tiny things, tiny things. We didn't make that
instruction clear, we didn't make clear, you click it twice,
we, and it's so simple to fix. So for us to love our own
content and love our own products, that passion must be
transferred, transferred to the customer. And so a lot of people
say, Well, I'm not in customer, you know, I'm not doing customer
service, I'm not doing, you know, I don't manage customers, I
don't do account management, you know, I'm just a programmer. And
our view was, everybody is selling, everybody loves the
product, everybody's involved. So I would say that if you're if
you have a receptionist, or your accountant, or get them out of
the office, get them out into a customer site, and let them
experience that, that is really, really healthy. So that's what
we mean by dogfooding. Everybody gets, you know, Waffle House has
a massive anybody know Waffle House? Is that a distinctly
southern thing, right? Okay. So Waffle House, if anybody knows
what that is, is a big restaurant group in the south,
I think it's spread throughout good parts of the US. I don't
know how many 1000s of stores they have. But Waffle House has
a fascinating policy on public holidays. So that would be
Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, the senior executives and
the and the home office staff actually manage the stores
themselves. And everybody else gets off. So if you went into a
Waffle House on Christmas Day, which they're open, you'd find
the CFO or head of HR, or, you know, the accountants literally
making your eggs. And the reason they did this was to keep the
keep home office grounded dogfooding, keep them grounded
in. And if you would eat that food yourself, you know, why
would you encourage others? Why would you be part of a
marketing team telling people you don't know to be to
participate in a product you and yourself are not entirely
convinced about? So there are these great ideas. I'm sure
some of you have seen, you know, great shows like undercover
boss or whatever it is, just fantastic ideas of getting this
is like the extreme version of dogfooding. Okay, so let's talk
about two other quick categories, product development.
So what we're going to do when we break up here in a section in
a moment in our breakout session, I'm going to ask you to
pick one question from each category, product development,
working backwards, and then user experience or customer
experience working backwards. So you're going to pick one
question from each of those. So here are the questions we're
going to go through. And again, start work backwards, start
with a customer. So under product development, here are
nine questions, pick one of these, what things can we do
that don't scale? What in other words, go and intentionally do
something that doesn't scale so that you can work backwards?
What things can we do that don't scale to how can we go out
into the into the market into the world, meet our customers
and discover their experience in their environment. So that's
really important, not your environment, not at a show, not
at a big, you know, industry event in their environment.
That's question number three is, how do we move our products
from like to love? Do you know the difference of moving your
product from we like your product to we love your product,
you know, or it's usable to it's adorable, is usually a bunch
of very tiny, stupid things you could have fixed, had you
known. So that's the purpose of that question. For what's the
invisible gap between our product and our market, we all
think that our products match our market, and they do not. We
all think we are meeting the need. And the reason we think
this is because we do what I call boardroom design, we sit in
boardrooms, and think of what we think is the problem.
And we come up with solutions, boardroom design solutions,
instead of going out into the field
and finding what the customer actually needs,
not what we thought they needed.
And you'll be amazed how many times
you can scale on your product,
make it simpler, quicker, better, easier, cheaper,
and people just go from like to love.
Number five, how do we get customers to use the word,
insert your company name here, brilliant,
and the word love in the same sentence?
We love brilliant, we love team brilliant,
we love brilliant coaches, we love brilliant,
put your company's name in there.
So how do you get your company name and the word love
to connect in the same sentence?
That's a fun question to answer.
Next one, six, how can we get people
to fall in love with what we do
so that they will tell others about it?
You know, we've talked about this
from Simon Sinek's viewpoint,
people care more about why you do something
than what you do.
And so this is a key to answering that question.
Can we help people understand why we do what we do?
Can we help customers understand why
and will they fall in love with the why?
And if they fall in love with our why,
they will automatically start to pass the word along.
This is called permission marketing.
You're giving your customers permission
to market it organically for you.
They're so excited about what you're doing.
They're so excited about your product.
They automatically feel the permission
to tell others about it.
Number seven, what biases are we up against?
So in the Airbnb case, stranger danger.
There was a bias against strangers being in your home.
So there was stranger danger.
Number eight, what is the sweet spot
for building trust with our customers?
We think again in the boardroom that we know,
but when we find out, when we get into the field,
it's a different thing.
For those of you that are running a small company
or you're running, you know, you're a solopreneur
or whatever, you're in a smaller team,
I would say this to you.
This is the fastest way for you to accelerate your business.
Get out and ask the customers.
There's nothing more powerful than picking up the phone
and saying to a customer,
can I ask you a couple of questions?
I would really love your opinion about what you think
about what it is we're doing.
People love to give their opinions.
Very busy CEOs will stop doing what they're doing
to tell you the answers to those questions.
So be bold and ask them.
And then number nine, what do we not want in our products?
I'm going to ask you to pick one of those nine questions
and then we'll go into, you know,
and then I'll ask you to answer them in the worksheet.
The second batch of questions, only seven questions,
and this is all around working backwards
from a user experience.
So what things do we think our customers can do,
but actually they cannot do it?
Like, oh, they can easily log in and do this.
They can easily do that.
They can easily do this.
What is it we're expecting?
We think, oh, our customers can do that.
Oh, they can go live in the app, but can they?
Do they know how to do that?
What is it we think they can do, but they actually cannot?
Number two, what is the perfect user experience?
From the day they meet you,
what would that perfect user experience be?
Number three, what is the user experience end to end?
In other words, what are the distinct steps?
And what for each one, what is the touch point?
How are they interacting with us
as they go through those processes?
Or do they meet us and then they don't hear from us again
until there's a problem,
which is how a lot of companies operate.
Number four, how do we design for trust?
What does that mean for us?
How can we put trust at the top of our user experience?
We want our customers to trust our app.
We want our customers to trust our product.
We want our customers to have a high confidence and trust
in the advice or the certification or whatever it is we do.
How do we build trust core into the product?
Fantastic question.
And what is the sweet spot for building trust
with our customers?
Number six, how can we use customer service
as the branding moment?
It's amazing.
Customer service is not an afterthought.
Customer service is the pointy end of the spear.
Customer service, you can form your customer's impression
of who you are so quickly by how you answer them.
We've talked a lot about how good Starbucks is at this
using their acronym LATTE, L-A-T-T-E.
We've discussed that before.
Just to remind you again,
you remember LATTE is somebody comes to complain
and you can do this in your team.
L stands for listen,
A stands
I acknowledge, I understand, I acknowledge your problem.
I listen to you, I acknowledge your problem.
T is you thank them,
thank you for telling us about the problem.
The other T is tell them what you're gonna do about it.
And the last is E, execute on it.
So L-A-T-T-E, latte, clever.
So, you know, that's the Starbucks way.
And what they're using there
is they're making customer service a branding moment.
I just advertise their lattes, just telling you about it.
And then number seven,
what experience are customers having
that's not good long-term?
They may be putting up with something
with what you're doing right now,
but long-term, they're not gonna do that.
So what I'd like to do is hand back to you, Jenny,
and then have people pick one of those questions
from each of those categories
and discuss them in the worksheets.
All right, thank you, Dion, the latte.
I remember that when I go places,
I recite it to myself in my brain.
Listen, acknowledge, that's good.
Okay, guys, so this is the breakout room time.
We're gonna break out and see you back here at 155.
I've dropped the worksheet in the chat,
so you all should have access to that.
If you have trouble moving into your room,
just unmute yourself and let me know.
And for you solo leaders,
we've created a group for you called General.
You can go in there and interact together,
and we'll have a reminder when it's time
for you to come back to the main room.
So we'll see you back here in a bit.
Hey, guys, welcome back.
Hey, Amber, Carla, Lisa, you guys have a good chat?
Yeah?
Some thought-provoking questions.
We've actually been doing a lot of this talking
as we're trying to do some sales and marketing strategy.
So these were good questions that make us think.
That's great.
Yep, that's really good.
It's nothing like asking the customer.
Right, which we actually had done some of this past week.
Yeah, especially if you can ask them in their own context.
I know it's easy to pick up the phone or do a Zoom call,
but if you can ask them in their own context,
it gives you a different feeling.
Like you can see how your product's being used
or anything that brings you close to their experience
of you and your products and your company,
that's really good.
Yeah, but certainly get on the phone
and ask them is definitely baby step number one.
So yeah, good point.
Anybody else come up with a good idea or a thought
that you're looking forward to implementing?
I was talking to Amber there about some of their ideas.
Robin?
Yeah, on the first section, product development,
and we said that everybody on staff
needs to go to a builder close to them
and get on the other end of the smart device with it,
one of our inspectors,
and do a mock inspection walkthrough
on one of their tiny houses.
Great idea.
You're gonna learn so much.
It's crazy how much you learn from those simple exercises.
Very cool, very cool.
Okay, anyone else had a good idea?
Something you wanna try?
Nancy, you wanna tell us
what we're doing on the user experience?
Yeah, Bonnie had a great idea.
We had this little animated like cartoon,
we call him our little Noah guy or the Noah dude.
And he's just on our website
and on some of our videos and things like that.
You'll see him across some of our media and things.
And we have some members
that don't wanna read instructions
when it comes to the onboarding process.
They're having a difficult time absorbing
what the next step is.
And we've really laid it out like onboarding 101
and detailed it and things like that.
But Bonnie had a good idea
that a lot of people don't wanna read
the Gettysburg Address.
They'll click on a 45 second video though.
So we're gonna have our IT guy create a video
with our little Noah guy,
just telling them what to expect
during the onboarding process
and how they can get through it
and hope that maybe we can help people
get to the other side of that more effectively
without needing all the handholding
that's happening currently.
Yeah, you know what would be cool though?
Was that Nancy speaking?
Yes.
Yeah, so Nancy, what would be cool about that great idea,
Bonnie, would be to,
when you got the video before you roll it out,
test drive it with three or four people.
Watch their reactions,
especially if you can be in the room with them somehow,
or if you can monitor them in some way
to watch their reactions,
watch where they would go.
And if it's as intuitive as you think it is,
get out of the boardroom mode.
go out of the lab mode and see what it actually,
what happens in the field is always a different thing, man.
People, it's little things as small as,
you think you mean something by one word
and they mean like click the icon.
What's an icon, you know?
So which one of these fixed six little pictures
is the icon you want me to press?
You know, it can be as simple as that.
So great thoughts, yeah.
You'll be amazed as you set this culture in.
I think if you can have a methodology
where people get out and talk to customers
and you design working backwards as part of your culture,
then what will happen is whoever's doing customer service
is one of the most valuable resources
because they're already getting
a lot of inbound customer responses.
And it'll be great if you pick
some of your most negative customer responses
and call them and say,
hey, could I ask you how they went?
What did we do wrong?
How can we do better?
Very few, one or 2% will go crazy and stay crazy.
But for the most part that people will soften
and wow, thanks for calling.
I didn't expect, you know, somebody would call me back.
I think that's really huge.
Jenny, did you guys come up with anything?
I know you didn't have a lot of time on your end.
No, I think collectively we came,
no, we didn't come up with an idea of what to do.
We talked about different points.
It was really a fun exercise to do
and I look forward to doing it later on
from start to finish.
Yeah, so Jenny and I were talking
beginning of the, before the session started today
around the idea that, you know,
when you first introduce an idea to your team,
if it all goes smoothly, you have mild, you know, adoption.
And the mild adoption is like, they're not against it.
They're like for it.
They just haven't quite clicked on how to actually use it
all the time.
So, hey, we got playbooks and we got deep work
and we got this and we got that.
So you get mild adoption.
But when they go through the second time, a third time,
once it becomes culturalized and institutionalized,
once it becomes part of who you are as a team,
then you get deep adoption.
And that's when you really get the bang for the buck.
Back to you, Jenny.
Thank you.
Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that
and will implement that and use that
as part of your customer experience.
And if you have questions along the way,
remember the mybrilliant.app.
You can post on the community any questions or comments,
things that you are walking through
and you're seeing the benefit of
or where you might even be getting stuck.
And please complete the end of the call survey.
Thank you so much.
We read those and we take that feedback in.
You guys all have a great rest of your week
and we'll see you next week.
Bye.