Welcome to Making It! This weekly show explores the lives and stories of entrepreneurs as they share their unique perspectives on their success and the path to making it. 

Episode summary: Ron Kaufman, the co-founder of Uplifting Service, has made it his mission to help leaders and organizations build service cultures that deliver real, authentic value in communities for employees and customers. 

Early on, he embarked on a mission to uplift the quality and spirit of service everywhere in the world. As the philosopher innovator he is, he has spent his entire career trying to make it fun to build service quality and excellence. 

When the Singapore government asked him to develop a service quality boot camp to teach the adult working population how to be more responsive, more collaborative, more proactive, and more creative, he felt like a kid in a candy store. And he immediately started inventing. However, as he says in this episode of Making It, you have to bring authenticity to your business to make it in today's changing world.

Guest bio: People often ask Ron Kaufman, Customer Experience Educator, Service Culture Expert, and keynote speaker, where he gets his intense passion for the topic of uplifting service. “I get my passion for uplifting service from you” is the constant answer.  It delights him to see people succeed by contributing to the lives of others.

Ron, co-founder of Uplifting Service, is on a mission to uplift the quality and spirit of service everywhere in the world. He specializes in building uplifting service cultures with leaders in the world’s largest and most respected organizations. In 2018, 2019, and 2020, Global Gurus ranked Ron as the #1 customer service guru in the world.

For 40 years, he’s been on a mission to improve the world. The vision sustaining him is a world in which everyone is empowered and inspired to excel in service. To realize this vision, he’s worked with businesses in every industry and with schools, governments, and associations in 62 countries, becoming one of the most sought-after educators and customer service consultants in the world in the process.

He is on a mission to transform the quality of service delivered by the organizations he works with. That work has led him to become the consultant who changed the Republic of Singapore. The Singapore government asked him to develop a service quality boot camp to teach the adult working population how to be more collaborative, more proactive, and more creative.

Ron is a regular columnist at Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of the New York Times bestseller Uplifting Service and 14 other books on service, business, and inspiration. He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.

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• Track Title: Sweet Loving Waltz

Artist Name(s): Sounds Like Sander

Writer Name: S.L.J. Kalmeijer

Publisher Name: A SOUNDSTRIPE PRODUCTION

• Track Title: The Sunniest Kids

Artist Name(s): Rhythm Scott

Writer Name: Scott Roush

Publisher Name: A SOUNDSTRIPE PRODUCTION

• Track Title: The Sweetest Thing

Artist Name(s): Brent Wood

Writer Name: Philip Barnes

Publisher Name: BOSS SOUNDSTRIPE PRODUCTIONS

• Track Title: The Changing Tides

Artist Name(s): Brent Wood

Writer Name: Philip Barnes

Publisher Name: A SOUNDSTRIPE PRODUCTION

Episode transcript:

     I'm Ron Kaufman and you're listening to Making It! I run a business called Ron Kaufman; Serve, Care, Love. We help leaders teams and organizations all over the world improve their service performance and build the kind of service cultures that deliver real value in communities for employees and for customers year after year.

     I went to a high school in Westport, Connecticut that happened to be the second high school in the world to learn the rules of the game called Ultimate Frisbee. That's when that global sport was just getting started. And if you meet me in person you'll find that I'm quite short and I wasn't gonna play on the football, baseball or basketball team, but the frisbee team that was getting started was willing to have me and I jumped in and learned how to play and then I spent two years studying during my college years in Europe and I took the rules of the game with me and everything just spread from there. Creating tournaments and clinics and family play days and festivals. And then I ended up in the ultimate frisbee Hall of Fame as a Johnny Appleseed for taking the sport out to the world. 

     When I was invited to Singapore back in 1990, the government wanted to improve service education for the entire working population, hundreds of thousands of adults who had been trained to not make mistakes, do the right, thing get it right the first time, which was perfect for the factory environment that existed when I moved here. But all of that was moving to China and all of the data entry back office operations was moving to India. So they needed to move up the value chain and teach the adult working population how to be more responsive, more collaborative, more proactive, more creative. And that meant thinking in a very different way. 

     Now I was a guy who knew how to get adults to learn how to play frisbee, how to learn new games, how to do throws, how to do catches. And so while they had topic experts in service quality and service excellence, they didn't have anybody that knew how to take that and make it fun. To take that and make it engaging in participatory. So when I came here and they said they wanted to develop a service quality boot camp? Oh my gosh! It was like giving a kid a whole candy store and I immediately started inventing games that would teach adults about seeing the world from someone else's point of view, about taking some creative action that would create more value for the person that you serve. And of course you would then also be uplifted in the process because you feel better about yourself and that's where the whole brand Uplifting Service came from. 

     Do something that you love. Charge high value. And then over deliver. And be just incredibly careful about protective of and invest constantly in your reputation. Do more than anybody asked you to do. Aare about the impact of you in the world on other people. Really make the extra effort go more than just the extra mile... so that your life matters to the people who come into contact with while you're alive, can make a bigger difference in the world that may even outlive you. 

     Singapore has had a profound impact on my life, in that it is an extraordinarily pluralistic society; multicultural, multiracial, multireligious in a very volatile neighborhood, a tiny country, one little island that cannot afford to have a single enemy. And so everything about the way Singapore operates internally is to cultivate a sense of community and harmony and mutual respect. And then the way it contributes to the world is really devoted to trying to get everybody to get along a bit better. Well, that aligns completely with my own values. That's absolutely an expression on a national scale, and ultimately on a global scale of what I think each and every one of us should be doing on an individual scale. Which is appreciating the differences between us, respecting one another and finding ways to create a good, successful future together. 

     We are social creatures. We live in communities. We exist throughout our entire lives, dependent upon, engaged with, contributing to others in the world. Our success is necessarily dependent upon their response to what it is that we do. So then for me, each and every time I have an opportunity to interact with someone. I start out fascinated to find out who is this, someone that I'm going to be engaging with, what is it that they are interested in? What are they concerned about? What do they care about? What's the background that they come from? Because the better I can understand the other person I'm working with, whether it's a vendor, a supplier, a customer, a client or a member of my team, the more ready I will be to be able to take the kind of action that they will appreciate. That makes me more valuable. That makes us more valuable. And that is what contributes to the foundation of our success. 

     Anyone who starts a business who asks themselves what is making it should take the question super seriously. For some people, making it could be creating a financial foundation for their family. Maybe it's taken care of their kids or their parents. For some making it will be generating an entrepreneurial venture within a community where people are going to find good jobs. For some of us making it will be being able to make a contribution to improving the world and addressing serious issues in some walk of life. In my particular case, I consider myself sort of a philosophical innovator who happens to also be a very engaging educator and so I love taking these abstractions like service and care and saying, no, these do not belong only in the schools of philosophy and it's not okay to have shallow definitions like the customer is always right because we know that he's not. He's not always a he either. So then somebody needs to dig into these areas that may not be considered academic and say wait a minute. These are incredibly important for good human living together. And I've been privileged to be able to work on that in the domain of service for 30 years and I'm now embarking on the next 30 years to do it in the domain of care. 

     What's your contribution? What commitment do you have? What contribution do you want to make with your life and let that be the expression of your business. That's how you're gonna make it. I think authenticity is the new hallmark of the market, that people are going to be extraordinarily more discerning about where they take their custom, where they spend their money, where they give their social media accolades, what they talk about, what they refer, what they will go back to, what they recommend. People are no longer going to be satisfied with the flash in the pan or the shiny sparkly object that people are recognizing that our lives on this planet are more precious than that. It's not just an accumulation of toys. Remember that phrase? He who dies with the most toys wins. What a load of and how bizarre that it was going to be a "he" in the first place. How about "She who dies having created the most value and contribution to others wins because so many other people win." That's the way in which the market has changed. 

     You can't just take what's already there and think you're going to do it well and make a great business. If you want to stand out in your field, you've got to become a designer and innovator, a thinker, a creator, somebody who leads the field. So when I dug into this word care, I recognize that once again, very few people could give me even a working definition of what does it mean when we say, why should I care? What do you care about? How do you take good care? So I've studied it and I wrote this sentence, "Care is concern and commitment to well being." And now on the foundation of that, I'm building a whole new suite of intellectual property services and courses that will come in the future. All of that is driven by being on a mission to make a contribution during my lifetime. Because your lifetime and my lifetime ends at some time and you have an opportunity to make a contribution that matters while you're here. 

     This is Ron Kaufman and you've been listening to Making It! You can find me on the web at ronkaufman.com