Building your ‘Wow System’ for long term profits
July 1, 2021
In this episode, we talk about shifting from a short-term profit mindset to a long-term sustainable mindset.
In a previous episode, I talked about how MBAs are actually killing their startups. And one of the reasons that they're killing their startups is because they're over-engineering. And that's what that previous episode goes into. How MBAs over-engineer their startups and essentially lose focus on what's really important in the long term.
So today we're actually gonna talk about the long term and this is one of the problems that I see startup founders make consistently is very short term thinking. They're trying to figure out how they can keep the runway going, how they can survive. So it's very understandable. But they try to extract more from the market than what the market is willing to give to them. And when they come into a situation like this where they're trying to take more than the value that they're actually giving out. Well, people are going to remember that and you're essentially taking away from long-term profits. So here's what I mean.
There are two different ways to think about your company. You can think about your company in the short term and the long term people that think in the long term, they are focused on customer experience. While people that think in the short term are only focused on either profit revenue or some kind of growth, usually it's just revenue, but where they differ is long-term thinking wins out. Because what you end up doing is you end up creating, an army of evangelists for your company, and this army of evangelists, they are so valuable.
This is something that a lot of companies would kill to have because it really does come down to your NPS, your net promoter score. So thinking in the long term is pretty interesting because I have been reading the book Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, and I've been sharing some of the passages in the book. Zappos, they have a very strong company culture and part of the company culture is customer experience first, right. They're all about delivering happiness. They're all about that wow factor in building up that wow system. And they sometimes will give up revenue now or profit now to think in the long term.
So some of the things that they do is they'll send flowers to their customers or they'll do upgrades, um like unnecessary priority shipping upgrades to their customers. And this makes the customers feel really special. And they will start sharing these stories with everyone around them. Right though, they might post it on Facebook, like wow Zappos sent me flowers today or wow Zappos said that these shoes were supposed to come here in five days and they just automatically upgraded me and what wonderful stories and these stories are what actually drives growth in the future.
And one of the things that I mentioned is as you are building momentum with your customer experience, it becomes a snowball effect. So what I mean by this is the more you take care of your customers now. This will start compounding into other customers that will be interested in your offering because they're hearing all these different stories and it's going to create a snowball effect of positivity.
At the same time, if customers have bad experiences in the very beginning, it's really going to be difficult for you to recover from that because the bad stories will likely snowball before you can start snowballing back with some good stories. I hope this makes sense. What I'm trying to say is when you're starting a company, it really should be customer experience first. You should be thinking about the customer first. If you can wow the customer and make the customer extremely happy, then everything else will fall into place. The customers will actually want to give you value. In fact, I can actually think of a time when I was consulting for a customer and they were so happy with the value that I provided them.
That one day I would say two months later after helping them, they sent me $1,000 just like that and I had no idea where this money came from. I was a little scared that someone painting by accident and then I wasn't checked LinkedIn and I linked in this client sent me a message saying, hey Robin, we were so happy with what you were able to do for us and I just sent you a little gift to your PayPal. So how awesome is that? And that's the thing that was two months later at this? At this time I didn't have an email sequence, There was like no nurturing or anything like this. But the service that are provided provided such a lasting impression that this person remembered after two months and they were so happy they actually sent $1,000 gift and I will tell you that this $1,000 gift was three times over the initial amount they paid.
So the point of that is is when you focus on the customer and you focus on the customer experience and you're providing value, you will get that value back. You will, you will eventually make money because people are gonna want to take care of you. When you take care of people, it's reciprocal. People want to take care of you. So when you start thinking in the long term instead of the short term you are going to be much better off.
But what kind of companies are actually able to think in the long term? And this is the key. If you want to have long-term thinking, then you have to focus on a customer that's congruent with your core identity. So I say this a lot and it's so important because if you pick the wrong customer, then it's not gonna sustain, you're obviously not gonna do a good job taking care of this customer. And you'll probably move towards profit, um short term profit type of thinking or MBA type of thinking and you'll just sabotage your brand and your company for short term profits. Now, this might be an okay thing for you. This is your goal.
If this is your goal just to make some really quick money and just be out, you know, then I don't know why you're listening to this podcast because you're probably not the type of founder that would be attracted to this podcast. The type of founder that's attracted to this podcast wants to make an impact and they want to elevate the floor for everyone in the world. And if you are this type of founder, then you are likely in it for the long haul. You don't care about the money, You don't care about the Prophet. So don't let that MBA type of thinking that over-engineering type of thinking, ruin your vision and ruin your values. Stay true to your values. Think about the long term, take care of your customers and everything else will fall in place. This is Robin Copernicus. Boom, bam. I'm out.
Continue your journey with me on my other channels:
So today we're actually gonna talk about the long term and this is one of the problems that I see startup founders make consistently is very short term thinking. They're trying to figure out how they can keep the runway going, how they can survive. So it's very understandable. But they try to extract more from the market than what the market is willing to give to them. And when they come into a situation like this where they're trying to take more than the value that they're actually giving out. Well, people are going to remember that and you're essentially taking away from long-term profits. So here's what I mean.
There are two different ways to think about your company. You can think about your company in the short term and the long term people that think in the long term, they are focused on customer experience. While people that think in the short term are only focused on either profit revenue or some kind of growth, usually it's just revenue, but where they differ is long-term thinking wins out. Because what you end up doing is you end up creating, an army of evangelists for your company, and this army of evangelists, they are so valuable.
This is something that a lot of companies would kill to have because it really does come down to your NPS, your net promoter score. So thinking in the long term is pretty interesting because I have been reading the book Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, and I've been sharing some of the passages in the book. Zappos, they have a very strong company culture and part of the company culture is customer experience first, right. They're all about delivering happiness. They're all about that wow factor in building up that wow system. And they sometimes will give up revenue now or profit now to think in the long term.
So some of the things that they do is they'll send flowers to their customers or they'll do upgrades, um like unnecessary priority shipping upgrades to their customers. And this makes the customers feel really special. And they will start sharing these stories with everyone around them. Right though, they might post it on Facebook, like wow Zappos sent me flowers today or wow Zappos said that these shoes were supposed to come here in five days and they just automatically upgraded me and what wonderful stories and these stories are what actually drives growth in the future.
And one of the things that I mentioned is as you are building momentum with your customer experience, it becomes a snowball effect. So what I mean by this is the more you take care of your customers now. This will start compounding into other customers that will be interested in your offering because they're hearing all these different stories and it's going to create a snowball effect of positivity.
At the same time, if customers have bad experiences in the very beginning, it's really going to be difficult for you to recover from that because the bad stories will likely snowball before you can start snowballing back with some good stories. I hope this makes sense. What I'm trying to say is when you're starting a company, it really should be customer experience first. You should be thinking about the customer first. If you can wow the customer and make the customer extremely happy, then everything else will fall into place. The customers will actually want to give you value. In fact, I can actually think of a time when I was consulting for a customer and they were so happy with the value that I provided them.
That one day I would say two months later after helping them, they sent me $1,000 just like that and I had no idea where this money came from. I was a little scared that someone painting by accident and then I wasn't checked LinkedIn and I linked in this client sent me a message saying, hey Robin, we were so happy with what you were able to do for us and I just sent you a little gift to your PayPal. So how awesome is that? And that's the thing that was two months later at this? At this time I didn't have an email sequence, There was like no nurturing or anything like this. But the service that are provided provided such a lasting impression that this person remembered after two months and they were so happy they actually sent $1,000 gift and I will tell you that this $1,000 gift was three times over the initial amount they paid.
So the point of that is is when you focus on the customer and you focus on the customer experience and you're providing value, you will get that value back. You will, you will eventually make money because people are gonna want to take care of you. When you take care of people, it's reciprocal. People want to take care of you. So when you start thinking in the long term instead of the short term you are going to be much better off.
But what kind of companies are actually able to think in the long term? And this is the key. If you want to have long-term thinking, then you have to focus on a customer that's congruent with your core identity. So I say this a lot and it's so important because if you pick the wrong customer, then it's not gonna sustain, you're obviously not gonna do a good job taking care of this customer. And you'll probably move towards profit, um short term profit type of thinking or MBA type of thinking and you'll just sabotage your brand and your company for short term profits. Now, this might be an okay thing for you. This is your goal.
If this is your goal just to make some really quick money and just be out, you know, then I don't know why you're listening to this podcast because you're probably not the type of founder that would be attracted to this podcast. The type of founder that's attracted to this podcast wants to make an impact and they want to elevate the floor for everyone in the world. And if you are this type of founder, then you are likely in it for the long haul. You don't care about the money, You don't care about the Prophet. So don't let that MBA type of thinking that over-engineering type of thinking, ruin your vision and ruin your values. Stay true to your values. Think about the long term, take care of your customers and everything else will fall in place. This is Robin Copernicus. Boom, bam. I'm out.
Continue your journey with me on my other channels:
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