305: Creating a Generous Business

Steve Haase  0:00  
Welcome to the Superabound podcast with master coaches Erin Aquin and Steve Haase, where entrepreneurs and leaders learn coaching tools to help you build a business you love. You are listening to episode 305: creating a generous business. 

Erin Aquin  0:16  
I'm so excited we're going to talk about this today, because I think having a generous business is, you know, we've talked about having a lean business and having a new business, but I mean, at the heart of every company, whether you're big, whether you're small, there is an opportunity to create a more generous business. And so this week is going to be a little bit different kind of than what we've done before. We actually have a quick start guide that is a companion to this particular episode, where you can go right now and download five quick start ways to create a more generous business. This little PDF is going to be full of ideas for you, five really good idea is to swap out some of the maybe more bland ways in which people conduct business with more generous opportunities, so you can find that over at besuperabound.com/generous that PDF guide is waiting for you. We hope you will stop everything right now and go download it. You know, unless you're driving, then don't, don't pull over for that, but do go download that. We've got some really great ideas, and we're going to be sharing today a little bit about what it takes to create a generous business, and how the heck you can do that.

Steve Haase  1:38  
And to begin with, I actually want to talk about some of the philosophy behind it. Why would you create a generous business? And the thing that comes to me with this is that the pie is infinite and can always be bigger. There is not a set amount of pie to be eaten, metaphorically. But the more Wait

Erin Aquin  2:00  
Are we talking about pie or business? Business pie. We're talking about

Steve Haase  2:03  
money. We're talking about resources. We're talking about how you can help people and how you can grow your business. There is not a set amount of generosity that exists in the world whereby you giving it means that you have less of it when you put it out more comes back to you. There is the idea that you know what you put out comes back threefold or sevenfold, or whatever your ideas say about how kind of karma happens and how you know cause and effect. All of those things go into this idea of being generous is actually the best way to grow, because there is no limit to how much wealth and abundance exists in the world, and how much you can create by adding it to your marketplace, to your ecosystem, to your customers.

Erin Aquin  2:50  
I love that. And I think for a lot of folks who are running a business right now, the thing that can sometimes stop your sales your marketing can have you like shying away from posting on social media, or whatever your kind of sticking point really is, is sometimes that you're feeling salesy instead of generous, you're feeling like you're just out there trying to get yours, and you're not really in a space where you're client focused, customer focused. So what we're going to share with you today, and in that quick start guide, is a way to help you not just do the motions of a business that looks generous, but actually help you to feel more generous, because when you are generous, it's so much easier to sell what you've got. It's so much easier to welcome people, to tell people that you really have something that is for them, and not feel cringy or salesy or weird about it. So I actually maybe will start with what we decided about running our book event. So our brand new book, Superabound, is out in the world. We hope you have your coffee if you do not in the show notes, we have a link for you to go find it. But I have a really icky relationship with things like surveys and testimonial requests and review requests. So when we were speaking with our publisher, they said one of the most important things that you can do to support your book so that the algorithm really sees people buying it, sees people talking about it sees people appreciating it is get as many reviews as you can on whatever site people are buying from. So like, Amazon reviews are amazing for books. And I heard the publisher say that, but I was like, Oh, the last thing I want to do is. Start spamming our email list, asking them every week to please review our book, give us a review. Can you please review our book? Please? I mean, actually everyone listening. Can you please review our book? It actually really does help, but it really just felt like a chore that I didn't want to take on. I wanted to, like, let the book speak for itself,

Steve Haase  5:21  
well and also, just to interrupt, it's not that you didn't want to take it on. It's that you are allergic to asking for things without giving something in return. Damn. It's just like, why would I just ask someone to give me something? I need there to be an exchange of value. I want to create some joy, some something important in somebody's life, if they're going to give me a review. And yes, of course, we give you a book, and there's plenty of wonderful things there, but to just say, hey, customer who bought our book go above and beyond for us, because we're awesome, and you should you were just allergic to that whole mindset,

Erin Aquin  6:01  
yeah, and this is something, you know, I think I've taken this from we talked to Bev a couple weeks ago. One of the things that I learned from really Beveren, yeah, last week, last week, on the episode, on the podcast, one of the things I learned from her as a higher end coach is not ever requiring your clients to do your work for you. So I never want my clients to feel like they're part of my marketing machine. They are my clients. They have already when they pay me, they have done their job. They show up to their sessions. They have done their job. They take some of the things that we talk about and actually go create an incredible life. They've done their job. So of course, I'm very grateful to all of my clients who have given us referrals, who have talked about us publicly. I love love, love that, but I am sort of allergic to saying, Hi, thank you for doing your job and doing it so well now can you go talk about how great this book is, and how great we are and all of that. So I knew there would be people who would be very happy to do that, but one of the ideas that we had was to really make it easy for our friends and our family to come together, and some of our coaches and mentors to come together and have a book celebration for us, but then if they felt compelled to leave a review for the book,

Steve Haase  7:31  
so it was not only easy, but also fun. And I think part of the give that that we gave in this quest for reviews was to actually make it fun for people, where it wasn't just, Hey, isn't this easy? But also, guess what, there's a little contest here with actual, really nice prizes, and so people were focused in our in our book launch party, on giving those reviews. And it wasn't just, Hey, do this nice thing for us, but it was do this thing that is part of a game and that has some really nice prizes at the end, because we're so grateful. And also it does open the way for people to say nice things about people they like and about a book that they've enjoyed. Yeah,

Erin Aquin  8:19  
so I'm going to kind of let you in on a little bit about this. The PDF guide has the whole details of how we organize this for our book launch party, but we had a scavenger hunt where we had a few things on there, and you had to do, I think it was three out of the four items on the list. We'll share what all the items were because this is really helpful. If you are going to do some kind of in person thing, you can also do this online. There's definitely a way of transferring this to be more virtual, if that is your business. But one of the things we had people do was click the QR code that we had on the sheet. We made it very easy go and leave a review on Amazon at the party, and that night, I think, we got about 18 really positive, like heartwarming, bringing tears to our eyes, reviews about the book, which gave our book a huge boost. We like we're on top of a couple of bestseller lists, not on top top that will be happening soon. You know, we it definitely was like wind in our sails. And it was fun for them, because they knew that if they completed three of the four things there, they got a little prize for just for doing it. But then there were, there was a draw with some some fun gifts, some related to the book, some that were just from local businesses that we love, and so it just kind of added a little bit of fun and gamify gamification to the book launch party.

Steve Haase  9:55  
Another thing that we did at the party was one minute podcast. Interviews, you'll be hearing that as a bonus episode later on, and it was an invitation for people to share their story, to share their own experience of superabounding in their life, and to kind of shine the spotlight on the wonderful people in our community. What we didn't expect was that people would say some of the nicest, most generous things about us and about working with us in response to that platform that we offered. And so the idea of setting up an automated email and saying, hey, leave a review. Hey, leave a testimonial. Is honestly, it's so 2010 it's

Erin Aquin  10:48  
20. It's okay if you do it. Steve's not really judging you. I'm not judging you do it, and then we get why, but it's

Steve Haase  10:55  
a little lazy. Sorry. It's very judgmental. The opportunity to make that experience generous for your customers to open the door to, hey, here's how we can work together. You know, you can say something nice about us. You can share your thoughts. It's your chance to be creative about creating that real connection with your customers, rather than sending an automated email and doing it at scale, all the things that are kind of touted within you know, the marketing automation world, relationships are generous, so creating that connection is how you bring that generosity into your marketing, rather than making it transactional. About, Hey, give us a testimonial. Yeah, yeah.

Erin Aquin  11:43  
And I will say I know that there are plenty of industries where, like, reviews on Google really matter, or reviews in different places do matter. So there is the impulse to be like, well, if I don't ask, no one's going to ever leave those reviews, which are imperative. Like, you know, if we're looking for an Airbnb, we read the reviews, so it's important that those people get positive reviews. But there's probably ways in which you can make that process more for the client, more in support of them, on what they need, more about their story, then about, like, just tell the world how great we are. Tell the great how great our business is. No, tell us your story. You'll see this great brands when they do testimonials, their it's their customer story. It's about how the product or how the service was part of this person's like hero's journey. They don't focus so much on how great the company is. They focus on how, on the transformation of the person that everyone can relate to. So that's another feature of generous businesses, is if you need reviews, like we all need reviews, we all need positive feedback, we all need referrals, but the way in which you do it should ideally be a little more creative than what everybody else in your industry is doing, and be more for the people in front of you than it is for you. That's the kind of the concept of generous business is that we are doing for others. So in the quick start guide, we have a few different ways in which we're going to help you do that. I kind of want to talk about maybe the last one, yeah, in that quick start guide, just for a second.

Steve Haase  13:37  
So it's about frontline connection with vision. The fact is, the people who often are paid the least in your organization are the ones who are most in touch with your customers. And you know, especially if you're scaling in any way when you get started, it's just you. But as you get bigger, your connection with the customers becomes more and more distant. And so it's the folks who are at the front line that are actually making the biggest impression on the people that are walking through your doors. And so the degree to which they are on board with your vision, which means you have a vision, you are practicing it, you are sharing it, you are embedding it in all of the operations of your space, of your training, of your hiring and onboarding. That is what will have that vision flow through and create an experience for your customers that feels magical. It feels like it's not just a transaction. They're not just another number coming through the door, but they're actually part of your world that you created.

Erin Aquin  14:48  
I learned this actually from, you know, in my own experience of being a customer, there was a restaurant that I used to go to all the time that I really loved in the place where I. Used to live, and the most amazing server in the restaurant was a co owner, and we knew that the restaurant was doing really well, and we were like, Hey, why are you still the one, you know, bringing our wine to the table and bringing our food? And, you know, we loved this person, but he was like, I really just feel like this is how it's done. I never want somebody who's in a bad mood, who doesn't understand our customers, doesn't understand our business isn't really like getting paid a living wage to interface with you all when this is like my livelihood, there's nothing I would rather be doing than spending time with my customers as a part owner of the business. So I just, I just bring that in, because some of you listening may not have companies where you have frontline people or a customer service staff. And I think what was really interesting is we've seen so many people as they grow, they're like, Oh, I'm just going to toss everything to my assistant. I'm going to toss everything to my customer service person. But in so many VIP situations where you're really feeling taken care of the person taking care of you is often one of the owners. It's often one of the, you know, people who really have deep care and in alignment with vision. No, I'm not saying everybody should go start overworking and take over the customer service email, but I do think you know, the big issues we've ever had in our business have happened at the level of a new client coming in and not being responded to in like a timely manner with a professional overtone. We once had a someone working with us as our customer service person who ignored a brand new client request because they thought it was fam they didn't follow up, they didn't even let us know. And I was like, you possibly just created a situation where that person will never work with us, and we probably really could have helped them just because they didn't know, and that was our fault for not training and not really making sure that it was an aligned vision. But that's what often happens, is we expect sometimes people coming in are just going to love our businesses as much as we do, and they're going to do the same kind of level of work as we will. Not if you haven't trained them Well, not if you haven't been generous with your time and your energy and your vision to train your frontline people. And anyone who's had a bad customer service experience knows you might love the product, you might be happy with the end result of the service, but if the person at the front desk was rude, if they forgot who you were, if they treated you in a way where you felt disrespected, you're probably never going back to that business. And

Steve Haase  18:14  
so that's how the generosity really flows through. You might think, Oh, why do I need to be generous with this frontline person. You know their minimum wage entry level Bubby boo, but that is who your customer is going to experience. And if that person at the front desk has the essence of your business in their own heart, because they are on fire with the mission, they are on board with the vision that is going to translate. And it doesn't mean you pay them five times the industry standard, but it does mean maybe you pay them a little bit more, and you onboard them with care, and you make time to ensure that they feel heard and valued, and

Erin Aquin  18:57  
you support them to grow right?

Steve Haase  18:59  
That is the kind of this, these little things, I think that's one of the main insights about creating a generous business, is it doesn't mean you suddenly throw caution to the wind with all your spending. It's often just a little shift of perspective towards towards giving, towards realizing that when you put out that little extra, much more will come back to you, because that's what we're looking for as humans. Is that little extra, that extra connection, that extra care, it makes all the difference. Yeah,

Erin Aquin  19:36  
I with the frontline folks, especially like they are the they are the show. They are the main stage. And I used to work in the music industry. My I was a tour manager, so like the artist and their care was the most important thing to me. My job was. To protect the energy and the essence of my artist, and I think companies would be really well served to treat their front line people like the artist, like the the beautiful, the person, if you you know, if you own a spa, the person at the front desk. Who walks you through the locker room is going to set the tone for the entire experience. Doesn't matter how good the massage is. If the person at the front desk is depleted, they're feeling disrespected, they're, you know, not living into the essence of the space. For whatever reason, it's going to translate to a negative experience for your client, and it's going to be hard to grow your generous business without happy, amazing customers, which that's just hinting at one of the other pieces that we're going to talk about in the five step quick start guide to creating a more generous business. So

Steve Haase  21:00  
we hope that this sparked some ideas for you, even just thinking about what it takes to build a generous business. It's so much fun. It's so valuable. Head over and download the quickstart guide. It's at besuperabound.com/generous, and we will talk to you next time.