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"An individual who gets used to hard work can thereafter never live without it. Work is the foundation of everything in this world."

"Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers."
                         
                       - Louis Pasteur, Founder of Modern Medicine



     
Examples of Empirical Creativity, Evidence and Results:

By delivering a branded customer experience and service you will drive measurable business results.  
  • Only by delivering a signature and sustainable best of class service were we able to drive our care centers to profitability and become the fastest growing revenue channels.
  • Launching outbound service programs resulted in touching millions of more customers and increasing profitability and engagement.  
  • Defining what was right from the customer perspective we were able to increase number of incidences handled per employee by 50%, within weeks, and improve employee engagement and customer loyalty for the fastest growing SaaS division of a Fortune 500 company.
  • Reaching thousands of people in the first day, of their 30 day free trial, converting them to a paying customer and receiving their true appreciation for helping them make the right and informed decision.   
  • Increase revenue per sales employee by 175% as the result of focusing on better service and introducing a different definition of sales.    
  • Redesigned the work for a engineering department that had 10 specialized functions, matching flow to demand and understanding variance, reduced a 21 day queue to a 22 hour queue within 3 days with no additional resources.  This resulted in saving $500K in additional staffing, a more engaged department and a better customer experience. 
  • Turning upset customers into advocates is a challenge every company should embrace - one customer at a time added up to tens of thousands of high value customers.   
  • It starts with how you define service and measure customer satisfaction.  Most companies define and
    measure both incorrectly - they are not nouns but verbs - not activities but outcomes.    

Managing to the rigorous and disciplined approach with a P&L made us smarter about our business and customers.
  • So many times we find a single measure to focus on and miss the biggest opportunities.  By not getting caught up on just a single measures like quotas, revenue per person, cost of sales, or individual margins, we found opportunities to scale and drive millions to the top and bottom lines.  Most do not go granular enough and others are incapable of managing to the whole.  This is why many bankers are not operating businesses.   
  • Making a decision to reduce our margins contributed millions in annual profit.
  • Focusing on improving margins allowed us to identify and remove waste, contributing millions in top line revenue.
  • You cannot optimize top line growth if your cost structure is dragging you down.  Changing the term cost to waste helps people with proper perspective.       
  • Finding opportunities to pay people more resulted in needing fewer people and an $800K annual saving for a single department at a $50 million company.  Many finance people really struggle with understanding this concept.    
  • Improving revenue per employee by over 90% for hundreds or thousands of employees would have never happened if that was everyone's primary goal.  We learned the difference between cause and effect.       
  • Acting like a bean counter can be debilitating to an organization.  Not thinking like a bean counter can destroy it.     

It is not just cheaper to keep an existing customer than acquire a new one.  Marketing to your existing customer base can be the fastest growing revenue channel for your business.
  • Many companies find it easier to acquire new, lower margin, customers (discounting) than keeping an existing higher margin customer.  Our largest growth opportunities for the business was with our existing customers.           
  • Marketing to existing customers resulted in bringing 72% of our new customers from them in the form of word of mouth and referrals.      
  • There are many relevant touches for a customer that we miss everyday.  Once we discovered this different way of thinking with empathy it drove stronger loyalty and tens of millions of dollars in incremental annual revenue.  The best part is that the intent was to serve not self serving.  
  • Integrate your channels for the customer and they will thank you in the top and bottom line of your business.  Some of these channels have been abandoned by many companies, are being used in the wrong functional area or are just plain confusing to the customer.
  • Empathy and perspective need to be key traits of marketing.  The curse of knowledge needs to be continually overcome.  

Technology has to be an enabler for our people, not the solution.  It should increase management's importance in the operation not remove it.  
  • By introducing a different approach for system design, we displaced a best of breed application with our own internal system that improved efficiencies by over 20% for over 700 employees, aligned with what a customer should expect and took less than four months from concept to release.  It also saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual licensing fees but outside of finance this was not the intent.  
  • Removed predictive dialer serving up 150 calls per person per day and set revenue records.  We put the glory and responsibility in our employees hands literally.   
  • Once we defined our core principles, we abandoned a million dollar enterprise solution and actually learned more about our operation and inadequacies that were being hidden.  This intelligent solution had became a co-dependant of learned helplessness.  
  • A one year CRM initiative failed but the reason was a priceless life lesson for all of us.

Changing the definition of conversion from initial purchase and transactional to the seventh month of engagement and an intentional relationship dramatically changed the trajectory of the business.
  • This required us to create a new definition for sales, roles, targets, reporting and compensation but not in obvious ways. 
  • This resulted in an immediate 30% increase in revenue and changed the cohorts of the business.

The manager and employees of a customer facing team are critical roles.  Do our actions support this belief?
  • Knowing that a single manager runs a multi-million dollar business and their team touches over 100,000 customers puts in perspective that this is one of the most essential management roles in the company.  It deserves a formal leadership development and mentoring program.   
  • An employee who interacts with between 10,000 - 23,000 customers in a year is a brand.  Are we doing everything to support our brand equity and promise by helping them, throughout all levels of the organization, to succeed.  It had less to do with whether they knew the leaders of the company and more if the leaders knew them.  Christmas and New Years Days were some of the best times to be with your employees.
  • Day care centers and universities both make money.  Which of these is a closer representation of your organization.    

Give people an opportunity to choose, compete and achieve.
  • Hired people who have bachelor and master degrees from Ivy League schools and others who have never been to college or been homeless.  Sat them next to each other and experienced why it became the best job they ever had and how we all learned from each other.  It had less to do with which school they attended or what they did before they joined and more to do with who they are as people and what they became as a result of their role, the purpose they served and the people they touched.  
  • Asking people to volunteer to work on a holiday instead of forcing people already scheduled to come in resulted in 30% improvement in sales and 27% lower cost with over 600 volunteers - who wanted to be there.  They inspired me.  
  • While the company had a three day off-site retreat, and recognizing we still had customers to serve during this time, the employees who did work produced record revenue days.  There was no sense of resentment or entitlement - only sincere gratitude from their colleagues who did attend the retreat.
  • Ask someone what their personal goal is and you will learn about the person.  Measure if they hit it and you will learn about your culture.   
  • Having contests are priceless to a culture if done correctly.  The challenge is most contests are not done correctly because  the intent is misplaced or self serving.  Doing them correctly has resulted in a positive ROI, brought people together, pushed people outside their comfort zone and created great memories for employees.  If the goal is ROI or for everyone to win a prize - don't do it!  We learned some great lessons from investing millions of dollars in contests for our employees.  
  • Promoting from within is one of the most important and difficult commitments a leader can make for their employees and organization.  It is less about declaring the answer to this choice and more to do with the leadership capabilities and commitment from the top of the organization.  Promoting over 300 people taught us what we needed to do better to help them and our business succeed.  There are trade-offs for both choices and it should not be an ideological decision for a company.       

Launching over 30 new products and services - the requirements for a successful definition and launch of a product are very different than what most product professionals view are the most important.
  • Performing an employee roadshow for an existing $100 million product line increased sales by 15% within 3 weeks.
  • Presenting a new value proposition and description of a $30 million service that resulted in renewed engagement from channel partners and sales teams - without ever introducing a feature.
  • Managing a portfolio of 53 skus and driving double digit growth for each product line over a four year period.
  • Introducing a new product line that became the fastest growing revenue channel for the company within two months.
  • Launching a "can't lose" product that failed within two months.  
  • End of life a product that caused a 25% drop in employees' compensation and they cheered.   
  • Having a substandard product to compete and repositioning the weakness into the key differentiator that allowed us to win