Today's Guest

Keith Lee’s Make-You-Happy Management System didn’t just come about overnight. In 1991, his business was growing rapidly and generating profit, but he decided he didn’t want it to grow anymore. It seemed like the only thing that grew as fast as his business was his headaches. He had become a slave to his business. It seemed like he was always responding to things and taking care of problems. Keith shares about the changes he made that allow him to take breaks from work when he wants and keep the business running smoothly.

Resources Shared

• KeithLee.com
• How to Control Your Business and Your Life by Keith Lee
• The Happy Customer HandBook by Keith Lee
• Thryv
  

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:

Hey, hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street, the show dedicated to helping small businesses succeed. And this week we have a really unique small business story. Welcome Keith Lee.

Keith Lee:

Good to be here, Gordon. Thanks for having me.

Gordon Henry:

Almost no company has a unique product that customers could not get elsewhere. We may think we're unique, but it's likely customers could get what you offer somewhere else. Why do customers come to you? According to Keith, his customer service are what some of us call customer experience. How can you embed great customer service or great customer experience into your company? This show will help you answer that question.

Let's turn to your book, "The Happy Customer Handbook." There are lots of great maxims in the book. And we'll go through a few of them that tell people some of the things you believe in. Number one that you list in the book is your core values must put a huge emphasis on the customer. Why? It seems pretty natural thing to do, emphasize your customers. What's specific about that?

Keith Lee:

The bottom line is if your core values... Our core values were care for our team members, care for our customers and be a good member of society. That was our core values. And you don't have that kind of thing as your core values you go back to that and you look at it for the tough decisions.

You look at it... For instance, I was looking to buy a company in Hawaii. And that company in Hawaii wanted me to be part of basically defrauding the state of Hawaii out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes if we set up this thing just exactly right. And I couldn't sleep and I was thinking about it, da, da, da.

Finally I went back to those core values. I said, "This is not being an honorable member of society, of our community." And so I actually sent him an email that night and said, "Can't do it, not going to do it, sorry."

Gordon Henry:

Some of the other key items you put in your list in your book are maybe not as intuitive. For example, you say one, I like this one number 16, "Reward customers who complain." That's a customer focused value. But it's a funny way to put it, "reward customers." Why would you do that?

Keith Lee:

Because you want to hear about the complaints. If they have a complaint, it's really likely that other people have the same complaint. One of the ways I got this was from a good friend of mine, Bill Glazier, who had menswear stores and he would call them silk ties. And if they had an issue with a customer and they weren't happy, they would make them happy. And then they would say, "Hey, go over here and pick out a silk tie if you'd like." That's what I mean by rewarding the customers.

Also make them a hero. Make them a hero. And for instance, again, we did that newsletter that we sent out. We sent that newsletter out. When I sold the business, it was in its 23rd year of sending it out every month to our clients. And we would thank people for telling us of... Because they had problems. Because we wanted everyone to tell us if they had a problem. We wanted no unhappy customers.

Gordon Henry:

Right. Right. One more I want to hit on in your handbook there is "Have a great database," number 28. Why is having a great database so important?

Keith Lee:

So you can answer questions, number one, so you can be quick, you don't waste their time.

Gordon Henry:

Let's turn to what you do when you get hired. Companies come to you now and they hire you to help them improve their customer service or customer experience and you come in. What is your process of training and embedding this idea into one of your client companies?

Keith Lee:

If somebody wants to do my system, what they get is they say, "Here's this package, here's the video, here's all your instructions on showing this video to your team." But don't show it to them for about a month. And so what we do is we start out every Monday morning, the managers that are in this, get an email that says, "This is what I'm going to share with your team this morning. By the way, here's some stuff as a manager, you want to know about this also."

Tuesday morning then they get the email they share it with their team. Wednesday morning they get a 90-second video to share with their team and they keep sharing these forever and ever and ever. They throw in the video about three weeks after they're into it. Because it's basically they're taught to say, "Hey, you know all those things I'm sending you every week about from Keith? Here's some of the training from him too."

Key about this is that it has to be consistent and persistent. People need to be reminded. And if you just simply forward these emails and these videos, again, they're just 90 seconds, to your team every week, they're getting that reminder that they need to put this number one. If you don't do that and you're giving them the normal training, they're like, "Yeah, okay, they told me that, but nobody really believes it." That's the whole idea. It has to be consistent, persistent, and it has to be on an ongoing basis.

Gordon Henry:

I feel like we've been hearing about companies like Nordstrom's and Disney and FedEx for decades now. If you follow what's going on in the business world or what people are writing about, it's not new. You said yourself you had heard about it decades ago.

Why is it still such a hot topic? Is it just so hard to get it right that companies want to cut corners or they just can't learn the lessons? Why is it that we're constantly talking about this even though this topic has been plumbed many times before?

Keith Lee:

The reason we're still talking about it is customer service sucks. Most places customer service sucks. And customer service sucks because there's no ongoing reminders and training, and by the way the basis is, these 59 separate things that we do on an ongoing basis. That's the difference is that people pay lip service to it but they don't really do anything.

Gordon Henry:

We're going to slightly shift gears by talking about a different aspect of what Keith preaches, which is how you as a business owner can free yourself, that you could actually take a vacation, not answer an email and come back and have things be better. And I found that a really compelling message, Keith, because I know many small business owners love their business but feel trapped because they can never leave. And the bigger business gets, the more headaches they have. How do you get over that hump?

Keith Lee:

What's going to do that is when everything in your business is documented so that you're not needed to get it trained or done or whatever. That documentation can either be in writing, can be in videos, it can be in all kinds of things.

Gordon Henry:

Connecting these two themes of yours, whether it's customer service or how to free yourself from having to live at the office, it really comes back to systems and creating a clear communication of everything that needs to be done in the business. If you are not there, people know what to do and the work gets done, whether you could be on the golf course, you could be in the office, the work's still getting done.

Keith Lee:

You can go away for 2, 3, 4 weeks, whatever and not be bothered when you have your systems in place.

Gordon Henry:

Terrific. Keith, we just have a few more minutes. And I really want to ask you, who are your clients? And what type of engagements are you having typically now? Because most of our listeners tend to be small to medium-sized businesses, not big businesses,

Keith Lee:

That's who I deal with. Okay. The reality is if they get too big, they think they know everything. It's just

Gordon Henry:

That something perfect. Where can our listeners get in touch with you or find you on the internet so they can learn more [inaudible 00:08:54]?

Keith Lee:

Yeah. Let me give you sources number one, if they want to get this book, which is about the systems, it's how to control your business.com, how to control your business.com, go get the book $2.97 cents free book two ninety- seven call covers shipping and handling. If they want to get the Happy Customer Handbook, just type in the happy customer handbook.com, the happy customer handbook.com. You can get that. I've also got an easy name, Keith Lee. Feel free to drop me an email. I call myself mostly retired now, so I do this stuff as I want to do it, frankly. And

Gordon Henry:

What's the email or site?

Keith Lee:

Keith K-E-I-T-H keithlee.com. K E I T h K E I T H L E e.com.

Gordon Henry:

Fantastic. All right. Well Keith, this has been awesome. I love you have so much information available free or nearly free for people and that you're open to taking emails from people who may want to get in touch and find out more. So thank you so much for your time and for sharing all this decades of wisdom you've built up.

Keith Lee:

Thank you. It's been a pleasure, Gordon.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah. Great. I want to thank Keith and thank our producer Tim Alleman and coordinators Diette Barnett and Daniel Huddleston. They do a great job. If you enjoyed this pod podcast, please tell your colleagues, friends and family to subscribe and please leave us a five star review. We really appreciate it helps us with the rankings. Remember, small business runs better on Thrive, get a free demo@thrive.com. Until next time, make it a great week.

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