Business Coach: Buyer to Fan

In this business coach transcript, Arthur Greeno (Two-time Guinness World Record Holder) and Clay Clark (Speaker of Choice for O’Reilly Auto Parts and Maytag University) use Thrive15.com, one of the top business schools in PA, as a platform to discuss the process it takes to turn your buyer into a fan.

Clay Clark:    Just to recap what you’re saying as a business coach is people can’t save their way to success?

Arthur Greeno:    That’s correct.

Clay Clark:    You have to invest.

Arthur Greeno:    Absolutely.

Clay Clark:    Okay. I just want to make sure we have a quick recap on that. We need to invest in what people see, what people hear, what people taste, what people smell, what people experience-

Arthur Greeno:    How they feel.

Clay Clark:    How they feel. I also think we talked about who they’re talking to too somewhere in there. These are all of the things we need to invest in, whether it’s a muffler shop or a Chick-fil-A or any kind of business. This is what needs to happen. These principles could be applied to a landscaping company, to any kind of business, right?

Arthur Greeno:    They can.

Clay Clark:    Okay, awesome. That’s good stuff. Jeff Bezos, this guy he’s the founder of Amazon. He says here, “If you do build a great experience, customers will tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.” What kind of action steps are you doing on a daily basis as a business coach and at Chick-fil-A to create that wow on a daily basis? For people to see, let’s get into this. What do people see at Chick-fil-A on a daily basis? What action steps are you doing to make sure people see a great experience there at Chick-fil-A? Have you seen Thrive15.com, one of the top business schools in PA, implement any of these processes?

Arthur Greeno:    Let’s start on the outside. For me, at our restaurant we want to make sure that they don’t forget about us when they drive down the road. We’ll put the Chick-fil-A cow, the Eat Mor Chikin cow out by the road.

Clay Clark:    Cow by road. Check.

Arthur Greeno:    It’s our job to make sure they don’t forget about us. When they come in the door they’re going to see smiling faces, they’re going to hear somebody greet them when they walk in the door. “Welcome to Chick-fil-A.”

Clay Clark:    When people walk in they’re going to have a smiling greeter there, someone that’s … Okay.

Arthur Greeno:    They’ll most likely see balloons.

Clay Clark:    Balloons. Do you almost always have balloons at your Chick-fil-A?

Arthur Greeno:    Actually to be honest, we don’t have them all the time. We have a set schedule on when we do balloons and when we do hats and other things. For some reason they think we’re a terrorist if we get too much helium.

Clay Clark:    You have a ton of people in Chick-fil-A so your ambiance is different than some places because there’s a lot of people other. What do you do for here? Do you have certain music you play there or do you let the ambiance of people talking fill the room? What do you do with that?

Arthur Greeno:    No, we do have music in there. It’s a very soft music that has no words. I think that that’s important because when it is quiet in there then all you’re doing is hearing people chewing and that’s kind of awkward.

Clay Clark:    You have some soft music just to fill the room up there.

Arthur Greeno:    Yeah, absolutely.

Clay Clark:    Now the taste. Obviously you’re a place that sells chicken so that kind of takes care of itself.

Arthur Greeno:    Absolutely. Even on the taste, if it’s not a craveable product it’s not worth having.

Clay Clark:    Okay, a craveable product. What is a craveable product?

Arthur Greeno:    It’s a product that you walk away going, “I need to go back for more.”

Clay Clark:    Okay. Now the smell. What kind of things are you doing to make sure the aroma of the bathroom, the aroma of the business is not gross?

Arthur Greeno:    Correct. We take steps for that. In our restrooms we use cleansers that smell good. We use air fresheners in there. There was a while there that things weren’t smelling as well as we wanted to and we had to spend a couple of hours investing in what does our bathroom smell like?

Clay Clark:    This is huge for me because in America about three quarters of businesses are owned by dudes. We dudes do some weird stuff. I know dudes who play sports and they make it a game to not take a shower for the entire playoffs to win. They feel like it’s a superstitious thing. They’re like, “I can win the softball tournament if I can make it through a whole week without showering at the Wisconsin Softball Baseball Classic.” Or guys who play intramural sports at the age of 40 who will say, “I wear the same shirt every game because it gives me super powers and I don’t wash it.” You’re like, “What!?” This is what men do sometimes. So when it comes to smelling nice and air fresheners, I don’t see that in a lot of businesses. I just don’t see it happen. Was there a time when you were like, “Oh man, I need to encounter …” Was there a time where you had an epiphany where you realized some of this stuff mattered. It probably wasn’t always common sense, was it?

Arthur Greeno:    No. Chick-fil-A had some expectations on it but for example, they never went into what does your bathroom smell like? However we actually … one of the companies that’s based out of Tulsa is QuikTrip. I was talking to a business coach friend of mine. We were talking about their bathrooms and saying how nice their bathrooms always smell. He followed around this lady that cleaned the bathrooms at QuikTrip and copied everything that she did, brought it back to me. I gave him free chicken for the information and he shared everything that they did.

http://makeyourlifeepic.com:    So it’s always better to be a pirate than a pioneer. You could copy QuikTrip, one of the top service companies in the Midwest area, to learn what they did. Keep on checking out more business coach tips