324: Get Customers 17 Ways with Vance Morris

https://youtu.be/47bH911YFF0 Vance Morris, consultant, coach, and speaker, helps service-based businesses break free from the ordinary and create extraordinary customer experiences that generate loyal customers for life. After spending more than a decade working for the Disney Company and learning its powerful systems and processes for customer service, Vance launched his own businesses and built them around those principles—eventually creating companies that run largely without his daily involvement. We explore Vance’s Customer Experience System, a framework for turning ordinary interactions into memorable moments that create lifelong customers. The system focuses on mapping all customer points of contact, ideating experiences for each boring touchpoint, prioritizing the biggest impact moments, and memorializing those experiences in systems or playbooks so they can be delivered consistently by the team. Vance explains how businesses can create “tellable moments,” recover from service mistakes in memorable ways, and build repeatable marketing systems that generate referrals and long-term customer loyalty. — Get Customers 17 Ways with Vance Morris Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Vance Morris, a consultant, coach, and speaker, who helps advisor-based businesses break free from the ordinary and step into the extraordinary. Vance, welcome to the show. I appreciate it, Steve. Thank you so much. Your background is very interesting and your whole idea of making customer experience unique, and also you have unique ways of acquiring customers. So let’s get into it. But I’d like to start with my favorite question: What is your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in your business? My personal ‘Why’ is very strong, and that is I never want to be an employee ever again. I make a lousy employee. I don’t like to be told what to do. And so knowing that has kept me on this entrepreneurial path for the last 19 years. Okay, well, I can relate to this. I can relate to this. That’s a big thing when you are in charge of your own time. It’s a big blessing. Some people make a lot of money, but if they don’t own their time, it’s not ideal. I agree 100%. Yes, sir. Yeah. Love it. Let’s talk a little bit about your journey. I mean, how did you end up being a non-employee and being your own boss and advising companies, what the route led you down this path? Sure. Well, the long and short of it, I spent a little over a decade working for the Disney Company down in Orlando, Florida. Magnificent experience. Great company to work for. Towards the end, I was starting to get that inkling that maybe I should be doing something on my own. So I went out and worked as an employee and a consultant at the same time for a couple of different restaurant concepts. And then I had a couple of high-profile positions. I was catering director for the Smithsonian Museum System, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, things like that. And along the way, I realized that I do indeed make a lousy employee because I got fired a couple of times. So I own up to it. I’m okay with it. But I said to myself, let’s put something together that will be your own and we’ll be able to afford the lifestyle that you’re looking for. So about 20 years ago, I started a couple of home service businesses. I took all of my Disney knowledge and Disney systems and processes—both on customer experience and customer retentionShare on X and importantly pricing—and put those all into those businesses and started to grow them. And people started asking me, well, geez, Vance, you don’t look like you’re working very hard. How are you doing that? So I back in 2013, I started consulting with other companies, primarily professional services, on how to really deliver extraordinary customer experiences that will lead to what I call raving fans for life, or customers for life. I love it. No better place to learn than at Disney, right? Yeah, I mean, it was great. And one of the first things I learned there was that Disney operates 100% on systems and processes. I mean, I ain’t sure we learned how to pick up trash and smile at people, but the biggest lesson was Disney has a process for everything. You want to carry a tray in a restaurant, they got a process. You want to change a bus tire, they have a process. So I took that everywhere I went, which has actually led me to be fairly autonomous from my home service businesses because I put systems and processes in place, and I only spend about 90 minutes a week on those businesses. That’s fantastic. So let’s talk about these processes, particularly the customer experience processes that you have installed. And actually you have a process for installing processes, which is kind of a system to enhance the customer experience and then keep customers for a long time. You talk about keeping ...