Episode #206: FLIPPING THE FORMULA FOR BETTER RESULTS

Sam Walton loved this principle, and he used it as one of his top 10 concepts to drive Wal-Mart to meteoric heights. In 1988, I took a chance with this mindset, and it turned our 5.5-million-dollar company into a 12-million-dollar company in 2 years. Imagine exceeding corporate expectations by exchanging a company-centric formula, for a customer-centric recipe? Today we tell a pretty cool story (at least I think it is cool), about building a productive sandbox that is a polar opposite from the competition. This valuable lesson changed my standard business approach forever. Cheers!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Alright , Mr . Simple Biz Sky . Let's guide to show.

Speaker 2: 0:09

Hello everybody and thank you for tuning into the Simple Biz 360 podcast. My name's Jeff Mason, I'm your host on this five Minute Adventure. And , uh, we can be found at Simple Biz three sixty.com , 28 listening platforms for this , uh, podcast and YouTube and Rumble tv. We also have a book out on Amazon. You can get it through our website. It's called Simple Biz 360 Timeless Business Tools in Paperback Audio or Kindle. So today gives me a real pleasure. I want to talk about just , uh, uh, shifting the mindset and I call it flipping the formula for better results. So really taking a formula that was company centric, flipping it so it's customer centric. So I'm gonna rewind the clock to a mission I had in 1989 that started back then and my mission was to grow the company's business. And how we were gonna do that was to go after some untapped markets that required us to go to the college level, hire college graduates, and really create a sales training program, put 'em through a program, and really drive the doubling of our company size on the backs of college graduates to come out and go into this untapped market. So , uh, long story short, I'm at Drexel University, and when you're recruiting at colleges , uh, through the Career Placement Center on these , uh, interview days, you have basically 1230 minute interviews. So , uh, long story short, I had one of my , uh, students just not show up. So I'm kind of eavesdropping and I'm listening over the top of the cubicles to these other companies, DuPont, Dow Chemical, Dow Paper , Johnson and Johnson Proctor and Gamble, you know, Bausch and Lo , all these big companies, right? And I'm realizing, wow, they're all doing the same thing and I'm doing this too. They have a 25 5 formula for this. 30 minutes, 25 minutes they talk about the company. And the last five minutes they actually asked the students some questions. And the questions were always the same. Why did you pick Drexel University? Why did you pick your major? Where do you see yourself in five years? It was like, you know, the same everywhere. And I'm doing this too, and I'm thinking I'm never gonna get anywhere , uh, you know, against these big companies. I need to flip the script. I need to focus 25 minutes on the student, five minutes on the company. I can always give 'em a leave behind packet, right? So I go out and do some research. I'm really energized by my, you know, my thought process that day. And I find these behavioral example interview questions from Drexel, I mean from , uh, Northwestern University in Dartmouth. So I kind of combine these articles. I read about Dartmouth and Northwestern and I create this interview program that basically if they go full tilt with us right before they get a job offer, it's three interviews, it's 60 questions and it's all behavioral example interview questions, give you a quick example. Um, you know, hey, college student , uh, potential graduate. What's the best piece of advice you ever got? Oh, my, my dad told me, you know, blah, blah , blah. Great. Gimme a couple examples of how you use that to , uh, change an outcome. And now you're asking them to give you examples, right? So any rate , I start, you know, floating out these , uh, letters and hey, you know, we'd like to hire you and I'm getting some really good , uh, candidates that are saying, yep , I want to be part of the company. Mr. Mason. Long story short, in two years we did double the size of the company from five and a half million to 12 and a half million. And I did hire 65 college graduates and put him through a program. But it was one young man that when he accepted the job offer from me, he said, Mr. Mason, I said to him , I know you got tons of job offers from other companies. He goes, oh yeah, I got a bunch. I said, what made you choose our company? He says, Mr. Mason, it's simple. You showed genuine interest in me and the other companies didn't. And so folks, I I've taken that lesson forward and I've plugged it into the customer , um, service, you know, mindset to customer satisfaction mindsets. And I've never forgot that lesson that the customers just like that young man want us to show genuine interest. They want us to ask them questions about their business to find out what they like, dislike, or what they love to have done differently. They want us to talk in terms of the real benefits to them. Remember, we're selling perceptions, opinions. We're selling experiences. They want us to, to actually understand what it is they want. What's the radio station they listen to? W I I f M remember that radio station. And so they want us, and if we can do this just like I did there, I got outta that sandbox where everyone else was playing and I created my own sandbox using those 30 minutes valuably. And that's what I did. I created a new sandbox and went after my mission with this new and fresh sounding sandbox. And you can do the same in your business if you focus on the customer as the center point . So , uh, we're gonna have some fun with this song today. We're gonna leave you with a 1963 hit from the Crystals. Kind of a kicked off the All Girl group , um, singing , um, quartets, if you will. And this one is called Dadou Ron Run . So enjoy it and we will see you in 168 .