[00:00:00.000] - Chris Nordyke
Wow. How many of you have listened to the Head, Heart, and Boots podcast? I can't tell you that reaction, how much that means to us.
[00:00:07.540] - Floodlight
Welcome back to the Head, Heart, and Boots podcast.
[00:00:10.500] - Chris Nordyke
I'm Chris.
[00:00:11.240] - Brandon Reece
And I'm Brandon. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead. This new camera angle makes my arms look smaller than yours.
[00:00:20.960] - Chris Nordyke
I'm noticing that, and I really appreciate it. I thought you did that on purpose.
[00:00:24.040] - Brandon Reece
No, I don't. I didn't, and I am not happy with it. Good morning, my friend.
[00:00:29.560] - Chris Nordyke
Yo.
[00:00:30.400] - Brandon Reece
Little morning record sesh.
[00:00:32.800] - Chris Nordyke
Yeah, this is earlier than we normally do it. I know you've been coming to the office really early. I come in selectively early. I bounce back and forth to an morning and afternoon schedule. But yeah, today was an early morning one.
[00:00:49.260] - Brandon Reece
Yeah, I got the old... I was running into some problems committing to afternoon workouts. I'll actually say it the way the truth is. I suck at being committed to afternoon workouts. Man, dude, I did an overhaul on the old calendar, and we're getting up pretty early. We've got a 3: 45 start to the day.
[00:01:09.380] - Chris Nordyke
You're doing workouts at 3: 45?
[00:01:11.060] - Brandon Reece
Well, 4: 30. It opens at 4: 30. I got to wake up pull my head together, and drive into town.
[00:01:16.880] - Chris Nordyke
How did you get here by 6: 00? If you're working out at 4: 30 to 5: 30.
[00:01:20.360] - Brandon Reece
Well, I haven't yet.
[00:01:22.060] - Chris Nordyke
Oh, you haven't started this? I haven't started this yet. This is a planned.
[00:01:24.480] - Brandon Reece
Yeah, because I can't. I'm not doing afternoons. It's a wild commitment, but But it's weird, too, because when I look at my morning schedule, there's this massive set of hours between getting up and then being able to sit in on my first session or meeting. But with drive times to the shop and to all the things, it's just what is required. I'm digging in and I'm excited about it because I really love a morning workout routine. Anyway, that's not what we're talking about today. I got a direction I want to go. I had an interesting thing happen over the weekend. We were visiting family and friends We have a brand new... Our niece and nephew had the first of the babies in the kids. We got to go hang out with a four-week-old. What would that be? Our great nephew. His name's Calvin.
[00:02:12.900] - Chris Nordyke
Yeah, you're the great uncle.
[00:02:13.950] - Brandon Reece
We're the great. Yeah. His name's Calvin, and it was amazing. I don't know how many hours I logged, but essentially the goal was to hold that little dude as much as possible, and we were successful, and it was magical. Anyways, while I was there, I got a message from a family member that used a company that we've referred over the years, maybe out of habit, part of it, and then some sense of loyalty. Anyways, needless to say, the conversation was not a warm and fuzzy one. It was him ultimately unpacking what the experience over the last 90 days has looked like. It brought up several things. One, I was a little disheartened. Two, it just served as a fantastic reminder, and it ultimately up to as a message that I sent out to our team at FP at the start of the week. Here's a rundown of what was communicated. I know that for many of our listeners, you're either the owners or leaders of restoration companies or service businesses, or you're one of those team members that helps create the experience. It runs the gamut. This is a little bit of a something for all of us for certain.
[00:03:23.480] - Brandon Reece
He essentially spent about 15 minutes just unpacking what his experience had looked like, and the themes are this, long delays between having people on the project physically doing anything of substance, a lack of consistent and proactive communication. Essentially, it was like if he asked a question, he would eventually get a response, and in that response, he would hear something that would make some element of the next step a little clearer. I used all that language very intentionally. He also experienced several times where people would show up, and they themselves didn't know what they were being prepared to do. When they would show up, they would ultimately identify they didn't even have the skillset or the resources to complete the phase or the task that Supposedly, they had been scheduled out to produce. Imagine you're in a claims experience, you're in a project experience. You're very rarely getting any proactive communication. It requires you to ultimately pull and prod and poke to get any level of information. You're experiencing long delays. This is a project that was in a small bathroom that's gone on now for almost three months. In addition to that, when people show up, they actually talk to you and say, Oh, well, I didn't know this was what I was doing, and I can't do this.
[00:04:47.080] - Brandon Reece
I'm actually not capable of doing this work. Then there was an outreach to leadership, and leadership ultimately said, I'll be the hero, and then failed to deliver on any the pain points that the client communicated to said leader when asking for help on their project. It's a bummer when I hear something like that because that's a crappy client experience. There's nothing in that experience that will motivate this individual to refer this company. But more importantly, if we all just slow down for a minute, put our ego to the side, there was me going, okay, I've been a project manager for years in this industry. I've been a leader in this industry now for a long time. Isn't it safe to say that my team and myself have created experience like that before? The answer is yes. Sure. If I'm honest, the answer is yes. It was just... Again, I know I didn't say anything now that's blowing anybody's hair back, but it's just crazy sometimes how we'll have an experience and how it can serve as such a heavy reminder of, Hey, when you pull yourself out of the equation and just think open-mindedly about your client's experience, regardless of how many times you've been engaged in a loss or a project, is that client experiencing something that you're proud of?
[00:06:09.560] - Brandon Reece
The reality of it is, is that over time, slowly but surely, it is so common for our level of service and our commitment to client experience to erode because we just get in these behavior patterns where we grow numb to the uniqueness of every one of these situations for our client because we've done it a million times. And so we start acting and treating the client as if they've been through it a million times, meaning we don't communicate, we don't explain process, we don't keep them up to date because we just start to assume that they know these things. And I don't even think it's a conscious thought of, I assume they know. It's we just forget they don't. And so we don't control the controllables, and we let those things slide out from under us. I'm on a little bit of a pedestal here preaching a bit, but there's a reality check for all of us. In 2024 and 2025, we've had several guests on to include some teams from big corporate vendors to guys like Mark Springer, where we've talked about what is shifting in the industry that's creating more friction on our growth and our top line.
[00:07:24.120] - Brandon Reece
The reality of it is a lot of those factors are fixed and or overcome by being critically keyed in on what experience we're creating for the client. Just really quick before we unpack more of this conversation, here are some of the things top of mind for us at FP and us as consultants in the industry right now in terms of what's impacting Claim volume and opportunity, project volume. One, we have very sophisticated leaders coming into this space right now. I'm talking specifically about restoration. Pe brings a lot of things, but one of the things it will bring is sophisticated business leaders that know how to manage companies and create scaling systems. There's power when you come with money, talent, and resources, and that creates a different level of competitiveness in our industry that many of us have not experienced before. Another thing that you're seeing is that the client, and I think a big influence on this is 1% deductibles. 1% deductibles now are very common, if not the standard. There's a reality check that now there's a whole lot of friction in the decision process now for someone to decide whether or not to process a claim.
[00:08:36.140] - Brandon Reece
When you're likely to spend three, four, seven grand on a loss, a lot of people are saying, A, I don't want this on my insurance because my rates will go up, and two, I will barely get over the deductible for this dry out or whatever this case may be, and so I'm going to pay for this out of pocket. Our consumers now have access to unlimited information, and Chat does a phenomenal of helping a consumer educate themselves on the buying process. Now you have a more educated client that expects a lot more from you in terms of transparency and process engagement and all those things. Then I think third, I think there's a reality where there's so much additional scrutiny that is beginning to get leveled at our industry that it requires a higher level of transparency and commitment to delivering a good product, meaning you have to professionally deploy and create that experience, not hafhazardly do it because people don't know better in quotes. Everyone's watching now, and they understand at a level that they've never understood before. Now there's just a lot more scrutiny on what we do and how we do we do it?
[00:09:45.350] - Brandon Reece
Anyways, my point is that when I hear about that example, there's two things that well up in me. One, holy hell. I know we've created an experience like that in the past, and we have to be absolutely aggressive about never letting something like that happen again under our leadership. Then two, it's just an unbelievable reminder as a whole that us as operators and business leaders, we have a responsibility to create a phenomenal client experience or you're not going to grow. Because what happens is it's like the building the sandcastle. You know what I mean? And so every single time we have a crappy experience, we deliver a crappy experience, Our truth erodes the trust and prevents that client from being someone who adds to our ecosystem. They will actively be taking. When they get asked at a bar, they get asked at a church meeting or whatever, they will actively be speaking against your brand. As our sales teams go out and try to generate new doors to knock on and new opportunities to persuade someone to give us a chance, if we even a fraction of the time create That client experience, you're ultimately eroding.
[00:11:03.880] - Brandon Reece
It's no different than churn inside some contracted sales process. Floodlight, perfect example. The more often I'm turning a new client through the system and they're not staying with me, the more expensive and more difficult it is for me as a company to scale and grow. We're no different on the service side. Anyways, I just was processing this all weekend and I sent out some communication to our Our team, and we didn't do anything wrong. This wasn't our company, but it was just, Guys, remember, it's how we make them feel in the process that differentiates us from the rest, period. Our gear is the same, Our trucks are the same. Lease rates are similar. We do not differentiate our brand from how we do what we do in terms of infrastructure, but we do separate ourselves from the pack when we create a client experience that motivates them to want to share and talk about how awesome it was that they were taken care of. Okay, I'm almost done preaching. There was a couple of things that stuck out to me that I think as organizations we can really focus on. One is we have to remember that for our client, they literally could give zero shit about anything else happening in our ecosystem.
[00:12:22.480] - Brandon Reece
They don't care about how busy we are. They don't care about how many commercial clients that we have. They don't care about how great of a job we've done for somebody else. All they care about is the claim they're engaged in right now. That's it. It's like it's a whole Wayne's a river's a river, a mountain's a mountain. Clients Don't give a shit about anything else other than how are you taking care of their claim, period. How often do we approach our client experience from the fact that we're busy? We have lots of clients. In fact, this client is a pain in the ass, and I love the other 12 clients a lot more. It comes out. That client experiences the fact that you're reacting to their job instead of prioritizing their job like it's important to you to. Anyways, I don't even know where I was going to go with a couple of things, but that just, man, it was such a good reminder as he was telling me his experience. Because I'm thinking in my mind, like the other 100 claims that our company currently has, but you don't care, right?
[00:13:26.700] - Chris Nordyke
You and I had burgers yesterday. Yeah. And we went to this one burger joint where we order basically the same thing every time. And it's this weird process.
[00:13:38.280] - Brandon Reece
Yeah, it is.
[00:13:39.400] - Chris Nordyke
Of adjudicating this whole experience. Meaning the person who's supposedly trained to take our order and give us what we want at the restaurant doesn't know how to take our order and give us what we want. This has happened to you and I three or four times at this particular restaurant. Hey, we don't eat the bun. Can we have a burger bowl? They look at us funny. Do you mean a salad? No. I just put what you'd normally put on the burger.
[00:14:14.020] - Brandon Reece
Slap that baby in a bowl.
[00:14:15.180] - Chris Nordyke
Put it all in a bowl. That's it.
[00:14:17.280] - Brandon Reece
That's it.
[00:14:18.120] - Chris Nordyke
Wait, so you want the burger in a bowl? What you would normally put on the burger, put it in a bowl. Okay, so just for future reference, that's going to be a salad. So just...
[00:14:35.320] - Floodlight
Are you a business that's under 5 million in sales? And you're just now getting ready to try and scale your company up and hit some of those targets you've always wanted to hit. But now you've got to build a sales team, or Maybe you just hired your first sales rep, but you don't really know how to manage them. How do you manage, lead, train, develop a sales rep? Floodlight has a solution for you now. So we can actually assign your sales rep a turnkey VP of sales that will help them create a sales blueprint, their own personal sales plan for your market. They'll have weekly one-on-ones with that sales rep to coach, mentor them, hold them accountable to the plan. And they'll also have a monthly owners meeting where they'll meet with you or your general manager and review the progress of that sales rep, their plan to actual results, what performance improvement they're working on with them. Also let them know, Hey, you might they're doing really well. Maybe we should think of hiring a second sales rep. They're going to have that one-to-one advice for you as an owner or senior leader on the team as well.
[00:15:29.030] - Floodlight
How great would that be? To have a bolt-on sales manager for your one sales rep, and it's only 2,500 bucks a month. If you're interested in talking more about that, reach out. Let's grab some time and let's talk shop. Our floodlight clients this last year in 2024 generated over 250 million in revenue, supported by, advised by an industry expert who's owned and operated a business just like you. So take action.
[00:15:52.730] - Chris Nordyke
Don't kick the can down the road.
[00:15:54.130] - Floodlight
Start with our business health and value assessment, and let's unlock the next chapter of your success story.
[00:16:02.160] - Chris Nordyke
I think our tendency sometimes as businesses is we don't think through what it's like for somebody to do business with us. I think this is true in all services I experience this in all kinds of stores that I walk into and services. My wife and I, we hired a guy to come fix our heater, and it's turned into this whole debacle. Two, three weeks ago, my wife called this to just repair. Our pilot light was out, and so our heater wasn't working. It's a 25-year-old furnace. This guy comes and he's like, okay. He looks at it. He's like, Yeah, I got to order a part for this. We find out after the fact, we hear nothing about cost or price, nothing. Then we get an invoice for $1,100. This guy was on site for 30 minutes. Anyway, it was just a crazy experience. But this guy didn't set the table at all. We had We had no idea what to expect. We just thought, Fix our furnace so it turns on again. It's an old piece, whatever. The guy didn't at all talk about, Hey, have you guys thought about replacing this? What's your intention?
[00:17:11.630] - Chris Nordyke
It was nothing. It was just like, Hey, this little control panel is out, need to be replaced. I'll order it. I'll bring it by when it's ready. We're thinking, he's so casual and cavalier about it. We're thinking, Oh, this is a couple of hundred dollars service visit, a $30 part. And then our mind is blown, and then we're pissed off, and we're like, What Now we're fighting him and he's getting weird. But it all comes back to, I think we typically do a really poor job of helping our clients know what to expect. They end up feeling like they have to manage the job. The moment that starts happening, it all goes downhill. That's right. When they feel like they have to reach out for information, that they have to ask questions, it just feels more and more terrible for the client. Then every time we try to collect from that client, they're thinking about, Well, I'm the one that's been doing the work.
[00:18:08.120] - Brandon Reece
Yeah, that's right. It makes it very difficult to cut a check when you feel like you've managed your own project.
[00:18:13.780] - Chris Nordyke
When you feel like you've either been having to do the work, you've been tasked essentially with work, you've got to chase down the project manager to find out what's going on. You've got to connect with the company so then you can plan your personal schedule as the homeowner or whatever. That's where things really start to break down. I think one thing that you and I've been working on behind the scenes at FP, I think, helps solve for this, our damage repair roadmap that we've been building. This is not like... Tons of companies have these damage repair roadmaps. Yeah, for sure. This isn't fancy, but it's basically just a roadmap of what a typical damage repair is going to look like, feel like for a Mr. Or Mrs. Sure. It's like initial response, talks about the silent phase. Hey, we're negotiating with your adjuster scope. We're lining up our trades and subs. It feels like nothing's happening, but trust me. It walks people through all the things. One of the things that you and I got really good at teaching our team to do, and I think when you were a PM, you did this, is if you get really good at talking about the stuff that tends to break and be hard and be annoying and being frustrating ahead of time.
[00:19:32.640] - Chris Nordyke
Because there's certain things that happen in our industry, and I imagine if you really dug into the details of this family members experience, you would probably identify things that you're like, Oh, yeah, that happens all the time. It sucks, but it happens. You'd be like, I bet I know what happened behind the scenes that led to this freaking bathroom taking 90 plus days and it's still not done deal. There are probably elements to that job that if they'd just been communicated ahead of time, the client wouldn't have so much heartburn over it.
[00:20:06.120] - Brandon Reece
Yeah, there's certainly some.
[00:20:07.650] - Chris Nordyke
But it's the fact that all that stuff was neither not mentioned or glossed over. Then on top of that, there's a lack of proactive communication, a lack of follow-through, and all of that stuff. Then I think it's also a reality that we all deal with, which is none of us have perfect teams. You can have everything systemized organized out and processed out. You're going to have some people that refuse to follow the process. The question is, do you have...
[00:20:39.080] - Brandon Reece
Or failure, too.
[00:20:40.080] - Chris Nordyke
Do you have a system... Because the other thing I heard when you were talking about this experience is, There was a lack of inspection along the way where that leader, instead of them having to jump in and try to play hero and then screw it all up because they didn't follow through and they failed to actually execute, you have a leader coming in at very end, trying to clean up a massive mess. They probably have other massive messes they're helping deal with, and so they dropped the ball. And now it turns into... Now it's just compounded. Now it turns into something that can't be salvaged. Yeah.
[00:21:14.160] - Brandon Reece
At At this point, there's not any factor left to trust. Yeah. If leadership fails, well, then who else do I go to at this point?
[00:21:22.440] - Chris Nordyke
It turns into the situation where you're making big in voice credits to try to keep somebody from badmouthing you online.
[00:21:28.110] - Brandon Reece
That's right. Right? Yeah. So It's interesting. I don't know if I told you, I have a water loss right now. Tis the season, baby. My truck was rear-ended a couple of weeks ago. My daughter's engine needs to be replaced, and I have an active water loss. I'm having a great time right now. Anyway, but it's interesting. I called out Freddy Bosque as Wolf Restoration. First off, we've known Freddy for literally years. He's a technician for us. Yeah. I mean, it's so fun him go out with his wife and just crush owning their own restoration company, and he's awesome. Anyways, shout out, obviously, to Freddie. By the way, his social media is really fun. He made a commitment to his social media, so he's on all the time, and their videos are hilarious. Anyways, contrast of this experience. You were talking about when you can proactively address some of the not so good parts to get in front of it to mitigate that negative impact. Well, one of the very The first things that they told me is holidays, and he went out of his way to help me. I'm not right in the prime of their market.
[00:22:37.950] - Brandon Reece
I'm definitely on the outskirts of it. They were both just very upfront with me in terms of this is what we can realistically do. We understand if that won't work for your timing, and we don't want you to make a decision that's basically ill-informed. They told me, this is what's going to happen with timing because of these factors. I want you to know ahead of time, and I made a decision to move forward with them because I trust them. Well, almost immediately, within days, they were able to, because of a cancelation, blah, blah, blah, they're going to get a jump on my job faster than I was anticipating. I was set right. I had the right mentality because they prepped me for a worst case scenario.
[00:23:20.800] - Chris Nordyke
You were pleasantly surprised when they were getting off faster.
[00:23:22.940] - Brandon Reece
Then I get surprised, and I'm like, cool. I'm excited about that. Another kudos. As part of this I had a limb come down from a really tall tree and it basically speared my roof. I called Paul's team over at Ironhead Roofing, another local contractor. Killer, super responsive, great follow through and follow up. I got an immediate response where they said, this person is going to reach out to you and set a time to come out. Again, they under promise, so it's not likely to be until then. And then I get a call from my person. Let me know. Again, cancelation, love to come out early. Those are examples of you can set the stage that stuff is not going to go great in every phase of the project. But when you do, and then you're proactive, meaning they saw an opportunity to overdeliver on what they stated, and then they proactively take advantage of that. The bar just kept going up with both of those companies and experiences. Now, we got to do some work, so we'll live through that and we'll have some feedback. Watch yourself, Freddie. No, just kidding. But it was just fun to experience that firsthand on the back of having this other conversation.
[00:24:35.070] - Brandon Reece
You can just see the contrast between the two. But as a company, right now, we've really looked inside FP and said, Look, there's space I want to be very clear. We just got done with our OPSP planning, so our strategic planning for 2026. I just want to say this very confidently because I know a lot of our team listens to our show is that there was There are several fundamental strengths that we see inside the organization. One is just grit. We have a tough ass team, dude. Another one is we have a team that once they get clarity and direction, they will work themselves into the ground if it matters. You know what I mean? I want to be clear, that is a known strength inside our organization. What I'm about to say is not an example of ill intent or a lack of caring. It just can happen. A lot of it's procedural. We identified there were some opportunities where we created paths where a client could have a poor experience. We were leveraging too much on the individual to overcome institutional friction or failures in the system in terms of good planning and process.
[00:25:46.700] - Brandon Reece
We've been really grinding gears to get rid of that stuff prior to the new year kicking off because we want to marry really good systems and processes up with a team that, again, we already said, has a ton of grit, a a ton of high work ethic, and really do care. They want to do the right thing, but we have to give them a way to succeed at that consistently and at scale. I think that one of the things that we've aggressively keyed in on is you engineer a client experience. You don't train one. Training is part of how you execute on it, but you engineer it. For a lot of folks that have worked with Floodlight in the past, they know that part of our process, often with them, especially in our scale model, so right out of the gate, the first 90 days, a lot of times we're working through helping you create workflows or engineer a client experience. The intention The reality of that is now you know what your team needs to be trained on, they know how to win, and we can hold them accountable and help them, support them in creating a great client experience.
[00:26:58.020] - Chris Nordyke
It's really interesting that connection you just which is one I don't know that we've actually said out loud before. When we've been working with clients on developing their mitigation process flow or the recon process outline, I think, frankly, we've made the mistake in the past of not making that connection for them that it feels really, for a lot of these teams, they get frustrated slow work because they just... Yeah, sure. In the midst of doing the business of the business, it's like now we give them this assignment and they're supposed to map out all these process steps, and it can It can feel really sterile. It can feel like, why is this worth my time? My guys know what to do or this stuff. The connection you just made is what we're actually doing with them is we're designing the customer experience process. I think that's actually, it's worth us. We could almost do a whole other show on that of what are the critical moments in time that we're trying to build a process around? Honestly, in our early with clients, I don't know that we did a great job of connecting those dots for them.
[00:28:02.910] - Chris Nordyke
By the way, this is what we're actually doing. That's right. Because instead, I think at the time, we were so oriented around the importance of having a documented process that everybody's trained on, and all that's true. But more and more, I, too, am starting to think about, how do we create certain kinds of feelings within the customer at different intervals in the project? You and I did a keynote, we've talked a couple talks around this, this idea of Daniel Kahneman's peak-end rule, and just how relevant it is to our industry and our type of work, because there's so many things that inevitably get screwed up in our projects. Often, even out of our control, the actions, behaviors, and words of adjusters, the just particular program maybe that we're doing work for within, materials, back order. There's just so many things that go wrong, not the least of which is Having team members quit in the middle of the project, all the things that happen. But Kahneman basically says, look, people remember the peak emotional experience during the customer service, and they remember the end. I think if we take that more seriously, one of the things we do is we think really, really hard about how we start projects and what we're telling the customer it's going to be like.
[00:29:27.660] - Chris Nordyke
We've already said it, but I think, arguably, the most important thing we can possibly do is tell people all the bad stuff. You used to sell this way. You used to steal fires this way. It's like other people, I think, when they're fire chasing, come in with the hero, like the white horse mentality. Oh, don't worry about it. We're going to take care of everything for you. Everything's going to be fine. You're going to be great. Yeah, don't worry about it, Mrs. Jones. And whereas you would take more of the tact and taught up me and the rest of our team this of, No, No, no, no. They need to understand what's actually going to happen in front of them. This will be one of the hardest things they go through. It doesn't matter how rad of a company they work with. This is an emotional experience, the process of navigating the insurance claim, negotiating scope. This stuff's freaking hard. In most cases, displaced from your home, and you still have your life to carry on.
[00:30:22.000] - Brandon Reece
Like your mortgage isn't-There's nothing about this.
[00:30:23.720] - Chris Nordyke
Your mortgage isn't suspended while you have an insurance claim. It's just like going through and helping people see clearly just how hard it's going to be, builds so much trust.
[00:30:33.380] - Brandon Reece
It does.
[00:30:34.240] - Chris Nordyke
It also softens the blow when the frustrating shit happens later that we know is going to happen.
[00:30:40.620] - Brandon Reece
We know it's coming. Here's the reality. This is how recently, I've just been reminded how distant from this or disconnected we can be from this. As we've looked at our internal process at FP, one of the things that will come up from time to time is a little bit of pushback from some of our downline leadership in terms of, well, why are we doing this? What's this new action? What's the point? Here's an example, and I know some of our team will be listening and they'll have a knee-jerk response to this. We put in a requirement as we're getting ready to prep to go into the new year around this idea of putting in a blood pressure note. The idea is, I think we had some jokes around it. It's like this is how you keep a leader's blood pressure down is when we can see these things or understand the current atmosphere of this particular project. What are we doing about these key factors that make a difference in the job? At the beginning, it felt like just a new task on top of tasks. I think what we're starting to get some clarity with the team on is, no, wait a minute.
[00:31:46.080] - Brandon Reece
The idea here, and again, I want to reiterate, our team wants to win like this. It's not an ill intent or a lack of caring. They just helped me understand, basically. The idea is that we're trying to identify where in the client experience or the project phases, do we have these moments that if we're really clear that that part is okay, then it's a high likelihood that that client is receiving the experience they need to. Just help turn this tactical. There's several phases to this, and I would encourage all of you to dig in. Maybe try to do some of this over the holidays where maybe there's just a little bit of of less chaos, maybe. The idea is, one, first outline the entire current project process, from first call to final invoice collection. What are the big nuts and bolts that happens inside your business from start to finish? Then identify in those processes, what tends to go wrong? What is it that happens? Is it we don't communicate where monies are going to come from, and so we end up inevitably having to stop the project because there's no funds available? How can we prepare the client for that?
[00:33:10.040] - Brandon Reece
What can we do in our process to mitigate or eliminate that from happening? As an example, If you just, again, start on a whiteboard, a piece of paper, an Excel spreadsheet, I don't care, outline the big elements of what transpires in a project process, and then go through it and help identify with you and your team, where can this create negativity for my client and for us as an organization and the referral partner. Then try to work with your team to engineer an update, a maneuver, a leading indicator that you can put into place to prevent that or mitigate the negativity of that impact. Then when you're done with that and you begin to train and deploy that in the field, I know I'm way oversimplifying this, then we're following it up and we're doing a really great job of conducting these after-action reviews to help the team identify where the fix is working and maybe where our fix isn't good and that we need to make some adjustments and reprioritize. But the point of doing that is that if you can start the whole cycle and say, look, as an organization, our number one job is to create an excellent client experience as they go through this.
[00:34:25.660] - Brandon Reece
Then you engineer a service flow that in all While it's priorities, effort, and strategy are attempting to mitigate the negative things that happen in a project, we are going to be failing forward, I guarantee it. The reason I'm encouraging all of us to double down on this is that it's never going to be harder to retain and get more clients than it will be over the next several years as claim and project transparency becomes more and more obvious because you're going to have to create an excellent customer experience or people will keep hunting until they find the one that will. Someone is going to do this. Someone in every market, and often cases, many of us, are going to slow down, put our ego to the side, and we're going to dissect our current workflow and build one and update one that mitigates the friction for our client. One of the things I just wrote down here is that one of the behaviors I think that we often lean into, especially when we talk about scaling a business or growing a business, is how can we make this easier for us? I think in a lot of ways, it's the exact opposite.
[00:35:39.340] - Brandon Reece
You need to be the company that's really good at solving the most difficult problems and elements of a client experience and lean in, man. Lean in embracing the suck and creating something, systems, process, people, behaviors that address those most difficult pain points to overcome. Every time you get that much closer or address one more of those really significant pain points, you're going to get farther and farther from your competition. It's going to be painfully obvious. Then people will start telling the story about that experience, and it will look in such contrast to what your competitors are doing. I guarantee you your business will begin to grow. You'll get clients that maybe have been cold back online. You're going to earn new relationships and keep them because your team is going to Excel. Well, anyways, easier said than done, but definitely worth our time, especially as we close out the year and prepare for the new one. This might be the best place to start.
[00:36:39.660] - Chris Nordyke
Yeah, it's a good way to end.
[00:36:41.960] - Brandon Reece
Cool. All right, gang, thanks for hanging out with us. We'll see you on the next one. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, Heart, and Boots.
[00:36:52.240] - Floodlight
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[00:37:05.000] - Chris Nordyke
Thanks for listening.