bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

Really obsess about your employees.  Look after them.

No seriously, the good guys aren’t hanging about, especially if you don’t look after them.

If I was hiring, things I’d offer are:

• Decent Health & Life Insurance
• Huge holidays, if you want to take 3 months off no pay, let’s figure out how to do that.
• Extra benefits for family guys
• Performance bonuses based on real business value that employees contribute
• Own time to build personal projects, whether related to business or not (including building personal brand, blogging, twitter)
• Flexible hours.  What are rigid schedules for? Deliver on time, don’t care whether you do 1 hour or 2 hours.
• Flexible location, if you can do the work from Cambodia whilst you do some travel, let’s make that happen
• Want to build a startup out of work hours? All good, maybe we can sort you out with some equity or loans to give you a helping hand.

Oh and of course a reasonable wage.

Maybe this sounds like a pipe dream or maybe providing a dream job scenario will attract dream employees…

It is industry practice to give the worst room to walk in guests. (Travel tip: never accept the first room they offer).

Sure there are many reasons behind it but to be honest I don’t really care.

If you have a walk in and rooms are available – give them the best damn room you can.  Hell if the best room is empty.  Upgrade them!

You need to obsess about each and every visitor.  They may only visit once but for every person they tell about their trip or provide tips to a friend heading the same way, you want them to recommend you over and over again.  If you impress them you might get decades of referrals – what better way to build a solid business.

Makes complete sense to me.

One of my points in the bwagy marketing manifesto (download pdf) was that:

“We have all heard, a bad experience results in 64 people hearing about it, a good experience leads to 8 hearing about it.  Sounds out of whack right? Wrong.  If I have a good experience with you I will repeat my purchase, if you keep looking after me, I will keep telling 8 people forever…. and everytime I make a purchase.  Marketing & Business is all about the long term.  If you can get a customer and keep them forever they will sell your products for you.  Easy.   Never forget this.  A good customer experience compounds over time.”

This came from the realisation, that when people talk about a brand they love (or a lovemark) the real thrill and enthusiasm from which they speak from is the continual experience they maintain with this brand.  The fact that they get looked after over and over again.

Karen is one such lady, now Karen is a super mum, she all week as a Theatre Nurse, still finds time to do the cooking, baking, washing, looking after the kids, taking time to really help her friends and family, we all know a Karen in our lives.  They are all absolute legends (and the cornerstones of society).

She absolutely loves Jack Lums, the local fruit and vegetables place, she has been going there for 15 years and she can name all the bad experiences on her fingers, that’s how rare they are! She recommends them to everyone, their price, the freshness, the quality of their produce and they stand behind it.  This consist experience has only compounded her loyalty, in turn she has also spent 15 years raving to them to everyone.  Now if they had tried to take a short cut to make a quick buck they would have lost Karen.  But they haven’t.

You see providing a good experience does compound and pay off over time, the key is it’s a long term strategy, but it’s a solid one.

Given the transitional environment at the moment I thought I would share the words of the new economy.

Obsess, obsession about your customers, how can i help them? how can i deliver insane value, how can i build their business?

Passion, what is my passion? am i fulfilling it? What are my employees passions and how can we utilise that? Do we have a team of passionate people?

Delicious, are your services delicious? are they the nicest in your category, if i was to eat your business would it be delicious?

Agility, we need to be leaner, fitter, agile in every sense.  Leveraging our resources to achieve results that we used to do with twice the resource base.