Turning Your Customers Into Friends (And Your Employees, Too) With Matt Barnett

 

Aspiring to be the most beloved brand in the world, Bonjoro works at turning customers into friends. This culture has been the main driver of their business success. Bonjoro is an app for sending individual personalized videos to welcome and onboard new customers and clients. On today’s podcast, Steve Farber brings on Matt Barnett, the Papa Bear at Bonjoro, to talk about how their customer success teams convert and retain more customers through personal video. Matt is a serial entrepreneur, an industrial designer, and an artist passionate about building great products and great cultures.

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Turning Your Customers Into Friends (And Your Employees, Too) With Matt Barnett

It’s my great pleasure to welcome Matt Barnett, who is the Founder of a company called Bonjoro, a technology company which we’re going to know about. He is a bit of a serial entrepreneur. He’s an industrial designer and artist originally from the UK. He’s living in Australia and he’s had a couple of false starts along the way as any entrepreneur has had, myself included. He has a love for building great products, but more so, he has a love for building great cultures and that is why I’ve asked him to join us here. At Bonjoro, they have their culture. They call it customers as friends and have been the main driver of their business success. They’re just getting started because their stated goal is to be the next Zappos. In other words, they aspire to be the most beloved brand in the world. That rings my bells. Matt, it is great to have you here on the show. Thanks for joining me all the way from down under.

Thanks, Steve, for having me.

It’s my pleasure. Let’s start out with the Matt Barnett story. You and I have met a long time ago. According to my records, we met maybe many seconds ago. That was a long time in this day and age. You and I are starting to get to know each other. Let’s do this together. Tell me and us your story.

I’m from the UK. I am British. I went to study design and got fed up with surfing in Scotland in the snow. I decided to move to a warmer climate so I moved to Australia. Many years ago, I was always intending on starting a business. I came here and fell into tech. I expound on it because I’m on a date with my first ever founder and we did not hit it off, but we decided to start a company instead which is interesting. I did the whole race, off we go, had all the fun and then crashed and burned in flames, which is exciting.

You were dating somebody and that didn’t work out so you started the business together.

We went on one date and there was a spark. I remember six hours later, we come up with a business plan. We were going ahead. We didn’t hit it off, but we were the same. We’re similar. It was probably one of the issues is we were both creatives. We were probably a couple, but we went off and be like, “Let’s do this.” It was one of the best dates because of where it came out to.

Did you start a company out of that?

We started the company the next day.

That didn’t work out well?

We were naive. It was a B2C company. It was playing video, but it was about family life stories. We went out with a great idea. It was a good concept. An American in the States meeting somebody tried it before he was like, “It’s hard. It won’t work.” Here are the challenges that you’re going to hit. I was like, “Whatever, we’ll do it anyway.” I should have listened.

 

How many stories do we all have? In retrospect, that’s also obvious, but was that chronologically? I like to keep track of things.

Many years ago.

You didn’t say, “That’s it for being an entrepreneur.” You said that the idea didn’t work. What happened next?

I was interested by video. This is a couple of years later, the first phones are playing around with video. Something just opens up. We look at something like, “There’s something exciting here.” We ended up building a company that did research by video. What we would do is we would have in your Huggies, your craft once the customer research around the world. They might want to chat with moms in twelve countries about how they use Huggies in the world. They might reach out to Korea, Brazil, Japan, the UK, and Germany. This is done by brand and new product development teams because I was from an industrial design background. I understood the industry. We’re using mobile videos.

We would get people to run diaries for a week where they would film them changing their kids. They would film them how they stored the stuff and they would talk through. We set the camera shopping with them as well. We do a lot of it in new age countries where we put at the moment was massive and this will come in overnight. We’d all be pulled out. We pull the insights out of it. We work with the research and we pulled together reports and videos from this. It was an awesome trifecta where it was cost-effective, quick, and then high-quality research. Obviously, that kicked off. We started going and I started building this with another founder here. The challenge we had is living in Australia. It’s a great place to live and surf. A small country and there are not a lot of headquarters here because we’ve dealt with large FMCG and large brands. They were all based in London, Paris, and New York.

You don’t sleep ever.

You don’t sleep for the first six months and then it hits you. This is about being sustainable. I like the different energy you get, so you need to get to a place where you got something sustainable that you keep going for ten years. We hit this point where I’m going to cut me off if you want to go in deep but we started to get inquiries and leads coming from countries that were down under to us.

Before you take us to the next phase there, the technology you were working with was using video on mobile phones to capture the experience of consumers, for example, Huggies. You were using that video, was it simply for brand research for your clients?

It’s simply qualitative research.

It wasn’t like a social media marketing thing. It was to get close to the experience of the customer of the user and then use that experience as information for your clients.

This is a different world that we're stepping into where suddenly you've got a camera in every pocket. Click To Tweet

I’ll be talking about this. When we talk about video, there are video companies, communication companies and research companies. Video to us is a medium. It’s an amazing way for us to talk and doing this. It’s an amazing way to connect with customers and to get a window into people’s lives. You have this other thing where mobile devices are the most personal things we own. At least we used to be vehicles or homes. Now, it’s a mobile device. You sleep with it. You take it to the toilet with you. It goes everywhere with you. It’s an interesting thing that women will start to use video on mobile, they would open up like never before and because they become comfortable with this device.

The way they would interact with this versus a computer was completely different. We tried doing web recording and it didn’t work. The mobile device, they would walk around with it and would go into things. You get the user’s point of view of their life. You have to understand there were biases in there because they’re using a device. It’s not like there’s a remote camera watching them. You get these moments when they’re on and you’re watching this and you are doing the research. It opens your eyes massively into what’s out there in the world. You’d have emotional content coming in.

We’ve done the research for every single major brand you can think of from alcohol to even stuff with drugs and stuff for kids. You see hugely emotional content, personal content, which is also amazing to put that in the hands of people making serious decisions who were sitting in headquarters back in London. You can eventually connect them. They’re like, “This is not what we expected.” It’s because we don’t have a lot of the stuff in new world countries, there is no comfort. You have these amazing things, although they will still have mobile devices, which has always come to your mind.

What’s interesting to me about that Matt, is early on in my career, back in the mid-’90s, this whole idea of getting close to the customer and the concept of customer intimacy was first starting to be talked about back then. The challenge as consultants that we would always give to our clients is you have to get out of your self-contained ivory tower world and get up close with your customer to experience what their experience is in using your product or service. The technology of adding video to that as a way to capture that experience is, I imagine was powerful.

It’s another arrow in the quiver. It was something that hadn’t been done before. We talked about it as a window into their lives, which is what it was. It wasn’t exhaustive. Photoshoots are still good. I still think at-home interviews are good as well with good interviewers. You haven’t got that two-way process, but it’s a different type of content that would come in. It fundamentally starts to change how researchers would do research too. They would pull us in to augment other things that we’re doing. You look back now and you couldn’t help and be influenced by the content you saw coming in and the connection you have living a life of customers from design myself. It was mind-blowing what you could do. You can do it quickly as well. It was eye-opening for us. It also started to show the power of video as well.

We had to drag it, kicking and screaming because the first iPhone had videos. We couldn’t do anything on Android and then it got video, but then no one had a connection. You only have 2G, especially in these countries. People will have to go into internet cafes to upload it. It was exciting to be at that point where it was starting to change and you’re looking at it, you’re going, “Something’s changing. Something’s happening here. This is a different world that we’re stepping into where suddenly you’ve got a camera in every pocket.”

I want to go right to the present time because for people who are reading who are not familiar with what you guys do, this would be a great time to tell us about that. I can see the connection with what you described in the earlier iteration. What does Bonjoro about? What do you guys do and what do you offer?

It’s a one-to-one personalized video messaging system that allows you to connect with customers at certain points on the customer journey. Primarily, to drive more lead conversions, drive more activations and products, or to drive more referrals.

It’s a way for me or in addition to sending an email to somebody saying, “Thank you for signing up for XYZ,” I could shoot a quick video so it becomes more personal face-to-face. Is that the concept?

It’s asynchronous. What I mean by that is one way. We’ll take away a simple scenario. You’re going to welcome new customers that come into your funnel or new leads. If someone signs up, it plays as a layer on other systems. If you’re using Salesforce, HubSpot, or Shopify, you name it. They come in and we notify you. We say, “Brian from Oklahoma signed up. He works for ConvertKit. He’s head of marketing.” We give you information about the customer as well. We also show you what he’s done with like, “He came in through a webinar and he’s downloaded this lead gen thing XYZ.” That affects displays when you’ve got two minutes and you stop your work. You pull out your phone or your desktop and you record a video, but you’re recording it for Brian from Oklahoma.

 

This is not an automated generic piece of content. It’s communication. What you’re doing is you’re stepping out of your day for not more than one minute to show Brian that he matters to you as a company. That you’re thankful that he’s come in. At the back of this, you are driving Brian to take a very important action, which depending on what he’s done because everyone has different customer journeys. It could be to book a call, download another piece of content, or fill out the form that he’s forgotten to fill out or whatever that is. The fact that you’re taking the time to connect with him, he is more willing to go and take these next steps because he’s like, “These guys care,” which an online experience and in the world of automation are incredibly rare.

To paint a picture using Bonjoro with Bonjoro. Let’s say I went and I signed up for Bonjoro. I signed up for the service for me to use in my own customer outreach. Would I get a lot of a video message from one of your team?

You would. I can’t say who from. We share it across the team. I do some every single day. If you sign up at 6:00 AM Australia time, afternoon PST, you might get one from me, you might get one from the Australian team, but later we also have the US team and the UK team as well. We all chip in to get them. I worked on the day. I’ve spent seven and a half days of my life sending videos to people back to back however many hours that is, a couple of hundred hours. There’s a point here, maybe it’s coming from having the research background as well. As a founder, I am product-driven. I am a product guy still. I still support management. You have to keep that thread through the end customer. You should keep it no matter how big you get. A big company that does this well is Zapier is an awesome example. I know they always had a piece where the whole team gets hands-on to support. They used to do it once a week for an hour. If we do one week a month but you are able to support it. You can get Wade Foster, who is a CEO coming in and helping you out.

This starts to segue into the cultural side, but also in terms of building a good business. If those of you that run the ship at the top of the pyramid is connected to the end goal, which is the customer in an intimate way. You talk to them and they bring your problems and you say, “If you have anything, you’ve got my email. Hit me up.” They’re like build the CEO. You’re like, “It doesn’t matter. If you help them, you got me. You hit me up.” It’s the wonderful trigger line for things that are going well and things aren’t going well. It helps you empathize with your CS team and your product team. It helps you build better products. My point is, whatever you do, do not lose sight of the customer. Unfortunately, some leadership teams do and the excuses that they don’t have time, which I don’t think is a good excuse.

It sounds like what your technology allows for is a quick, easy and personal connection between a real person at the company and the customer. If somebody signed up, let’s say one of my audio programs and I got a notification for it. I shot a quick video that said, “Matt, I saw that you signed up for the Extreme Leadership audio. I want to say, welcome aboard. If you’ve got any questions, shoot me an email Steve@SteveFarber.com. Thanks for being here.” That’s it. What happens then, there is a real relationship that starts to get created, not an automated canned relationship. It goes back to the previous company that you worked with about filming people’s experiences.

It’s about bringing people closer together and the customer closer to the company. For me, when I hear that, my position has always been that our competitive advantage as business people is to create an experience for our customers that they’re going to love. Anything short of their loving what we do for them and how we do it, we’re not competitive. It doesn’t build brand loyalty, customer referrals, and that thing. This is a simple technology it sounds to me to begin to build that relationship in a way that’s going to be surprising for a lot of people.

The good thing about video as a medium is that you can get 80% of the results with zero experience. It’s one of those things where turning up is good enough. I’m like, “He’s always low, it’s low enough.” This one situation where turning up is good enough because when you’re in online space and we just connected. I’m in Australia, most of my customers, 95% are overseas. When we turn up, they’re like, “You’re here.” That’s already gone above what others would do then what you say and how you behave. If you’re like a person, this comes down to the culture to empower your team to talk in the right way and the right things.

People will like them. People genuinely like people, 9 times out of 10. Whatever they say as long as they mentioned the name and show that it is personal, you’ve got them. Over time, you can get better. As a business, the end result of this love and the best first impression and connection is to drive more conversations that drive more business. There are reasons you’re doing this. Don’t worry about those. As long as you’re making the connection, the rest follows on. As it would do, if you can be 100 people a day for coffee, that’d be wonderful. It’s just unfortunately not scalable, impossible.

That’s a great point because I think a lot of people get intimidated by video. I’m a victim of this mentality myself. I do quite a bit of video and there is this whole thing about like, “I got to get the lighting right. What am I going to say? Is my hair in place?” You shoot the video. What you’re saying is just show up. That doesn’t matter. What matters is the connection because people don’t expect broadcast network-level quality in this stuff.

I would argue that. It’s about authenticity as well here, especially in the world of fake news, etc. I think authenticity has become more important. Turning up with your hair ruffled and not perfect, I would argue probably has a better impact because your customers aren’t perfect. You’re like, “This is this guy real.” Imperfection is beautiful if you asked me. Maybe that’s the artist inside of me. When it’s imperfect, you know it’s real. It’s almost the more real this is, that’s the point. It’s a human, it’s not I’m wearing a shirt and tie anymore and portraying the brand. The brand is the people and that’s what you want to connect with.

Whatever you do, do not lose sight of the customer. Click To Tweet

Let’s take that and expand on it in terms of Bonjoro. We got a sense of what Bonjoro offers as a service at a high level. Tell us a little bit about the company. I want to start with some of the vital statistics. You have people all over the globe, how long have you guys been in business and how many people do you have on your team?

We’re three and a half years in business with fourteen people. We’re in two cities in Australia. We’re in the Philippines, London, West Coast of the States, South Africa and Poland.

Are you guys set up primarily as a B2C or B2B?

It’s purely B2B. Most of my customers are B2B as well, interestingly.

You started building this thing a few years ago. Did you give any thought from the outset? Did you give any thought to the culture that you would like to create or was it all about the technology?

I take our brand and culture synonymously. To me, they build at the same time. We did take a conscious effort early on start to think about what it is we’re wanting to build. This is combined with the brand, product positioning and product design, it all converges into one for us. It came apart of that. We have a very enlightened heart and nature. We have a very close team. We take a little time as a team. We have get-togethers, and we fly the whole team to one country once a year. We don’t go anywhere. We’re hanging out. The teams in different countries will go out camping and go out fishing, etc. We have this extremely close culture, which has upsides and downsides. We knew that was part of it and wanted to extend that to your customers.

What’s the upside?

The upside is communication and trust. When you know people and you’re friends with them, you can have harder conversations. Forget the good conversations because that’s all easy. The hard conversations are the things that matter. Those are the turning points. If people have an issue with each other, which happens. If someone’s having a bad day in the UK and twelve hours later, you get on Slack and there’s no one. You’re going to have breakdowns in communication. You have differences, but you raise them, you bring them up and you sort them.

What’s the downside?

The downside is, everyone’s extremely close as well. Maybe you can have emotional issues. You probably would have been more and people can get hurt more if things aren’t handled well. You’re friends, you’re not just colleagues where you can shrug stuff off. I see guys who did not want their business that way and they are afraid to do it. I think they call it and that’s fine. It’s a choice. I’m not saying everyone should do it that way. One of the key things here is our culture and our team culture, I would say are extremely similar if not the same.

 

It’s the same for a lot of businesses. We’ve made a very conscious decision around that because it was easier for us. We work with people that we like and that does not make a difference if they are a customer, a team member, a partner, an investor or anything else. We build the same people all around us. We have fired multiple customers that we do not think are a fit for the company. I tell my whole team, it doesn’t matter who they are, juniors or seniors. I’m like, “If someone’s not behaving well, send them off to someone else.” There are other solutions, say thank you. We don’t need their business.

That reminds me of a story. It might be apocryphal at this point. It’s like Herb Kelleher. He is the founder of Southwest Airlines, which is a US Airline that’s often cited as being a great example of customer service and all that. He said to have received a letter from a dissatisfied customer. This was a long time ago. The customer was complaining about all the things that were quintessentially Southwest, “Your flight attendants shouldn’t be making jokes when they’re doing the safety announcements.” His response to this customer was three words, “We’ll miss you. We’re the wrong the wrong airline for you.” That sounds like what you’re saying. There are always other customers.

It’s a great business principle in my opinion that there are times where you need to fire employees and there are times that you need to fire customers. Firing a customer is a bit of a foreign concept for a lot of people, particularly early on. You guys are several years into this thing. It takes a lot of balls to fire a customer. Without naming names, is there an example of a customer that you became clear was the wrong kind for you, therefore, you said goodbye?

There’s been quite a few. We’ve had the whole, “We think your brand is too playful and it needs to be more serious.” I’m like, “That’s great. Go hang out with a serious company.” We don’t have to be rude on supports. I tell my team, “You fight customers if you want to. You can let me know. They’re not always tough owners as some of us.” I have stepped into customers before where I’ve seen it pop up or someone else is flagged down that I said to him, “It’s part of the of business. I’ve refunded the last six months. No hard feelings. Go and use the system.” I found people would come back to that and they’ll apologize and they’ll ask to stay and the answer is always no.

I understand people have bad days. Every now and again, you have to take into consideration. You turn this way intentionally because you need to have some empathy with customers. If someone’s done something multiple times, you know they’re a serial offender and that’s who they are. If you think it scares the other customer, you’re probably familiar with how it works with team members. We’ve all had team members that haven’t worked out and he’s getting rid of them because if you have the wrong person, your culture could be destructive.

If you don’t nip it in the bud, it will compound and it can destroy a culture. It can send other team members away. It can impact the business seriously. By customers, one of the lesser extents can have the same impact because if your frontline team is dealing with these people and your frontline team is not always that tough, then it will ruin that day. A simple conversation has a few bad words, somebody not being understanding can ruin someone’s day and upset them. That person will not perform. They don’t feel good. I don’t want that in my company. No customer at all is worth that. I’ve had this in the past, especially when we used the privates is where we have very big clients. The ones who’ve done it before, they will do it again and again. I don’t think there’s any excuse for bad behavior.

If they’re complaint about your company particularly relates to who you are as a company, that’s clearly the wrong customer for you. It’s like you said, “You guys are too lighthearted.”

This is branding. Be confident about your brand. Do not be wishy-washy on your brand. If you’re starting a company, understand what your brand is and do not lie to yourself. Don’t be like, “We want to change the world.” If you don’t want to change the world, it’s they want to change the world. It’s fine. If your culture is like cutthroat, that’s fine. If that works for you, you need to know it and need to hire people who are cutthroat. Your brand is your culture. It’s your tribe. You can behave within bounds of how you want to behave. Don’t go outside of that.

What will happen is if you have a stronger brand like Southwest Airlines, your brand sticks to that. You will attract customers are for that brand but most importantly, you will generate advocates and super fans. People will come in who love that brand. Wishy-washy brands do not have people who tattoo Ironman that level-headed people tattooed on their arms. People don’t tattoo wishy-washy brands on their arms. You want to be a company where people are going to tattoo you not literally. You want to be in a company where people would love you enough to tattoo you on their arms for life.

Sometimes it is literally. There’s a company that are primarily in the US if not exclusively called Anytime Fitness. They have customers that have literally tattooed the company icon on their bodies.

When it's imperfect, you know it's real. Click To Tweet

That’s a success story. The best tribes because that’s what we are building here have lovers and they have haters. You can’t fit to everyone. You have a lot of these large niches and small niches and it is a great thing because you will get customers, and when you find them, they will never leave you. Whereas if you’re on the fence they’re liked, “We’ll use you for the bet. We use competitors.” People would be called to be bold with the brand, mix it together and own that space. If someone doesn’t fit, it’s fine. It doesn’t matter. They’re not going to work out for you anyway. Make sure you get the ones that fit and stick.

I’m inferring from some of the characteristics of Bonjoro’s culture but in your words, what are they? What are the characteristics that defined who you guys are as a culture and a brand?

Transparency is the first piece. With customers and with ourselves, we have that weird wacky nature as well. A lot of us are eccentric. We love customers who are eccentric. They are the ones we ended up hanging out with. I went through a conference with a company Design Pickle and we all turned up wearing bear suits and they all turn up wearing pickle suits. We all stood on the stage and we own the whole conference. We do have a very hard-working ethic and we are quite blunt.

We don’t tend to mess around with insights, data or decisions. To come back to transparency, if you don’t agree, you say it. If you agree, bring it up and fight for it and don’t back down. If you’re quite spoken as a team member, this is primarily internal. You might not fit because your ideas might not get through because we are quite strong-willed but the customers are the same. The ones who speak up and they’re like, “This isn’t working.” We’re like, “Let’s hop on a call. Tell us why it’s not working. Let’s see how we can fix it.” This one is a little bit aspirational. I’d say that we are non-profit conscious at giving back. This is not exclusive.

There are members of the team who are more driven in this aspect than others. It’s not something that we wouldn’t hire somebody for. Empathy and they are compassionate, we will bring them on board. We try and we’ve done the whole 1% pledge for quite a while. We were trying to coach the team to do this more. We tend to get team members to pick this up more. As a result, we also worked with a lot of charities and a lot of nonprofits. If they want to talk to us for hours on end to work out how to do it, and they’re paying $15 a month, that’s fine. We’ll spend all the time we can with them. Something as a company, we’re doing a good job and it’s good enough. At the same point, very blunt, data-driven, hardworking and open and transparent.

You said lighthearted sense and humor.

It’s the way it comes down to branding. It’s got a sense of humor. Everyone who starts working for the team, we buy them bear suits when they work. Everyone who starts job designs wear bear suits. We have these old grannies in the North of England that knit them for us. We send bear suits to customers and kids when they hit their milestones. We have the same pictures of customers where we set in bear suits and the kids had gone out for Halloween with the bear suits rather than their costumes.

What is it about? Is the bear an icon for you guys?

It got out of hand. I don’t even though why we start with the bear. We wanted to build a brand that had an icon that had a personality. We built this like a MailChimp around an icon, then we started doing the bear suit things for a bit of fun internally. I was like, “Why don’t we send bear suits to the customer’s kids?” You have customers wearing our brand. We put our brand on. That’s powerful. People love it and they think it’s hilarious. We started doing all that. We ended up hiring a chief delight officer who runs our community and is in charge of doing these things.

I want to say with the whole delight and with the whole evolving customers in this, for us, it’s a process. For the customer, it’s unexpected. When you start to weave this in, we have some trigger points that we are doing it. We want the customer to believe it’s unexpected and unique. We do put time into this. We’d like sponsored koalas for customers as well. We sponsored a few bears in Ukraine. It’s gotten nice to go through this because it’s fun, it makes us laugh. It makes customers laugh. Some people come in and they’re like, “This is not serious enough. I don’t like this.” We’re like, “We don’t like you either.”

 

You prefer elephants to bears. I got to say the image of a little British granny sewing up a bear suit makes me want one. That’s a great principle. To the customer, the experience is surprising and feels spontaneous. Part of it is because it is personal, but yet it’s systematized for you guys. It’s in the way that you do business. It comes across as surprising and spontaneous to the consumer. To you guys, it’s the way that you do business. You’ve operationalized that fun and surprise into the way you guys do things.

If you think about what makes delight, we call it research and that’s quite a lot because part of what we do in the videos is the delight piece between them. It’s got to be unexpected. That’s the number one thing. We have triggers for things like the bear suits, which is when they hit certain volumes of sending. That can happen for the machine or it could happen in year two. It’s not wedded to a specific time. The other thing is that to keep it delightful, you need to change it up. This is one thing with video. It’s equivalent to your tool.

It’s not the answer to everything. To understand the video message at every single point for the customer to follow. That’s not the point. Do it once at the beginning, make your best first impression. Do it down the line when you’re looking to engage with the idea because you’re on a fellow side. In the meantime, use all your other methods of communication. Mix it up because the way our brain works now experiencing different things, at different speeds, and different types are exciting. It’s like acceleration and deceleration. If you’re going 100K or 100 miles an hour, that’s not exciting if you’re going 50K to 70Ks an hour, as you’re accelerating, that’s when you feel the thrill.

Think about delight as this, when you have triggers for these pieces, I wouldn’t wait for them to bake 1 or 2 weeks, or 3 days. Try to think about metrics or trigger points that would be different for different customers. Their volume is ascending. Maybe they’ve read X number of courses, maybe they’ve hit episode seven, whenever that happens and then put in points. Here’s the challenge is to try to make a gimmicky. It does not have to be. It had to fun like us. It’s not about that. It might be buying lunch for somebody. It might be coffee. It might be giving them a free month off. It might be donating to charity. It might be an extra training session. Do the thing that matches your brand. It’s not about gimmicks. It’s about doing the unexpected and put a bit of personal timing always like 30 seconds to 1 hour. Put it in depending on the value of the clients and they will recognize and appreciate that.

I’m assuming that Bonjoro is doing well. How are you holding up in these interesting and unusual times?

Where we are, it’s a very interesting space. There are a few things changing. People are starting to struggle and get through connecting not with the team, but with customers, especially in a remote working space. There are other changes, which is the way that we’re starting to blend working from home versus working at work and that dropping down to these barriers. It’s now okay for customers to do calls in t-shirts and shorts rather than the suit and tie. I see corporates doing this as well, which I think is wonderful because it’s more true for individuals. It doesn’t mean they have to lose their brand. A world of faith and authenticity is starting to happen as well.

We want to see the real and we want to be able to trust. There’s been a lot of erosion of trust and how do we get that back? This is part of that. There are a few things that play into this. Personalization at scale as well, but it’s a result of this. How do you personalize the customer journey at true scale? Scientifically, what’s the ROI on your time? When does it behoove one to invest a minute in the customer, our hour or this in order to help grow your business? The change is we always say automate processes, not relationships. Take the stuff out of the business where it doesn’t leave you personally and operationalize whatever you can because the whole point is to free up your time because your time is the most important thing. Invest that time depending on the company back into customers. That will get you a return. That’s the best return on your time you could do.

As we bring this in for a landing and thank you for sharing that story. I like to quote the great philosopher, Tina Turner who once asked the age-old question, “What’s love got to do with it?” From your perspective as a serial entrepreneur, the Cofounder of Bonjoro, the technologies and all that, what’s love got to do with all this?

If you love what you do, it’s everything. In a business, love your team, the products and services you’re building and love the customers that you work with. Surround yourself with good people. That happiness will come through and you will build better products. You will make better hires. You will inspire your team to work harder. You’ll work harder yourself. You’ll get out of bed every day excited. You and your team and your customers will all perform and your business will grow faster. It’s not rocket science.

Matt Barnett, thank you for joining us. Thank you for reading this episode. Until next time, do what you love in the service of people who love what you do.

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