Fred Reichheld on the Importance of Customer Love

Fred Reichheld on the Importance of Customer Love

[00:00:00] Fred Reichheld: Welcome to be customer led, where we’ll explore how leading experts in customer and employee experience are navigating organizations through their own journey to be customer led and the actions and behaviors employees and businesses exhibit to get there. And now your host, bill Staco.

[00:00:33] Bill Staikos: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another week of B Customer led. I’m your host, bill Stagos. My guest today frankly, needs no introduction with this group of listeners. However, I will say Fred Reich has just been a professional hero of mine for a long time. I’ve had an opportunity to meet him in person, and I am absolutely just floored that we’ve got him on the show for you.

For those that do not know Fred, the 0.01% of you are probably listening, Fred has been, is the creator of the Net Promoter System, which many of you all of all probably heard of the Net Promoter Score. He’s, uh, currently a Bain fellow who’s been with Bain for over 45 years. He’s written several books and, um, we’re gonna talk about his most recent book, winning On Purpose as well.

Fred, thank you so much for joining us on B. Customer led. Great to be here, bill. Excellent. I’m really excited to, To get into the question set with you, Fred, but you know, we ask every guest, just kind of, you know, tell us sort of just, you know, quickly or as far back as you want to go, frankly, just your professional journey and what you think were those differentiating markers for you in your career.

[00:01:37] Fred Reichheld: Well, I’ll start. When I joined Bain, I saw companies that I admired. Sometimes they were clients, sometimes they were competitors of clients we see out of the corner of our eye. But they treated people right and earned their loyalty. And they outperformed in a way that we couldn’t explain. With all the economics I learned in college and graduate school, they just were breaking all the rules, like enterprise rent a car grew to be the largest in the world as a private firm.

They didn’t need access to the funny money of the Wall Street capital markets. And finally, we figured out that that loyalty was at the core of financial prosperity. And that has been my focus since, since the very early days. I initial. Was shocked by the economics, but today I’m shocked by the philosophy of life that the leaders have that differentiates them and lets this all become possible.

That’s

[00:02:34] Bill Staikos: awesome. I love that. And you’ve obviously written about the net promoter system, certainly the score. And now with your new book, like, first of all, I’m just personally am an advocate of nps. I’ve personally seen. The transformational power of it, of the metric and of the system and closing the loop, both the inner loop and the outer loop.

But I have to ask you, because there is a lot of conversation as you have seen yourself, uh, and we’ve talked about this a little bit, is why do people botch nps? I mean, it’s one of the most simple things, frankly, out there, but like, why do you think people are, are botching it or even just kind of poo-pooed on some level?

[00:03:10] Fred Reichheld: Well, I’ll answer that at a, a narrow level and then at a much broader one, I think, um, Classic error is to turn nps the score into a KPI for your people, and very quickly it all becomes about the score and increasing the score, when in fact, that’s nuts. Um, it’s a survey based score. It’s soft, it’s sampling, it’s all these complex statistics, ideas, probability ideas, and if you make the score of the target, bad things happen.

It might happen right away. It might just take a couple, two or three. Gaming manipulation. Uh, I don’t really care about the customer. I just care about getting the score, and that is selfish. It, it’s the opposite of the net promoter philosophy, which brings us to the, the bigger reason I think people mess up is Net Promoter is about a framework of, uh, business that presumes the primary purpose is to make customers’ lives.

And most companies don’t stop and think, do I really agree with that? Actually today, 90% of companies wouldn’t agree with that. So let’s be more serious. If you just think customer centricity is one of a dozen things you ought to be doing, then you are not really living the net promoter system. Uh, if you think it’s one of a handful, you’re getting closer, but as I argue in winning on.

The primary purpose of the great businesses is enriching the lives of customers. And the leader’s job is to inspire their teams to follow and achieve that mission. And that’s way different than financial capitalist system measuring a quarterly accounting earnings. And the what I finally, this was years and years ago, Andy Taylor, the CEO of Enterprise Rent a Car.

I asked him, how did you, this is a miracle. It’s here, you know, broken all the economic rules. I learned in. What a waste of money that was. So how did you, you know, and he is, and the family is worth tens of billions of dollars. How do you do it? And he said, well, Fred, there’s only one way to grow a profitable business.

You treat your customers so they come back for more and bring their friends. And I heard that 20 or 30 years ago, and I sort of heard it and, and I, it was at Andy, at at Enterprise that I saw this two question survey idea, helping get control of this notion of making customers. But what I missed was back for more and bring your friends.

Mm-hmm. , that is the flywheel and accounting does not measure it. What I didn’t recognize quickly enough is our generally accepted accounting principles do not tell you how much of your growth is coming from customers coming back for more. Yeah. Or referring their friends and. Is it’s death. If you can’t, if you can’t quantify the core flywheel that drives prosperity, good luck at getting making the right

[00:06:07] Bill Staikos: decisions.

I’m a Hughes Enterprise fan because, I mean, even I had to rent a car from Enterprise not too long ago, maybe two months ago, and I got a call the first day when I rented it to make sure that everything was going well by the store manager, and then it was a four day rental. On the third day. They said, Hey, we just wanna just check and make sure everything’s going.

Right. Like nobody does that. Nobody

[00:06:27] Fred Reichheld: does that. But they don’t, they don’t charge you, uh, 500% markups on gasoline. And they don’t charge you a hundred dollars late fee if you’re 20 minutes late. Like the competition. Cause the competition has a mindset that the goal of a business is to maximize profits.

That’s right. And the goal. Branch manager is to maximize the profits of that rental to you, which makes ’em do things that gouge or cut costs and cut corners. It’s just, it’s a philosophical difference and that’s what I think I missed or I underestimated all these years. The great companies are trying to figure out how to give the customer the best value possible and the rest of ’em are trying to figure out how can I extract maximum value from that customer’s pocket.

That’s

[00:07:15] Bill Staikos: exactly. You talk a lot about this in your new book, and I want to get into the book for a little bit. By the way, the title for our listeners, if you have not picked up a copy, this is a seminal book that should be, you know, around loyalty and experience that you need to buy. The book is titled, winning On Purpose, the Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers.

You’ve got this word love and the title. You’ve got it throughout the book. It’s an incredibly strong word you do not hear much of in business, frankly. Why is now the right time for that word to be used in business and actually people being okay with saying, we’ve gotta love our customers.

[00:07:52] Fred Reichheld: Well, my teammates at Bain, uh, were a little uncomfortable with so much love lovey-dovey stuff in a, uh, in a hardcore business book, but I think the vast majority are on board and see the power that love when understood correctly.

And this notion of love, th neighbor as thyself is the religious one, but, Treat people the way you’d want, a loved one treated. That’s the highest standard in human affairs. And the more a leader can put his or her teams in a position to live up to that highest standard in human affairs to love their customers, that the better the community becomes.

And what I, I’m most proud of in the book is that we demonstrate how that soft notion of love actually. Economic, uh, success and the guys that win for their investors and their employees and everybody else financially are the ones who, uh, best love their customers. And I did live, one of the guys at Bain is good with, uh, word count things.

So he took the book and he, it turns out I used the word customer over a thousand times in this last book. And the word love is in there about 300 times. Yeah. So it’s not just once or twice. It is the seminal idea. That I think is animates the net promoter philosophy.

[00:09:12] Bill Staikos: Wow, that’s awesome. I do have a digital version of it and you can do keyword search.

I did. I searched client, customer, and love by the way. And it’s there, the numbers are there for real. I used to work for someone at at chase gentleman by the name of Mike Wach. He’s now, he was heading the home lending business at Chase and has since moved to Wells, uh, to a bigger role. And he would always say, don’t be right.

Do what? Meaning like just cuz the policy is some policy, do what’s right for the customer.

[00:09:41] Fred Reichheld: Yeah. That do what’s right is excellent, but then you have to understand what’s right. And I think this notion of treat people the way you’d want a loved one treated. Yeah. Is a really powerful standard. And I have an, you know, the one full chapter.

And winning on purpose is about the golden role. Yeah. Because so many people have just a superficial understanding of it and don’t recognize, you know, it’s just not you and the customer. It’s you and the customer and the communities that you’re both part of that need to be a stronger and it, you know, otherwise it devolves into cronyism and back scratching and horrible.

[00:10:21] Bill Staikos: I’ve seen people abuse the score in corporate settings as well. It’s not a pretty thing actually. And certainly you get it in a lot of car dealers who are asking for tens up front. Right? Remember,

[00:10:30] Fred Reichheld: a 10 only a 10 is a passing grade in our shot. I, oh gosh. Oh, I didn’t understand that. Thank you for making that clear.

[00:10:39] Bill Staikos: Uh, I just got a text from a, a car dealer’s GM of the, of the store location saying, Hey, look, if you can’t gimme a 10, please gimme a call. I’m just like, oh gosh, I’m not gonna even. It says a lot about the company

[00:10:50] Fred Reichheld: actually, but you responding so he succeeded. Probably you just didn’t bother responding to the survey.

So your less than a 10 score never showed up in the sample. That’s right. That created the score for them.

[00:11:00] Bill Staikos: That’s right. It’s a how does, it is a joke. How does sort of this concept though of customer love? Tell us a little bit about how that kind of translates then into nps or even likelihood to recommend, like how, how do the two, maybe, how does the metric and customer love connect just to make it real for folks?

[00:11:19] Fred Reichheld: I learned a lot about this over the years. Initially, likelihood to recommend was the best predictor of of the dozen or so questions that we tested as a predictor of future loyalty behaviors, increasing share of wallet, frequency of purchase, referring to friends all. Exam real behaviors. That was the question that was the best predictor.

So that’s why we based a system on it. Over the years, I’ve come to understand better why recommend is such a special thing. Cause people just don’t recommend and co-brand their personal reputation. Mm-hmm. with a product or a brand, unless it’s not only best value economically, but this has to be something you’re proud to be associated with.

It can’t be a company that abuses its employees. Or cheats its investors or, or even cheats on his taxes or pollutes the environment. So recommend, it’s an act of love that I’ve had my life enriched so much. I wanna share that with someone I care about. So I’m extending that love to or that referral to a friend or family member and that act.

So referral is active love is the way to think about. And we just do not track that in business. Everybody sort of nods their heads and says, oh yeah, the Bible says, you know, your, your reputation is everything. And I agree with that, but we don’t measure it. Although we’re starting to, at one of the companies that I’m working with most closely Keep is a pla, a tech platform that keeps, that makes it easy to refer people through the platform so you can actually keep track of who’s referring whom and get a sense of.

The economics of it and closed loop analysis of mm-hmm. what needs to be done better. So I think that actually is the frontier, but it’s also the hi, the beginnings of it, right? Recommend to a friend is the ultimate act of love. And it’s the a and it’s the best way to get a sense of, have you enriched someone’s life in a remarkable way.

Um,

[00:13:23] Bill Staikos: there’s so much to unpack there, . There’s just so much goodness there. When you think about the companies that you are engaging with on a regular basis, and you, I mean, whether it’s through speaking or engaging directly, and you’re doing a lot of that work for those companies that do exhibit love for their customers, and it can’t, I’m, I’m sure that, you know, we’re probably talking about a smaller subset of, uh, businesses out there, right?

At the end of the day, still,

[00:13:50] Fred Reichheld: I’d say far less than 10%. Yeah.

[00:13:53] Bill Staikos: Maybe even exhibit love for their employees. What are they doing differently internally than those maybe who are on sort of the lower end of the loyalty scale from an NPS perspective? You know, you hear a lot about customer obsession and what does that mean, like how does that manifest from employee to customer?

What are you seeing? What kind of examples could you share? The

[00:14:13] Fred Reichheld: average company thinks that, well, I need, uh, I need to have happy investors. I need to have happy employees. I need to have happy customers, I need to have happy vendors. And so this stakeholder idea, I’m just gonna keep track of everybody and try to make everybody happy.

And that sounds lovely. And it’s just complete crap. You know, the world doesn’t work that way. The world works by priorities and systems of, uh, you know, the compound interest brilliance is, is what drives, uh, progress. And the great companies I see say, of course everyone needs to, you treat everyone according to Golden Rule.

But the reason our business exists, its primary purpose is to make customers’ lives better. And I, as a leader, my job is to help my teams understand that and embrace that mission and love those customers and innovate and find ways to, to make customers lives. And that makes their lives better. Cuz you know what, what’s the best gift you could give to your employee to put them in a position where they can earn a meaning, a life of meaning and purpose through service to others that gets recognized and rewarded by teammates.

And so that’s, it’s a system with loving customers as the objective, as opposed to this static model of, oh, I’ve got a balance scorecard of, uh, lots of stakeholders and I need to keep ’em all. It’s just one works and one doesn’t.

[00:15:48] Bill Staikos: I love how you said before, sort of the flywheel, right? I mean, happy employees who feel like there’s a, the business has created a safe space.

They’re empowered, they’re able to deliver in the way that you’re talking about, that creates happy customers who are giving more business to that company. Employees want to be working for companies that are winning. And that just, it’s just a sort of almost circle of life and proud

[00:16:14] Fred Reichheld: of what they’re doing to customers every day and not sort of hiding that they’re polluting the universe or hiding that they’re abusing each other or enforcing policies that are embarrassing and they wouldn’t want that done to, to their family members.

Yeah. So the more you can put them on a course to act in a way that makes ’em proud and inspir. And win, which is part of this, you know, you can’t lose, lose, lose and be nice to everybody that doesn’t work out either lives better. But this, uh, the thing I was surprised by in the research we did for winning on purpose, we did not find one industry where the, uh, the company with the highest net promoter score correctly measured versus competitors wasn’t also the total shareholder return king.

And that relationship between return to investor over a decade. Being 50, 60% of the difference in total shareholder returns was being explained by relative NPS across each industry. That’s a power. I mean, that’s mindboggling, and no one knew that. No one had evidence that that was the case.

[00:17:19] Bill Staikos: Yeah, that’s a staggering number.

I mean, that’s in my role, you know, with Medallia. You know, I get to talk to companies all the time. We talk about the power of NPS and the system and putting it into practice and what that does from a financial perspective. There have been CFOs whose eyes kind of pop open like backhoe tires, the size of backhoe tires, right?

Because they see it and they say, when, you know, why haven’t we been doing this and when can we put this system into

[00:17:41] Fred Reichheld: place? But it’s harder than just putting a system, a measurement system in place. Remember, this is a philosophy and I, you know, in the book, I go through all the changes that have to take place.

You know, how does a standard financial capitalist company think about purpose? Mm-hmm. , well, they think of maximize shareholder. I think to be great, you have to have purpose as loving customers, making their lives better. How do I measure progress? Well, in traditional financial company, I use my gap, financials and, and profit.

And as I said earlier, that doesn’t measure back for more and bring our friends, which are the, the real behaviors. Yeah. And so the great companies are measuring share of wallet, repeat, purchase, and NPS as an. But don’t think that NPS is the goal. That’s a survey. The goal is behaviors of people coming back for more and referring their friends and all the way down to how do I grow my business?

In the classic company, I hire sales people, I have marketing advertising. That’s how I grow, uh, promotions in a great customer capitalist. I have to delight my customers and turn them into my sales force. So I put my energy and innovation not into sales practices, but into delighting my customers in such remarkable ways that they refer their friends all the way down to what’s my job as a leader.

I think in a financial company, it’s my purpose is take care of my shareholders. Yeah. In know cap customer capitalist company. It is to make my teams lives better. To help my teams lead. Great. And great lives means lives of meaning and purpose that are, that love customers in a way that they actually feel it.

So everything needs to change, and that’s a multi-year process. That’s not to say that putting an NPS system and a metrics isn’t extraordinarily important and you know, it’s, it can be the spine off of which these other things are evaluated, but it’s hard and, and people don’t understand mindset. It’s like asking the fish to describe water when they’ve never been outside.

[00:19:43] Bill Staikos: Fred, I want to talk about something that you introduced in the book, winning On Purpose, this, this concept of earned growth rate. We’ve been kind of talking a little bit about it throughout the show, you know, the acronym egr. Can you, you know, it’s an accounting based measure, right? It gets away from GAP a little bit, right?

Necessarily, but can you tell our audience, uh, about that and how that kind of

[00:20:02] Fred Reichheld: comes into the Yeah. The greatest frustration I had with Misapplication of NPS was people using it as a key performance indicator. Linking it to people’s bonuses and then ending up with car dealer kinds of behavior. But I, I preached, but people just didn’t do it.

They said, look, it, it’s an important idea. What do I measure instead? Yeah. And I thought hard about that. And I think the right answer is, will you measure the behaviors in this digital world? There is no excuse for not measuring back for more and bring their friends as the metric of accountability. That is the truth.

NPS shines a light on the truth, but the truth is back for more and bring their friends. Mm-hmm. . And so earn growth is simply the accounting or the auditable metric of, for your business. What, how much of your growth is expanded? Purchases from existing customers, net of their declines and defects, and there’s a name for that.

In the real world, it’s net revenue retention. So I want every company to focus on net revenue retention. Plus the second component of earned growth is new customers who are coming primarily as a result of a referral from an existing customer. That’s the earned growth. Those two things together, and it’s harder to measure than meets the eye.

There’s nuances, you know, if I’m a bank, do I measure loans to employees, do I measure refinancings? And you know, you gotta work out these details to have a metric, just like the accountants have to work out a lot more detail. But it’s worth the effort because eventually I think that is what boards of directors ought to be holding executives accountable for, not accounting growth.

I can get that by buying growth, which often ends up being destroying the future because you’re bringing in lower caliber customers for the wrong reasons, with the wrong expectations, big loan losses and big claims hidden in this group of bought customers. So you’re you really? Just destroying the future.

If you’re moving from earned growth to bought growth, and most big companies are in that trap today. They feel they must meet a growth objective. That’s what Wall Street needs. Mm-hmm. . We’re gonna meet that growth objective and they are cheating and buying it in ways that are essentially destroying their future.

[00:22:23] Bill Staikos: Fred, you, which companies do you. Whether they’re using earned growth today or not. Uh, which companies sort of, do you really see kind of in that category, in that below, you know, that top 10% or top 5%? Well,

[00:22:35] Fred Reichheld: the company that introduced Earned Growth to me was First Republic Bank, medium, you know, not a tiny bank.

They’re a member of the s and p 500 and huge success story. But First Republic showed me that they keep track of, of our loan growth, our loan origination. About 90% of that growth comes from existing customers expanding their, uh, borrowings and their referrals. And then when I, how do you do that? Well, when a new customer comes in, we ask ’em, what’s the primary reason you joined us?

And we make sure that we have the systems to keep track of, uh, by customer, by family. What are, what’s the loan balances? Now that they track it, I can see, oh my, Something like 70% of their brand new customers are coming through referral as the primary reason. And a typical bank is more like 10%. Yeah. 20% of their cus new customers are referrals.

And then I happen to know from working with banks and insurance companies for many years, that customers who come in on referral have far better loan loss and claims than an average customer. Mm-hmm. . But because companies don’t track this, they don’t. So I’m thinking, oh my goodness. No wonder First Republic has got this incredible track record of growth, profitable growth, and, and no big loan loss explosions, even though they’re growing at over 20% a year when the industry’s growing loans at 4%.

Yeah. To a financial minded regulator or investor that would spell trouble. Say, Hey, these guys are buying their growth. You know, look out, they’re gonna have a loan loss explosion. Because they’re 90% earned growth that shows you how they’re getting their growth far in excess of the market, not by dropping credit standards, it’s by loving their customers.

And so I see this in Costco in the, uh, warehouse area I see in Chick-fil-A and restaurants Discover Card in the credit card business. And you know, the book is full of examples, winning on purpose. It’s a radical book. I had to have dozens and dozens of examples to prove it, or people would think I’m a nut

[00:24:47] Bill Staikos: I’m not sure that would be the case, Fred, but I’ll let you to. You know, as you think about sort of the time where we are significantly slower economic growth, globally, what advice do you have for CEOs or even founders, smaller software companies, let’s say, for them to start coming, going down this path?

Like how do you. Going down this path outside of getting your book and reading it, that’s certainly step one, but maybe what’s step two?

[00:25:13] Fred Reichheld: Well, I think that book, reading the book, the guys who have done the most with this, don’t just read the book. They have gotten their teams throughout the organization into book discussion groups where they talk about a chapter each week or each month and then get to the core of what is it we, you know, what is, what are we doing well and we should be doing more of?

And then what are we doing that’s inconsistent with the ideas in this chapter or this. That we should challenge and, and reconsider. Cuz I think that’s what leaders need to hear is yes, from customers, but we’ve been surveying customers forever. Mm-hmm. employees have a better sense of the reality of the economics, what’s feasible, and ask them what is it we need to change to live up to this standard of loving our customers?

And we can’t do it instantly, but we can certainly lay out a path over the next five years that’ll get us there. And I, I see those teams being. It unleashes energy cuz they always wanted to live this kind of life. Mm-hmm. . But it means a leadership team who is courageous cuz they’ve gotta educate their board of directors as well to the realities of the economics.

And I’d say the smartest CEOs are making sure their board has read at least the investor chapter and either agrees or disagrees, but have that conversation. The evidence is, is over. Get them behind you before you do anything too extreme. But for heaven’s sakes, get your employees into the conversation. I see so many people ignoring what the employees know and going straight to customers.

And customers are sick of surveys, right? Mm-hmm. that I don’t answer surveys anymore, but if an employee and it’s real, I obviously ask, I answer employee surveys. Yeah. That’s where the goal is, I believe, for today. Great,

[00:27:00] Bill Staikos: great, great point to. Fred, one of the things that we do on this show is I ask the previous guest that I interviewed to ask a guest, uh, my next guest a question, and I started doing it this year.

It’s actually been some really interesting questions. The individual that I, I won’t mention the name, but the individual that I interviewed last time, she comes from a FinTech product. She’s a FinTech product leader, uh, at a global FinTech player in the payment. She’s created what is really cool, which is the, this concept of a two hour sprint, um, and is actually now coaches, product leaders and Tesla and Apple and others on the, on this process, she wanted me to ask you, how do you overcome situations where your stakeholders are not in agreement on a solution to a problem?

And I think your book is just a great backdrop in what you just said even would be a great backdrop to that.

[00:27:55] Fred Reichheld: Well, I, I would have ’em read the book and sit down and talk about what it implies for, uh, for resolving that set of differences. You can resolve ’em with data. You know, I, I think reasonable people, when they have a different point of view, they’d like to get some facts.

And the facts that resolve most, uh, differences probably have to do with a belief that the only way to succeed is to delight customer. . And if that’s the true objective of every stakeholder should be working together toward customer delight, that framework lets you think about the right choice. And to make it practical, I’ll tell you what Costco does in their major meetings and decisions and priorities.

Somebody always says what’s in it for the customer? Mm-hmm. . And if you can’t give a good answer, your idea is dis.

[00:28:47] Bill Staikos: That’s a good barometer for, uh, for success right there. I’ll turn it to you, Fred. What, what question do you have for my next guest? Without who, knowing who they are, I know that’s tough to do, but what would you want to ask someone you’ve never met?

Well,

[00:29:01] Fred Reichheld: I almost, one of the things I always ask is, what company or brand or product have you recommended to a friend enthusiastically and why? Cuz it gets people thinking about what is it? Enriches my life. And I hope at a deeper level, they start asking, and why aren’t I doing that in my business? Or something similar.

Cause then I say, and how did it make you feel when, when you felt so good about a business or a thing that it, you shared the love and that source of, you know, what’s wrong with financial view of the world? Is financials a fiction? It’s just made up by accountants, human energy and wisdom, but that’s what drives everything The.

And then, so what you’re really tapping into with that question is, but what created that energy, that love, and how did it make you feel? And, and they’ll start thinking about, wow, that’s like free growth for a vi free new customers. We all need that in a recession, and I, I believe all of our employees need to be thinking that way.

Who’s delighting me in my life today? And how can I learn from that and put it into my own daily

[00:30:13] Bill Staikos: practice? That’s a great question. Thank you very much for offering that up. One last question for you, Fred. Where do you go for your inspiration? I’m sure there are, are places you go that fill up your tires.

[00:30:25] Fred Reichheld: Uh, you read the, uh, read chapter seven. It, I go to the garden. I have a garden next to our house here on Cape Cod. That is a, uh, amazing place and sometimes I invite senior teams to join me. I think Chick-fil-A was the first team that, that we, so it’s a special space and uh, you think pretty hard about, cuz there it’s a ancient glacial formation.

So you have wow, you know, millions of years, uh, as well as what you’re doing right now with, uh, with plants and, and it’s thinking in that context, how can I make the world better in a practical way? That’s an inspiring thing for me. And then there’s a, up on the hill above the garden, there’s a huge bell.

It’s the same size as the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, but it’s the loyalty bell. And, and the ultimate thing is, you know, with the freedom of resources and the wisdom we’ve gained, what are the principles, the people, the what is worthy of our loyalty? Cuz loyalty in the end is really self. And you have to figure out what your life is.

What are you gonna commit to and be willing to invest in? And that understanding your loyalty is, is I think what, what helps all of us lead better lives. You know, in the book I say this for my grandchildren, I hope they understand that idea that the world is pretty screwed up in how it thinks about winning and, and responsibility and loving.

But you’ll know by, uh, choose your loyalties wisely. They, they guide your light and de define your legacy for

[00:32:01] Bill Staikos: sure. I have to ask, where did you get a Liberty Bell size

[00:32:05] Fred Reichheld: Bell? Well, I see, you know, that TV show Dirty Jobs turns out on one of the episodes this guy makes Bells. It’s one of the few bell foundries still in existence and he, I think he used cow dunk or something in the mix for how they’d, uh, create the mold and it struck.

Oh, you can still have bells made . And so I had to make it to the same dimensions as the Liberty Bell with this idea in mind that bells are such a cool symbol. You know, when you ring that thing, you can hear it for miles, and it does have this sort of sacred connotation. There’s something special about a bell ringing that, uh, that I, I like that, that symbolism.

[00:32:47] Bill Staikos: That’s awesome. The bank that I was speaking to this week, actually, they have bells throughout the floors and when. Quarter done or a major deal done, or employees being promoted or whatever that looks like. They, you know, employees get to ring that bell and they literally have them everywhere.

[00:33:00] Fred Reichheld: That’s, it’s cool.

It’s celebration, but it’s all, I mean, bell’s tolling for funerals, it’s, it, it’s for something special, for something sacred. Mm-hmm. . And I think, you know, if you’re bringing a new customer in, uh, for on the right terms as a. Ringing a bell is a wonderful symbol. Yep. If you just sort of pitched them way beyond your capabilities delivered then, then I would keep that bell.

Quiet

[00:33:25] Bill Staikos: man. . I love that story. Fred. It’s so wonderful to see you. Thank you again for your time today. Whether it’s the book or you know, or hearing you speak or or in different forms and like I always walk away learning so much from you and you’re an inspiration to me. You’re an inspiration to so many people and it’s just wonderful to have you on a show.

Thank you for the gift of your time.

[00:33:46] Fred Reichheld: My pleasure, bill. Thank you. Have a

[00:33:48] Bill Staikos: wonderful weekend. Take care. All right, everybody. We’re out. Another great. Talk to soon everyone.

[00:33:53] Fred Reichheld: Thanks for listening to be customer led with Bill Stagos. We are grateful to our audience for the gift of their time. Be sure to visit us@becustomerled.com.

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