Build to Enough

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Keila Hill-Trawick: Hello, you're listening to Build to Enough, a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to scale at their own pace. I'm your host, Keyla Hill Traywick, and I'll be your chief storyteller and cheerleader in a world that glorifies endless expansion, we're tuning out the noise and discussing the beauty of enough. Each episode will dive into inspiring stories, practical insights, and strategies to cultivate sustainable success on your [00:00:30] own terms. So whether you're a solopreneur, small business owner, or aspiring entrepreneur, get ready for a refreshing take on the entrepreneurial journey. This is build to enough. Today, we're delving into a topic that is all about transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, the art of unreasonable hospitality. Now, I recently read Will Gowda's book of the same name, and it was a powerful shift in my approach to customer interactions. So if you haven't heard of him, Gadera is best known [00:01:00] for elevating New York City's 11 Madison Park to the number one spot on the world's 50 Best Restaurants list back in 2017. And the way that he talks about it, unreasonable hospitality is really going above and beyond in the pursuit of how you make people feel. And really that that should extend beyond the restaurant industry. For me, it was more than a book. It's like a roadmap to infusing warmth, surprise and authenticity into every interaction, creating an experience that customers [00:01:30] remember long after the transaction is complete. Now, this was especially important for me as an accountant because we think about transactions as kind of the final deliverable, the thing that we're doing for people.

Keila Hill-Trawick: But Gadara kind of split this out to think about unreasonable hospitality into four themes. Hospitality is for everyone. Continuous improvement is key. There's something called the 95 five rule and the thought of looking for inspiration in unlikely places. So before [00:02:00] we jump into the book and all the things that I got from that, let's dive into why customer experience is more than just a buzzword. It's really a game changer. So here's a thought. Did you know that acquiring a new customer can be up to five times more expensive than retaining an existing one? Yeah, five times. So focusing on customer retention is not just about creating loyalty financially, it's just a smart move. When we think about holding on to our current customers. I think this is where that first [00:02:30] theme of hospitality is for everyone kicks in. So for restaurants, hospitality is ingrained in the culture. Um, it is the hospitality industry after all. But really, this goes beyond restaurants to all kinds of industries. I'm thinking about places like chewy. If you have a pet, you've heard of this. They are a retailer with everything that your dog or my dog could need. And an example is that they sent out sympathy flowers to customers whose pets had recently passed. [00:03:00] We've all heard of Zappos and them going extreme for customers.

Keila Hill-Trawick: They have a 365 day return policy. So these are just examples that you don't have to be in hospitality to go above and beyond for your customers. At Little Fish, our firm was built on the agency model. So you may have heard me talk about this before, but when I started Little Fish, I didn't know any other accounting firm owners. And so I was looking to my clients who were designers, agencies. That arena [00:03:30] and customer experience is always at the center of all the things that they do. So we followed in those footsteps. We wanted to make sure that everything started with the idea of the client experience, and then built from that. For example, we wanted to make a quick response time. It's one of the most often complaints that we hear for other accountants is that the clients don't hear back from them. We aim to respond in 24 hours, but no more than 48. We also have account managers, so the people [00:04:00] that interact with our clients, the team members who are their main day to day contacts, is an account manager, not an accounting manager. A small three letter change. But that's not really standard in our industry. And then we're accessible year round. So we wanted to make sure that even if you were a tax client, you could ask questions outside of tax time, even if it's not included in your service. The thing that we tell clients all the time is if you've got a question, ask us if it's in our wheelhouse, we'll take care of it.

Keila Hill-Trawick: If it's not, [00:04:30] we'll at least give you some information to help you along your way. So one of the things to think about in your business is where could you be more hospitable to your clients? How could you better anticipate customer needs so that you can surprise and delight them? How can you give proactive communication? And one of the biggest things that we think about at Little Fish is how do you make it easy to work with and for you to communicate with you when they have an issue, and to let you know when things aren't moving exactly as [00:05:00] you had planned. So we talked earlier about the night. 95 five rule, and I wanted to give some insight on that based on the book. So basically, the 95 five rule is that you want to manage 95% of your business down to the penny. You want to be ruthless about how you're spending and what you're doing, but that leaves 5% for you to really kind of spend foolishly. Now, it sounds irresponsible, but what we're really saying is that 5% that you're deciding to spend, quote, foolishly, can make a huge [00:05:30] impact on the experience. It's not the big, grand, expensive gestures. It's the intention that you put in those smaller gestures that may not cost as much, but give an outside experience to your clients.

Keila Hill-Trawick: So at Little Fish, what does that look like? When we say we surprise and delight, we not only want to do cards, um, renewal information that is really easy to understand and know what's changing and what's not changing in your service. But we also want to recognize milestones [00:06:00] in our clients lives and businesses. So yeah, birthdays, baby announcements, but also when our clients hit their first million or crush a goal that they told us that they wanted to achieve. It's a holistic situation. We want to go beyond just we did accounting for you to we understand that your business is super important to you the way it is to me, and we want to acknowledge when you meet those goals that you've been striving for all year, some practical strategies in your own business that you could do are. Allocate a small budget [00:06:30] for unexpected gifts or gestures. This can be anything from handwritten notes to custom stickers to small branded merchandise. Don't give people wasteful things. Think about how this could actually be helpful in their lives and businesses, and also just a token of appreciation to say thank you for honoring us by allowing us to serve you. Think about quality and unique packaging. It can be small, but make sure that it feels bigger than just a tiny throwaway trinket. And then finally [00:07:00] esthetic and ambiance. If you've got physical locations, allocate resources to create a pleasant ambiance that store design, comfortable seating, and an overall esthetic.

Keila Hill-Trawick: But even if you're just all virtual like we are, make sure that that is being carried through everything that you present, from the way that clients interact with you on software to the ways that you talk to them in all the arenas of your business, make sure that the feeling that you're trying to get across in your business is being felt by your clients at every [00:07:30] touch point in your relationship. So the next thing is, continuous improvement is key. Now we can take this way too far, right? Like always trying to get better to the extent of burnout, which nobody wants. But the idea is that there's probably always a little tweak to make things a bit better at little fish. This has led to a lot of pivots throughout the years, which I'll admit were a bit uncomfortable. This idea that we were constantly changing things. But the reason is because we constantly wanted to improve [00:08:00] the client experience, and that meant that the client experience has been up leveled with every new change that we made. We also are constantly asking for client feedback. I ask at the end of every call, is there anything that we could do better or that we could adjust, or that would help you to feel like you're getting the best value out of this service? Richard Branson said a complaint is a chance to turn a customer into a lifelong friend, and I like to believe that if we're asking clients what they want and actually making intentional steps to make that happen for [00:08:30] them, we're doing that much better for all of our clients, even the ones who haven't said anything.

Keila Hill-Trawick: So make sure that you're regularly interacting with not just your clients, but your team. You want to understand the struggles, helping them grow, and making sure that they feel like their ideas are valuable. Be open to and ask for client feedback. Often you can't fix something if you don't know what's working, and I know it can be scary. It's scary for me too, because every time you ask, there's an opportunity for somebody to say what they don't like about what you're doing, but you need to know [00:09:00] that if you do it, then you know that you're taking better care of your current clients and your future clients because you have information on how you can be better. The last thing that I'll say is look for inspiration in unlikely places. There was a story in the book about Guidara and his former business partners. One of the critics that was looking at their restaurant said it needed a bit of Miles Davis, and they're scratching their heads like, what is that supposed to mean? They're going down rabbit holes trying to interpret, like, what do they mean by this? And [00:09:30] what they realized is that the approach that Miles Davis took to his work was able to inspire them about how they wanted to approach theirs.

Keila Hill-Trawick: So they started looking at the words that were used to talk about Miles Davis. Whereas like adventurous, fresh, spontaneous, vibrant, how could they incorporate that into the business? So yeah, they're a restaurant. You're not thinking that they're going to get inspiration from musical icons, but it really makes you think about all of the ways that we can [00:10:00] be, you know, incorporating outside. Patients into our businesses. I said earlier that we got inspiration from design firms. I still listen to a lot of podcasts. I get a lot of information there because I think that they do a really good job of saying, hey, client, what you want is most important to us. The customer isn't always right, but they can always give us some insight as to how we can make sure that the people that work with us are getting the experience that they expected. The other ways that [00:10:30] I've thought about this are spending time outside immersing yourself in nature. I've started walking around and just looking at like, what draws my eye and why? How could I incorporate that into the business so that it feels warm and inviting in the ways that I feel when I'm walking the dog? Read and explore genres that you typically wouldn't read.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Step outside of your comfort zone, and that includes visiting different kinds of workspaces that you might not always go to. There's so many different conversations and collaborations that can happen as [00:11:00] a result of this that you wouldn't even be privy to if you just stay in the box of your industry. So I've waxed on and on about this book. I love this book. I want everybody who is a small business owner to read it because hospitality isn't reserved for the elite, it's for everyone. It's a universal language that businesses can use. And if you think about continuous improvement and that 95 five rule that we talked about, you have the opportunity to embrace the benefits of a hospitality mindset [00:11:30] and apply that to all of the things that you do in your business, so that the ways that we feel about these luxury products and services, everything from Apple to Ritz Carlton to Nordstrom, you can incorporate that in your small business so that your clients can have the same fangirl opportunities that we have outside. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Build to Enough. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, rate and share the love with your fellow entrepreneur friends, and [00:12:00] make sure to sign up for the Build to Enough newsletter. The link is in the show notes. Stay tuned for more episodes as we continue to redefine success one intentional step at a time.