Every Customer is the Most Important
The Amplified Impact Podcast
September 28th, 2023
I’ve learned a key lesson about creating a strong brand: treat every customer as if they’re the most important.
Back during our rapid growth phase, Operation Cannonball, we faced a challenge.
We were taking on any customer, big or small, but it was causing stress and diluting our ability to provide great service.
Our biggest customer, a distributor in Australia, was high-maintenance.
We had to make a tough decision and let them go. Revenue initially dropped…but our customer satisfaction, team morale, and overall revenue improved because we could focus on each customer intentionally.
The lesson is simple: treat every customer as the most important, but remember, you don’t have to take every customer’s money.
Firing customers who don’t align with your ability to provide excellence is what makes you a premium brand.
Think about how this applies to your business. It’s a leap toward building a brand that customers will adore.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“We want to treat everybody with excellence and we want to treat them like they’re a million dollar customer, even if they’re just buying something for $10.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
Alright, so I want to share with you guys one of the best ways I’ve ever stumbled upon for building a bulletproof brand. And we discovered this a number of years ago when when building Escape. And we truthfully just kind of fell into this backwards. At that time, we were in rampant scale mode. We were in the midst of what we called Operation Cannonball. Now, this stemmed from the nautical times when there were pirates out there on the open sea. And if you’re on a boat and on the horizon, you see another boat coming towards you, and you’re like, we need to fight those guys, well, you’d be mistaken to just start loading up your cannons and start firing at them. Because the sea is wavy and rocky and there’s distance between you, so there’s no guarantee that you’re going to hit them.
Anthony Vicino:
You haven’t triangulated your angles yet. And so you’re just wasting a lot of cannonballs. And by the time you finally do hit them, you might have run out because you can only carry so many cannonballs on your ship, right? So the better way of hitting that ship is to first fire bullets before cannonballs because you can carry a lot more bullets with you, right? So you fire the bullets once you hit, then you can triangulate the angle from that and now you can start firing your cannons. And this is an idea that we had gotten from, I think the book Good to Great from Jim Collins. This is all the idea of just fire bullets before cannonballs. And so when at that phase in escape’s growth, we had been very small for a number of years, I think we were doing maybe $300,000 in top line revenue. This was like maybe 2016. And up to that point, there was bullets being fired and seeing could we hit certain targets, like, could we hit home climbing holds for home users? Could we hit climbing holds for gym users? Could we hit hardware for commercial environments? Could we hit hardware on Amazon? Could we hit wooden training implements for like, American Ninja Warrior? So we’re firing all these little bullets and in 2016, 2017, we were doing about 300,000.
Anthony Vicino:
And yeah, we had hit these markets and we believed that now it was just a matter of scaling up. And this is where Operation Cannonball came in. And this was like a one year, two year mission. And then it moved on into Operation Escape Velocity as a different thing. But during Operation Cannonball, it was all about growing, growing, growing, and trying to widen the customer base as quickly as possible so that we could get to scale. And within just a year, we had done a million dollars in revenue. Within two years we did 2 million, and within three, we did three. So we were growing very, very rapidly during that period of time.
Anthony Vicino:
And one of the things that we were struggling with during that high growth period was we would take anybody’s money, anybody that wanted to give us money that had a product or they had some concept. No matter how convoluted, how much work it was going to be for us or our team, we never turned customers away. And one of the customers in particular was this distributor out of Australia. They were actually our largest customer, period. They were doing, oh, boy, a couple hundred thousand a year with us. So they made up a sizable portion percentage of our total sales, and they were in charge of distributing all of Australia. It was an exclusive market. It was very hard to break into.
Anthony Vicino:
And so we would bend over backwards for these guys. But the guy that was on the other side, he was lovely. He was a great dude, but he was just so high maintenance and high strung. It would cause me heart palpitations to think about because I was spending hours a day, every single day on the phone with him because it would take months. From the moment that they sent us, say, $100,000, it takes maybe two, three months for us to produce the product and then another two, three months of that product sitting on a ship ocean liner to get to Australia. So there’s these long runways and lots of things that could go wrong and lots of problems. This customer was just very difficult to work with, and it was causing me a lot of stress. It was causing our team a lot of stress, and we were wasting a lot of time and energy trying to service him.
Anthony Vicino:
Though he was our biggest customer, our margins on his stuff were so thin because we were just spinning our wheels, working around the clock, trying to make that one customer happy. Now, here’s the thing that we came to realize, is that if you want to grow a brand that is absolutely bulletproof, that people love and adore, you need to treat every single customer as though they’re the most important. And that customer was making it very difficult for us to do that because we couldn’t spread our time and attention amongst all the others that were in the pipeline. And I think it’s important, like this idea that we started to talk about this a lot internally is that every customer is the most important customer, regardless of if they are. That Australian distributor doing hundreds of thousands with us or just that home gym user who is buying $50 worth of hold so that they can build an experience in their backyard for their kids? Both of them are equally important to us, and we’re going to treat them with that type of reverence because every dollar in the door is sacred to us. But in order for that to be true, we actually needed to follow through and we actually needed to treat those customers as though they were the most important. In order to do that, you need to be able to say no to the customers that you cannot treat as the most important in the world. And this was one of the hardest decisions that we had to make.
Anthony Vicino:
It was terrifying. But we actually ended up saying no to this Australian distributor. We ended up saying no to hundreds of thousands of dollars of recurring revenue because we said, we can’t serve you to the best of our ability and still serve everybody else. We can’t do it. It’s just too much and it’s stressing out the team. It’s stressing us out because we don’t feel like we’re living up to the greatness that we have set for ourselves, like that bar of excellence. We can’t achieve it because we’re putting too much into this and we feel we’re neglecting everybody else. So we said no to them and it was very, very hard.
Anthony Vicino:
Revenue dropped, right? But now we were able to pour ourselves back into all the other customers. We got to the point where we could be intentional and say, if we are taking their money, it is because we are acknowledging and saying we can treat them like the best customer. We can do that. We have the bandwidth, we have the ability. So we became more selective with what we were taking on and it created a deep affinity between us and the customers in a way that our sales, our revenue, started to grow, the customer satisfaction started to improve. Overall, the team morale went through the roof because now they felt like they were living in alignment with this standard that we had set for ourselves, which was that we want to treat everybody with excellence and we want to treat them like they’re a million dollar customer, even if they’re just buying something for $10. And so the thing that I want you to think about is that every customer is the most important, that if you are going to take someone’s money, then it’s imperative you treat them like the most important customer that you’ve ever had. But the flip side of that is to remember that you don’t have to take their money.
Anthony Vicino:
And that in a nutshell, to be able to fire customers, to turn people away, that you don’t believe that you can serve with excellence to the level that you hold yourself to. That is what separates you from being a premium brand, from just being somebody that takes everybody’s money. So I want you to think about that. Want to think about how you can implement that into your own business, your own life. Because that one concept of firing customers, turning away people who are not your perfect customer is scary. It’s hard, especially when you’re new and you think you need to take every dollar through the door. I get that. But it’s probably what’s going to hold you back from serving that select group of customers that you truly could be the world to.
Anthony Vicino:
It’s going to hold you back from servicing them in the way that they deserve, and on a long enough time frame, that’s going to dilute your brand. It’s going to make it hard to grow. So take that, implement it in whatever way is unique to your situation, and I hope this brings you a lot of value. Guys, thanks for being here. I’ll catch you around these parts tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.
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