EntreLeadership - #403: Stories That Scale with Casey Graham

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

Businesses put a lot of energy into the chase—you know, wooing and winning over potential customers with emails, paid ads and fancy landing pages. They work hard toward that sweet moment of victory when their customers finally decide to purchase. But then what? That’s where a lot of businesses fall short. They’re really good at acquiring customers, but not so good at keeping them and making them come back for more. Sound like you? You’re in luck. Customer service pro and co-founder of Gravy, Casey Graham, gives us the inside scoop on what really makes customers stick around: doing unscalable things. No, seriously. He deep dives into how getting personal (and going above and beyond) for just one paying customer can help you reach, and keep, thousands more.   entreleadership.com/podcast Gravy's website UserTesting’s website FullStory's website EveryDollar budgeting app Gravy Core Values - Does & Doesn't Mean PDF How to Create Core Values Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, if you're like me and you came from the world of sales and marketing, first of all, I love you. You're my kind of people. And oftentimes business owners started out in sales and marketing and got good at bringing in revenue and then we picked up the other responsibilities of the business. But the double-edged sword here is that if you're wired like that, we're always gravitating towards all of our energy going into getting more customers. And there's nothing wrong with that. But the problem is, if you forget that once you have those customers, you actually got to take care of them, well, then you got real problems. From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and my guest today is Casey Graham.

Casey's the CEO of a company called Gravy. Maybe you've heard of them. Well, you probably have, because, well, they sponsor this podcast. We've been telling you about them. These guys are our friends. They're good people. And while they share the vision of helping business owners win, that's what we're all about here. And Casey's built an entire company around that one principle that if you will show up and love your customers after they become a customer, that creates a winning business. Guys, you can't just look at the sale taking place as the finish line. It's not the finish line for your customer. It's the starting line.

And you've got to deliver excellence with your service until you get them to become a customer for life. everything you want out of your business doesn't come from getting your customer to pay one time. It gets from paying time after time. And so, you know, in every survey you read for entrepreneurs, they want freedom. That's the thing they want, whether it's time freedom or money freedom and all that stuff. You don't get freedom by getting people to pay you one time. You get freedom from people paying you consistently time after time. And so my thing is not just, yes, let's take care of customers.

Yes, let's love them because they're people. Yes, let's serve them well. But also, if you want to get what you want out of your business, this is where it is. It comes after they start paying. And that's why we just always say, hey, one of the best things you can do is pay attention to paying people. Pay attention to paying people. And that's our mantra. We talk about it all the time.

And that's why we do what we do. We talk in entree leadership that one of the six drivers of a peak performing business is, obviously, you have to have a great product or service. But the way that you deliver that, doing it with excellent. doing it in a way that makes them go, wow, wow, these are people. They care. They went above and beyond. They're not like Comcast or these companies that just don't have a heart and we call and go, you know, they've got my money, but I hate it and I'm trapped. These people actually are giving me more value than I expected. What are the keys to doing that? Yeah, I mean, a couple of things is understanding, number one, that they're human beings. Like, they're not a number on a dashboard or a spreadsheet.

And so what I see is that the business owners spend so much time looking at dashboards. They forget that these people really have like real lives and real stories and real stuff going on and really busy. And somebody's got, you know, sick in their family and there's crisis and they have fear and they have all these things going on. And so the beginning point of anything that you create and what you guys have done so well, Entree leadership and what Dave's done so well is overall is understanding. These are humans and start there and celebrate there. and live there instead of we want to get all these customers, one of the first things we always do is we say people's names. Like, we tell stories about real actual people,

and that's the first place that we say to start. That's number one is that you've got to realize that we're human. You know, it's interesting you say that. I think we're all susceptible to forgetting, you know, at scale especially. We get a lot of customers, and we're starting to watch percentages of increase or decrease. And it's just a dashboard is an effective way to try to get your head around all these numbers and all this stuff. But if you're not careful, we forget these

are real people. One thing I have right here in the studio, just to help me when we're having these conversations, is a picture of actual entree leadership customers. I'm looking at Amanda. She's the executive director of Brain Balance Center. She's got a franchise to help with childhood development. She's in Orlando, Florida. And I'm looking at her face as I speak right now. And I've got several of them. Because here in the podcast, I want to remember, this isn't about just making a great podcast. There's people out there like Amanda who are listening. And what's going on in Amanda's world today? I don't know. She might be scared. She might have just had a record month. She might have just had to lay somebody off that was really hard. And so I think what you're saying is really important that we have the faces and the

names of our customers and their stories front of mind for us all the time. How do we do that to a level of making sure that our team remembers this is who we're here for? Because we have certain pieces of our teams that aren't necessarily front lines, the administrative side of the business, the accounting side of the business. Obviously, sales is out in front. They're interacting with the customers, but how do we make sure our whole team remembers the names that faces and the stories? Yeah, well, internally, so I think it comes with culture of what we celebrate. You know, we always talk about what gets celebrated, it gets repeated, and it's true. Inside a gravy, we have something called a gravy biscuit in Slack, meaning that when we catch somebody

doing something right, or they live out our core values, somebody who call out a gravy biscuit because we're a virtual company, so we don't get to see all of this. And so we throw it up and that's the gravy biscuit. And one of those is around the idea of doing unscalable things for people. Because doing unscalable things like, for instance, if somebody opts out of your email newsletter, literally texting them, getting on the phone and calling them and saying, hey, listen, I just noticed you opted out of my newsletter. And I'm just calling you.

I don't want you to opt back in. I just want to understand why. And you give me your perspective on it. And then you end up doing that. You stalk them on social media. You see that they like a smoothie king. You send them a smoothie king gift card. And that one unscalable thing that you can't do for thousands.

You can't do for hundreds. But you could do for one because what we found about unscalable things is that the story scales. So you can scale the story of the unscailable things. And that's what creates the magic internally of doing for, you know, Andy Stanley says, do for one what you wish you could do for everyone. Yes. And then oftentimes when you catch people doing. something right, you scale that story, and then you share it over and over again.

I want you to say more about the story that scales, because as you started describing that, I'm thinking about business owners who are going, man, I'd love to do this for everybody, but I just don't have the time, Casey. Like, it doesn't scale, and we're trying to build a system and a machine that's replicatable, and we've got millions of people we've got to help. How are we going to get to them if we're always running around doing these unscalable, you know, actions? What do you mean when you say the story scales?

Because I think that's probably where the magic is at. Well, I mean, you see great examples of this. I think that, you know, Elon Musk did it when something happened. There was a Tesla. Something happened on an interstate. And he saw it on Twitter. And he sent it a new Tesla to this one person. And it became the news headline.

The story scaled of this one thing they did for this one customer, right? When you do the different unscalable things, it becomes a scalable story. I'll tell you for us internally, even, you can do this with your staff as well. So we have a lady in our team named Patience. We call her the M&M of gravy. She came from a very bad situation in life. She randomly found out about gravy. She got on here in her entire life dream.

You know what it was? To get braces. That's it. That's what she wanted out of life. And so what we tell externally now is because she's gotten here. She got a raise. She's been promoted. And she's bought herself braces.

And now she smiles for the first time. And so when we're talking about our culture, we always say, hey, instead of celebrating rounds of financing at gravy, we celebrate round. of braces. And those are the kind of things where it gives you the story that says just in one sentence what it would try to take you forever to do. And this is very important. That's an incredible story. You know, the thing we do as leaders, when we own the business, we can just feel that in the moment and go, I'm going to give this person a $50 handshake or I'm going to call that customer and say, hey, this one's free on us next time. You know, don't worry about it because we're just going to make it right. I think we feel the autonomy and we feel

empowered as owners, as founders, as leaders, because we have the budget. You know, we know that it makes sense and we're just going to do the right thing. I think sometimes team members don't feel, like, they feel the spirit of this. You know, how do we get them to make the gravy biscuit and they, and sometimes money's involved or sometimes doing something unconventional is involved. Clearly, we have to have a culture that says, one, you're going to be deputized to do this, two, here's some budget. Three, if you do it wrong, you're not going to feel, you know, judged and shame. We're going to celebrate and say, hey, let's tweak this in a way next time that maybe is more on track. What kind of conversations do you have with your team to set them up to be the hero to the customer?

Yeah. I mean, for us, it doesn't have to cost anything. Like, literally, and what we do for a lot of our customers, so what, you know, Graview, what we do is we're talking to companies, customers all day and representing their brands. So we literally will send like just a loom video, like a loom video that's just a personal 60-second video that says their name like they do at Starbucks, Casey, your order's ready. So you say their name, which is important. You empathize with them of whatever their situation is, and you just make it personal. And that's like, it doesn't take any budget to do that. All it takes is effort and give a

crap. And so, you know, making a personalized video, that's one of the things we do. Like, for instance, our, we call them RDRs, they're basically our SDR sales development reps here at Gravy, the relational development reps. We don't send out cold text messages in people's DMs to them to connect with them. We send individual videos to people and we go to their website and we say specific things about their company and who they are and it takes more time, but it makes a bigger impact. It's not as scalable because we can't send 10,000 of them, but we send a thousand that matter and whatever.

So I think video is important. I think a text message is huge, very important that you can do for your conscience and your customers. And one of the things that we've seen is just celebrating. So what we've done is we've exported. We've exported the gravy biscuit to our clients. And so in their Slack channels, we catch their team doing stuff right. And we take our culture and say, hey, we want to give a gravy biscuit.

Here's what that is. And we call your team doing something right. And we want to highlight that inside of our client Slack channels as well. And so those are the practical free, quick examples of why anybody can do that. We know how we want to be treated as a customer, right? I was at the Perry Lane Hotel in Savannah, Georgia this past year. And I went down and I was standing in line and I said, my son looked like a cookie at the cafe. And the guy said, well, we don't have any cookies anymore.

But last time we went had cookies and so my son was sad that we didn't have cookies. I said, okay, we ordered something else. The next morning I get cookies, warm cookies delivered to our room with a note that says, for the duration of your stay, Gage will have cookies at the cafe. I am now on this podcast telling the story from the Perry Lane Hotel in Savannah, Georgia, because they spent what, 10 bucks and wrote a little note and said, here's some cookies. And so my question is, don't think of these big things. What are your cookies? What are your little things?

What are the little personalized things that can make the big difference? And that's the story that scales. Well, 10 bucks got them 200,000 listeners that normally sponsors pay thousands of dollars a month to get in front of. And so next time you're in Savannah, stay at the Perry Lane Hotel and you get your cookies. You know, I mean, it's just such a simple thing. You know, doing the right thing, taking care of people, going the extra mile a little bit. I've been talking with leaders about a metric that we often don't really have on our dashboards and it's conversion on effort. And I think one thing you're hitting on, especially when you're saying direct messaging people with a personal video.

And the volume is not as high. You maybe can't send out and blast tens of thousands of people at the same time. maybe you get to a hundred in a day because of all of the lift that goes in that. But the conversion on that effort is 10x what it would be if you just sent one email and blasted it to thousands of people that you paid to get a list or something, right? Because it's not going to convert because people are over it. People are tired of the white noise in this space and being spammed and being hit up one more time. And it sounds like you're saying bringing back the old fashion, let's have a relationship

and get to know each other person to person is the secret sauce. it is but I'm not saying you do it for everybody but what I am saying is as it gets easier to build technology and as the world gets easier to build businesses like the differentiation is not going to be your code the differentiation is not going to be the thing you sell the differentiation is going to be that magic sauce that you have in your brand when people think about you they think about you differently if for us like it drives us out of the competitive range to where we literally don't have any direct competitors. None. So in three years, we have no direct competitors because everybody just wants to build the app and scale. Everything's about scale. Well, we're scaling

just as fast or faster. We just have more effort and energy around what we call return on culture. And that's what this is. It's a return on culture of what we do inside, inside of our company. We want people to feel outside. And that's how we operate. And I just think that scale is overrated. I want people to scale, but if you scale without that magic and that touch and that meaning, it's important. And this comes directly from my story of I was the guy who didn't used to do this. So it sounds like you had a personal transformation that there was kind of this epiphany around this. Dude, I mean, I was a disaster. I was all like, are you talking about grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. And we literally, in the last company I was in, in 2014, I was approached by a

private equity group. And they said, Casey, we want to buy your business. And they made an offer for the business. And it was a, it was a really nice offer. We went and sat down during due diligence. And I don't know if you've ever been through due diligence, but it's kind of like they get you naked and tell you, tell you all the bad things about you and they're going to beat you up a little bit. And so I remember sitting in the boardroom and literally within minutes, I lost millions of dollars because they looked at the facts of after people bought and they were saying stuff like in month seven, we noticed that there's a drop-up for this. What was happening there? In month 10, here's a drop-off. And everything wasn't about the, and I was like, no, look at the sales. They were like, no, no, no,

we can't do that. We're looking at what we're going to get when we buy the business. And so in an our meeting, I lost millions and millions of dollars. And they said, Casey, your business is not sticky. And so we went back to the drawing boards for two years because what leaders try to do is they'll hear this and they try to treat it like a project, not a process. And so they'll go, oh, let's get fired up about customers for a minute or let's go fix our failed payments or whatever. And so what we went, we went back to the drawing board, we spent eight quarters. We put a leader over it. We put metrics over it. We put systems over it. We use technology. And that, That solution that we built, we went back to the same private equity group.

They 5xed their initial offer two years later because we fixed this problem. And you say you have a personal conversion? That was a personal conversion of the reality of the value of your business. It's not about how way you can sell. It's how way you can sell and then keep selling to people forever. So is it as simple as we have to increase the lifetime value? Like is that the whole metric we should be? be looking at? How do we get more value to the customer and then value out of them over the,

you know, it's like we're extending from month seven out to year seven? Like, is that the, is that the objective? Yeah, that's it. I mean, the king and queen metric of business from, from a financial standpoint is CAT to LTV. So how much does it cost to acquire and how long can we keep them? And so my question is, my question is for just everybody listening, how much strategy meeting, how much effort, how much time, how much thought process, how much budget goes to LTV versus KAC, how much? And so I just know I've been inside of it is that we just go, oh, they're going to take care of that. Or I hired them to do that. No, no, no. If you're the leader of the business, it's got to come from you to give a crap to care because this is where the value is.

Now, it doesn't mean you have to do it, but you sure got to lead it and care about it and you've got to prioritize it. A lot of people know these acronyms, but just for those who are going, what's a cac? Is that something you buy at the pet store? Let's break it. Customer acquisition cost, right? That's right. And then the ratio of lifetime value. That's right. If it cost you a hundred, if it cost you $100, let's say in a Facebook advertising, it costs $100 to buy, you know, a customer. And then they pay you $1,000 over a year. You'll have a 10 to one cactel TV. Yeah, it's key to track that stuff because I think it's a myth that you just throw a bunch of money into Facebook and you get a bunch of customers that you, you know, we talk about the ROI almost like, hey, look, we won. You know, we put the money in and we got new customers. But if we're not really watching how much that customer is worth to our business over time, we get delusional with just the, you know, how much we spend on the campaigns and the initial conversion. Totally. Yeah. So you've got to force that process to creating, I guess what you call sticky customers.

What do you mean by sticky? Well, sticky means that they stay and pay and they want to over a long period of time. And so what we found in the business, so I'm not saying this is like Casey figured this out or we figured this out. All we did is that we've processed over now is about six million transactions and customer interactions of hearing customers back and forth on emails and text message in the last 40 months. And so what we've seen from the businesses that do it the best and what we've seen from the business. business do it the worst. And there's four things that we've seen that businesses that keep customers for a long time do very well. And the first thing is, is they make it super easy for their customer. And so the phrase of what we say is that you've got to make it

obvious for the oblivious, obvious for the oblivious. Now, here's a practical example of that. My mom was late to getting a cell phone. And so I told her, because she kept saying, I'm calling you, I'm calling you, and I wasn't answering enough. I'm sure we've all had these these kind of thing. I was like, Mom, if you just get a cell phone, then you can text, you know, and I'll text you back. So she comes in town two months later, and she's mad. I mean, she's hacked off at me. We're sitting eating some wings, and mom's mad at me. And she says, Casey, you told me if I got a cell phone that if I texted you, you text me back. I was like, Mom, I haven't gotten a text. And so I pick up her phone. I look at it.

And my mom somehow was texting herself. Not me. You got to give her an A for effort. I mean, Mom's trying to stay with the technology, right? I do. And so what I learned from that was, you know, you've got to make it obvious for the believe it. She just hadn't done this before. And so this is how every customer is when they interact with your brand for the first time. So what I suggest for every single person in this Zoom world to do, literally go get somebody who is not your target audience. They know nothing about what you do or care about it and get on a Zoom call and literally let them have their screen. And, and pay them for 30 minutes and pay them and watch them go through your website,

what they click on, what does that phrase mean to you, and literally it's a look over the shoulder. They used to do it in like the 90s. You just look over the shoulder and you would watch, but now you can look over the shoulder on Zoom and watch people, pay people, five or 10 people. Yes. And you'll see how oblivious people are to your insider language,

to what you think is being said and what to do. You know, one of the biggest things is they don't know where to go after they buy. They don't know who to contact. They don't know what to do next. And so oftentimes we spend all of our effort on getting them to buy, but then after that, how clear is it? Where do you go? What's the next thing you buy?

All of those different things. And so that's what we mean by make it obvious for the oblivious. Well, you're hitting on something that's really important. My friend Donna Miller talks about the curse of knowledge. When we live so close to our stuff, it's actually a curse that we know so much about our landing pages because we just look at it and things that are obvious to us. Well, you just go here and you click this. And we know that they're going to get this.

and the workflows of our website even can be really confusing if you've never been there before. And what you're talking about is getting people who don't have that native experience, that knowledge that they've been working on it as a project. It's fresh eyes.

And you go, oh my gosh, it's right in front of them. Why are they not clicking it? And then you realize the messaging is off. I think it's a great exercise. In fact, there's services. We use one that lets you do this in mass, usertesting.com. And they find people

and you can pay them, and these people sign up and say, yeah, I'll be someone that'll test drive your website for you and give you the kind of the brutal, honest feedback. And actually, usertesting.com just called us the other day and said we're running too many tests through their site per our agreement. We're going to have to. But that's how much we believe in it? Because we get so many insights. We're like, oh, my gosh, you know, if we'll just test some of this stuff. And how many customers are we losing if we never test it? And we never realized that thousands of people were putting all this money and energy to drive traffic to our site. And then they're just bouncing right off because it's confused. using and we didn't fix the thing that once they got to the site could have been a natural conversion point if we just worked on that and did exactly what you're talking about. That's it. Another one's called Full Story out of Atlanta. It's an Atlanta-based company. It kind of does the same thing. It shows you the full story of what they're doing.

But those are the digital versions. I'm even talking more analog of like literally when people click on stuff like in your product or the other thing is let them buy all the way through the process. And so even if you are shipping a physical box to their house, have them on Zoom. And watch them open the box and ask them every step along the way, like, what do you think this is? Why do we do that? You know, just asking questions and get the analog data back. And some of that, some of your best marketing materials and some of our best marketing materials that we've ever done.

Wow. Really good. I love it. So make it obvious to the oblivious. And then the next step is to make it simple. Yeah, make it simple. So in my previous company, I laughed because we were selling these courses to church leaders. And because churches were broke and I came from the, and you guys know all about churches being

broke, I'm sure. And so a lot of these churches were broke. And so I built this thing called Giving Rocket back in the days. And I taught them how to raise money without being a televangelist, okay? Like how to do it properly. And I built this whole system and 12 modules and all these coaching videos and documents and downloads. And all you have to do is pay $90. We're going to give you all this stuff.

And so we started selling the crap out of this thing. talking about that we went from zero to $500,000 in ARR in under 90 days from scratch. And it just started taking off. But then just as soon as the roller coaster went up, about three months later, the roller coaster started going down. People started leaving. And so I started calling customers and I would say, I don't want you to come back. This is not to win you back.

I want to know, why are you leaving? And they were like, well, there's too much stuff. I don't, I'm not using it all. And I was like, okay, well, is there anything you are? are using and they kept telling me about this one document that was the easiest thing that we make that was this one thing called a giving talk and the giving talk was literally here's what you say this week when you stand up on stage to take up your offering that's all it was and we just wrote it for them but i had all these wonderful videos of my wonderful coaching and teaching and

stuff that they just didn't care about and so i started calling people that were staying and i was like what are you what are you using giving talks oh i'm actually hearing these customers say that so we stripped the program out of everything and the easiest thing to make was the thing that delivered the most value the fastest, which is the giving talk. And so we made the whole program about giving talks, which was cheaper for us to make. It was better. And then people stayed longer and we sold millions of dollars of this thing. The point of this is you've got to give people inside of your product a magic moment within the first seven days of buying. And that psychological win of the magic moment of them winning, even if it's a psychological win, keeps them staying and paying longer than

trying to deliver on all these big wins that happen over time. And so we do this at Gravy. As soon as somebody comes on, we save the first payment. We make the biggest deal out of the first payment save because it's a psychological win. And so my question is, what's the magic moment for your product? What's the magic moment for your service? What's the one thing that you can do that's like, this is the feature or this is the thing that if they do that, Then we celebrate it to the customer and we reinforce that. That's the magic moment. We see people that don't do this and they just go, oh, we hope the product makes them happy.

It doesn't work. And it's too complicated. You got to keep it simple. I love that story. It reminds me of about 10 years ago here. We had a website service. It was like a blog with a membership called My Total Money Makeover. And Dave Ramsey wrote the book, The Total Money Makeover.

It has a New York Times bestselling book. And we thought, let's have an online community where people can have you know, they can chat, they can get answers. And we probably had 15 different things in there. We had a budget template. We had a forum. We would take clips off the radio show and dump those things in there, tools and calculators. And we had a decent little following because we had a lot of people that were just big fans and they'd jump in there. But a guy, a really great product guy, Michael Finney, who's on our operating board today and oversees all of our technology and digital product, he came in to that team and kind of entry level and he said, hey guys,

they're only using one thing. What are they using? What are you talking about? And this was a sacred cow. I mean, we love this thing. My Total Money Makeover, and it was a business unit. And he started challenging that it shouldn't be everything we were trying to make it. And he said, guys, the thing they're using is the budget.

It's all about the budget. Everybody comes to Ramsey. They hear they want to get financial freedom. And then they're going, just show me how to do the budget. Get rid of all this noise and all these articles. And essentially, they took that entire, what was a line of business, shut it down, sunsetted, and relaunched what today is every dollar, which is our budgeting app. And it's the most popular thing that we've ever done from a digital product. And it's blowing up. And it's got a five-year just up into the right hockey stick. If you look at that thing, you go, okay, one guy came in and noticed that there's one thing that's the magic moment. That's the, this is the core part of the product that everybody really cares about. And it takes a lot of courage to do that. And so I think as founders, as leaders, as entrepreneurs, we're, we're,

just idea people and we're constantly thinking about, okay, they need to know all this stuff. And you're calling out that we've got about 30 seconds of their first day with us of attention span to really win them and create that magic moment. How do we figure out what that thing is? Because I mean, we're proud of all of our things. We like all of our ideas. We want them to sit down and read and read for hours, all brilliant stuff that we came up with for our customers. And the reality is they're not going to do that. How do we decipher? How do we filter down to, well, this is the thing that we need to double down on. I literally think it comes down to doing the unscailable questions that you ask.

And you can do the scalable technology of watching what they do to when they stay, right? And so that works. But then the unscable thing is getting down and asking, or you can send the survey out and ask the question in their language, which is if you had to boil it down to, what is the one reason that you bought this product? What is the one outcome that you want from this? And getting it that clear and that simple, that's what helped me. So a company called InfusionSoft, I was one of their first early customers like 10 or 11 years ago.

Yeah, I love it. Great friends of ours. Really good company. Yeah. Yeah. And so when I started, one of the things that they found out from the founder Clayt Mask was if they can get me to send out my first email campaign, that's it. If I get one email campaign and get my contacts uploaded, I'm stuck. That's it.

And so they created success coaches around that. And so they found that by looking at what are the actions and the activities through personally talking to people and seeing via the technology what they do. And so I really think it's that simple. Here's the deal with all this. If I was listening to this podcast, it's the whole like, no doubt. There's not been any magical things that we've talked about. There's no unicorn ideas here.

This is all about giving a crap. That's what it's about. It's all about saying I'm going to wake up and I'm going to actually. do things and talk to real human beings and watch what real human beings do instead of living in my fantasy world of what I think they care about and how cool my product is and what I'm trying to celebrate in my cool company and why we're so good, I'm going to just wake up every day with the humility to talk to people and learn. And I think that's what this is more about than if you do this strategy or that strategy. You know, you talk about the humility to do that.

And as we grow our businesses, we start delegating. We have to work on the business, not in it. How do we stay in touch with the front lines, especially as the founder, the CEO? It's cool how Dave Ramsey has this built in because he's on the radio show at three hours every day. So it's kind of a force. Like he's interacting with the marketplace and has never lost touch of like, this is the front lines of what we're really doing with our customers. But I've lost it at times. I mean, I talked to plenty of business owners and founders who you just get more and more removed from, whether it's

the sales seat that we started in or the customer service or actually building and providing the service that we, you know, are known for in our business. How do we stay in touch with that? How do we get the time? You know, I mean, how do we get out of bed and actually go out and talk to the customers when we got all this other stuff going on? Well, I actually asked the same question to one of my board members. Name's Ken Polk. He owns Arlington family offices in Birmingham, Alabama. And Ken gave me his system that is what I use. And so what you do to take the angst out of this, It's like, when is it enough enough, right? Like, I don't have enough time to do all this.

And so I have a spot checking system. And so a spot checking meaning that I listen to actual phone calls from our sales reps. Once a month, I get a couple sent to me and I listen to them when I drive. That's spot checking. I'm just listening. A spot check might be with a save call for us. If somebody's wanting to quit, gravy. I want to listen to that save call.

I will actually go attend one or two of those a quarter and listen. I won't even do it. I'm just listening to being there. That's a spot check for us. And so you find the key pivot points. And usually those pivot points are transitional points. It's like when somebody's going to become a customer and they didn't. Okay, you need to spot check those.

Call that person and talk to them, why didn't you buy? You're the perfect fit. You're the perfect. You got the budget. You didn't buy. Tell me the real reason. I'm not trying to convert you. So I have a system of like five to seven things and they change based upon the different season of the business.

And so my assistant then has it. It kicks up a reminder. I do the spot check. And that's how I stay in tune. Now there's other stuff where I'm just relationally connected. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. But the systematic way is a spot-check system.

But you created a system, and it automates a lot of it and is pushing it to you, especially if you can listen on your commute. It's, it's net zero time in your calendar. So what's an example of, let's say you're listening to a safe call and it's going pretty well. And then there's a moment that you cringe. You're like, oh, no, no, no. It happens every time.

And then you think, okay, if this is how we're doing this across all of these, we need to do, what, some training? I've got to show up as the CEO and light people up. I mean, what do you then do if you see something that's like, this isn't how I would do this? Number one thing I do is personally talk to the person and have an individual conversation. I did it this morning. I was on a webinar dry run call with a guy on our team and he said I could tell the story because he's telling it. And the way the meeting was led was not the gravy way that we lead meetings.

It just wasn't. And I instantly picked up the phone after the meeting. I said, hey, the number one thing I always ask are you open to feedback? And if they say yes, because if not, it's just seen as judgment. So are you open to feedback? And then I walk through, hey, here's what I noticed. Here's what I prefer. So those two words, here's what I noticed.

Here's what I prefer. And then I said, what I always do is I take this micro example, I mean, this micro thing, and I make it a macro example. And so today, actually right now, and he actually texted me back and said, you don't have to do this this time. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to teach people how to lead meetings the Gravy way so you don't have to. That's what he did to me, which was great leadership on his part. And so we take it.

What that means for us is we go to our All Team Slack channel and we literally do a recording, an audio recording or a video to say this is how we lead meetings at Gravy. And we train everybody on it and make them give a thumbs up that they've watched the entire video. And that's just a quick way of how we do things. Again, that's how we're entrepreneurial, so we move fast and do things fast. So it's not like this training system. Now everybody sits in a room and we train everybody. It's on the fly.

And so we bubble things up on the fly. We make people watch it in Slack if it's a big thing. And that's how we do it. You know, I wrote down when you were talking about kind of how you kick off that feedback conversation, these phrases. I've never heard them put this way, but they seem really powerful. Here's what I noticed. Here's what I prefer. Yeah.

I learned that in marriage counseling. My wife was telling me that. It feels very disarming. You know, I think that's always a tough, like, how do you break the ice when you're about to give somebody feedback? Because you don't want to be the heavy. You want them to know that you're for them. You know, hey, I noticed this.

I prefer this. What have you found in setting it up that way? Is it helpful? Do people say, oh, this is the magic phrase that I'm about to get in trouble? Or is it more like, no, let's have this discussion? Well, I think it's not ever about trouble. you know, it's not about getting in trouble. He wasn't getting in trouble and I wasn't angry at him.

It was literally just a, this is a thing. It's leading a meeting. It's not you suck, right? And so I noticed the way you lead the meeting was here. This is what we prefer. This is the gravy way. And so that's another thing. Another trick that I use, and I learned this from a coach, his name is Rob Berkeley is,

and it's kind of harder in a digital environment, but not really. So if I'm giving feedback to somebody, always have a third object in the room instead of it just you and the person. And so I write the feedback out. And if I'm in person, it's on the piece of paper. And so I'm pointing at the piece of paper and the feedback, not them. Same thing. Share your screen screen on Zoom.

You can pull your screen up and say, this is the feedback I'm talking about. And it's not like I'm just looking at you and you're the problem. It's this thing. It's so separate the thing out physically. and it's a great tactic to help keep, you know, the feedback loops helpful. That's really cool. I like that. Okay, so we're talking about creating sticky processes, I guess sticky customers via great processes.

The first one we talked about make it obvious to the oblivious. When we talked about the magic moment principle, you've got seven days to create that moment. The third step, you say they want it fast. What are we talking about? What do they want fast? Well, have you, do you remember when we used to file in airplanes all the time? You know, it's one of those things where everybody that's flown had the experience when they had to call in because something changed or they had to move something or they were trying to get in touch with somebody.

And you get that because Delta or American allies, all of them, they all love us so much that they tell us that on their automated voice thing tells us how much they love us. You're such an honored customer that you get to talk to the robot. And when we all have a problem, and especially when we're pissed off at the Comcast, like you said earlier, whatever, we call in, we get the thing. And what everybody does is they either, we press zero, or we start screaming, representative, or then you have to slow it down, representative, you know, to get them to understand. So we all have had that experience to where when a person feels pain, this is a macro principle, though. When a person feels pain, they want people. When you feel pain, you want people.

And when do you want them? I want them right now and I want them fast. From the time you stub your toe as a kid, you want your mama, right? I mean, it's just the way that it works. And so what we have seen in business is that people have created such a hard time to get in touch with people. And the response times are so lag that it pisses people off and that people then become pissed at your brand. And then they get on the show and say, well, Comcast, blah, blah, blah. Right.

Well, they did that because they did it. And so what I always say is solve your customer's problems before they become your problem. So solve their problems before. And so the best way to do that is speed. The best way to do that is speed. It's to let them know that you got it. You don't even have to solve it. Just answer.

The biggest example, I called Nike. I called Nike. I had these shoes. They picked up. I was shocked. I was literally shocked. I called Nike and it was like, hello, this is Nike represent. Like straight away.

And I was like, there's no way this is happening. it shocked me. And so they immediately, it took 90 days for me to get the problem solved, but I wasn't mad about Nike because they answered the phone. And so my question for you as a business owner listening to this is, if you went through, which I think every business owner should go buy their own product today, go buy it.

Just go buy your product. Buy your technology. Ship yourself the product off the Shopify store. Go literally put your computer in Cognito mode and go through the entire process. Not only that, fake sales call in and fake out somebody and buy or have your assistant do it and listen in and go through the process of buying. But then on the backside, where do you go for help? What do you do? And we do not make it clear for people.

Where do you get somebody fast? And we see this is one of the number one reasons that customers churn. It's not that they necessarily don't like the product or that they hate it. It's if that somebody would talk to them really quickly, they would stay. that's why people hire us is like people say Casey what's your secret sauce I'm like speed and empathy we're faster to the person than anybody else and I used to do this even in hospital visits when I worked at a church I would get there at five in the morning and it's this is actually terrible and I'm sorry if I did this visiting hospital my strategy was the earlier you if you got there before them

and then they walked in you didn't have to stay a long time so the longer you want the later in the day you went, the more you had to the longer that stay. So I would be their first thing, but there's something about being there first. There's something about being there quick. And that solves the customer's problem. And I just think a lot of businesses should pressure test the speed on the back end of their businesses. How quick is quick. I mean, today, I think we're in such an on demand. The expectation for fast has done nothing but increase. Totally. On response time. I know a lot of companies that try to have little chat features on the website that pop up right then. But then as a customer, you kind of go, I don't know, do you even really work for that company? Are you really

going to take care of me? Are you just a robot? Everybody's trying to get into AI and scale the stuff and do it where it's automated. I think there's a lot of, there's resentment and stigma and a little bit of guardedness in the consumer base about nifty ways that businesses are trying to get fast, but they're short-cutting the key part you're talking about, which is empathy that only can come from a real human. So how do we get lots of empathy really fast and how fast is fast? What are we talking about? Yeah. And that's why I would say like you there's a couple of different ways. Obviously there's technology. There's two things. There's technology and people, right? What's the technology system that you use to get information from your customers fast? Like what is that? And there's a

million different technology you can use. But then the people side is that they've got to know that this is actually a real person named Jamie and that Jamie actually has access to their files and can actually solve their problem. I don't think they actually care if it's outsourced or if it's an AI thing. I think all the end user consumer cares about is did I get my pain resolved? So there's a million ways to solve it, but that's what I would say. Empathy is the number one way we get people to stay in subscriptions. And so if you have a subscription business, the number one way we get people to stay, we have like what we call three stay bonuses. And one of the stay bonuses is is just people listening, like they're going to get out of the subscription, whatever the subscription is.

We listen to them and we say, and all we do is listen to them. Tell us everything you don't like about this. They'll list everything they don't like about it. And then we say, hey, listen, we hear that because of that. I know you were going to leave, but we'll give you 50% off for the year. And here's a one-time purchase and you can just purchase and you can have it for the rest of the year. And you would not believe just because we listened to them. And then they paid more. just because we listen to their story. And then we put an offer in front of them, but it's an empathetic offer.

Here's 50% pay up front. You get the whole year. And how many people stay in the subscription? It's amazing. How do you do that with, I'm not going to say integrity because that's too big of a word. But, you know, if you're thinking about new customers and they're going to pay $100 a month, but then if they knew that they were in for three months and they were going to leave if you would knock it down to $50 a month, it almost feels disingenuous. to your new customers that you're charging $100 a month. So is it is it kind of under the radar?

Is it something you just you pull out just because they're leaving? And now you go, oh, this is really what you're worth to us because you're about to leave. Yeah. And it's not to us. We represent the brands. And so we on a spectrum, we go through when somebody comes on, we say, hey, listen, if somebody's going to leave, how do you want us to get them to stay? So I don't, you know, it's up to, it's up to our end user of how what pitch or offer we want them to make. And so whether they feel it's ingenuine or not in genuine, that's up to them. We don't feel like it is. We feel like it's an opportunity. If the person is going to stay and keep the product, they can do that. And so that's how I see that.

So empathy and speed to resolve the pain. Do that quickly. That's the third step to creating sticky customers. The fourth step, you talk about making sure that it's personal. Say more about the 55 cent principle. This is a big deal. Colonel Derek Lane, in the Marines. He's one of the youngest Marine colonels and happens to be one of my very best friends. And he was in Tampa and he was over, you know, this huge marine base. And so he's the guy, right? I'm talking about like at the thing, like the guy. And so I was walking around going, dude, I just know you as a friend. These people are like, do it like, you're a big deal. And so what he would see is it's like 99 degrees in humid in the summer. And he'd see these 18 year old Marine

that would be out there working, their job was to work on the trucks, like physical labor working on the trucks. And he just kept seeing this guy, and this guy had a poor attitude, and he was down and all this kind of stuff. And he went over to him, and he just started talking to him,

whatever, he got his name. He went back, and what he did was something that changed the way I see everything. He found out the guy's mom's address, and he writes a personal thank you note to the guy's mom and talks about how good of a Marine this guy is and all of this.

A week later, he goes by, he says the guy is literally running from place to place, putting stuff on, big smile, like totally changed everything for him. And he said, Casey, this is what I call the 55 cent principle. It cost me 55 cents to send that thank you note. And it changed that. It changed not only his life, but it changed his mom's life and her perspective of her son who joined the military at 18. And he told me the story, and he was just like, you never know what 55 cents can do for

somebody. And so what we've adopted, and one of the things I think that we as companies, and the people that are going to win in the future aren't, it's not AI and robots. That's not what's going to win. What's going to win is when we start treating everybody like a somebody. And the reason why is, is because business owners won't scale. customers won't care. So you can win the world and you can win your product by having personalization at scale. You can win by saying people's name. You can win by doing unscailable

things for your people. And my question is, when is the, so one of the things that we do, when somebody becomes a customer gravy, I write a handwritten personal thank you note or my daughter does. My daughter is 13 years old. Her name is Darby, Gil Graham, and she's awesome, and she works as a celebration coordinator with us. She's on Slack, and when new customers come in, me or her will send a handwritten thank you note

and put my personal email address in there to say, hey, this is coming from me or from my daughter to connect with people. And people say, well, you can't do that forever. It doesn't matter if you can do it forever. I can do it for now. We can do it for now. And so being personal, saying their name,

and actually thanking people for being apart because they're giving you money. Like we treat them like they should give us money. We should wake up every day and go, good gracious, thank you so much and be personal with them. Wow, I love it. So when we do this well, obviously our customers are served better, right? They get more value. The lifetime value increases to the business. As we get to that point where maybe we can't do these things, you know, we hit these

thresholds of, okay, as a byproduct of being amazing at taking care of our customers, I can no longer scale personally sending everybody a handwritten note. Although, I think it's fascinating. I had the privilege of getting to meet Truett Kathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, before he passed. And I was in his office one day, and we were in town working on some stuff with Chick-fil-A, and I was friends with his assistant. She said, come here, come here, come here. And we had a little baby at the time.

And so my daughter was in his office and spit up on his, you know, beautiful rug. And I was embarrassed. I'm like, oh my gosh. So, Truitt Kathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, obviously he's got an operating team and a CEO, and he's kind of in his legacy season. And I said, what are you doing? He's got all these notes on his desk. He doesn't have a computer on his desk anywhere. And he said, all I do, I come in every day, and I read fan mail and I write thank you notes. And that's all I want to do for the next 10 years. I just want to make sure everybody that I can gets a personal note from me, because I want to thank them for all the years and years and years that they've been good to Chick-fil-A. And I was like, oh my gosh, you know, what, what founder of a multi-billion dollar enterprise is spending all their time writing thinking notes? So I thought it was cool. But I mean, it's kind of an anecdote to say, hey, don't assume that things don't scale because some of them are just limiting beliefs that we give ourselves. But at the same time, there's points where what worked and what got us here is not going to be doable at the next level. Do we delegate it?

Do we stop doing it? Yeah. But it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. What I'm saying is I feel like so many business owners say, well, I'm not going to do. that's because it doesn't scale. And I'm like, well, how big your business? Just a million dollars. Well, then it doesn't matter. Just do it. Just do it. And then as it scales, just like everything else scales. We have what's called on our team because it went from being one person to now what we have is called a celebration coordinator. Celebration coordinator works across all things.

And so if, let me give you an example, if one of our team members sees that one of our customers on Instagram had a baby, then they contact the celebration coordinator, the celebration coordinator, then sends a personalized gift from gravy out to that person specific to them to their hospital, right? That would be an example of that's an actual role that we fund and have to then weaponize, I guess you would say, personalization. And so that's our first step in going, well, Casey can't do it all or Renee can't do it all. And so that's like one step. And my question is, how far will that get us?

You know, $20 million, $30 million, $40 million, then you build a little team underneath it. And the bottom line is like, do you care about it? Do you fund it? Do you celebrate it? Is this a big deal for you? And for most people, it's just not. But it is the difference maker. Your product will become a commodity over time.

This is what keeps you premium. This is what keeps people telling people about you. You wouldn't believe the number one thing that people share is that we have this little onesie that we send to babies called, it says gravy baby. So we send gravy baby onesies. and personalized note and gift or whatever, how many customers just put that on Instagram, Facebook, they share, hey, this company, like they talk about what we do for them,

not what we do. What we do is boring. Even though it's saving people tons of money, what we do for them is what they talk about when we treat them like a human. That's what doing unscailable things. That's how it gets you the scalable stories. I love this. You clearly have a culture of this and you've designed that intentionally.

I imagine you and I are similar, probably similar to Dave Ramsey. We started this thing based on us having personal relationships. You know, I started entree leadership on the phone with every customer that showed up to the first event where we had 100 people. I wrote all of them, a personal handwritten note. I knew their kids' names. I knew their stories. And like I was so invested relationally early on. And then it got bigger.

And we started hiring people. And the same thing here with Dave Ramsey. You know, I mean, he sat kneecap to kneecap across a card table from people who are in financial distress and he's personally coaching them through. And he's going, let me call the creditor for you. I'll put them in their place. I'm going to fight for you, man. Like, he personally advocated for the first, I don't know how many thousands of actual customers. And today he's, you can't do that, you know.

We've got teams that do that. As founders, I think we assume that when we hire people, they're going to have that same fire and that same. for us it's obvious you know it's like of course you take care of the customers that's what got us here we remember those early days when they're all we had you know we didn't have the multi-million dollar facilities and the resources and the we just it was our ability to build relationships is what the whole thing got off the ground on and then we we bring people on you know and i think we forget or we assume that they they don't know those stories and we have to teach them hey this is this is how business works these are these humans out here

here who have hopes and dreams and fears. And how have you been so intentional to distill what you know as a founder into the hearts and the minds of your team? Two ways. Number one is the way that we've transitioned to doing this is now I have to do this with our team. So we're at 53 people as we record this. My number one priority is to do for them, do for one, what I wish I could do for everyone

with them. That's why this morning I was coaching a guy that said, hey, because I see him be. a future CEO somewhere and I want to be his first investor. So I was like, he's on our team. He's awesome. A young guy is just killing it. And I was just like, I'm personally going to coach him, not all the time, but I saw something I'm going to coach him.

And I'm doing that with him and sharing with him the cookie story. Because I tell people, hey, we want the Ritz-Carlton experience. Well, I didn't experience that on the call. Then I explained to him the story of what that means. And then he sent me back the thing that says, now I understand about what it means to give him the cookies. That's a one-to-one example of now, though, that guy gets it. But it took some time. It took a little bit of effort and energy. And he's going to crush it.

And so it starts with your team. And it starts with, and again, it can't just be me doing it. It's got to be other people doing it as well. But that's number one is if you see something, you say something. We talk about that all the time, which is I notice I prefer. I've been around for, this is how we do it around here is another phrase that we use. So this is how we do it around here. So that's cultural stuff. And then one cultural thing I would say is inside of our core values, we have what we call myths and legends stories that we share in our new employee onboarding class. We do five weeks and me and my co-founder still train every single group of people that come in. And all we do is tell stories of heroic stories that happened one time of what one person did.

And we connect it to our core values. And so they remember the story more than the value. And so we have a heroic story. connected to our values. And we make our team the heroes, not us, right? So things that they did. So that's the cultural side of how we do this to multiply. Now, the other side, which people think we're crazy that we spend so much time doing. Gravy is essentially a leadership development company disguised as a payments company, period. So we have a system internally called Decade of Destiny, which is where we spend, and it is a passion of mine, to help our team,

leave gravy better than they came in. And we help them plan one decade in advance in three key areas, which is their relationship, their money, and their energy. And we help them do that. And every quarter, we're planning with them for their life to have a better life. Now, you'd say, what does this have to do with recruitment and staff and everything? Well, here's what it has to do with. They know that we care about them as human beings, not human doings.

And because we're modeling, caring about their life, in turn, they care. about the lives of other people. And so these are the two strategies that we employ, and I'm not saying everybody needs to do this, but that's how we do it internally. I'd love to hear you more on this idea of telling the story and connecting to a core value. We have core values. You have core values. We throw these around a lot, and there are a lot of business owners going, okay, I know I need to get some core values, and then now you're saying tell a story about it. Do you have a practical example of one of your values and then a story that you would tell to make this a little bit more concrete? Because I think it's brilliant and I want you to unpack it a little bit more. Yeah, well, this is a fun. One of our core values

is that we don't take ourselves too seriously, as you probably can tell. But here's the deal with statements. You and I, if I told you that statement, we don't take ourselves too seriously and said, you go write down what that means to you. And I'll go right down what that means to me. They're going to mean two totally different things. That's so true. This is big. Okay. So what we do is that we have a chart underneath those. that breaks it out that says this is what this does mean, this is what this doesn't mean for clarity. And so does means and does it means. And so we break it out into each one. And so we have this chart.

And this is a side note. If I'm ever coaching somebody or giving feedback, I'll circle which does mean or doesn't mean that we're talking about if it's a cultural thing and say, this is the specific thing we're talking about right now. So it makes it super helpful to coach people to values. All right. And so the story side of it would be the 300. dollar bottle of wine order hurt around the world. Okay. So there was a lady that we hired.

And it was her literal like 10th day in the company. And we're on a company trip. And she just happened to be along with us. And so we're at dinner. We had a big win. And we went to the nicest Italian restaurant in Toronto. We said, hey, let's go blow it out. Let's have fun.

And they had the sommelier and all this stuff. And listen, I'm from Birmingham, Alabama. I drink wine out of a solo cup. Okay. So I'm like, I'm like, I'm in. I'm as pretentiousness is my, like, kryptonite. It drives me through the roof. We grew up around the same group of people, so you're among friends here.

So we're sitting there, and this Somelier working at the nicest place in Toronto, and then we have this new lady that comes on, and she corners him and starts telling him about, like, all this wine that she, you know, all this stuff, and she said all this. And then long story short, sends him over to me, and he's going through the wines that she suggests for the which was, this is her tip day on the job, a $300 bottle of wine. And then she's pitching the table of like how, you know, all this kind of stuff. So of course I didn't order it. And of course she got fired seven days later after we had some conversations in coaching.

And then she didn't want to deal with it, which was essentially that pretentiousness is taking yourself too seriously. And it also makes other people feel stupid and puts them on the spot for not knowing what you know. So we're never going to be that way. We're always going to make the sommelier the hero. Not the sommelier, we're going to make the janitor the hero. So when we went to Hyatt Ziva in Cancun for our first we do bi-annual summits,

our goal was, when we leave, it wasn't that everybody gets the information that we're going to tell them, that the janitors go tell their bosses that that was the best group that we've ever had at this hotel. Can we have them back again? And so those are the kind of stories that we would tell about, you know, how to not take yourself too serious. I love it. Wow, cool stories. By the way, I went to Hyatt Siva this year with my girls on spring break. They got dolphins. We swam with the dolphins for the first time. Incredible experience. I'm going to two weeks. Maybe we should jump down there with you. I'm ready to get back to Mexico and getting the sunshine. Well, man, I just, I love your spirit. I love what you're about. And I got to be honest when someone came in and said, hey, there's a company that helps with retention and they want to sponsor Entree leadership. I thought, no, that's not something you out. outsource. Like you, you really have to keep that in house and you really got to care deeply. And you can't have people calling your customers that aren't on your staff. I mean, it's almost a value around here at Ramsey. There's certain things we just don't outsource because we don't want to

lose the relational, human. We care really, really hard. And we're not going to leave that up to somebody else. And the way that you guys do it was remarkable to me. The way that you guys are actually interact. I mean, these values, you know, it's like some of these are higher standards than I think we've even communicated to our own team. And we're going, gosh, this is, if we were ever going to outsource this or recommend that business owners listening, bring on a partner to help them with retention, you guys are doing it right. I'd love for you to speak a little bit more to your service. I mean, you guys are a partner with us here at Entree leadership. You sponsor the podcast. People have been hearing about you. But talk us through the way that somebody can get plugged in

with you guys and specifically some of the benefits and how that interaction works. And you probably get a lot of objections from business owners asking similar things. Like how do I know that I can trust you with my customers? Let's tackle some of those objections. I'd love for you to talk through that some. Yeah. And that how you know you can trust is that you guys do, you know, and that it's, we can walk you through, you know, the Michael Hyatt's of the world that work with us and the different brands and all that. But I know that doesn't, you know, necessarily seal the deal. The bottom line is what we do for retaining revenue is very simple, is that we pay attention to paying people.

And in companies, like CEOs listen to this, everybody agrees that we should do this. Everybody thinks that it's absolute what should be doing. But the problem is it doesn't sit anywhere cleanly. Here's what I mean. Finance, usually what people say is they'll go, well, our finance department should do this. Well, usually financial people are not getting on board to reach out to customers. and win them back over all the time.

Well, customer success to do this. I've never once met a customer success team that wasn't already overwhelmed with inbound. And so, yeah, it might sit there, but it becomes number 17 on their job description, right? Okay, sales team, good luck getting them between sales calls to go back and go get these people. Like, they're just not going to do it.

And so it doesn't fit cleanly anywhere. And so what they'll do usually is they try to treat it like a project. And like, you know, and what we're talking about specifically is failed payments, that cards are failing. on subscriptions or at purchase and say, we need to clean this up. And what they'll do is they'll put it on one of those three teams and they'll get after it for a little bit.

But as soon as the next urgent things come up, it slips by the wayside. And so what gravy is and why we exist is that when we started, we said we want to return $1 billion back to businesses by the end of 2023. We're at $120 million back to businesses. And the way we do it is as soon as our technology hooks in, to your payment system, whichever one it is. As soon as the card fails, we instantly are alerted. We have internal technology that alerts us.

We have real retention specialist agents that use email and text, sometimes phone, but we're not outbound because you don't answer outbound, you don't answer random calls. I don't answer random calls. And so it's warm. It's connected. The email's like, hey, this product failed. Here's why your card failed. It's very specific to why their card failed, what product it is.

And we start the process. and we have what we call reconversion cadences, that for 30 to 60 days, depending on the companies, that we stay after this. And so the reason why this doesn't work in-house is because if you really think about this, you shouldn't have it in-house. You shouldn't. And here's why. Because you have limited resources, this is a limited amount of money that you can go after.

So if you only got 10 people on your staff and you're failing, let's say, $50,000 a year, well, you don't want to take a full-time FTE and go get $50,000 a year. You want to put them on the marketing and the scalable and the 10x and those kind of things. And so that's why they hire us to come in and be that consistent in that presence. And we're less than a part-time staff member. So it's literally. Right. I mean, it's a partial staff member, you know, depending on volume, right?

You wouldn't even bring on a full-time person initially to do this. No. And there's nobody that wakes up like a career day in high school and goes, you know what my dream role is one day? I want to be a retention specialist. And so the question is how do you, this is all we do. We've built a culture, a vision, a mission, values, everything around this one thing. And we only do one thing. People say, what are you going to do next?

Nothing. Until we return $1 billion back to businesses, we're going to be returning money back to them. That's all we do. And so that's what we do. That's how we do it. And it's literally less than the cost of a part-time person doing it. I like the focus, man. Troy Eggman, the great, probably greatest.

quarterback for the Cowboys for sure. My favorite quarterback, he used to be on the old Ford truck commercials and he said, you know, do one thing, do it well. Yeah. And I learned that lesson from not doing that. Like in my last business is my business coach, Les McKeown used to call me a visionary arsonist. So I've learned the power of relentless focus. I did it in my finances. At 23, I read Total Money Makeover and said, by 30, I'm going to be debt-free, including my house. We didn't accomplish the goal. It took till we were 31. But we were a pastor salary. My wife did it work. And we were able to accomplish it by so we did it in that life. And that's what we do now. And so we're just super focused. Amazing. I love it. Thank you. And thank you guys. Seriously, I'll never get a

chance to tell Dave. Thank you personally. So I'm telling him now. I mean, our life was changed. And we taught the class and we've done the thing. And we really appreciate it. Like it was literally at 23. It changed everything for us. Well, he'll hear it. He listens to these podcasts. and our entire leadership team does. You know, people don't realize that the entree leadership thing is our playbook. And everything that we teach externally and all the guests that we have on, we make sure that our internal leadership team is soaking this stuff up. In fact, you've said quite a few things today that I'm going to take back

and have our team listen through and go, hey, think about the way, the core values thing, the do's and the don'ts. And, you know, we all have to be learning from each other all the time. That's what's cool about entrepreneurship and this community of leaders. We're all learning things and we all have a voice to help the rest of the community level up. And in this together, locking arms, that's how we heal our country. That's how we heal the economy. I mean, we're the backbone of this nation's economy. And if we think of ourselves as individuals, we miss it. But if we think of ourselves as a collective whole, we all have a contribution to make. And you've made an incredible contribution of value and just really practical today.

Sometimes people get on and it's a lot of inspiration, but I just love all the nuts and bolts and just the really practical steps for entrepreneurs and business people out there listening. Just a note of encouragement as we sign off here. You know, it's been a tough year for a lot of people. You're a business owner. You're winning. You're fighting. You're doing your thing. You're working with hundreds and thousands of business owners who are passionate about their product, their service.

And it's been a tough year. What would you say to encourage their hearts and minds as we march forward together? Yeah. I had a guy called me. He lost $2 million. He had $2 million of revenue scheduled for Q2 and it went to zero overnight. And he called me and he said, I'm sitting on the back of my boat.

I've got a beer in my hand and I just need you to talk to me. And the main thing that we talked about was your asset is not your business or your revenue. Your asset is every mindset and skill set that you picked up to be able to create that revenue. So this is the beginning for you, not the end. And how you view it is how you do it. That's what we say. How you view it's how you do it. And so I want you to shift your mindset right now.

And yes, you can be sad, but just for a little while. And then we're going to take and what I want you do is write down your asset inventory as a business owner. What's every mindset that you picked up? What's every skill set? And what's every relationship? And that's your starting ground. That's your ground zero. And from there, you can build the next great thing.

And I honestly believe it would be better than the first thing you built. So that's what I would say. Wow. I love it. Asset inventory. You know, we think of assets as just the. the physical things. But I mean, we have so many assets, things we've learned, lessons learned, mindsets. It's, what a cool exercise to take inventory of that. And that's why business

owners do well in the second round is like, once you go through it one time, you've picked up these things and you have all these skill sets, your Swiss Army knife with the relationships with the mindsets and the skill sets that you can move so much faster. Yeah, huge. I love it. Well, Gravy is such a cool product. It's changing lives. It's impacting the people that we care about small business owners everywhere. Casey, it's been a joy to visit with you today. Thank you for all the wisdom and encouragement that you've shared. How can people learn more about gravy and what you guys are doing? Yeah, I go to gravy solutions.io. It's that simple. Gravy solutions. And if somebody's listening, I don't know how you want to do this. We can show you guys the

the does mean, doesn't mean core value thing as an example. I'd love to be able to get that to them somehow, whether you email me, Casey atgraveysolutions.io, or we can put it on a website somewhere and allow them to be able to see it. Well, yeah, and we'll grab that link and host it and put in the show notes on this episode as well so people can just drop down there and link over to that. Great. Thank you. A lot of it. Casey, thanks, man.

Really grateful for you, brother. Yeah, thanks. A nice haircut. For those just listening, we're both extremely bald, like all the way bald. So this is my fellow bald brother from Birmingham. I love it. Take care, man. All right.

All right. I know if you're like me, a lot of times you listen to a podcast in the car on the treadmill. It goes in your brain. It inspires you. you for the day, you kind of move on. This is when you got to go back and listen to with a pen and paper. Casey dropped out so many practical nuts and bolts that really are action items. I mean, I could fill up a to do list and all the things that. I probably will do that. I'm going to go back and listen to this with some of our team members. I'm thinking about some things differently as a

result of this discussion. Man, good, good stuff. Lots of meat. Lots of nuts and bolts. Thank you, Casey, and thank you for your sponsorship here at the Entree Leadership podcast. What you guys do is really something special. And it helps business owners win, which is what we're all about. You know, one of the things that I loved about Casey talked about in there is how to make your core values come to life. Tell the story.

Make sure your team knows this is why this value actually matters. And to the point that, you know, you could get fired for this because you're not a fit. I mean, guys, this is serious stuff. But if your team doesn't know about it, if you're not telling the stories, well, that's on you as the leader. Also, I kind of enjoyed the whole how you do it where it's, this is what it does look like,

this is what it doesn't look like. Really good, good stuff there. And we'll make sure we put a link to their values in the format that they use in the show notes. You guys know we beat this drum all the time here at Entry Leadership. Core values, core values, core values. You know why? Because it matters a lot. And it's one of those things that most of us go, yeah, I know it matters, but we never do it.

So we're going to keep beating the drum until every business owner on the planet has the core values. How about that? because we love you and we're committed to your success and we want to help you build your core values and our coaching team has put together a great free resource to help you do just that. All you got to do to get this free guide is text the keyword EL values to 33444. Again, text EL values, no spaces to 3344 or you can just click on the link in the show notes. Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entree Leadership podcast. If you did, we would love it if you gave us a five-star review and told your friends

about it too. Also, for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card, you can review this episode by clicking the link in the show notes. We'd love to hear what we can do to make this better for you. And be sure to follow us on social media at Andre Leadership. You can follow me on Instagram at Daniel Tarty. We'd love to hang out with you over there. This episode was produced by Tim Hull. It was edited and mixed by The Amazing Will Rudder. I'm your host Daniel Tarty and on behalf of the entire Andrele Leadership team. you for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading. If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like the Rachel Cruz Show.

Hey guys, it's Rachel Cruz, and I'm so excited to tell you about my podcast. A lot of people are living paycheck to paycheck. They're in debt. They don't even know where to begin, but they have this need, this want to get in control of their money. And if that's you, you have come to the right spot. So in each episode, you're going to get a ton of inspiration and practical advice. If you're not subscribed to the Rachel Cruz Show podcast, make sure you do it today. To hear full episodes, just search Rachel Cruz, wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to ramsysolutions.com slash shows.