EntreLeadership - How to Build a Brand Your Customers Rave About with Joe Hamilton

Episode Date: September 6, 2021

Every small-business owner eventually needs to focus on building their company's brand. They have to get out of the day-to-day sales grind and focus on building relationships. In this week's episode of The EntreLeadership Podcast, we sit down with small-business owner Joe Hamilton. He explains that business branding comes down to the relationships we have with our customers. Then he gives us the principles he uses to build the brand at his company, Vortex Optics. Later in the episode, George Kamel speaks with Ramsey Solutions Executive Director of Digital Marketing Andy High. Andy talks about how we go out of our way to care about our customers at Ramsey Solutions—and how you can do the same.   The EntreLeadership Podcast Vortex Optics' website Switch by Chip and Dan Heath Bright Spots by Chip and Dan Heath The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath Recent Episode: Stories That Scale with Casey Graham Read The Flywheel effect concept by Jim Collins. Download the Branding Guide. Schedule a call with Tim, our producer.   Learn more about the offers from our EntreLeadership Partners: BELAY  |  Gravy  |  Hite Digital Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's really difficult to build and grow a business without repeat customers. So how do you get first-time customers to come back? Well, you've got to create customers that rave about your brand. 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, George Camel. In today's episode, we're talking about building a brand, which connects to our business driver of product.

Our first guest is Joe Hamilton, CEO of Vortex Optics, a family-owned and operated company. They've got 300 team members that aim to help you find the right optic for your outdoor adventures. I sat down with Joe to talk about why building a brand with raving fans is important to any business. In our second conversation, I sit down with Ramsey leader Andy High, our executive director of digital marketing. And we talk about how Ramsey Solutions creates raving fans no matter what part of the business they interact with. Up first, my conversation with Joe around why every business needs to build a brand, people rave about.

Joe, it's good to be with you today. Yeah, thanks for having me. This is going to be fun. You are leading the crew over at Vortex Optics, and we got a lot of fans of yours here in this building. But for those that maybe aren't familiar with what Vortex does, give us the high level. Yeah, so Vortex Optics, we're a family-owned business.

We've got about 360-plus team members. We're here in Southern Wisconsin, and we primarily specialize in sport optics. So rifle scopes, binoculars, spotting scopes, red dots. We sell to hunting retailers, shooting retailers, birdwatching stores, and obviously we support all those customers who buy that stuff. Yeah. And, you know, you guys have done an incredible job with the brand,

with creating a community around this. There's a lot of optics companies out there. You've got a lot of competitors in the space, and you guys stand out for a reason. So I'm excited to dig into that. But you said you have over 360 team members, which is absolutely incredible. What have some of the milestones along that journey

from starting with just a handful of people, now up to 360? Yeah, there's been a lot of milestones. I think one of the things that we've been really good at is pivoting and trying a lot of experiments. We call them experiments over here. Along the way, what's really led to the team members is just the fact that we use our flywheel like Jim Collins calls it, and that's where we take care of the customers,

we over-serve the customers, and we give them so much value that they keep coming back, they tell their friends about us, and they become customers for life. When you do that kind of day after day, week after week, month after month, it sort of adds up. And you need a lot more team members

to be able to support all those customers. But some of the biggest milestones that we had was when we added rifle scopes as a category in 2007. That's now our biggest category. We added red dots in 2009. We added rangefinders in 2011. It was almost every two years. We'd add a new category.

And then a lot of our, our retailers that we support, they really spurred a lot of growth for our brand and then ultimately, you know, adding those additional team members. Wow. So you guys just kept evolving. You were like Apple. Like, we got to release the iPod and the iPod touch and the iPhone. You've kept innovating even in your space where it feels like, okay, how much more crazy and

techie can we get? And you guys have just kept on doing that, which is incredible. And I mentioned you've got a lot of competitors in the space. What has set Vortex apart from the other companies out there? Yeah. So we have a lot of competitors. We have a lot of good competitors. And so one of the things when it comes to sport optics,

that's the end of the day, what we sell is a tool. It's a tool to do a job. But one way that we approached it is we never wanted to just be a tool. We wanted to be somebody that really became part of what our customers love. And so there are hobbies, so whether it be hunting or shooting or birdwatching, whether it's supporting military and law enforcement, we really wanted to be part of a lifestyle brand and become part of what they're doing. And we really felt like that would set us.

apart, it would create longevity for the brand and for the business. And it would also create a lot of additional salespeople, if you will, in that we would win them over and they would tell their friends and their family. And then those people would become customers as well. So we would just try to get into every area almost of their life that was sort of not creepy to become more than just a tool. Yeah. And you guys have done that so well. I mean, the people who are coming to you, they're going, I want to be a part of this community. I want to be a part of people like this, like-minded people who love the outdoors,

who love hunting, who love all these different things. And so you guys have done an incredible job with that. So, Joe, there's a lot of things that set your company apart. And one of those things is your core values. We talk about this a lot on the Entree Leadership podcast. We're big on core values. And I love what you guys have in your core values. About you, that's a great core value.

Customer is king. Be the Buffalo and willingness to shovel. snow. Walk us through those real quick. For sure. So about you is really a play on words when you look at somebody's website. Usually you look at a website and it says about us. Well, we wanted to flip the script, particularly my dad. When he'd go to those places on a website, he would say to himself, hey, it shouldn't be about us. It should be about the customer. And that's where About You came from. I love that. The second one is customer is king. And so we've got a priority stack because there's a lot of customers. There's the end consumer. There's the retailers. There is internal customers.

And what we just say is in any given situation, you need to know who your customer is and that person is the king. So in the priority stack, there is a priority to these customers. And we have to serve all the customers, but we have to serve our end consumer number one. And the retailer is a very close second. We have really good relationships with our retailers. The third one is be the Buffalo. And you guys definitely know the Be the Buffalo message. But for those that don't, you know, in Colorado, the state's sort of divided in two by mountains and these storms build up on the West Coast.

and they eventually spill over the mountains onto the plains. And on the plains, you've got cows and you've got buffalo, and they react very differently to these storms. The cows run, or since they're cows, they probably walk, away from the storm, therefore prolonging how long they're in discomfort and in that storm. And the buffalo react very differently. They turn, they face the storm, and they charge it. And so there is a level of discomfort.

There is a level of a storm that they have to face, but by running straight towards it, they reduce the amount of time of discomfort and that they're in it. And so that was really resonated us when we heard that story in that we're constantly going after new categories. We're constantly trying new things. We're not going to be afraid of change or afraid of storms. And then there's another thing.

You can even go down to having difficult conversations with team members or discussing difficult topics and wrestling with those. That can be a storm. And so we don't want to be a cow and sort of walk away from those and prolong how much discomfort there is. We want to be the buffalo and go right at them. And then the last one is willingness to shovel snow. And again, that goes right to my dad, who's the founder of our company. When we were much smaller, we get a lot of snow in Wisconsin, as you can imagine. We had a lot of team members and you have to park on the street and you'd have to make your way kind of over the median to get to vortex.

And sometimes the snow would pile up, you know, six, seven, eight feet. And he would get there extremely early in the morning and shovel a tunnel to get through to the door. So you didn't have to trudged through the snow and then he would shovel off all the walkway. And of course, he was the founder and he's the president of the company. So if he was willing to do that, then we need to be willing to, you know, be humble and to take on any task. There was no task that was beneath us. So those are the core values. So Joe, core values obviously an important topic, but what you guys have built is a brand. And there's a lot of listeners out there going, man, I got Joe's H-FAC. You know, we're not a brand. We, you know, we turn wrenches. We help people. We're passionate, but I don't

know how to make this into a national brand, which is really what you guys have done. So why is building a brand so important? I think one of the things with building the brand is you need to realize that you already have a brand and you're constantly building a brand. You need to ask yourself, what kind of brand am I building? And then the other thing is that your brand doesn't really belong to you. It belongs to your customer, meaning that they really set what your brand is. So I think that's the first place to start. The second thing, though, is that at least for us, and my recommendation would be to get out of the rat race of transactional business. So you can just do transactions,

meaning a customer, they choose you, I give you a service, and then we're done. And then after that, you know, you may get them again, you may not. And so we knew we had to serve people in a way that they would keep coming back. And not only coming back, they would tell their friends. And actually, in the beginning, we didn't have a lot of money to advertise and to market.

So we needed to serve people so well so that we were their preferred choice going forward. And one of the phrases that we really look for when we serve people is, I'm a customer for life. I mean, it's almost like taken on mythical proportions here, similar to, you know, it's a wonderful life. When every time a bell rings and Angel gets its wings, it's almost like every time somebody says I'm a customer for life,

it's almost like, you know, bells go off here. That's what we're going for. We're wanting to serve people so well, and they feel so taken care of that we don't become a transatlose. any more if they become a customer for life. I love that. And this whole idea of customer service, serving the customer, obviously that's a big part of building the brand, but you guys have focused on a lot of other areas as well to build the brand. So walk us through some of those.

Yeah, I think one of the biggest areas is social media. I wouldn't say we were on necessarily the cutting edge of the world for social media, but certainly in our industry. And so those were some of the experiments that we recall experiments where we really got into it. So we got into Facebook and we got into Instagram and we got into doing podcasts very, very early. And we wanted to have a real connection with a customer. And those mediums really allowed us to do that. It allowed us to show our personality. Our personality is really mesh well with the customers. It allowed us to entertain the customers. It allowed us to inform the customers. And every once in a while, we don't do it a lot as far as a ratio, but we would actually sell the customer. So we would do a

promotion or we'd highlight a new product. But more often than not, maybe even a nine to one ratio. We're trying to entertain, educate, inform, just make it a really good experience and just connect with the customer. Yeah, I think a lot of businesses out there, you see a lot of the one, not a lot of the nine. You just see sale, stock photo, we've got a promo, here's a business card on social media. And what you guys have done is say, hey, what kind of content could be produced that could really help our customers and our fans really make this a more fun experience, educate them along the way, entertain them, and get them excited about going to do the things that we love as well.

And so I love that you guys have done that. And you talked about that knowing who your customer is. And that's such a key part. You guys have dialed that in to a core. So how do you determine that ideal customer and what problems you're going to solve for them? Yeah, and that's a great question. And I think one of the things is you do need to know your customer. you need to know your core customer, but you need to be open to other customers as well. And so what do I

mean by that? At one point, it might sound surprising, but our core customer was a birdwatcher. And we still serve those customers now, but now our core customer is a hunter. They love to shoot. They might be in competition shooting. It might be somebody in the military and law enforcement. And so we were open to somebody outside of our core customer that was very interested in our products and serving them. So, you know, have your customer, personas, your avatars, know your data. That's really important. But don't have blinders on to the point that you're not going to see opportunities outside of your core customer if they open up. It's really, really important that you are open to be able to pivot because most of the companies that I've associated with, and certainly within our

companies, that have really grown, they've grown through a series of those pivots. So again, you do need to know your customer, your data, all those things. but be open to other opportunities that present themselves. Yeah, that's huge. And you guys, again, have really evolved and innovated where you said, hey, guess what? Our products have changed. Our customers are changing, and now we have a different core customer.

So that's super important. To know your data, know where the trends are going, know what's being sold, and where people are really attaching themselves to, is huge for building that brand. Very much so. You've created, obviously, a culture at Vortex that thrives on serving the customer. How have you done that on the team level where they're all bought in on this too. So a couple things. First of all, it's just, it's very much authentic to who we are,

not only as a as a vortex family, but even my family. It was really a part of who my dad and my mom were. And I'll kind of give a story, because there's a couple of key things I think we need to hit on here. But one of the stories, and I think I'll bring it around, so it makes sense. But years ago, this is over 15 years ago, I was going to talk to a team member. I was new to being a manager. I wanted to talk to a team member that was struggling and I need to give them some tough feedback. And I went to my dad and I said, dad, I need to give this person this tough feedback, but I really want them to know that I care about them. And so I'm looking for some advice. And he said, well, here's what I think you ought to do,

Joe. And so I had my pen, I had my paper out. I'm ready to go. He says, I think what you ought to do is you ought to postpone that meeting a couple days and just think about that person. I want you when you're driving to and from work, I want you to think about that person. What's it like to be them, what they're going through, what's happening in their life, all these sorts of things. I just want you to really, really think about them. And then in a couple days, when you thought about it enough, and you got to the point where you really care about that person, then go have the meeting. And I said, okay, well, then what?

And I was really looking for tactics. And he said, well, then nothing. They'll just know that you really care about them when you have a conversation. And so that was a really key lesson for me in that you really have to have the thing. So if you really want to have good customer service, there's a lot of tactics that I can tell you and that you can learn. But it really doesn't mean anything unless you actually care about the customers. And I really think you should because they're the lifeblood of your business. If customers don't choose you, you don't have a business.

So you really need to care. But spend some time getting to a place where you truly care about them and then start going after tactics. And now just a few things on tactics that I'll say to really win over customers. First of all, they want speed. Speed is everything. And speed in particular in access to getting a hold of you. So if a customer calls and they have to leave messages, you better return it quickly. I mean, better yet, don't have them leave a message.

I think you need to be available or your team needs to be available. And if you're the leader and I get it, you need to think. Make sure you hire some people so that the availability of your business is there. The other thing I'd say is if you don't have an answer, still reply and let them know. Let them know you're working on an answer. don't just be a black box. And then the third thing, and this is really, really key. And there's more of this and switch from the Heath Brothers, which is a fantastic book.

Or you can just Google an article Bright Spots by the Heath Brothers. But one of the things is one of the best ways to win over customers is find the bright spots. And the bright spots are when a customer tells you that you serve them so well. They're over the moon. It's an email. It's in a letter. And they're telling you why they're a customer for a life, why they're a customer for a life, why they love you. That is a strength. And strength finders, we spend too much time, actually

we spend a good amount of time on individuals, but businesses have strengths just like people do. And when you mine the bright spots of your already existing business and you double down on them, you will double, triple quadrupa your customers. And here's the thing, they may not be the things that you think they are. They're the things that your customers think they are. And just one last point on that, I used to love to talk about our product and our features and our benefits. And then I'd go to shows and I'd talk about our products, our features, our benefits. And you know what everybody talked to me about? What's that? They talked to me about our warranty, our VIP warranty, our unconditional lifetime warranty. And most of these people never even used it. But I didn't

want to talk about that because I want to say, oh, time out. You're not going to have to use the warranty. We make really good stuff. Look at this feature. Look at this benefit. But they kept talking to us about our warranty. And when I read that in that book, it just dawned on me that, holy cow, we need to pour gasoline on this warranty and what we're talking about. That's the thing the customers wanted to talk about. That was one of our strengths. So when we actually doubled down on those strengths, it really was a huge momentum builder for our company.

Man, there are so many mic drop moments. I don't even know where to start with that whole piece. There's so much gold in there. Thank you for that. That's huge. It sounds like they're saying, hey, Joe, stop trying to impress me and show me that I can trust you. That's what the customer is saying. Man, that's so good. You talked about this earlier, this whole idea of it being a transactional relationship with a lot of businesses where you go,

hey, I've got a product. Do you want it? Okay, great. See ya. And you guys have done a great job about continuing that relationship with your customers after the sale. How do you do that outside of, hey, sign up for a newsletter and we'll email you when the next sale happens? Yeah. So assuming that you care about those things as the business owner or leader and assuming that you're hiring team members whose eyes light up, okay, when you talk to them about those things. They have to light up. I know it sounds corny, but eyes light up when they're excited about stuff. But assuming that you're doing that, you have to find out what your customers are interested in.

And one of the best ways to do that, yes, you can ask your customers that question specifically, and yes, you can run surveys. I'm not a huge survey fan. But one of the things you can do is go where your customers are and observe them. Observe them online, observe them in the store. and that will kind of reveal to you where they're at and what they want. And so with us, we would find our own employees, which are our customers already. They were on social media.

They were on Instagram. They were on Facebook. And then they were also listening to podcasts. So we went to where our customers were. And the number one tool, and I can't stress this enough for us, was observing. Oftentimes when you ask somebody something specifically or you do a survey, they start to react in different ways. ways than they normally would. So if you observe people, almost like observing them in their natural

environment, almost like, you know, like an animal or something like that, but it will start to reveal. You have to be really curious about your customer, observe them, and then go where they're at. That's huge. And I've seen you guys do this in a lot of ways, but one of the biggest ways is through your content channels, like you were talking about earlier with creating ongoing content. I mean, you have an Instagram that has almost a million followers for an optics company. I mean, that's unheard of. You've got 100,000 subscribers on a YouTube channel. And so what are you guys doing right in these areas that's causing this kind of momentum?

Yeah. So, you know, when I talk to our social media teams, they've got a couple things that they do. One is they go for content, entertainment, education, fun, more than they go for the hard sale. So that's one thing we talked about earlier. Again, I would double down on that. The other one is a lot of our customers are excited to share about us. And so we go right after their user-generated content. And we affirm them when they do something.

We call them out and we promote their content. And there's one quote that I just love, and it's the Maya Angela quote. She says, you know, people will forget what you say. People will forget what you do, but they'll never forget how you make them feel. And that is so true. And your customers, when they are excited about your brand and they're sharing about your brand, nothing is better than when that brand comes and affirms them and says, we love this, they promote it. Oftentimes we send them a private message.

We find out their shirt size. We find out something that they shared about. And we're going to send them a surprise gift in the mail. And that makes people feel important. And the reality is they are important. So we really have a responsibility to make them feel that way. And I would recommend a lot of other brands do that. But the other thing is that we talk to them in a voice.

where we're not talking at them. So a lot of times we talk about that we picture them in the pickup truck and the passenger seat and they're our friend and we're heading out to Deer Camp. And that's why we're going to talk to them. I say that singular, we're going to try to talk to an individual rather than talk to a group, even though we know it's going to be a group. Those are some things that we do from a social media perspective

that I think really resonate with the customers. That's so good. And all comes back to making the customer the hero. And we've done that at Ramsey Solutions in a lot of ways. At Entree Leadership conferences, we'll have a 10-foot banner. of just one of our customers and their business. And we're saying, hey, this guy's the hero. That small business is the backbone of America.

This guy's crushing it. We're so proud of him. We do it with debt-free screams on the Ramsey Show. We repost someone's Instagram of their debt-free, you know, letterboard of how much they've paid off, and we're celebrating them. And so that's so huge. It's such an easy thing that businesses can do to show how they're winning. And it's not because of how awesome the business is.

It's because of what they're doing. And so I love that mentality when it comes to building a brand. Now, I got to talk about this podcast because a lot of people have every guy in their mom's basement's got a podcast, but you guys have a massive Vortex Nation podcast. And I don't think a lot of businesses out there are going, hey, we want to have a podcast for HVAC technicians. And I was just on a podcast recently, and these guys just have a heart for people in that industry. And they start on a podcast just for those in the HVAC industry. And I thought, this is so cool. And there's a lot of richness in the niches.

and you guys have definitely carved your piece out. So what is the deal and the goal of this podcast? Yeah, I think the goal from a super high level is just to be, again, as connected as we can to the customer and be in a medium and a space that they're already in. I think more to the podcast. My brother, Jimmy, so I work with three of my brothers, and Jimmy is the youngest, he was very interested in podcasts and very interested in social media. And he really had the idea that he could start this podcast.

It would be something that our customers would be interested in. And again, we have a history of allowing experiments in our company. So this was an experiment. And he tried it. And when you do an experiment, one of the things that I would recommend, don't pet the farm on it. So that's one thing, which we didn't. But the second thing is give it some time. Give it some time.

And that's one of the things that I think we did here was we gave it some time. You know, he had to kind of perfect how to do a podcast. And then we needed to give it time to get out to the customers. And then we needed to see how our customers were reacting to that. and adjusting it. And so, again, from a high level, it's staying really connected to the customers and giving them the content

that's really going to add value to their lives, to their hunt, to their shooting experience, or just to their entertainment. But then also, I think it was a really good example of how running experiments for your company, intentional experiments for your company, can really reveal some gold that you didn't otherwise know was there.

That's huge. These experiments mean, hey, a failure just meant, it didn't work and we're going to keep experimenting. And so that's such a result. optimistic mentality, and there's a consistency element to everything you're talking about. You said, hey, we're not going to strike gold in the first week with this podcast. We have to do it for two years before people know, before they care, before they latch on to it. And I think a lot of business owners go, oh, I tried Instagram. We posted twice. No one cared. I'm giving up.

And so there's a piece to it of you got to be in it, just like you've been in business 10 years and all of a sudden you're an overnight success. That piece has to be there with your marketing, with your branding. That's so true. That's so true. Yeah. Well, I want to move into this idea of creating raving fans, which is what you guys have done. And a lot of people go, listen, Joe, my company, my industry, there's no raving fans in this industry. And I'm sure that was the deal, you know, before you guys came along in the optics world. People went, hey, I got to buy a thing for my rifle and I'm out. I'm a birdwatcher. I got to get this piece in him out. But you guys have done so much in this area. And people are evangelizing

your brand. They're telling all their buddies about it. And then the buddies want, you know, they're seeing their friends and they're going, I got to get that. I want to be a part of that community. So what do you attribute to there being so many raving fans for Vortex? Yeah, it's a good question. I wish we had so much time that we could spend on this. I would say, again, just to reiterate a few things, is you do really have to care about the customer, and that will come through.

So assuming that you truly do care about the customer, I think you need to be fast and you need to be friendly and you need to break the script. And so another good book plug I'd give would be The Power of Moments also by the Heath Brothers. But one of the things that we do is we look for opportunities to do something unique for the customer. So just this morning, I got something from one of our team members who they had a message from a customer who said, I love your brand.

I've bought a bunch of your rifle scopes. I'm super excited to use this new one I purchased in hunting season right after my wedding later this month. So that right there, you can just take that letter and say, oh, cool, let's share it around the office and we're done. or you can say, okay, this person has bought multiple rifle scopes of ours. They've spent literally thousands of dollars with their brand and they just told us they're having a wedding next week. Let's do something for their wedding. So, you know, we get together some wedding gifts and we get together a letter and we'll send

that out. It'll be a handwritten letter. And so we'll do things like that. And one of the things you're a guest a few podcasts ago, Casey Graham mentioned, and I just loved it, was the story scales. So we are creating stories with all of our customers. Yes, we're going to be fast. We're going to be friendly.

We're going to take care of them. But we're also going to do some element that's going to break the script. And that creates a story, which then gets told from customer to customer. And it really takes on a life of its own. And I would say that is where you get raving fans. And again, when you get a raving fan, that is gold. And so deep dive on the raving fans. Any mail, any emails that you've gotten that somebody falls in the category of raving fans,

that's where your gold is. Go right there. That's an A plus on your raving fans. report guard. Don't go to the C and say you got to get that better. Go to the A plus and double, triple, quadruple down on the A pluses. Your business and your customers will be better for it. That's huge. Yeah, the scale, the unscalable is what you're talking about, where you're going, hey, what are these little things we can do where the customer goes, I'm shocked. In 2021, for a business that's this big to be even knowing that I have a wedding and sending me a gift or the

card or whatever it is, no matter how big or small, is just absolutely incredible. And of course, I'm going to go post about it. I'm going to tag you guys. And my friends are going to go, man, I'd like to do business with a company like that. That's how I'd like to be treated as a customer to show that you really care. So I love that mentality. And a lot of businesses, they have customers, they have revenue, but they don't have raving fans. What is the journey to that aside from doing, you know, the things that we're talking about, how do you go from their customer, their transaction, to they are evangelizing my business?

It feels like there's a journey there. It may not happen overnight. So what is the steps that, you know, a business, are listening can take to get there. Yeah, so two things. One short, maybe one long. So the short piece, I think, is to do things where, again, you break the script, but then to just stay the course.

And you hit it earlier is that, you know, people have been in business for 10 or 20 years, and then all of a sudden people hear about you and they think it's an overnight sensation. And it's not. You've got to push that flywheel. If you need more on that, type in Google, Jim Collins flywheel. And you really need to do it day after day, week after week. month after month, and then compound interest will kick in. It will kick in. And all the sudden,

everybody will swoop in and want to know what the silver bullet was that got you there. And you'll know it was just doing that time and time again, fast, friendly, and break the script. And this is something that'd be remiss to say in any podcast or anything talking about Vortex. It's a story, if I may, that happened early on in my career. I was just out of college. I was real excited. I was green, and I was going to go on the first trade show Vortex, the first trade show Vortex. And my dad sat me down and he went over. He said, Joe, here's our plan. We're going to make products that will be the best product at that given price point in the market.

So the customer is going to get a better value than anybody else. Number two, the retailer that sells our product, they're going to make a meaningful profit margin. After all, we had been retailers, so we wanted to make sure that they made a meaningful profit margin. And third, he said, we're going to give them the best service before, during and after the sale. He told me that. I thought he had given me the keys to the castle. I was so excited and so jacked up. We go to this trade show, and I'll kind of do the Cliff Notes version,

but the trade show was a disaster in the sense that it was the first trade show, nowhere ever heard of our brand. The only people went to our booth were looking for where is the nearest bathroom. And so I had a lot of time because there weren't a lot of customers. So I went around to all of our competitors, and I should use air quote competitors because at that time we were just a gnat. Nobody knew about us. And I grabbed some of their literature.

And all of our competitors in their own way said, the same exact thing, the same thing that my dad had told me. Here I thought he'd given me a map to the treasure and everybody had the map to. So I got back from the trade show, went in my dad's office, had an appointment. I threw, I'm probably being a little over dramatic, but I threw the materials sort of my dad's face and I said, hey, what gives? I said, everybody has got the same talking points as we do. And my dad is, you know, much more calm and stoic than I am. And he just sort of sat back. He had a little smile on his face. And he said, you know what the difference is? He said, the difference is, we're actually going to do it. And that just hit me like, you know, a bullet. And that's what we did.

But we were in it for the long haul. And that was in 2000, late 2002, early 2003. And I think it was before, it was about 2011, 2012, before I actually heard somebody said, man, you guys are really blowing up right now. What's going on? And, you know, and I, of course, I didn't. tell them what are you talking about. We've been at this thing for a long time. But it took us and took that level of commitment. Most of your competitors or people that are doing what you're doing, most of them are going to have the same talking points. Most of them are going to list on their website the same benefits. But very, very few actually do it. So that would be one of my biggest piece of advice, not only for raving fans, but just a successful business, is that you're actually

doing the things that are in your literature, and you're doing them in an excellent way. It's one of the best pieces of advice I ever got and that I think I could give. That's so good. It's all about walking the talk. And once people see that, you're the real deal, and Joe breaks the script, and the company is who they say they are. That creates trust. And that really brings me to what you mentioned earlier, this legendary VIP warranty in creating that trust with the customer. So how did that come about? And how did you guys go? We're leaning into this. Well, before Vortex started, we were retailers, and we sold all of the brands of products. And so when my dad would sell these products, if somebody had an issue with them, they would try to contact the manufacturer.

And the manufacturer wanted nothing to do with that. They wouldn't answer the phone. They wouldn't return the message. And if they finally did, oftentimes it took them going back to his retail store to have him advocate for them, which was embarrassing, quite honestly. and then they would take a very long time. It could be months to get something repaired. And oftentimes the cost was so expensive. It was almost equal to the product in and of itself.

So it was a very frustrating experience. And for my dad as a retailer, again, it was embarrassing. After all, he was the one that sold the product. So when we made the transition to a manufacturer and a brand, he said to himself, that's never going to happen with ForetX. We're never going to do that. And so a VIP, the customers are very important people. but actually it stands for very important promise

because it's a promise that we make to customers that before, during, and long after the sale, we're going to be with them. So we spend as much money and dollars after the sale as we do before. So with our VIP warranty, our turnaround time now is less than five days. We probably, for a lot of people,

they would say we'd overstaff our customer care and customer service departments. Just because when you call, we want you to get a real human being who knows what they're talking about right away. That's something that, again, was really important, but it was born from our experience as a retailer, which again was another thing that was something a way to mine for gold is look at what you've done in your past and what you had to overcome or what you had to go through. And oftentimes, the opportunities are there in your initial

sort of proving ground. And so for us being a retailer, it really allowed us. to be laser focused on the customer. If anybody's worked retail, it's way harder than people realize if they've never done it. It's an extremely tough business. You have to be laser focused on the customer. You have to be quick.

You have to add good customer service. So when we transitioned to manufacture, we kept those retailer routes with us. And it really allowed this VIP warranty to not just be something in writing, which a lot of our other competitors, they said, oh, you've got a VIP warranty. And everybody's talking about that.

Let's come up with our Bulletproof warranty or our Forever warranty or whatever they call And you know what? I'm glad that they do that because it's good for the customer. The difference, though, that I would say is have they've actually invested in making it more than something that's just clever copy and a unique name? Man, Joe, I can see why Vortex has done so well over the years. I can feel it in your passion and your knowledge and how much you care about the customer. So as we wrap here, give some encouragement to maybe the business owner who's not where you guys are at. Maybe they're at a smaller place.

Maybe they're a million dollar company. they've got a team of, you know, five, 10, 15 people, and they're going, hey, Joe, we're not a brand. We don't have a fancy podcast. We don't have a fancy YouTube channel. We don't have a customer service team of 10 people. How do we go from where we're at right now to building that brand and creating raving fans? Yeah, I would say this for encouragement. I would say you probably already have customers.

And so I would say go right after those customers with everything you have. They're not just a transaction. They're the lifeblood of your business. go right after them and by you overserving them in a way that makes them feel valued more than just a transaction, they will start to tell other people. So when you take care of the customers that you already have, you will get more customers. Stay the course. It will work. You've got to continue to push that flywheel, do the work. But all of your gold, it's already there. It's in your customers. It's what they're telling you, even if they realize they're not telling you. Go right to your

customers double down on them. So good. Joe, it's so good to talk with you. This has been a masterclass on branding, on customer service, on creating raving fans. We're big fans of what you guys are doing at Vortex Optics. You just created another raving fan right here. And I've never even made a purchase. I might. I might start shooting today just so I can support what you guys are doing and become a part of this stuff. You're amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you, George. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. I love Entree. I love Ramsey. I love everything you guys are doing. and like you guys said, small business, not only is the backbone of the economy, it is the economy. So we need what you're doing. So thank you.

Great way to wrap. Thanks so much, Joe. Huge thanks to Joe Hamilton. So many gems dropped in there. You may want to go back and listen again. So if you're ready to create raving fans around your brand, you might be asking yourself, how do I make sure everyone on my team is focused on creating raving fans? We'll have a conversation about that and how to dial in your customer experience right after this. In our second conversation, I talk with Andy High, our executive director of digital marketing. We talk about how we've created raving fans at Ramsey Solutions for over 25 years now, and how you can apply those lessons in your business.

All right, Andy, we're talking about creating raving fans. Are there any companies that you are a raving fan of? You know, it's hard as a marketer sometimes. Like, you're kind of such a cynical person that you're always looking to everything and just constantly judging it, which can drive your wife crazy, by the way. but there are a few companies that I think do a great job of really managing like every aspect of their customer experience to where I've just fallen in love with them. I've got a lot of music in my past. I used to be a musician and Sweetwater is a company that almost every musician would know.

And, you know, they do such a great job. They just sell, you know, musical instruments and microphones and things like that. But their entire experience is so laid out so well. Like their customer success reps will like, they can just, you know, grab any instrument that they. have in stock and just like pull it up on the phone and start playing it for you and be like, I think it feels like this. And they're really fun. They've got a slide in like, you can tell that they're encouraging their own people to just create the best experience possible. I love that. So we're talking a lot about customer experience. There's a direct relationship between

creating raving fans and the experience they have as a customer. So how do you define that? Yeah. So at the end of the day, everything that we think of and internalize this customer experience is simply our emotional experience with that brand. And it's just all of these things, all of these different touch points and how they relate together that we just kind of pull together into an emotion that said,

oh, or, you know, like, going to a restaurant's a great example. Like, you can have that experience for like, we got to come back here next week. And it could be that the food was just right or the service was really good or, you know, they just took care of you at the front of house,

or they remembered that it was your birthday or whatever the case may be. Or it could have been one of those experiences that you're like, I don't think this is going to work out. And it could have been because the bathroom wasn't clean or because the waiter was rude or whatever the case may be. We just kind of internalize all of these things,

this total experience and how these things interrelate and just say, hey, or... So we're kind of subconsciously keeping score as the customer throughout the entire process. And by the end, our brain just goes, yeah or nay, I would not do that again, or I would, or, oh, my gosh, I'm telling all my friends about it. And we may try and rationalize that,

after the fact. Like, we had a great experience. We're like, oh, it was probably because this and this and this, at the end of the day, the whole goal is just to create positive emotional experiences. I love that. And we have done that very well over the years, and that's largely thanks to our CEO, Dave Ramsey, who has a very high standard of excellence. He sets the suck bar very high for us, as he likes to call it.

And so he's connecting with our customers three hours a day on the radio. Not many CEOs are spending three hours a day talking to the customer. And so as we've grown to now over a thousand team members, that's hard to make consistent across the board with whoever you interact with from the, you know, if you call up Ramsey concierge because you need some help or you buy a product from the online store. How do you craft a consistent experience as your team grows? Yeah, it's a great question. And frankly, one that we're still trying to wrestle to the ground. We don't have the solve for it just yet. But it means that our responsibility is even higher to continue to uphold the standard that's he set.

and that can be really hard. But at the end of the day, it's really about just trying to walk through those experiences yourself, you know, kind of like eating your own dog food, so to speak. Dave has modeled that well again, not just on the radio, but, you know, he used to go to all of our live events, not just as a speaker, but also just to make sure the quality is high. And he would really put himself in the customer's shoes and start in the parking lot. Be like, does this work? Does this layout make sense? Am I going to get stuck here for an hour?

And then walk into the front door and say, what do I see? see, where's my eye drawn? What do I feel? Even stand in like a bunch of different seats in the arena and say, is the sound good everywhere? Are there places we need to fix it? It's just really experiencing all of these different things from the customer's perspective. So when we look at it how we can manage that,

the company's the size of ours with as many products as we have, of course it's impossible to just try and do everything. And what I tend to tell my team is almost think about yourself like a relay runner. Like the baton that you're passing. We're not going to say the baton's a customer because that would be weird, but it kind of is. And you don't need to run the entire race yourself. But you do need to run a little bit into everybody else's lane. So you don't have to necessarily understand the whole experience when you're a company the size we are.

But if you can make sure you understand, you know, the guy before me, what he was talking about, and the gal after me. You know, you don't need to know 10 people down the line, but you need to know the people immediately around you. And that can really help smooth out those experiences. That's really good. It reminds me of Casey Graham. We've had him on the podcast before from Gravy, and he talks about this kind of customer experience audit that you can do for your own business. And so he says, hey, call up your own business and see what that experience is like.

Does someone answer? Are they friendly? What do they say? Email your business. How long does it take for them to get back to you? Did they solve the problem? Buy a product from your own store and see what that experience is like. And I think once you do that, there's some forced empathy where you as a leader have to go,

gosh, this sucks. We've got to make this better. Yeah. And what you often find is that we tend to, especially as leaders, kind of look at the individual components of our experiences and say, oh, that was really good or, oh, that wasn't so good. Like, you listen on a call with your sales guide. You're like, that sales guy is really killing it. Or you look at what your marketing girl is doing. And you're saying, like, her copy is really great.

But if you're not looking between the two things and saying, well, her copy does not match with what he's saying, that's a problem. Or you look at your emails and you're like, we're sending some really good emails. and then you don't realize that we're sending five of them in one day, and it's making everybody mad. It's more the connection between the things than it is the experiences themselves, and that's why I love what Casey talks about, because he really is understanding, like, no, we've got to push at it from beginning to end, and we're going to catch all those little gaps along the way.

Yeah, and if you do that over a long period of time and you're really consistent, you'll have a raving fan, and then you have to do it over and over again. And we have millions of them, which is amazing, and we work really hard to keep them by building that truck. by being consistent over time. But, you know, as you're leading the marketing team, as the executive director of digital marketing, you're leading a lot of channels that feel like they're a little bit removed from the customer. You're not physically talking to the customers when you send an email or, you know, running the Facebook channel. So how do you create a relationship, quote

unquote, through a social media channel or email marketing? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, we do a great job of just creating a culture where everybody's focus is on raving fans here. As a company, I think we do a great job at it. And the first thing that we do is just we surface wins, right? We talk a lot about fans of our fans, of people who are winning, and that helps you stay emotionally connected to your fans, right? But we also surface a lot of knowledge to people, and this can be customer interviews, you know, like actually getting out and talking to people, people in the lobby, sure, but people on the phone. It also is a lot of, like what we would call for lack of a better way to put it, quantitative data,

like looking at what everybody's doing and saying, okay, I hear what you're saying, but you might not actually do what you're saying. Like if there's a distance between what we call stated action and then like actual action, and making sure that all of those things align. So sifting through a lot of what we're seeing in all of these various channels, you know, what are people saying on social? Are people searching for more or less of this thing? Like looking at all of these indicators because people will,

tell us, both through us actually asking them, but also through a lot of their actions that we can measure, whether we're doing the right thing by them or the wrong thing by them. Yeah, I love that idea of celebrating the fans. And as I talked with Joe Hamilton in the previous conversation, he was talking about their, one of their core values is about you. Most people, you go to their page, and it's about us. And look how great we are. And instead, he makes it about them. And he says, hey, this is who you are and this is why you're here. And yeah, there's a little bit about us, but we want to make them the hero. And I think we've done a really good job of that. You know, even on the Ramsey show for years now, we've done debt-free screams. And it's not

about, oh my gosh, Dave, you're so amazing. It's, hey, I did the sacrifice. I did the hard work, and we want to celebrate you for doing all of that. So there's a lot of ways that the small business owner can do that. You don't have to be a business as big as ours to celebrate your fans. Yeah, that's exactly right. And it could take a lot of forms. I think those will probably come for each business naturally. What we've done really well is just say, as Dave always says from stage, we exist for the people outside these walls. And if you're setting that culture, if you're setting that mindset, whatever your version of a debt-free scream or some kind of fan celebration will come naturally because everybody's just thinking that way. And that's probably one of our biggest

assets at this company. Yeah, that's huge. And a lot of this comes down to knowing your customer. If you have no clue who they are and what they're wanting, it's going to be really hard to create a great experience for them where they go, oh my God, they're reading my mail. They knew exactly what I needed at the time I needed it. So how do we go about really understanding the customer? We talk about customer personas and their surveys. There's a lot of ways to go about this. What have you found is the best way to fully understand your kind of target customer? Well, the best way is all of them. And because no one thing is really going to tell you what your customer is really thinking or really doing, right? When we look at all the data we can get from our systems, well, let's tell

us a lot of what, but it's not telling us a good why. So we got to go talk to people and say, like, why are you feeling this way or doing that? And we may or may not get some level of accuracy from that, because, again, the experience is an emotion at the end of the day. It can be really hard to actually distill that into words. So it's pulling all of these things together. And then I would say the final thing, which is something that we often miss, is if we want to create raving fans, that means we need to do a lot of talking to people who are not yet fans. We really need to be fans of our not yet fans because they have a lot of objections or a lot of opinions that we're not addressing. People who already love us, like they have a different mindset than the people who don't yet.

So we really need to get out there and be talking to people who aren't in our wheelhouse. Do you have an example or a story of how you or your team have done that, how they've talked to the customer and how they've really developed that or created that raving fan? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of areas where we can just listen, right? Social media is really great for that sort of thing. People are very willing to share their opinions on social media, as you are well aware. Even search is that, you know, we can see search trends that people are looking for. But I would say, you know, we do a lot of surveys or emails to people of like they abandoned their cart, you know, like, why did you not buy this thing? Or just trying to find people,

even man on the street stuff. Like, hey, you don't know about who we are. We're going to, you know, gorilla crash of Starbucks and just interview a bunch of people and we'll buy you a coffee and you know, Danish is while we're doing it. So let's just talk to people who don't know us and don't know what we're doing. Yeah. And I've seen our team kind of just being hanging out in the lobby as we have visitors and they're just say, hey, would you mind just looking over this website and telling us what you think and what's confusing about it and what you like about it? And so there's some really easy ways where they go, wow, I don't know how to do all this stuff. Just ask, hey, I'm Joe Schmoe plumbing company. Why'd you reach out to us? Oh, you Googled us and

we just had good reviews. Okay, that's great. You read the reviews. Or it was recommended by a friend. And so I think just inquiring why you bought from us is just such a great way to start figuring out, oh, a lot of people are coming to us because of this reason. Let's lean into that. Yeah. And it's a great call out because I always tell the team, like, I don't want to be well-rounded necessarily. I want to find what's working. And just it's a lot easier to pour gas on a lit fire than wet wood, you know, like you're just not going to get as far. So, So in that example, it's a great callout because you may find that, hey, you're paying a small marketing agency to do some of this stuff and none of your leads are coming in that way. Maybe they're all coming in through referrals.

So how can you make it easier for the people who love you already to refer you to other people? Or you may find that none of them are referrals and they're all coming in through search or something. It's like, well, how can I pour fuel on that fire? Like thinking about what's working and making sure you're understanding how people are starting to love you and then pouring a lot more fuel on that is a great way to go about it. That's awesome. So for the small business owner out there who doesn't see themselves as a marketer, right? They may not have a marketing team. They probably don't have a single person doing marketing. How do they go from either people don't know who I am or I'm making money, but I don't really, I don't understand how to create that raving fan. What are some practical steps that small business owner can take to start heading in that direction? Yeah. Well, the good news is you're already one step ahead of the game as a small business owner because you're still close enough to your customer. Probably a lot of you are still wearing the chief everything officer hat, right? Which means that you're more in practice of understanding the entire system already. You don't have as far to go as maybe somebody at a thousand person company that's doing this very specific thing over here. So the great news is you've got a head start. And then my encouragement to everyone would just be understand your entire system, walk through it with fresh eyes as a customer. You know, the fish can't describe

why the water's wet, like they're just in it. So get outside, talk to as many people as possible. At the end of the day, this all is nothing to do with marketing. It just boils down to human emotion and empathy. And we're all humans, so I think we can all figure that out. So Andy, in summary, it sounds like, as the small business owner, we need to care. It comes down to caring about the customer. Yeah, I think that's a great way to summarize. Wow, we could have done this in one minute. But I'm glad we took 15. This has been awesome. I'm glad you're at the helm of all of our digital marketing, really stewarding that relationship with our fans and customers to create raving fans. And I'm sure you created some today with the listeners. So thanks so much for

your time. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Andy, for some great practical next steps that business owners can take to start creating those raving fans. And as Joe and Andy both talked about in today's episode, we gravitate towards people and brands that have passion, that we connect with emotionally. So if you need help clearly expressing your passion through your brand, fill out the brand building guide. It asks you the right questions to start identifying the heart and soul of your brand so that people connect with you emotionally. To get this free guide, just text brand guide to 33444. Again, text brand guide, no spaces, one word, to 33444 or click the link in the show notes. Hope you enjoyed today's episode of the show. If you did, leave us a review and subscribe so you don't

miss the next one. And if you're a small business, owner with 2 to 200 team members, we want to hear what you think of the show, what you like, what you don't like, and what we could do better. Give us your feedback by clicking the link in the show notes to schedule a call with Tim, our producer. If you want to keep up with us on social media, you can always follow us at Entree Leadership. This episode was produced by Tim Hull, edited by Jacob Harrison and Bob Borquez, and mixed and mastered by Will Rudder. I'm your host, George Camel, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team, thanks 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 Christie Wright Show. Hey, y'all, I'm Christy Wright. You know, it's so easy to feel stuck. You live life, just going through the motions, doing dishes, doing laundry, carpool lines, and a whole list of commitments that bring you no joy. We say yes to what everyone expects of us, and we have no energy or time for what we want. And let's be honest, most of the time, we don't even know what we want.

Why do we live like that? God certainly never called us to. You know, I believe that the life God has for us is bigger and more amazing than any of us realize. That's why I want you to check out the Christy Wright Show. Every week, we will fire you up to break through what's holding you back and inspire you to create a life you love and are proud of. Each episode will help you build confidence in yourself and the God that created you. To hear full episodes, just search Christy Wright,

wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to ramsysolutions.com slash shows.