Latest / The Start, Scale & Succeed Podcast / Are Your Happiest Clients Killing Your Growth? with Bradley Rausch (stage 3) - Ep. 404

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Are Your Happiest Clients Killing Your Growth? with Bradley Rausch (stage 3) - Ep. 404 · The Start, Scale & Succeed Podcast

• 0:00
  Scott Ritzheimer: Hello, hello, and welcome, welcome once again
• 0:03
  to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast, the only podcast that
• 0:06
  grows with you through all seven levels of your journey as a
• 0:09
  founder. I'm your host, Scott Retzheimer, and I want to talk
• 0:12
  to those founders out there who look like they've actually made
• 0:15
  it work. You've got clients, you've got a team that's helping
• 0:18
  you out, your clients are happy, nobody's complaining. The
• 0:22
  reviews are good, yet somewhere along the way the growth started
• 0:26
  to flatten out, and you can't quite put a finger on why. So,
• 0:30
  you do what every founder does, you go get more, more leads,
• 0:33
  more ads, more closes, more volume, but somehow it just
• 0:37
  doesn't change a thing. So, the question that I have for you,
• 0:40
  and the question we're going to explore today is, what if what
• 0:44
  if your happy clients are the very thing that's quietly and
• 0:48
  effectively killing your growth. Well, here to help us explore
• 0:52
  this rather interesting question is Bradley Roush. He's a client
• 0:57
  experience architect, strategic advisor, and the go to backend
• 1:01
  profit partner for founder led coaching groups and programs,
• 1:05
  with six years of experience, he's helped dozens of founders
• 1:09
  turn chaotic growth into durable high margin revenue without
• 1:12
  sacrificing their values, from first 72 hour onboarding systems
• 1:17
  to referrals, testimonials, and ascension playbooks, Bradley and
• 1:20
  his team help founders turn each great client into one and a half
• 1:25
  or two times more profit and build businesses that feel
• 1:28
  lighter as they scale. Bradley, welcome to the show. Glad to
• 1:31
  have you here. Really looking forward to this conversation.
• 1:35
  And as I was getting ready for this episode, this question just
• 1:38
  kind of started jumping out at me and seemed like you'd be the
• 1:41
  guy to help us out, so what's the problem with these
• 1:47
  founder-centric businesses that have really happy clients,
• 1:52
  what's going on there mechanically? Why is that a
• 1:53
  problem?
• 1:56
  Unknown: Well, I love that you say founder, and of course the
• 1:58
  podcast being focused on founders, and super honored to
• 2:01
  be here. The idea of a founder-led business, there
• 2:04
  comes with so much leverage, which I'm sure you talk about in
• 2:06
  a lot of different capacities, but specifically from a
• 2:10
  retention, upsell, profit perspective, people are coming
• 2:14
  in with so much more trust, so much more due diligence, usually
• 2:18
  done on the founder and the brand, and they're coming in
• 2:20
  guns blazing, ready to go, the lifetime value inherently of
• 2:24
  clients and a founder-led business is usually already
• 2:26
  higher than just a corporatized, you know, systematized from the
• 2:29
  from a 90 30,000 foot view business, but with that being
• 2:33
  said, a lot of times people are not capitalizing on that full
• 2:37
  opportunity, and in fact are kind of doing the exact
• 2:39
  opposite, which is always I like to call this the hamster wheel
• 2:43
  of founder-led businesses, which is always needing more clients
• 2:45
  on the front end to build revenue, but then you're losing
• 2:47
  clients in the back end, and then to make up for that lost
• 2:50
  potential revenue, you go out and find more clients, and then
• 2:51
  the history, the process repeats itself over and over, so it's
• 2:54
  just this hamster wheel that it's really, really difficult to
• 2:58
  get off, and it doesn't help, of course, that you know, the I
• 3:00
  could go on a tirade, I won't, but the industry in general of
• 3:03
  online business, you know, high ticket space, coaching,
• 3:07
  consulting, SaaS, you name it, is so focused on get more leads,
• 3:11
  get more sales, get more stuff, get more front end, more
• 3:13
  clients, more influence, and the question I always pose is, just
• 3:17
  what if you could have half the amount of clients but make four
• 3:20
  times the amount of revenue and profit per client, meaning you
• 3:23
  work half as much and make twice as you work half as much and you
• 3:26
  make, make twice as much. So I would say the biggest thing that
• 3:35
  gets in our way is two things: one is a narrative that we think
• 3:40
  that more again, more growth equals more volume and more,
• 3:45
  more quantity, but I talk about quality of revenue a lot, and
• 3:50
  it's just a concept that I don't say nobody's ever thought of
• 3:54
  before, but usually a lot of the people I speak with have not
• 3:57
  really, really dialed in, and you know, when you look at, for
• 4:00
  instance, like the total value of a client that you bring in.
• 4:03
  Most people would just consider that to be, well, they paid me,
• 4:07
  you know, 10k for six months of coaching, or 10k for b saas for
• 4:11
  12 months, something, you know, something like that. Usually,
• 4:13
  those are two pretty common examples, and you know, if you
• 4:16
  were to go to somebody and ask, well, cool, what's the total
• 4:18
  value of that client to your business, they would say, well,
• 4:20
  the 10k minus, you know, any cost it takes to fulfill them,
• 4:23
  and of course, any anything it took to acquire the customer on
• 4:26
  the front end. I would challenge that, and I would say, well, out
• 4:29
  of every - I usually use the ratio - out of every 10 clients,
• 4:32
  how many are sending you a referral that closes with zero,
• 4:34
  could zero customer acquisition costs? How many are sending you,
• 4:36
  or, sorry, how many are continuing past the initial six
• 4:39
  or 12 month container that they were sold into. How many out of
• 4:43
  every 10 clients are upselling or ascending? I like to say into
• 4:47
  another offer. Usually those numbers are zero or next to
• 4:50
  zero, but if you can even just move those up, just one for each
• 4:54
  of those categories. Usually the total client value you're adding
• 4:56
  anywhere between 30 to 50% for every single client you bring in
• 4:59
  and. Can factor that into the front end, of course, and can
• 5:03
  say then across the board. Well, then, if I bring in one
• 5:05
  referral, the closest of zero customer acquisition costs, for
• 5:07
  example, all of my clients become $1,000 more valuable to
• 5:11
  the business because that 10k spread over the 10 clients.
• 5:13
  So, just kind of as an example, there, so I would say it's
• 5:17
  really, really this attitude towards the front end and the
• 5:20
  growth that is possible there, and I'm not dissing front end,
• 5:24
  I'm not saying don't, I'm just saying at some point you need
• 5:26
  to, you need to focus your, you need to focus your attention in
• 5:29
  other places, otherwise, again, it's just going to be this
• 5:30
  hamster wheel that, yeah, just is really hard to get off as you
• 5:33
  grow.
• 5:34
  Scott Ritzheimer: One of the challenges related to this, and
• 5:36
  maybe even on the flip side of it, is you see this, I see this
• 5:40
  a lot in professional services, and maybe you see something
• 5:42
  similar, but there are a lot of folks who come because they want
• 5:47
  to work with you, but if you're trying to scale beyond just your
• 5:50
  own 24 hours in a day, hopefully a lot less if you sleep, there
• 5:55
  can be this frustration of no one does it like me, the client
• 6:00
  really wants to work with me if I, if I'm not there, this whole
• 6:04
  thing's gonna fall apart. How do you use, how do founders need to
• 6:09
  think differently about that problem to start overcoming it?
• 6:13
  Unknown: Love, love, love, love that question. There's a client
• 6:18
  centric answer, and then a founder-centric answer. The
• 6:20
  client-centric answer from pure strategy is I always like to
• 6:24
  say, what are the things I can highlight about my team or the
• 6:26
  people that I am, you know, quote unquote passing them off
• 6:29
  to that I can say, 'Listen, I'm passing you off to Sally.
• 6:32
  Sally's gonna be working with you for the next six months, 12
• 6:34
  months, whatever, in this capacity. Listen, you're
• 6:37
  actually in better hands with Sally, because Sally's way
• 6:38
  better at x, y, and z than I am. I mean, listen, I know I'm super
• 6:41
  honored you came in, because you saw me on social, or you saw me
• 6:43
  on ads, whatever. Sally's actually the goat. Sally's
• 6:46
  fantastic, you gotta, you know what I mean. So, you, and of
• 6:48
  course, you're not, you're not dissing yourself in the process,
• 6:51
  but you know, you're amping up your team, you're giving the
• 6:53
  credibility, you're passing off your credibility to other
• 6:54
  people, and of course, you can, you know, do that at scale with
• 6:57
  things like, you know, very like internal onboarding VSLs. I
• 7:01
  always, I always love to say one of the biggest things I preach
• 7:05
  is, you know, people oftentimes stop selling after the close,
• 7:09
  but you know, for a quote unquote client success person,
• 7:11
  not a lot of people say this in my space, but you actually need
• 7:14
  to keep selling the entire time, that's what a big part of my IP
• 7:17
  is based on, so that's kind of the client centric part, on the
• 7:20
  founder-centric part, it really comes back to you, kind of
• 7:24
  alluded to this, is like if you don't offload the responsibility
• 7:28
  or the narrative that someone else can help you, you will
• 7:31
  always be capped. There's never going to be anything that you
• 7:34
  know past your 20, you won't get more than 20-four hours a day,
• 7:38
  and so it almost becomes a well, not almost. It is a feature, not
• 7:44
  a bug of the business, and of your, of your scalability. And I
• 7:47
  think a lot of people look at it as, oh, it's a bug, it's a
• 7:50
  problem that I can't give more. It's a problem that I have so
• 7:53
  many clients coming in, and I want to grow the, I want to grow
• 7:56
  how much I'm making per client, and how much I'm charging, and
• 7:59
  my ability to work with them all, but the frame needs to be
• 8:02
  completely, I think, 180 into that is a feature of growth, and
• 8:07
  then finding solutions for that.
• 8:10
  Scott Ritzheimer: Yeah, one of the things that I think is a
• 8:18
  legitimate concern, but is part of a deeper problem is that
• 8:24
  founders have a tendency to have success excelling what they can
• 8:28
  do, but there's only one of them, and so they'll hand it off
• 8:34
  to someone, and either by virtue of the fact that it's just not
• 8:36
  them, or more likely that they haven't done the right vetting
• 8:42
  or training of their employees. Sure, there can be a pretty big
• 8:46
  drop off in, in, in customer quality. How do you, how do you
• 8:51
  help them address that? Because, again, there's just not more of
• 8:54
  them to scale to go around. How do you help them create that
• 8:59
  same quality experience without having to drive it all
• 9:02
  themselves.
• 9:03
  Unknown: Yeah, so what I find again is that if you can, from
• 9:06
  the very beginning, essentially just hype up, and that sounds
• 9:10
  very woo woo, but I genuinely mean it, hype up, give, give
• 9:13
  credibility to, you know, your team, that is really, really
• 9:17
  great. But then, of course, the thing you're alluding to is,
• 9:19
  well, then how do you keep that growing, or how do you keep that
• 9:21
  moving at scale through the entire client journey, not just
• 9:23
  this initial period of like excitement. So, as I said, the
• 9:28
  everything that I do is really based around this IP is called
• 9:30
  the for sales framework, and so it's based on this idea that
• 9:33
  everybody focuses on the first sale, which is enrollment,
• 9:36
  moment of payment, but there's actually three other sales that
• 9:40
  need three other quote unquote sales throughout the client
• 9:42
  journey, or revenue opportunities. I'll say that
• 9:45
  require at scale just as much attention and frameworks and
• 9:49
  scripting, and you know actual strategy to put into place with
• 9:54
  your team and with how you're, how you're filling on your
• 9:56
  clients, whether it's a team, whether it's a system, AI,
• 9:58
  whatever it is, so I. Four sales are first is enrolling, of
• 10:02
  course, moment of payment. Second is onboarding, so the
• 10:04
  first 72 hours, as I like to say, after a client enrolls. The
• 10:08
  third is advocacy, so that either is in the form of
• 10:11
  testimonial, referral, or ideally both. And fourth is
• 10:13
  ascension, or your upsells. And so to answer your question, as
• 10:17
  far as you know, systematically how that is put in place a lot
• 10:21
  of what I do revolves around training teams. Occasionally,
• 10:24
  I'll work with when it's a very, very high margin, you know,
• 10:27
  business, slightly easier to grow. It'll be a smaller team,
• 10:31
  but most of my work revolves around at least a team of, say,
• 10:34
  three to five minimum. My largest one I'm working with
• 10:36
  right now is Team 12, you know, in the in the back end in CS,
• 10:40
  and working with them through essentially we think about these
• 10:44
  working with closers all the time and like we drill calls and
• 10:46
  we do scripting and frameworks etc it's not very simplified
• 10:51
  version is it's that but for for client success knowing how to
• 10:55
  ask for a referral when to ask for a referral what language
• 10:59
  what nuance you're looking for from the client at the right
• 11:01
  moments to be able to know that you're most likely to get a yes
• 11:04
  for a referral ask or for an upsell ask, or when are you
• 11:07
  discussing that? Are you waiting until the very end? Hint, don't
• 11:09
  please. Are you making sure that you, you, you, you see those
• 11:13
  moments and you can guide people toward those moments, and
• 11:16
  honestly, you can even artificially engineer those
• 11:19
  moments to where somebody is most likely to say yes, or even
• 11:21
  consider, you know, one of those next steps: referral,
• 11:25
  testimonial, ascension, things like that. So
• 11:28
  Scott Ritzheimer: love that. For sales in a team like that,
• 11:32
  founder-led, where do you see the division of labor, if you
• 11:36
  will? Obviously, everyone influences all of those sales,
• 11:39
  but who is it that you're training to do sales two, three,
• 11:42
  and four?
• 11:44
  Unknown: It's usually either going to be an offer. It's
• 11:48
  usually falls into one of two buckets. It's either going to be
• 11:50
  an offer that is able to be fulfilled at scale by two to
• 11:57
  three, maybe, maybe more, somewhere in there, you know,
• 11:59
  single digits amount of people, because it's a lot of it is is
• 12:05
  AI subsidized, a lot of it has to do with a one and done type
• 12:08
  of situation, right? They fulfill on the thing once, and
• 12:10
  then that's really it. It doesn't require any sort of
• 12:12
  long, lengthy time. The more traditional then offers a second
• 12:15
  bucket is the more traditional kind of offers of like a
• 12:17
  coaching program, six months long, a 12 month long SAS thing,
• 12:21
  you know, a service that's going to take three months to
• 12:22
  complete, because you know you're it's a physical thing
• 12:25
  that you're building, you know, whatever it might be. Those are
• 12:27
  the more traditionally, you know, as you scale, you need
• 12:30
  more team, and as you need more team, you get put risk for more
• 12:32
  bloat and for more, you know, lack of culture that kind of
• 12:36
  gets disseminated through the team. And then, how do you set
• 12:38
  those standards, etc. So it kind of falls into one of those, one
• 12:41
  of those two buckets, and usually the I would say the
• 12:44
  differentiating factor is that as you grow in bucket one scale,
• 12:50
  bring scale will naturally bring in more profit, right, when it's
• 12:54
  those really, really, really lean teams, but then it's just a
• 12:57
  question of do you dump fuel on that fire or how do you make
• 13:00
  sure you can, you continue to increase those margins, maybe
• 13:03
  you stay at the same top line you're at, but continue to
• 13:05
  increase the margins and reduce operational efficiency. So, I do
• 13:08
  a lot of work with that, but then on the other side, it's, do
• 13:10
  you pour more fuel on the fire, or, sorry, do you pour more fuel
• 13:15
  on the fire with front end, or do you pour more fuel on the
• 13:17
  fire with your back end, and oftentimes, again, the only
• 13:20
  really quote solution to growth is more front end, more ads,
• 13:24
  more marketing, more sales, more calls, etc. And so it's just
• 13:27
  kind of opening up the not only the founders' perspective to
• 13:30
  that, but also just the team culture, because people do not
• 13:33
  hire CS, and this is one of the biggest things, whenever I help
• 13:35
  with hiring conversations with either CS or salespeople, people
• 13:39
  do not hire CS for having sales experience or even just a slight
• 13:45
  interest in it, and people do not hire sales individuals who
• 13:50
  have a heart and who want to actually serve clients, and I
• 13:53
  really work to flip that script and saying listen, I'm not, I do
• 13:56
  a lot of disc testing with my clients, and or rather with the
• 14:00
  people that you know we hire that I assist with, and I don't
• 14:03
  know if you know anything about disc, but it's basically gives
• 14:06
  you indications in terms of how somebody likes to show up at
• 14:08
  work, what their maybe perhaps quote unquote weaknesses are,
• 14:10
  things like that. When somebody is very high D, they're very
• 14:13
  sales, outbound driven, you know, Sharky, etc. I won't
• 14:17
  recommend we hire a CS person unless they've got a little bit
• 14:19
  of a little bit of a Heidi, because you need them to be able
• 14:23
  to go out and have those sometimes uncomfortable
• 14:25
  conversations and push the tempo and be able to close a upsell
• 14:29
  offer that's perhaps twice as high of a margin and twice as
• 14:32
  high of a price tag as the initial offer, you need somebody
• 14:35
  with some guts there to do that, and then on the flip side with
• 14:38
  the sales, I like to make sure they have at least a little bit
• 14:41
  of so D I S C high I means you're you're more inbound
• 14:46
  sales, but you're also very kind of ethics driven, ethic
• 14:49
  centered. And then high C is very procedural driven, so
• 14:53
  strategy framework like scripting. So I like to make
• 14:56
  sure they're high I or high C before we recommend that we're
• 14:59
  hiring a salesperson. The odds are they're going to be at least
• 15:02
  more malleable to understanding the full perspective of the
• 15:04
  client journey, not just, hey, who has a pulse that I can close
• 15:07
  that I can take money from, which will cause a lot of
• 15:10
  problems. So,
• 15:11
  Scott Ritzheimer: very cool. I like that. I've got a couple
• 15:13
  more questions for you. Want to make sure folks know how they
• 15:15
  can get in touch with you, but before we get there, the next
• 15:19
  question is this: one, I ask all my guess, but it is what is the
• 15:22
  biggest secret you wish wasn't a secret at all. What's that one
• 15:25
  thing you wish every founder watching or listening today knew
• 15:31
  Unknown: that what you do in the first hours and days after you
• 15:34
  collect payment sets the tone for the entire client
• 15:38
  relationship. It's very difficult to increase, or rather
• 15:43
  I'll say, improve the opinion that a client has of you. If you
• 15:49
  do not intentionally systematically set it from the
• 15:53
  very beginning, oftentimes people will look at the first
• 15:55
  hours or days after somebody enrolls. That's just this admin
• 15:58
  time, oh, book the next book, the first call, the first
• 16:00
  interaction, couple days, couple weeks out, whatever it is,
• 16:03
  right? Oh, did they sign the signing agreement? No. Usually
• 16:06
  it's very high ticket sale, it's very high ticket situation. The
• 16:11
  client is no more. The client is the most malleable to their
• 16:15
  opinion of you that they will ever be throughout the entire
• 16:18
  client journey. In those moments after you finally get what you
• 16:22
  want, they have, they've laid out all their cards on the
• 16:24
  table, they got nothing left, and so how you show up for them
• 16:27
  in that moment when that power dynamic is really, is really
• 16:30
  switched. I mean, I could, I could sit here for the next
• 16:34
  three hours and tell you all of the just the tactical, I like to
• 16:38
  say relational equity that that builds through the client
• 16:41
  journey, and so the biggest thing I would say is don't don't
• 16:43
  waste the opportunity to intentionally set, intentionally
• 16:47
  create your client's emotional equity toward you.
• 16:53
  Scott Ritzheimer: It's, it's fascinating. I can't remember
• 16:55
  what the stat was, I'm not even going to quote it, but some
• 16:58
  biblically high number of people have buyer's remorse after,
• 17:02
  especially a big ticket sale, and some categorically low
• 17:06
  percentage, it was like 4% or something, actually have a plan
• 17:10
  for dealing with buyer's remorse when it hits, and so I love this
• 17:13
  idea of engaging proactively early, I think it's so powerful
• 17:18
  and really speaks to this, this multi sale approach, I think
• 17:22
  once you recognize that, hey, the first sale happened, sure,
• 17:26
  but it's just there, it's like good, good copy, you know, first
• 17:29
  sentence just sets up the second sentence. Yeah, so I love that
• 17:32
  approach, I think it's really powerful, and yeah, could talk
• 17:36
  about that for a very long time, but there's some folks listening
• 17:40
  who would love to implement the for sale approach in their
• 17:43
  business, they feel like they're stuck and they're finally seeing
• 17:47
  a light, a little glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel,
• 17:51
  and believe that you're gonna be a big part in helping them get
• 17:53
  there. How can they find more out about the work you do? How
• 17:55
  can they reach out to get started?
• 17:57
  Unknown: I post every day on LinkedIn, so LinkedIn is my
• 18:00
  LinkedIn is my jam, so I just say connect with me on LinkedIn.
• 18:04
  It's just the LinkedIn, LinkedIn tag, Bradley, my name dash
• 18:07
  Rausch. And then my website is just my name as well, Bradley Rausch.com
• 18:11
  Scott Ritzheimer: Beautiful, beautiful. All right, Bradley,
• 18:14
  that was awesome. Yeah, super cool content, and very simple.
• 18:17
  That's what I love about it, is these are not hard things to put
• 18:21
  in practice. They just take a little bit of understanding and
• 18:25
  a lot of diligence. But it was a privilege having you on today.
• 18:29
  Thanks for joining us and sharing your wisdom with us. For
• 18:33
  those of you watching and listening, you know that your
• 18:37
  time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as
• 18:40
  much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait
• 18:44
  to see you next time. Take care. Hey everyone, Scott Retheimer
• 18:48
  here. Thank you so much for listening to the Start Scale and
• 18:52
  Succeed podcast. I hope this episode gave you exactly what
• 18:56
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