GREG: Welcome back to Part Four in Uncle Frank’s 21 Secrets Of Creating A Money-Making Customer Experience. Today we’re speaking with Tracy Myers, founder of the Unfair Advantage Automotive Mastermind Group and owner of Frank Myers Auto Maxx. Over the first three sections we’ve been revealing some of Tracy’s biggest secrets to really deliver a customer experience that has helped him grow his business.
In the first module we talked about why your customer experience is so important. In modules two and three we unveiled the first ten secrets and really showed you some great ways to implement these secrets into your business.
Tracy, right now we’re in the middle of these 21 secrets and number eleven is key to growing your business and that is to have a clear vision. What did you do to create a strong vision in your business and how can others take your vision and apply it into their own business?
TRACY: You know, Greg, I don’t think I can say it any better than Jack Welch said it, so I’m not going to try. I’m just going to share with you what Jack Welch said, and he said, “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.”
Those are the four same steps that I follow in my business, and my father followed those steps, and my great-grandfather followed those steps before him, long before Jack Welch even said them.
GREG: That’s a great quote and it’s one I’ve heard before and it’s very, very powerful if you actually go through it. What I want to do is I want to help some of the business owners reading this to think about their own vision. What are some key questions that you want your vision to answer about your business?
TRACY: I’ve got this Post-It note on my mirror in my bathroom that reminds me to ask myself one simple question: If my company were still going strong in one hundred years, what would it look like?
Once again, the question is: If my company were still going strong in one hundred years, what would it look like? The answer to that question helps me to create my vision for my businesses.
GREG: That’s a really powerful question and I encourage everyone listening even to hit pause right now, hit stop, think about that question and think about how important of an impact it can have on your business.
As we move on to number twelve, I love this one, and I think it’s very, very important, especially in your line of business, and that’s to cater to the kids. What I want to talk about is: How can we make some changes in our business to focus some attention on children and what impact does that make to the overall customer experience?
TRACY: Many years ago there was a guy by the name of Ray Kroc, of McDonald’s fame, and he recognized the possibilities of catering to families because of something called “pester power”. If you’ve got children, you absolutely know what “pester power” is, and that’s when kids keep whining about something until parents give it to them.
So he decided to promote McDonald’s to kids and families. Ray Kroc thought, “If I get all those children in here, they’ll eat a lot of hamburgers.” And of course, we all know the end result of that story;just look at the impact that Ronald McDonald in catering to children had on McDonald’s. What business owner wouldn’t want to take the example set by Ray Kroc and mold it to fit their industry?
GREG: You’ve actually done some of that molding into your own business, and you have some great examples of how you’ve made your business into a family business.
I’d love if you can share some of those examples as to how you’ve taken some of those same techniques from Ray Kroc and McDonald’s and Ronald McDonald and really implemented them and catered to the kids in your own business?
TRACY: Well, I’m just a big kid at heart, so it’s real easy for me. There’s several things that we do, but the biggest impact on kids is our Kid Zone. It includes a video game center with old school arcade games and all the latest family-friendly Xbox video games that can be played for free. In addition, they can chow down on our all-you-can-eat popcorn.
We’ve got big-screen plasma TVs that show family-friendly movies, and not the old outdated VHS tapes; we’re talking Blu-Ray and the latest releases. The kids love it and they rarely want to leave with their parents.
In fact, we have parents that get ready to leave with their new car and their kids cry because they want to stay. So that tells me we’re doing something right. Our Kid Zone is a fun and a safe place that allows the kids to be who they are, and maybe-maybe- even more importantly, it allows the parents to shop in peace.
GREG: I think that last point is the point that really is going to really paint a good picture into the entrepreneurs and small business owners reading this is keeping those kids occupied really allows the parent to shop in peace and really have a great conversation with your sales reps. Would you say that’s kind of an accurate statement?
TRACY: Absolutely. You know, we can give you all the tips and all the secrets you can stomach in a day, but at the end of this, business owners still have to ask themselves: What’s in it for me and how will it affect my bottom line? That alone, by catering to kids and making it easy for the parents to shop, that could possibly increase your business’ bottom line by millions.
GREG: I love it, that’s a really great secret.
As we close out this Fourth section, again I encourage everyone to be taking notes and seeing how you can relate these new principles and secrets into your own business.
In the next section we’re going to continue showing you how you can deliver an amazing customer experience at your business. Thanks again for reading module four, and we will see you again in module five.
– To Be Continued. Stay Tuned For Part 5 Coming Soon.
– To Read Part 1 Of This Series, Click HERE.
– To Read Part 2 Of This Series, Click HERE.
– To Read Part 3 Of This Series, Click HERE.