You’ve built your brand from nothing and have developed a healthy following, but have you bred superfans who are wholeheartedly invested in everything you do? Today, we are joined by the incredible keynote speaker and author of Creating Superfans, Brittany Hodak, who uses her wealth of knowledge on customer and candidate experience to explain how you can create superfans for your brand. We begin with Britany’s professional history, why she wrote Creating Superfans, and who she wrote it for, as well as how your company’s candidate experience may affect your brand overall. Then, we discover how to vet your candidate experience for clients and candidates, why many businesses fall short of making the right hires, how to build your base of superfans, and the best practices to follow for a more enriched candidate experience. We end with more recommendations for raising superfans, how to measure the value of superfans for your brand, and the belief that work and rest should always go hand-in-hand.
[0:01:14] DF: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode of The Staffing Show. Today, I am super excited to be joined by Brittany Hodak, the author of Creating Superfans, a keynote speaker, and someone who I was lucky enough to see live at Avionté Connect just a few weeks ago. Brittany, thank you so much for joining the show.
[0:01:33] BK: Thanks so much for having me, David. I’m excited for our conversation.
[0:01:36] DF: Absolutely. Same here. So, to kick things off, could you just give us a little bit of background on kind of what led you to create Superfans, and also what, what is the book Superfans?
[0:01:47] BK: Yes. So, I worked for most of my career in the entertainment industry. First for a few record labels, then I launched my own entertainment agency when I was 27. I started working with a lot of CPG brands, and I found very quickly that all the questions I had spent asking on the artist side of, how do we sell more tickets, how do we get people to not just listen to the song passively, but actively request it, and want to buy the album, all of the things to drive greater engagement. Those were the exact same questions that were being asked by my CPG partners on the brand side, was, how do we get people to choose us at the exclusion of our competitors? How do we get people not to just try the product, but continue to buy it, to adopt it?
Then, once they’ve adopted it, how do we get them to advocate for us? How do we get them to truly feel more affinity for us and our competitors in a way that’s not strictly driven by price or promotions? So, I really started to think about the intersection of those two worlds. I went back to school to get a master’s degree to study consumer behavior, to really try to understand the psychology behind not just buying decisions, but what drives buying decisions, what makes people choose one thing, and not choose something else.
So, I started to write about that. I started to speak about that. All of a sudden, one day, I woke up and thought, I have two full-time jobs. I’m running this agency. I’m doing all of this thought leadership on the side. So, I sold my stake in the agency so that I could focus full-time on researching, writing, and really advocating for what I had found. Which is, if you want someone to choose you, if you want to go from being seen as a commodity provider to a category of one, you’ve got to give them a very compelling reason. You’ve got to show them that you don’t just sort of care if they pick you, you care so much, and doing the things to create that, what I call a two-way street.
[0:03:41] DF: I love that. One of the reasons I was so excited about having this conversation with you today is that your background, your keynote speech was, it was excellent. If anybody’s looking for a speaker, I highly recommend they reach out to you. Because I think, the experience that you create for your brand is one of the most important things that you can focus on, and deliver from a profitability standpoint. One of the, I think probably the reason that you were asked to come to Avionté Connect, is because, in our industry, in the staffing industry today, the candidate experience is becoming paramount. It’s something that differentiates your brand, it’s something that can kind of drive the success or failure of your brand, depending on how you are looking at it. Could you talk a little bit just about how important the experience is from a consumer perspective, and then we could tie that back into staffing as well?
[0:04:27] BK: Oh, it’s incredibly important. One of the things that I always say is, your customer’s experience is never going to be better than your employee’s experience. Because an apathetic employee does not create an engaged customer. It’s so important for staffing agencies to keep this top of mind because you’ve got the two levels. You’ve got to have somebody who has a good experience with your brand, like the candidate experience, getting placed in that role. Then, you’ve also got to give them the tools to where they’re ready on day one to plug in and be an appropriate representation of whatever brand that you’re helping place them with. Because a customer does not care if it is somebody’s first day on the job or if they’ve been there a decade. They just see someone who should solve their problem. They just see someone who represents the brand.
One of the things that I say a lot is, every single employee is the acting chief of experience. It doesn’t matter if that’s a temporary employee, or if that is one of your board members. They are the acting chief of experience, and that is so much more critical to your brand than all of the things that we’ve traditionally thought of as brand. Like, “Oh, the ad campaigns we’re running.” Our mission, our vision, our values, our logo, our website. Yes, that stuff matters. But if the experience that a customer has with the living embodiment of your brand, which is your team doesn’t match all of that, which one do you think they believe? They’re going to believe the one that they’ve been shown by that teammate much more so than like, any amount of Super Bowl commercials or door-knocker advertising that you’re doing.
[0:06:00] DF: Yes. I mean, I think to that point, what we are seeing in the staffing industry this year is a lot of, people that we talk to, a lot of agency owners are struggling with the fact that there’s limited job orders, limited placements this year. I think that that ties back to what you’re saying, that’s like, more than ever, the candidate experience matters, because it’s your brand. There’s stats behind this that the right candidates are going to stay on contract significantly longer because people like working with them. What are some of the ways that agencies can actually vet the candidates to make sure that they’re – whether it’s the interview process or how can they actually go about ensuring they’re delivering a good experience to the candidate, and then also, to the client that they’re working with.
[0:06:42] BK: So, I am such an advocate for writing customer-centric job descriptions. There are very few job descriptions that could not be improved by simply adding the words to serve our customers by, before whatever words you’re beginning the description with. So, it starts with being abundantly clear upfront. This is a customer service job. I don’t care what department you’re in, everyone is in the experience department. Everyone needs to be aligned around the idea of creating amazing customer experiences.
So, that’s the first part, is writing the job description in a way that says you are serving our customers by doing all of these things that you’re doing. The next thing is to ask customer-centric questions in the interview process. So, asking things like, what’s the last amazing experience you had as a customer, to find out how attuned people are to really paying attention to this. Ask questions about what’s a role in the past you’ve had where you had to deal with overwhelming requests, or customers coming to you with needs in real time. How were you able to respond? How were you able to prioritize, and then triage, and then solve?
Asking questions about how important you think customer experience is to the overall. You’ve got to sort of sniff out whether or not somebody is wired in a way that makes them more likely to go above and beyond. Is this somebody who’s going to kind of like, check the box, or is this somebody who’s going to say, “Your problem is my problem. I’ve now made it my problem, and I’m going to work with you until we get it solved.” So, that’s really where it starts.
Then, the biggest thing is treating your candidates, your employees, your talent, as you want them to treat your customers. Because, as I said before, your customer experience is driven more so by your employee experience than anything else, because nobody ever goes to a job and thinks, “I hate being here. I don’t feel respected. I don’t feel appreciated. Let me knock it out of the park for these customers that I’m dealing with.” That just doesn’t happen. So, treating people, again, whether they’re a temporary staffer, or whether they’ve been with you for years. Treating them as that important part of the brand puzzle that they are.
[0:08:56] DF: Yes. I think that sounds so critical. What are some of the common mistakes that you see in an interview process that may be missed the boat in terms of getting the right people in the door?
[0:09:06] BK: Sometimes I see mistakes around not really asking, why do you want this role? What is it about this position that you see as motivating you?
[0:09:15] DF: Kind of identify the motivation.
[0:09:17] BK: It’s just sort of very transactional, like, “Oh, you have the ability to do this thing that we need someone to do. You can be here Monday morning at 6 am, you’re hired.” Sometimes, you need that. This is not a mix of like, if we look at this on in a perfect world, would everybody say, “I am passionate about this. I feel like this is serving a greater purpose.” Of course, but we also know that there are roles where it is going to feel transactional to that person doing it. It is very much like, “I’m going to show up, I’m going to do this, you’re going to pay me at the end of the shift or the end of the week.”
So, doing your best to balance those out, and knowing that when you’ve got people who do still look at it as very transactional, giving them the tools to excel. Like, what do they need to do just a little bit more, to be just a little bit better for your company, for your customers, and giving them those tools?
[0:10:09] DF: That makes a ton of sense. In the staffing industry, there are times where, I think it could feel a little transactional. But even in those moments, can you identify the motivation? Should you interview one more person to maybe get the right person? And/or if you’re putting somebody on contract, and you know it’s transactional, what tools could you – I haven’t thought about that, but what are the specific training elements about how to show up, what to do that will actually create that better experience? So, a handful of things, I think very actionable for the listeners today.
[0:10:36] BK: Yes. The training is so important because oftentimes, we ask people to do something that they have never experienced before. I heard somebody saying the other day, l don’t understand why my team won’t deliver first class. I keep telling them, this has to feel like a first-class experience. It’s got to feel like first class. I said, “How many of them have ever flown first class?” Like, none of them. So, you’re asking people to recreate this thing, that in your mind, means one very specific thing that they haven’t experienced. Then, just asking for the tools.
I was having lunch with a with a dear friend of mine yesterday, and like he always asks a lot of questions to the wait staff. He was talking to this particular waiter. He’s an entertainment lawyer, she wants to be a singer. So, they’re having a conversation. He said, “Hey, do you like your job? Do you love your job? What do you think?” She said, “You know, I love it here. Everybody treats me really well. The reason I wanted this job and fought to get this job instead of another restaurant is, I get the cash equivalent of all of my tips at the end of every shift. Most restaurants don’t do that. Most restaurants make you wait until Friday, because almost everybody is tipping you on credit card, and they’ve got to figure it out. But at the end of the night, they figure out how much we all get. And then if there’s anything that needs to be reconciled, because something else came in, we get that at the end of the week.” She said, “I fought to get this job because not a lot of people do that.”
So, again, identifying with your candidates, is there something that might take a little bit of tweak on your end, but means a huge amount to that candidate pool. And then allows you to attract the best of the best, because you’re offering this thing that your competitors aren’t.
[0:12:08] DF: It’s interesting that you bring that example. Because I think in the staffing industry, there’s a little bit of a trend where some, I think in healthcare, there’s been some elements of like same day pay, where you’re actually doing the work, getting paid the same day. That’s actually been pretty impactful, and can be a differentiator. Even though it’s something that people might think, “Oh, that’s not necessary,” there’s a lot of people that care about it if you know you can go to work and get paid. If you’re like, “Hey, I’ve got this party or trip that I’ve got coming up and I want some extra money.” You can go do the work right then and get paid. That’s a great example of that. What are some of the steps that – I know we talked about the interview process specifically, but what are some steps that staffing agencies can take to create superfans?
[0:12:47] BK: So, Avionté, I sort of walked through this framework that I lay out in my book, Creating Superfans, which is something I called the super model. The idea is, if you want to create superfans, you have to be super. You’ve got to go above and beyond. One of the things that I like to say is, superfans are created at the intersection of your story and every customer story. If you want your candidates and your talent to treat you as someone and as a company that is different from not just your direct competitors, but all of the like apps of the world. Like, I could go work at Instacart. I could go drive for Uber. I could go work for somebody who’s going to hire me by the day.
If you want to differentiate yourself, you have to do that, and you have to start by telling your story. You have to start by showing them how you are different, why you care more, why you represent a better alternative. Not just for them today, but for whatever it is that they’re trying to build for, for their family, for their future, for what they’re doing. Why your solution is a better path than any of those other potential solutions out there that exist for their time.
[0:13:54] DF: Yes. Do you have any examples of that that you’ve seen, whether it’s staffing or consumer specific, that have been exceptionally – done an exceptionally good job of creating superfans?
[0:14:03] BK: Yes. Absolutely. So, you really have to start by asking yourself like, what does make me different? What is something about me that stands out? What is something about this organization? It could be that you are the fastest, it could be that you care the most, it could be that you have the best access to technology. It could be any of 100 different things. It’s leaning into that, like finding that uniqueness, and saying, “We’re going to go all in on talking about this, and we’re going to attract all the people who care the most about that thing. And we’re of course, going to attract other people who kind of care about that, but care about these other seven things that we also do.”
But instead of trying to show that you’re like an okay solution for everybody, show that you’re the best solution for the people who care the most about this particular thing. Then, you’re going to attract 100% of those people, or nearly 100% of those people, and you’re going to have the halo effect of all the others that think, like, “Oh, if they’re great at that, they’re likely great at this too. Or if they care about this thing, they’re also going to be able to deliver on this thing.” So, really asking yourself, like, “Why should someone pick us?”
A really great way to start, if that’s not something that you’ve asked the question or thought about it in exactly those terms, is talk to all of your best talent, talk to the people who either have been with you the longest, have referred the most people to you, keep coming back again and again, and say, “Hey, what are all the other things that you considered, and why did you pick us instead of those?” And really start to have those conversations to learn. Because, oftentimes what we think is the most important is not what our target audience thinks is the most important.
[0:15:35] DF: Yes, it’s incredible to me that the number of businesses that think they know what their customers want, but never actually asked. I think that’s a very common thing. Then, I also – when it comes to creating superfans, it seems so relatable in the staffing industry. There was an accounting finance staffing agency that had a really rapid growth, that they actually did not even – they didn’t use job boards at all, because they were so focused on the experience of the candidates. That they were like, “We are going to dive into what you care about, and where you want to be placed, and we’ll never place you at a spot where you don’t want to be placed. And if we do, we’re going to make it right.” That they’ve lived 100% off referrals.
So, I think that like the impact of what you’re talking about, and why everybody that’s listening to this should go buy your book is because this has a dramatic impact on what the growth of your business could be if you’re doing this right and being intentional with it. One of the areas that I want to understand is like, where do you see kind of the future of customer experience going? Where do you see things going from here?
[0:16:36] BK: I love this question. I think where we’re already starting to go, but we’ll continue to go is figuring out how AI and human customer agents can work together. I don’t know if you saw the news, just within the past few days, the Biden-Harris administration announced that they’re trying to regulate what they call doom loops, like when you can just never get a human on the phone. So, they’re trying to create a law that says, you have to be able to let people press zero to talk to a human.
I appreciate the spirit of the law, and I absolutely think that there are a lot of companies that need to do a much better job with people resolving their issues, I don’t think this is like the exact best solution. I think, really, the problem is not architecting ways for customers to self-service and choose how they want to get their problem answered. A lot of times, when you’re calling a company, it’s not because you want to call the company, it’s because it’s the last resort. Because they do not make it easy for you to solve your problem or get the things that you needed to make, the decision that you need to make on your own.
So, I think while, yes, in a perfect world, press zero get to an operator is great. But a better step, I believe is, how do we make it to where, if you’re one of the majority of people that don’t want to talk to an agent, you don’t have to, because you can solve the problem yourself. And not with like a seven-year-old chatbot that’s never been updated, but with best-in-class technology that’s merging the high tech with the high touch to create more seamless interactions.
[0:18:14] DF: I could not agree more. I feel like call to have a question answered that could have been answered in a one-sentence AI chatbot is a failure of systems almost. It’s like you didn’t think through that fully. Have you seen any examples of people that are doing this well? Or, I know a lot of staffing agents right now are looking at, how do they do more with less, because of the market conditions. I think that this is something that’s, people are trying to figure out any best use cases or directions that you could give to the audience for this.
[0:18:45] BK: Yes. So, if you have a small team, I would say, have the people on your team write down the questions they get asked most frequently. Whether that’s from potential candidates, whether that’s from potential clients, whether that’s from existing clients, existing candidates. Then, put together a really easy-to-navigate question bank, like an FAQ area of your website. That’s a really great first step.
Then, if you have the ability to have somebody on the dev side create a chatbot that’s making it simple to search those, let’s say you’ve got 83 questions, and that can be a lot. Is there the opportunity to let people use a chatbot to help them get where they want faster, almost like a decision tree. So, that’s a great way to do it.
From a tech side, like the slightly larger companies, there are a lot of innovators in this space right now. One of my favorites is a company called Glia, and they are really focused on the intersection of AI-aided customer experience and guardrails. How do we make it safe? How do we make it in an environment that is a net positive for everyone instead of a net neutral? So, they are really leading the way with kind of omnichannel AI. Where when you hit a website that’s got Glia, as you’re scrolling, they’ve got an algorithm saying, “Okay, what are you likely to need help with based on where you’re hovering, what you’re reading.”
So that when you get a pop-up, it’s not the same pop-up somebody else is getting. It’s, “Hey, I see that you’re – it looks like you’re interested in insurance for a boat, would you like to talk to someone?” If you say yes, it’s routing it to a human who then you can say, “Call me on the phone” or “Let’s talk via chat” or “Let’s scroll together.” Where you can help show me while we’re having a phone conversation, what I need to be looking at on the website.
So, really finding ways to eliminate the differences that exist between on-screen and off-screen. Just, “I have someone here to help me with this problem I’m trying to solve.”
[0:20:43] DF: That’s great. And I think the omnichannel is key. Then, also, there’s so many tools right now that allow you to – they can ingest your entire knowledge base. You can upload your Zoom calls, and you can literally create AI chatbots that can answer 90% of the questions. I was on an AI – there’s a video software that I use, which I won’t name here, but we use it for as AI note-taking recording. It’s awesome.
Then, ironically, I went yesterday to solve a question. I was like, “Hey, I’ve got a problem that I need to figure out.” And they don’t have AI to actually give you an answer to the question. So, I was like scrolling through their knowledge base. I’m like, “How’s an AI company not applied it here?” I think in the staffing space, your employee manuals, your training guides, all these things can be uploaded, and then people can ask questions, and get answers immediately. Obviously, there’s accuracy elements, and you need to do some testing, and some rollout, but I think there’s a low-hanging fruit when it comes to AI. For those of you that are listening, if you haven’t checked out staffingengine.ai, that’s a great platform out there that’s solving some of these things for customers as well.
[0:21:46] BK: I would say, for anybody who has not built this out yet, make sure that the information you’re uploading for ingestion is current as of now, and tag it to when you did it. Because what invariably happens is, rules change, policies get updated, and you may have chatbots that are giving 2023 answers to a 2026 question. So, we all know that the data that comes out is only as good as the data that goes in.
So, if you are in the process of building some of this out for the first time, working with some of these platforms, just please make sure you’re doing a great job of A, putting the right data in in the first place, and B, tagging it in a way that is very easy for you to search and update it later. The AI will do some of that tagging for you, but not all of it, because it only knows what you tell it.
[0:22:35] DF: That is great advice. I’m going to personally take that one and use it. I had not thought about that. I’m sure over time, you keep uploading stuff, it was like, over time, that’s going to get outdated. You won’t be able to figure out what it is. That’s fantastic.
[0:22:47] BK: Yes. My youngest son, when we enrolled him in the preschool program that he’s in last year, we got the parent handbook, and it was digital. It was like a PDF that somebody sent us to look at. It said at the bottom of every page, “Last updated October 2018.” This was in May of 2023, and all I could think is, the world is so different than it was five years ago, especially when you’re talking about the little germ machines that are children. I’m like, “What? How did you not update any of this at all, even during COVID? How in 2023 are you passing out something that was last updated in 2018?”
So, I was skeptical, as a customer you’re like, “What else have they not updated in five years? What else is being overlooked?” So, you never want to give your candidates or your clients the opportunity to second guess or question something because you haven’t updated something internally. So, it’s very important to make sure you’re tagging all of that before you upload it, and assume it’s like truth forever.
[0:23:53] DF: That’s great, great insights. What are some other practical, actionable steps that agencies could take today? Whether it’s building superfans or just kind of hands-on. We talked about the interviews, and you talked about some of this stuff, but is there anything else that you’d recommend as entry points for jumping in and focusing on building the superfan base?
[0:24:12] BK: Yes. One really great point of entry is looking at all the data you have of where do things start to go wrong. Is there a certain point where if you know, we lose a candidate in the first this number of days, we’re never getting them back. Or, if we can keep somebody this many days, we’re probably keeping them this many months. Looking at the data for your company, for your industry, and then asking yourself, how can we get through these gaps, how can we get somebody over this hump that we know is going to happen. And being very intentional about what all of those moments are.
So, it could be as simple as like a text message from the hiring manager after somebody does their first shift and say, “Hey, Ronnie. I know today was the first day. Hope it went really great. How was it?” Something seemingly so simple that signals to the candidate, we care, we want you to have a really great experience.
So, I kind of classify the personalized touches like that into two categories, like the high tech and the high touch. The high tech is, what can you automate, what can you schedule, what can you draft out and say, “We know that these seven touch points are happening at these given intervals.” Then, ask yourself, what are the things that we need to be paying attention to so that we can recognize. Whether it’s, someone has a baby, someone gets married, someone gets promoted with a client that you’ve placed them with from the entry-level to the next thing up. What are the things that you’re doing that you’re paying attention to, to say, “We’re happy for you, celebrating you”?
Because when somebody feels like they matter, when they feel like they’re being seen, not just for the work that they do, but for the person that they are. They are more likely to stay longer, and they are more likely to tell their friends what a great experience they’ve had with you. So, creating more of those referrals. So, I think that’s a really great takeaway for everybody is – maybe you’re already doing all of this stuff, and if you are, amazing, can you add more? Like, what if the stuff that you’ve added becomes standard? Then ask yourself, where can we up level, where can we add one new thing, where can we have one new touch?
If you’re not doing all of these things, ask yourself, what’s one great thing that we can add that we can execute 100% of the time? Is it a handwritten thank-you note? Is it a video before someone starts wishing them a great first day? Is it that text message saying, “How did your day go?”? What is one simple touch point that you can deliver 100% of the time?
[0:26:30] DF: So, it sounds like you’re basically customer journey mapping as kind of the idea, is like doing a full customer journey map, identify where the gap is. That’s a great thought. I don’t know, one thing that we always talk about on here is like, if you’re the staffing agency, even going in, and just like applying to a job and see what the experience is like. But I love the idea of thinking about, on contract, where everybody’s trying to get longer contracts today. So, digging into that and trying to figure out what can you do to do that, where’s the link, why are people dropping off. That’s great insight.
[0:27:00] BK: Yes. And with customer journey mapping, if you’ve not ever done a client journey, just know that it’s one of those things that can become very overwhelming. I always laugh when somebody’s like, “Look, we have our entire customer journey mapped out,” and it looks like a Boeing manual, right? You’re like, “Cool. This says the document was last opened 11 months ago. Tell me again how often you guys are referring to this?” I don’t care about the sentiment analysis. I don’t care about that we’re tracking 84 different emotional points to say, you need to go there. I care about what’s a journey that we know is happening, what are three moments that we know every client experiences. Like, it’s the first day of their job, it’s the first time they’re getting their paycheck. It’s like, whatever it is, whatever those moments are, like they said yesterday, fix that.
Because a lot of times people are like, “Oh well, I can’t do anything until I hire this think tank, and pay them $250,000 to map out 911 touchpoints.” Just do one thing great, and once that becomes the norm, add another thing that you can do great. Because as Elizabeth Arden said, “Repetition makes reputation and reputation makes customers.” Just do the one thing great, and then add another thing.
[0:28:11] DF: I love that insight so much. Our team, specifically, we went through customer journey mapping. It became the massive document, and I was like, “What do we do now?” So, I love the idea of the idea of the three moments, and just like figuring out what are the most impactful things. That’s really good feedback there.
The last question I’ve got for you is – well, actually, I want to jump into one other category that you and I talked about just briefly before the call. Is the, I always talk about candidate lifetime value with customers, and on the podcast, we’re talking about it sometimes.
You were talking about the different buckets and looking at the overall value for creating superfans and what that looks like. Could you just talk a little bit about what the buckets are and what this whole concept is of measuring the value that you get from taking actions like this?
[0:28:53] BK: Yes, of course. So, as you said, figuring out candidate lifetime value using formulas like EGR, which is earned growth rate, are fantastic, but very much like a customer journey map. Sometimes it becomes so complex that people get overwhelmed and they don’t do it, or they don’t do it until the end of the year, they forget to look at it. So, a simple way is to look every week, every month at the candidates that you’re getting, both on the talent side and on the client side, and ask yourself, where did they come from? Where did every single person come from?
Typically, there’s four buckets in which you can put every one that you get. I came up with R words for all of them to make them easier to remember. So, the first one, this is the one that’s like kind of the stretch for the R. I call it retail, and I call it retail because these are the leads that you paid for. This is somebody that you got because you paid for that lead. We know that that’s costing money, so we’re going to have a lower profit margin on the back end of that because we’re paying for that growth, we’re paying for that lead.
The second bucket, I call reputation. Now, you’re paying for some of these and you’re earning some of these. Reputational could be somebody’s like, “Oh, yeah, I think maybe I’ve heard that name before” or “I’ve seen you on TV” or “I saw a social post.” So, that’s a mix of paid and earned growth.
Now, the next two buckets, which are the really exciting ones, are repeat and referral. So, the referral are, of course, somebody who’s coming to you because someone that they trust said that you’re the best. So automatically, you’ve gone from category, or you’ve gone from commodity provider to category of one, or at least category leader. They’re considering you strongly. Then, the repeat bucket, obviously, these are people who are coming back to you again, either as part of an unbroken relationship or that was somebody who had a good experience with you. Maybe they did something else for a while, and now they’re back.
So those last two buckets are where we want to concentrate the most of our growth. Because someone who comes to you via a referral is four times as likely to refer somebody else as a customer who comes to you via either retail or reputation. That’s because, not only do we have the authority bias of, “Oh, Jeff told me that this place was going to be awesome, so they probably are.” Then, like you go there, you get the confirmation bias of like, “Oh, yeah, they are awesome.”
So, instead of thinking, “I got to keep going for a while before I’m willing to put my name on the line to tell somebody how great they are.” You’re ready to start referring people. You’re ready to say, like, “Oh, yeah, this is great. My friend told me it’s great. It’s been awesome. You should check it out.” So, that’s why we want to concentrate on those last two buckets, the referrals, and the repeat. How do we get more people to come back? And how do we get more of those people to tell their friends.
[0:31:28] DF: I love that. I actually didn’t know, the four times more likely to refer somebody else. That’s amazing. That’s great data. What we’re seeing in staffing specifically is that they’re also, the referral specifically is staying on contract 30% longer or redeploying 30% more. So, you’re actually getting the repeat out of it as well from that individual. I love talking about it from the perspective of buckets. I think that is a great way to kind of think about it and apply that to your agency and try to understand, where are you getting the most gross profit from? Where are you getting the most revenue? What is the effort to get these people in the door? So, a great way to think about candidate acquisition.
[0:32:06] BK: If you think about it in terms of literal visual buckets, think about how much money it’s costing to fill those buckets, whatever you’re putting in the bucket. Because you are absolutely paying more to fill up that retail bucket and that reputation bucket. But those are the buckets with holes in the bottom because people are not staying. So, not only are you paying way more, but those buckets are leaking at a rate that is several degrees of magnitude higher than the referral and the repeat bucket.
[0:32:37] DF: Absolutely. I love that insight and I love that way of looking at it. I think you might have just changed the way I’m going to talk about it.
[0:32:44] BK: Yes. Feel free to get that analogy.
[0:32:47] DF: I will give you credit. Last two questions I’ve got for you, kind of the speed round. In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?
[0:32:55] BK: Ooh, this is a great question. I think the belief and the behavior that you really cannot work at your highest level unless you have rested at your highest level. The idea of truly giving your body the recovery time that it needs to be at your best. I don’t know if it’s because, like, I’m in my 40s now. I don’t know if it’s because I have two little kids, but I have learned the value of getting seven or eight hours of sleep uninterrupted because it really does make a difference in everything else.
[0:33:29] DF: Amen. A recent lesson for me as well. What book or books have you given most as a gift or has been most influential for you? You can give two books here, since you have your own.
[0:33:40] BK: Honestly, my book has been the book that’s changed my life the most, because it’s given me the opportunity to meet so many amazing people, travel all over the world. Probably, the book that I’ve gifted the most, which I actually have a copy of it right here because I need to mail it to a friend today. It’s called, Exactly What to Say: The Magic Words for Influence and Impact. It’s by a brilliant thought leader, speaker named Phil Jones, and everyone should read it. The best thing about this book is you can read it in like an hour. It’s so easy to read, it’s like 20,000 words. It will change the way you think about the words that you use and the impact that they create.
[0:34:14] DF: That’s amazing. I’m going to pick that one up today, and as well as Superfans. Last part I wanted to ask; do you have any closing comments for the audience?
[0:34:21] BK: I think my closing comment is to remember the ripple effect of the impact of everything you say and do for your candidates. That then, they go out, and say, and do in your communities. So, again, we’re always going to default back to like how we were treated. Most of us, most of the time will default back to like how we were treated when it comes to treating the people that we’re entrusted to serve. So, that little bit of extra effort, love, attention, and appreciation really does go a long way.
[0:34:55] DF: Incredible. The last part I want to make sure that we plug. We’ve talked about your book a little bit, Superfans. I realized that we didn’t talk about and something I think is also important for everybody to know is you have a course, a video training course, called Six Weeks to Superfans. Could you just tell us a little bit about that and then we’ll close it out?
[0:35:14] BK: Yes, absolutely. So, the book, Creating Superfans came out in January of last year. The number one request that I started to get, especially from larger clients was, what do you have for our team? How do we give our team the tools to implement this? I was like, “Well, they can read the book.” And very quickly, people are like, “No, no, they’re not going to read the book.” I said, “Well, there’s an audiobook and I narrate it. How about that?” “No, no, we need something.”
So, I created this program. It’s called Six Weeks to Superfans. It is an 11-video series that’s designed for everyone on your team to complete over a six-week period. Hence the name. There are about 15 different activities that people do throughout that six-week period to really think about the level of customer centricity in their role as it exists right now and to help drive them from paycheck to purpose. How do we get them more passionate about the root of the work that they’re doing and what that means for the bigger picture? So, it’s called Six Weeks to Superfans. It’s designed for teams to go through together. Although, people can also do it in smaller group environments. If you want to find out more about that, just go to my website, brittanyhodak.com, and click on the masterclass tab.
[0:36:26] DF: Awesome. Well, Brittany, it was wonderful having you on today. I really enjoyed this conversation, super insightful. I hope you have a wonderful day.
[0:36:33] BK: Thanks so much, David. I appreciate it and hope you have an incredible day as well.
