You may recall a blog I wrote back in October last year "What do your customers say about you ... even when you are not there?". I wrote about The Loyalty Zone - a company that surveys customers, not about customer satisfaction, but about customer loyalty. As CEO Craig Cherry says "a satisfied customer isn't enough - a satisfied customer probably won't come back, and probably won't refer anyone. You need loyal customers."

At the time I said I was ready to bite the bullet, and find out what our customers really thought about The Money Workshop. And I promised I'd let you know how we went - here's the verdict.

Our two month Bali adventure is over, so I thought I'd share some of our lessons.

You may recall we were on a 10 day holiday in Bali in May last year, and I was staring out to sea reflecting on my business. I realised that while the business had grown (the team was up to ten people), I was working harder than ever, feeling more stressed, and not really loving my business. As I watched the fishing boats sailing back into shore I thought I need more of this.

I then said to Trish what would we need to do in the business to be able to be a way for two to three months and still have everything run?

Trust in business is completely critical. In his book, Lovemarks, Kevin Roberts writes about trust and respect being the two precursors to a Lovemark. I agree - for someone to love your business, they must first trust and respect it.
 
It's interesting being in Bali, thinking about the cultural aspects of trust in business. In Australia the government basically trusts us to pay our tax. We may get audited, but its largely an honour system. And the vast majority of businesses do pay their taxes. On the other hand, retail stores don't trust the public (and often the staff) not to steal stuff. If you were leaving your shop for five minutes you'd lock the door.
 
Here it's the opposite.

Our experiment to live and work in Bali is underway!
 
A little background ... a six months ago we came for a holiday to Bali for 10 days. I did some reflecting on my business, and realised that while we had grown, had a beautiful office and a growing team that peaked at 10 people, I wasn't loving the business any more. I was working harder to pay everyone, more stressed and had lost my mojo. I was staring out to sea thinking I could get used to this, when I thought 'why not?'
 
Fast forward six months - I've gotten rid off the office, reduced the team, and I've just landed in Bali for a two month experiment to see if its possible to run my business and do my coaching from Bali.

I was at a workshop last weekend - Passion, Power and Purpose. It was a three day bootcamp that Trish had won a ticket to, and kindly offered it to me.
 
It was run by an organisation called Beyond Success. The workshop had a ticket price of about $3k, although most of the 80 people in the room had paid $25k for a one year program.
 
I was fairly disappointed in the workshop. I didn't leave with any great increase in my passion, power or purpose. I think it was partly because I've done a lot of personal development over the years, and so a lot of it wasn't new to me. However I also thought that a lot more work had gone into marketing the workshop than designing the workshop itself.

My last blog was about customer service - how to delight your customers. This week I'm getting on my soap box about a couple of simple things that waste my time and leave me feeling anything but delighted.

The first is a line I see more and more at the bottom of email signatures:

Craig Cherry is in the business of answering this question. He runs a business called The Loyalty Zone and came and spoke about customer service at a Love Your Business seminar a couple of nights ago.
 
Most people I talk to say that word of mouth is their most important form of marketing - me included. However most of us don't know what our customers really think, feel and most importantly say about us.
 
Craig shared with us how exactly how to find out what our customers say. There are three (yep, only three) questions that he recommends we ask to find. The first question is:

Every second week I have the pleasure of hanging out with my two nephews, Jarrah and Sam, and doing pretty much whatever they want to do. Jarrah is four and Sam is coming up to two.

Last Sunday we were sitting in a cafe sipping our babycinos and my cup-of-cino (Jarrah normally orders, and he thinks a cappuccino is a cup-of-cino, and I think that's too cool to correct), when Jarrah asked me an interesting question.

I was part of a very interesting conversation about leadership last week facilitated by Sean Richardson. Sean is the high performance coach and sports psychologist at the St Kilda Football club. He proposed that great leadership strikes a balance between support and challenge.

I think it’s a great model. I remember a team I was leading many years ago when I was working as a business consultant with Accenture. It was a software development team, and there were two guys in particular that I remember. Daniel was a gun, and Jeff was considerably less so.

My leadership style (although perhaps "leadership style" is overstating it slightly) was very different for the two of them.

A key leadership distinction in the Love Your Business Method is creating your core values; and it's one of the first things that I work on with my coaching clients.

However it sometimes seems like a futile exercise - we create a great set of core values and then ... nothing happens. They aren't discussed, they aren't displayed, they don't seem to make any difference.

I have to somewhat sheepishly admit, looking around our office walls I can't see our core values displayed anywhere. Like the plumber with the leaky tap I guess.