Vance Morris, consultant, coach, and speaker, helps service-based businesses break free from the ordinary and create extraordinary customer experiences that generate loyal customers for life. After spending more than a decade working for the Disney Company and learning its powerful systems and processes for customer service, Vance launched his own businesses and built them around those principles—eventually creating companies that run largely without his daily involvement.

We explore Vance’s Customer Experience System, a framework for turning ordinary interactions into memorable moments that create lifelong customers. The system focuses on mapping all customer points of contact, ideating experiences for each boring touchpoint, prioritizing the biggest impact moments, and memorializing those experiences in systems or playbooks so they can be delivered consistently by the team. Vance explains how businesses can create “tellable moments,” recover from service mistakes in memorable ways, and build repeatable marketing systems that generate referrals and long-term customer loyalty.

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Get Customers 17 Ways with Vance Morris

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Vance Morris, a consultant, coach, and speaker, who helps advisor-based businesses break free from the ordinary and step into the extraordinary. Vance, welcome to the show.

I appreciate it, Steve. Thank you so much.

Your background is very interesting and your whole idea of making customer experience unique, and also you have unique ways of acquiring customers. So let’s get into it. But I’d like to start with my favorite question: What is your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in your business?

My personal ‘Why’ is very strong, and that is I never want to be an employee ever again. I make a lousy employee. I don’t like to be told what to do. And so knowing that has kept me on this entrepreneurial path for the last 19 years.

Okay, well, I can relate to this. I can relate to this. That’s a big thing when you are in charge of your own time. It’s a big blessing. Some people make a lot of money, but if they don’t own their time, it’s not ideal.

I agree 100%. Yes, sir.

Yeah. Love it. Let’s talk a little bit about your journey. I mean, how did you end up being a non-employee and being your own boss and advising companies, what the route led you down this path?

Sure. Well, the long and short of it, I spent a little over a decade working for the Disney Company down in Orlando, Florida. Magnificent experience. Great company to work for. Towards the end, I was starting to get that inkling that maybe I should be doing something on my own. So I went out and worked as an employee and a consultant at the same time for a couple of different restaurant concepts. And then I had a couple of high-profile positions. I was catering director for the Smithsonian Museum System, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, things like that. And along the way, I realized that I do indeed make a lousy employee because I got fired a couple of times. So I own up to it. I’m okay with it. But I said to myself, let’s put something together that will be your own and we’ll be able to afford the lifestyle that you’re looking for. So about 20 years ago, I started a couple of home service businesses.

I took all of my Disney knowledge and Disney systems and processes—both on customer experience and customer retention
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and importantly pricing—and put those all into those businesses and started to grow them. And people started asking me, well, geez, Vance, you don’t look like you’re working very hard. How are you doing that? So I back in 2013, I started consulting with other companies, primarily professional services, on how to really deliver extraordinary customer experiences that will lead to what I call raving fans for life, or customers for life.

I love it. No better place to learn than at Disney, right?

Yeah, I mean, it was great. And one of the first things I learned there was that Disney operates 100% on systems and processes. I mean, I ain’t sure we learned how to pick up trash and smile at people, but the biggest lesson was Disney has a process for everything. You want to carry a tray in a restaurant, they got a process. You want to change a bus tire, they have a process. So I took that everywhere I went, which has actually led me to be fairly autonomous from my home service businesses because I put systems and processes in place, and I only spend about 90 minutes a week on those businesses.

That’s fantastic. So let’s talk about these processes, particularly the customer experience processes that you have installed. And actually you have a process for installing processes, which is kind of a system to enhance the customer experience and then keep customers for a long time. You talk about keeping them for life. So tell me about that system and how do you delight customers on a schedule?

Sure. So the process is called Systematic Magic, and there’s seven magic keys to this system. And it’s designed to really look at all different parts of the business in order to surprise and delight folks. Some of it is not very sexy. I will admit that ahead of time. Some of it you’ll be like, oh my God, I get it. So the first thing that you have to do, though—and this is the unsexy part of it—is you have to map out your customer journey. And you have to do it from the point of view of your customer. So what is the first point of contact a customer has with you? Is it a phone call, a visit to the office, a website? What is that first contact? And then figure out how to create an experience out of that. And then what’s the second contact?

Now in between first and second contact, let’s say you’re a financial advisor, and in the first meeting you get all the numbers and all their information. You say, okay, it’s going to be about seven to ten days, I’ll get you a proposal or a plan a week and a half or so. So while the financial advisor is working, they’re actually doing something. What is the customer doing? Absolutely nothing. They’re sitting there waiting. And waiting is painful. While waiting, things start to go through your head. You start to possibly have buyer’s remorse. You’re rethinking this purchase. Is there somebody out there better? Is this guy even paying attention to me? I just met him and I haven’t seen him in a week and a half. So Disney—people wait for a lot of things at Disney.

You wait for the rides. You wait for transportation. But they figured out that they need to entertain you while you’re in line to make it not feel so bad. And they call it “linertainment.” So this is something that I’ve brought to other businesses is how do you entertain your customer while they are waiting for you to do something? It could be as simple as a maybe a sequence of a handwritten note that goes out in the mail on the first day. A follow up call from your assistant saying, Hey, Bob’s working on your plan. He hasn’t forgot about you. And then maybe you’ve written a book. And so getting that book in the mail to your client would be another step, really trying to make that wait period not feel so long. And also remind the customer that you’re still thinking about them.

Yeah. Love it. That’s brilliant. So you talk about this process of mapping out the points of contact, and then you talk about the boring touch points. You talk about ideating experience in each boring touch point. So tell me about boring touch points. I understand waiting is definitely boring.

Sure.

It’s such much a touch point. It’s more of a boring time period.

Disney has figured out how to create an experience out of all of the boring and mundane things we have to do to keep our business up and running: answer the phone, greet a guest, show them how to enter a building. So I’ve brought that to the real world. Quick example. So I have a insurance broker. And he’s got Allstate agent, and he has about 17 other Allstate guys in his area, in addition to all of the other regular insurance guys in his area. And he needed a way to stand out because insurance is a highly commoditized business. You don’t really know what’s the difference between one guy and the next. One has a lizard, one has a something else. So I got to his office. I noticed that he was a rock and roll fanatic. I mean, he had autographed guitars on the wall, gold records, posters, and everything. And I said, well,

I think you should lean into your personality a little bit and be the rock and roll insurance guy.
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And his receptionist was the one that came up with the way to answer the phone. Before, like most companies, they would say, “Thank you for calling Dave’s Insurance. How can I help you?” Boring. Everybody says that. So his receptionist suggested, well, we should probably, let’s sound like a radio DJ and really make it an experience out of answering the phone.

So now they say: “Thank you for calling Dave’s Allstate, the agency that rocks.” That’s a little corny the first few times you say it, but if you think about it, your marketing is designed to do two things: repel the people you don’t want and attract the people you do want. So just by answering the phone this way, they sift, sort, and screen out anybody who would be a bad customer.

Yeah. Love it. That’s a good example. How do you know which are the biggest impact points in this series of touch points, and we have to focus your energy?

Well, what you want to do once you’ve completed journey mapping is look at points where you may have the most impact on either the experience or on your profitability. Or is there something glaring that’s like, “Oh my God, we have to fix this”? And so you look for those opportunities within your journey map, and so it’s going to be different for everyone. The one place that I see most businesses falling down is after the sale is complete. So after money exchanges hands. So you get the check and that’s it. The customer never hears from you again because you got the money. It’s like going into the department store and you want to buy a shirt, you walk into the store and you’re immediately accosted by a salesperson who will follow you everywhere. Get you all set up, get your shirt, you pay for the shirt, and then that’s it.

Nobody talks to you. Nobody escorts you to the front door, holds the door open for you. Thanks you for coming in. They got the money, and off they go. You have to look at, okay, I got your check, or I got your credit card. Now we’re in a relationship. We need to continue to nurture that. Most businesses will think, well, you know what? I did a good job, or I’ve got a great product. People should remember me. And that is so far from the truth.

It's not the customer's job to remember you. It's your job to remind the customer that you exist. You need to have strategies and tactics in place after the sale in order to keep them engaged.
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Can you give some examples?

Sure, certainly. And this really will work for any business, either online or offline. B2C, B2B—it doesn’t matter. One thing I strongly recommend is a newsletter, preferably in print and sent through the mail. Newsletters designed to do a couple of things. One, it’s to entertain them, because you don’t always want to be selling to people. If the only time your customer ever hears from you is when you want to sell them something, well—that’s not really nice. All you’re doing is just asking for money every time.

So you want to be able to provide value, provide some entertainment, be a welcome guest in their home when your newsletter arrives.
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Now you can then supplement that with postcard or a series of emails and have calls to action, sales, or promotions there. But not everything should be a sales item. It should be there to reinforce the relationship or the emotional connection that you put together.

Yeah, love it. Some companies used to do this really intensively. I was part of Dan Kennedy’s inner circle in the 2000s, and they were sending CDs in the mail, all kinds of different postcards and funny mail, and copy. And they were really intense with it. They had lumpy mail—this kind of stuff—but it kind of went out of fashion. It seems like people don’t send stuff in the mail much anymore, or what you get is 90% of it lands in the trash unopened.

I mean, people have gotten lazy, I think. The internet is there—oh, I can just send an email, click, and it’s done. There’s a certain art to putting together lumpy mail. I certainly still believe in it. I use it almost every day. And Kennedy was a tremendous mentor to me as well. And I think that something he said it has always stuck with me is look at what all of your competitors are doing and do the opposite.

Opposite. Yeah.

So if all of your competitors are marketing online, well, how do we go and market and find our customers offline? And really, I mean, if you look at your mailbox, I mean, I got the mail today. I had a newspaper and a credit card solicitation.

Yeah.

That was it.

Yeah. Incidentally, Kennedy was a big Disney fan. He took tours of members to Disney every year, showed them around, and used it as an example.

He loved it.

Yeah. Let’s switch gears here a little bit and let’s talk about your marketing system because you don’t just have a customer experience system, you have a marketing system as well. And it kind of blew my mind when you told me that you have 17 different systems to acquire a customer. And you actually have 52 ways to connect with a customer as well, or maybe I’m confusing the two. So tell me a little bit about the different ways of acquiring customers?

Sure. So you got the numbers right, just in the wrong section, but that’s fine. What you need is a CRM, or customer relationship management system. You need to be able to automate this. There’s no way that I could even think remotely that I was going to be able to manage all of that. So if you look inside—like I mentioned, I own some home service businesses—we currently have probably about 70 marketing campaigns running. Everything from Google pay-per-click to referral campaigns, to reminder campaigns, reminding people they need to be cleaned and things like that.

And you don’t want to rely on just one thing, because as we all know, one is the worst number in business. If you only have one way of getting clients, and that way goes away, you’re in big trouble. So I don’t like to rely on the internet because that goes down, and Google or Facebook change their algorithms every other week. It’s a big guessing game. I would much rather have boots on the ground, so to speak, and go out and get my own customers. So we have a salesperson or a marketing person, and her job is to go around our entire area, creating referral partnerships and then maintaining those referral partnerships.

So when people say, “Oh, we get all our business from referrals,” I ask them, I say, well, do you have a system for that, or you just get one or two every now and then? And most people don’t have a system. And a system is what’s going to, one, add tremendous value to your company when you’re ready to sell it. But two, it’s something that is repeatable and replicable.

So if you want to step away from your business for a period of time, you have systems in place that your employees just have to run.
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In eight years, I spend about 90 minutes a week on my home service companies. I’ve got three businesses, and I spend 90 minutes a week on all three. An hour of that is just a meeting with the general manager that I put in place. The other 30 minutes, I keep control of the bank accounts—I never let go of that. So those systems have given me freedom to be able to come and go as I please from those businesses. And the businesses run without me. So without a marketing system in place, or a marketing checklist, we hear the story: would you ever get on an airplane where the pilot decided, “You know what? I’m not going to do the pre-flight checklist today. I’m just going to wing it”?

Yeah.

You don’t want to get on that airplane. Well, same thing goes for your marketing. I’m forgetful. I got a lot of stuff going on. Here’s the checklist, here’s the system. Follow it and get it done.

Love it. So yes, I think you’re right, I mixed it up. So 52 ways to acquire customer, 17 systems to acquire customers. What type of systems are we talking about? You mentioned the CRM, obviously that’s a system. What other types of systems do you have?

Sure. So certainly, the customer acquisition systems that we have in place—as I mentioned—we have the salesperson, we have Google pay-per-click, we have direct mail, we have shared mailings. And for customer retention, we also have a ton of different systems. Again, of them is, every month we take the top five customers we have and we send them a cake. I mean, when was the last time you had an electrician, a carpet cleaner, or somebody come to your house, do some work, and then send you a cake in the mail? It’s probably not happening. We do a lot of things like that because we want to be tellable. We want people, at the end of any interaction with us, to say, “Oh my God, you’ll never guess what happened when and [insert profession here]. So, “Oh my God, you never guess what happened when the carpet cleaner was here—they mailed me a cake after the cleaning.”

So you want to get people thinking, “Oh my God, what can I do to really get people talking about me?” How can we—not so much viral—but genuine postings of things? I mean, we do handwritten thank-you notes for everybody. That’s one of the systems. It’s got to the point where I had to subcontract the handwritten thank-you notes because I don’t have time to write a hundred of them every week. So I went out and “rented” some grandmas. I went over to a local senior center, and there was this group of three ladies just sitting there having coffee. I asked them, “How often do you get together?” “Oh, we get together at least three times a week. We have coffee and we talk.” I said, “Do you ever get bored?” She said, “Yeah, sometimes.” I said, “Great. I’ll be more than happy to buy you coffee and donuts and whatever. Would you mind writing some thank-you notes for us?” And now I’ve got three grandmas who write all of the thank-you notes for one of my businesses.

Fantastic. So these are some the systems. What are the 52 ways? I think you also have some kind of a freebie for listeners.

Yeah.

Could share it for us?

So the 52 Ways to Wow Your Customers. It’s one “wow” for every week of the year, and most of them are low or no cost.
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One could be just, “Hey, when was the last time you picked up the phone and actually called and talked to a few of your customers?” I mean, nobody uses the telephone anymore. They send a text or something impersonal like that. Pick up the phone and talk to them. Are you contemplating a new product? Go to your existing customers and say, “Hey, you know what? I’m getting ready to launch this product. I’d love for you to test it. Would you do that for me?” 99.9% of people want to help you. So yes, they’re going to say, “Yeah, I’d love to test your new product or service.” It’s things like that that build up the 52 Ways. You don’t need all of them—certainly pick one, two, or ten—so that you stay in front of your clients and really stand out.

One of the things I talk a lot about is service recovery—like when you screw up something. One way to wow your customer is, what do you do if you’re late? So if we are going to an appointment and we’re running behind, our technicians know that they are to stop at a grocery store or a florist and buy some flowers for the house that we’re going to. I mean, you can’t yell at a guy. The client answers the door, and there’s a 20-something-year-old standing with a bouquet of flowers. You really can’t yell at him. And then again, that’s tellable. We know we made a mistake or we were delayed. We want to make it up to you. Here’s some flowers. And then we may do some other kind of discount or something. But yeah, it’s about looking for what would make you happy.

Love it. Yeah. I had a client who was a construction company, and what they did was for every client that they had, that was one of their jobs is to figure out what they would really love having the new home. For example, one of the things that they did was one of the customers had the house in Hoboken, and they kinda loved the New York skyline to see from the yard, and then they moved down to Richmond. This came up in conversation—they mentioned this was something they would miss. And then what they did was they basically did a wall-to-wall poster. They took a picture of the exact skyline position, and they put a wall-to-wall poster on one of the rooms.

Oh, that’s brilliant. Oh, that’s fantastic.

Yeah.

I mean, construction and trades can easily do this. I’ve got a kitchen and bath remodeler as a client. Remodeling can be a disaster in somebody’s house, so he knows that maybe on a day when there’s not going to be a stove in the kitchen, he actually brings a gift card for a local restaurant so the family can go out to eat. Or if it’s lunchtime and there are people in the house and they can’t use the kitchen, he’ll order DoorDash for his clients. Now, of course, all this is built into the pricing. But it’s the matter that you’re thinking about doing these things is what really counts.

Yeah. Wonderful. Wonderful. Alright, so if someone would like to learn more and connect with you—maybe they have a home service business, a retail business, or any other type of business—they could use your suggestions. I think any kind of business, even business-to-business, would work because, at the end of the day, it’s mostly people, if not AI, that you’re connecting with. So where should they go? How can they connect with you, and how can you help them?

Yeah, certainly. So I only do one social media, and that’s LinkedIn. You can find me there. I’m the only Vance Morris Disney guy floating around out there. You mentioned the 52 Ways to Wow Your Customers. If that’s something people are interested in, it’s a free download at www.wow52ways.com .

wow52ways.com. Alright, so I’ll definitely download it. So, Vance, any parting words or wisdom for our listeners before we wrap up?

Well, you probably heard a couple of ideas on this podcast—at least I hope so. Maybe you read something today, maybe you heard something else.

You’re not going to move the needle in your business unless you actually do something. You’re not going to profit unless you implement.
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You’ve got to take an idea, try it, and put it into play before you can move the needle in any direction. So my big message is find one thing and go and implement it.

Love it. This is so true. I mean, it’s the definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, right?

Right.

Well, listeners, if you enjoyed this discussion, stay tuned because every week we have a wonderful entrepreneur or thought leader coming and sharing the best ideas with you. And Vance, thank you for sharing your gold nuggets. And do reach out to Vance Morris on LinkedIn, or get his freebies on wow52ways.com, right?

Yes.

That’s the website. I’m going to do that. So thank you Vance, for coming, and thank you for listening.

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Get Customers 17 Ways with Vance Morris

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