Speaker Blog Posts

Is your small business owed $26,000 from the U.S. government for every worker you employ? That’s the pitch you’re probably getting from services all around the country who claim that because of the Employee Retention Tax Credit the money is owed to you.

I hate when I mess up. On anything. Big things. Small things. Failure drives me crazy. I am my own worst critic. When I make a mistake, I tend to beat myself up. A lot. Self-loathing has been a problem for me for most of my life. Here’s what I have learned.

The reality is that culture is actually much more complex than most realize, especially when it pertains to a business or organization, and what defines culture at a business or organization is how they serve customers and significantly improve the world.

Finishing strong should be something for which we all strive. And one of the greatest examples I know of what it looks like to finish strong is British runner Derek Redmond. In the 1992 Olympic Games, Derek expected to win gold in the 400-meter.

Recently I wrote my annual Forbes article featuring customer service and CX predictions & trends for 2023. No. 4 on the list was Personalization Gets More Personal. The best marketers have realized that personalization is a way to get closer to the customer.

Okay, so maybe this year’s College Football National Championship game wasn’t one for the ages. And it certainly wouldn’t have kept you watching if you favor closely fought competitions, which Georgia’s 65-7 masterclass was never close to providing.

We waved goodbye to 2022, hoped for a better New Year and even made resolutions to ensure it would be even better than the last. And although only 24-hours into the New Year, many of those resolutions have already been broken!

How high is your workplace Kindness Quotient? Kindness is important at work. And everywhere. Popular advice tells people to focus on achieving individual goals to get ahead. Some people work their careers as if it is an individual competitive sport.

Before we do our deep dive, let’s simplify the overall environment for work from home (WFH) or work from anywhere (WFA), boiling it down to incentives driving actions. Let’s start with the negative impact on employees from WFH.

When a client is interested in engaging me to speak at their meeting, I’ll usually ask in our initial call, “Why is hiring a customer service speaker important to you at this time?”  We get many different answers that include low customer satisfaction.

Whether your caregivers read you a nightly bedtime story or your work team regularly meditates before a meeting, you experienced the power of rituals. These small, repetitive acts can shape our behavior and shift our emotions. Rituals can produce big benefits.

I love to fly fish. And, I am fortunate to have the Chattahoochee River running across my backyard only fifty feet from the back door of my river house in North Georgia. It is stocked yearly with beautiful rainbow trout for “catch and release” fly fishing.