Why Josh Liebman Thinks Every Business, Including Manufacturing, Needs a "Hospitality Mentality"
Manufacturing Happy Hour
Manufacturing Happy Hour host Chris Luecke recorded this episode in person for the first time, over chicken wings and beer at Tunes, a bar in Chicago's Southport Corridor near Wrigley Field. The guest was Josh Liebman: guest experience consultant, co-host of the AttractionPros podcast, and author of The Hospitality Mentality. Josh had last appeared on the show in Episode 17, recorded in May 2020, where the two discussed what manufacturers could learn from the amusement park industry.
This conversation asks whether the mindset behind a great theme park or restaurant visit carries over to a B2B manufacturer shipping product to other businesses. Josh's answer is that it does. Any business that deals with other human beings, which he says means every business, can use the same principles to turn first-time customers into loyal advocates. Chris kept testing that claim against the realities of the plant floor and long B2B relationships.
Revisiting the first conversation
Both men listened back to Episode 17 before recording. Chris noted that the earlier episode held up better than old content often does, partly because both were already experienced podcasters. Manufacturing Happy Hour had been running for about eight months at that point. AttractionPros had been running for nearly three years, having started in late summer 2017.
Chris picked up one idea from that episode. Josh had described how an amusement park opens each day with checklists covering both operations and guest experience. Manufacturers already run operational checklists daily, so Chris asked whether other industries could run those checklists with the customer in mind.
Josh agreed and split the idea into two separate checklists. The first covers functional needs. In a park, that means binary, tangible questions such as whether the gates around rides are properly locked. The second checklist asks about intangibles: what guests, customers, or business partners actually expect when they deal with you. That shifts the questions to more abstract ones. Is the environment welcoming? Is my attitude personable, or am I only meeting the functional needs of the business? Am I doing something that shows I am personally invested in this relationship, and not just financially? Josh said the aim is to show customers that they made the right choice by doing business with you.
Defining the hospitality mentality
Asked to describe the mentality as he would to someone over wings and beer, Josh said it is a mindset that anyone in any industry can adopt. Its first component is recognizing that the people you serve don't need you. That applies whether you call them customers, guests, clients, partners, or vendors. They can do business elsewhere, or do something else with their lives entirely. The actions you take should show that you understand this. Chris recalled that Josh had made the same point in their first conversation more than three and a half years earlier.
How the book came together
Josh said the idea for the book came more than ten years ago. He was connecting dots between the guest experience he observed in attractions, tourism, and hospitality and the gaps where he felt the industry could do better. He didn't want to write a list of what was going wrong and how to fix it. He wanted to describe a holistic approach. More than eleven years ago, he opened PowerPoint one night and built a complex diagram out of shapes and arrows. He says he is thankful it never became public, though Chris asked to see it. The central question of that flowchart was how to take someone who has just learned a business exists and turn them into a loyal advocate, "a customer for life," and what happens in between.
The ideas first turned into a consulting business. Then clients asked Josh to build a guest service training program. He felt qualified to do it: he had overseen guest communications at major theme parks, and he holds a master's degree in hospitality and a bachelor's in theme park management. He started delivering that training more than seven years ago.
The workshops became a testing ground. Attendees ranged from owners and executives to frontline staff. In Josh's industry, the frontline staff deliver the experience and "make or break" the organization's standard. He watched where "the light bulbs were going off" for each group and kept refining the material. He also drew on interviews with industry experts on his podcast and on published research and data. All of this went, in his words, into a funnel, and the framework that came out became the book.
What a raving fan actually does
Chris asked what a raving fan looks like. Josh started with the familiar image of a shirtless football fan in body paint, then broke the idea down into practical behaviors.
First, raving fans come back and keep doing business with you. Second, they influence others. Josh acknowledged that "influencer" now makes people think of TikTok accounts with a million followers. He argued the word applies more broadly. If Chris recommended a particular pool table for a bar or a particular microphone for podcasting, that would be influence. He cited someone who said they treat every guest as an influencer, whether that guest has ten followers or ten million, because everyone knows people in the business's target demographic.
Third, raving fans defend you. Josh gave the example of a business in a PR crisis posting on Facebook. Most comments may attack it, but loyal customers will say things the business itself can't say within its own communication standards. Coming from them, it is acceptable. Josh said the book focuses mainly on the first two behaviors.
Chris had underlined that third point in his copy. He said B2B manufacturing customers are loyal and influence others by describing good experiences with a vendor or value-added reseller. However, they don't post about suppliers online with the enthusiasm the two of them bring to tweeting about roller coasters. What stood out to Chris was that loyal customers, when something goes wrong, tend to use a private channel. They send an email or message saying, in effect, "I love working with you, but this is out of the norm." They don't criticize publicly on Twitter or, in manufacturing, on LinkedIn. Chris sees that moment as an opportunity to fix the problem and a way to identify who your raving fans are.
Josh agreed. Anyone can now criticize a business well beyond their inner circle with no barriers. Loyal fans know the business isn't perfect and speak up privately precisely because they want to stay loyal.
A restaurant that missed its chance
Josh gave a personal example. There is a restaurant near his home that he had visited frequently since it opened and loved. About seven months before the recording, he had a poor experience there. His personal rule is to report bad experiences by email or website contact form, not publicly. The goal is to give the business the benefit of the doubt, since he knows its normal standard. He never got a response.
As a result, he is in no hurry to return, and when friends ask where to eat in the neighborhood, it won't be top of mind. He described the alternative he had hoped for: an immediate reply acknowledging him as a regular, saying the experience wasn't their standard and explaining what they would do. That, he said, would have fully restored his satisfaction, reinforced his loyalty, and made him a more frequent customer. He would also have told people the restaurant is great and fixes things when they go wrong.
The math of a negative review
Chris raised a statistic from the book: one negative review can dissuade about 30 other people from visiting a business. Josh confirmed it and framed it as simple math about what a poor experience costs. The review could be on TripAdvisor, Google, or Yelp. In a close-knit industry where people talk to each other, Josh suggested the effect could be even larger than 30.
The next step is to multiply those lost prospects by average spend. Chris noted that the book uses an amusement park example of a couple hundred dollars per guest. Manufacturers whose customers spend four, five, or six figures would get an "astronomical" number. Josh's conclusion was that a recovery costing $1,000 or $5,000 stings in the moment, but you should weigh it against what you save.
The recovery paradox
Josh then explained the recovery paradox. He said research on it goes back to roughly the 1990s and early 2000s and applies across industries. When customers have a poor experience, speak up, and have it handled well through service recovery and complaint resolution, their satisfaction afterward is higher than that of customers whose experience was satisfactory from the start.
Josh said that in his industry, the odds are often stacked against simply getting people in the door, so this is something to capitalize on. Aiming for 100% satisfaction is "table stakes." Businesses should also accept that defects and negative experiences will occasionally happen and build service recovery into their culture and operations. Doing so cancels out the bad experience, regains satisfaction and trust, and in many cases, he argued, leads to loyalty.
He told a story from a workshop earlier that year at a family entertainment center, a venue with arcade games, a bar, and mini golf. While he was explaining the recovery paradox to frontline staff, mostly high school and college students, the general manager stood up. The GM told the team that what Josh was saying was 100% true and started naming guests. Everyone nodded, recognizing them as some of the center's most loyal customers. These are families who sit at the same booth every Sunday and order a large cheese pizza and a pitcher of Coke. According to the GM, their first visit had gone badly, and the staff had stepped in and recovered it.
Josh applied this to Chris's audience. If a manufacturer sells a product worth five, six, or seven figures and something goes wrong, the cost of fixing it shouldn't be written off as a cost of doing business or a loss from a mistake. It is an investment in loyalty that can multiply the value of that customer over time, because otherwise they would have gone elsewhere.
He added a point about reviews. A review that says "I had a problem, but Chris called me the next morning, was the nicest person, and invited us back," with five stars attached, is a five-star review. Josh said that when he sees a review like that near the top of a listing, it is often the deciding factor for him. It shows the problem that can happen to anyone was solved.
Getting the front line to care
Chris noted that manufacturing is in "the age of the frontline worker." New tools let plant-floor workers make many of the decisions that drive how companies operate, which he considers a good thing. The difference from attractions is that park employees see guests every day, while plant workers usually don't. Chris asked how to instill the hospitality mentality in them.
Josh said he always has two audiences when selling his training. For decision-makers, he explains that loyalty means revenue, influence, word of mouth, and lower marketing costs. Frontline staff are the second audience. He does connect the training to company goals for them, but that isn't his main message. He talks instead about why it is good for them personally, as human beings. He believes interacting with guests well is one of the most fulfilling things a person can do. Josh has worked on the front line himself, having started at an amusement park the day after turning 18.
He described it through the daily commute. The drive in may involve hitting snooze, skipping breakfast, and thinking "another day at work." The drive home is about wanting to decompress, play video games, have a drink, and go to bed. If the work in between is tied to how it makes people feel, Josh argues, the fact that it helps the business becomes "irrelevant." After creating a wow moment or recovering a bad experience, someone driving home can think that they didn't just do a good job but affected someone's life. A theme park visit may seem trivial on the surface. But it involves memories and a guest's sense that their money, time, and energy were well spent. Josh says that feeling carries into the next morning: getting up before the alarm, eating a good breakfast, ready to do it again. It builds momentum.
For manufacturers, he suggests taking the same concepts and explaining why they benefit the individual doing the work. That boosts motivation, and in turn performance, because people are doing it for themselves and not only for the organization. Chris said this matched manufacturing's constant challenge of getting both decision-makers and the people who carry out the work on board.
High value, low cost, and when hospitality backfires
Asked for a few practical pieces of advice for creating raving fans, Josh offered two. First, step back from your customer experience. It is easy to reduce it to a list of tasks. He recommends asking why each task matters, what it implies, and what its benefit is even if it has a cost.
Second, ask what you can offer that has high value to the customer but little or no cost to the business. He applies this in two places. One is service recovery, meaning how you compensate customers and resolve failures. The other is the front end: creating experiences beyond expectations that don't take anything away from other customers. Josh believes that when businesses look at their intangible assets, they find many things customers value that cost little or nothing.
Chris connected this to an example in the book about waiting in a hotel check-in line. The front desk staff were extremely friendly and chatty, which is good in principle. But with a long line, the priority should be moving people through. Josh confirmed it was his own experience: he was waiting before breakfast, possibly without coffee, and became "hangry" watching "the friendliest people in the world" go above and beyond for someone else. He called it a case where hospitality backfires.
Chris said that as a business owner, he now looks for things that have high impact for the people he serves, take little extra effort, and ideally can be turned into a repeatable process.
Memories are the business model
Chris asked how Josh's thinking had changed since 2020. Josh said his mindset hasn't shifted away from anything in the book. What has changed is how he articulates the ideas. After submitting the manuscript, he had to choose whether to stop thinking about the material, and his brain decided to keep going. He has kept finding new ways to package the concepts.
One recent example involves a common phrase in attractions and hospitality: creating "memories that last a lifetime." Josh called it a warm, fuzzy statement that makes people feel good. What the industry rarely says, in his view, is that it is actually the business model. In the book, he quotes a researcher's idea that people don't choose between experiences; they choose between their memories of experiences. Josh explained the chain like this. How we remember an experience shapes how we perceive it. That perception determines satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Satisfaction then determines how we share, and today broadcast, the experience through reviews and personal influence. The goal, as Josh put it, is to give people something that, when they recall it, exceeded their high expectations and makes them want to return and tell others.
Why a pineapple
Chris pointed out that Josh had kept a sweatshirt zipped over a pineapple-print shirt the whole time. Josh said he chose the shirt for the video, then added a layer because it was mid-December in Chicago, with temperatures in the mid-20s to low 30s.
He explained the pineapple as the international symbol of hospitality and traced it to colonial America. Explorers left home for weeks or months, and many didn't return. Those who did brought back exotic plants, fruits, and stories. Pineapples were a common souvenir. Returning travelers would put a pineapple on a spear in front of their home. It announced that they were back safe, and it invited people in to hear stories and share the exotic foods and spices they had brought. Over time, Josh said, the pineapple became the symbol of hospitality, and it now appears in hotels, restaurants, websites, and marketing materials. That is why he put it on the book's cover. His wife gave him the shirt to wear at a launch event held a couple of weeks before the official publication date.
Stories as the bridge to manufacturing
Chris used the pineapple story to answer his own question about how "memories that last a lifetime" applies to a manufacturer trying to get product out the door rather than heading to Cedar Point. The link, he suggested, is stories. Whether B2C or B2B, what people pass along to one another is stories about what it was like to work with you. He cited marketer and author Seth Godin's idea of being a "purple cow," something remarkable and worth talking about. If a company can turn its work into a story worth telling, Chris said, that is where Josh's ideas apply even for skeptics.
Josh agreed and developed the idea. He contrasted it with "death by PowerPoint": a presentation full of bullet points about what a product does. Instead, a seller could ask what success stories other clients have had and what benefits go beyond what's listed in the brochure. He suggests entering a meeting or sales pitch by asking how this person will remember their experience with you that day. Going back to the core principle, they could buy anywhere else, so what will set this apart from a competitor's bullet-point pitch? Josh added a caveat: the core product has to be 100% right first. The basics come before the extras. Once they are in place, you build a narrative that makes people leave saying "wow." He acknowledged that "wow experiences" can sound like a nice-to-have. His argument is that the wow cements a memory, which turns into future business and into what customers tell others. Chris summed it up as "memory, action, future business."
A mission that hasn't changed
Chris noted that in their first conversation, Josh described his mission as helping companies enhance the guest experience they deliver, and nearly four years later the mission was unchanged. Chris asked whether that surprised Josh.
Josh said he has been passionate about the topic for a long time. The story he tells today is very similar to the one he has been building for years, but he keeps finding ways to present it that resonate better with the people he wants to reach. Some parts are almost verbatim from the first training program he built more than seven and a half years ago. That client had asked how to improve customer service and how to become "the Chick-fil-A" of their attraction segment. Josh finds it exciting that the message has now become a book and keeps building on itself. He invited Chris to ask the same question again in another three and a half years.
Chris reflected on what that consistency does for a career. Neither of them ran their own business at the time of the first episode, and both do now. He also recalled their friendship. At the end of Episode 17, they recorded a bonus episode about roller coasters, and Josh cracking a beer signaled that the conversation would continue. In 2021, at this same bar, Chris asked how to get more involved in the attractions industry. The two wrote goals on a bar napkin: attend the IAAPA conference and record podcasts with people in the industry. Chris still has the napkin. Chris took notes during this recording with an IAAPA pen, deliberately. His point was that sticking with something connects you with people who share your passions and can change a career, even if only gradually. The changes weren't only professional: the room Chris recorded the first episode from became a nursery a few months later.
What Josh learned from manufacturing
Chris then reversed the question and asked what Josh had learned from manufacturing. About a year before they first met, Josh read Eric Ries's The Lean Startup, which he described as a business book largely based on Toyota's manufacturing principles. He grew up in Detroit, where he learned about Ford and the assembly line, and he found Toyota's approach to be the opposite. He stressed that he isn't a manufacturing expert.
What struck him was Ries's description of Toyota producing one vehicle at a time. When something needs to change or be fixed, it can be done in real time, and only the vehicle currently in production is affected. On an assembly line, by contrast, a defect means fixing everything produced from the point where the error occurred. Under the single-unit approach, each improvement carries into the next unit, so every unit is better than the last, and the process keeps iterating. Josh took from this the idea of the feedback loop.
He applied it to attractions through guest feedback. A park aims to give every guest a perfect experience but accepts that it won't always succeed. Collecting feedback shows where the experience falls short. The park makes improvements, measures whether they worked, and once one pain point disappears, the next one rises to the surface. Josh noted, calling it "very meta," that he built a feedback-collection process for his industry. It is designed to help businesses optimize their feedback loop, which Chris believed was the title of chapter nine. Josh said the process doesn't assume perfection. It gives businesses the data to know what to improve next, so the operation and the business keep getting better as the product improves.
Chris framed this as a main takeaway of the episode: much of what you learn comes from outside your own bubble. Josh doesn't learn only from the attractions industry, and manufacturers shouldn't learn only from manufacturing.
Closing round: beer, coasters, and fandom
When Chris asked if anything had been missed, Josh pointed out that Chris hadn't asked which beer he was drinking, as he had in the first episode. It was a Christmas ale from Begyle, one of Josh's favorite breweries, located near his home. The recording date was December 19.
Chris then updated his roller coaster answer. In 2020 he had named Superman at Six Flags New England as his favorite. After two trips to Cedar Point with Josh since then, Chris now agrees with Josh that Millennium Force is the best roller coaster in the world. Chris cited the lake view, the drop, and the overbanked turn, and said the ride has aged well enough to remind enthusiasts why they love coasters. Josh mentioned that he interviewed Sascha Czibulka, executive vice president of Intamin, on AttractionPros and intentionally made it episode 310 to match Millennium Force's height in feet. He admitted he "nerded out" on that one.
Chris ended with an observation from attending IAAPA, including in 2023. The attractions industry has true raving fans, and exhibitors at trade shows are sometimes approached by people who just want to say how much they love their work, even when those exhibitors are trying to close deals. It can be tiring, Chris said, but he believes almost any other industry would envy that kind of enthusiasm. That, he said, is part of why fandom was the subject of this episode.
Cheers from across the... we can reach, we can reach, there we go. Yeah, all right. Welcome to your first in-person episode of Manufacturing Happy Hour, Chris. I feel like this is a bucket list item right here. I am eating wings, drinking beer, and we're recording a podcast together, so what more do I need in life?
Well, I think you should add that it's at one of your favorite bars and a spot that I have come to enjoy as well since you introduced me to it as well. Tell us about the spot where we're hanging out right now.
That's true. We're at Tunes in the Southport Corridor area of Chicago, part of the Lakeview neighborhood, really close to Wrigley Field, and it's just a wonderful spot. They have fantastic wings, they have plenty of beers on tap, and service as well.
This is the second time you and I have hung out here. Before, first time podcasting, second time hanging out, and I can attest to the fact that they have wonderful wings as well, which brings us to a monumental occasion on this podcast actually as we get going in the intro. I don't know if the audience is going to like it or not, but hey, it's a holiday episode, we're going to do whatever we want. So we actually have wings in front of us. We are going to have the final wing of our set and try not to get the buffalo sauce on the microphone, just to let people know how good it is.
And I will say, if someone's watching on camera, they can see that I'm pouring my blue cheese on the wing itself. I don't dip, I pour it on there to evenly distribute it. How do you eat your wings?
Actually, you know, Chris, I don't think I've ever talked about chicken wing eating strategy with anybody, but I'm usually just a plunker, and it might be a fact that I'm impatient to evenly distribute the blue cheese across the wing. But I think I'm going to try it next time I get wings. I think I'm just going to... might do a nice drizzle, you know, call it a glaze, right? A blue cheese glaze across the...
You do eat quickly, you demolish your food. And as someone that just took a bite of his own wing on this side of the table, I will say it is something you kind of need to move the microphone out of for a little bit. I think you got it past it though, you have better...
Best I'm... I'm sliding it through on the left-hand side here, got the mic on the right-hand side. Yeah, you have better wing eating, even podcasting technique than I do.
You know, someone should make a show where they eat wings and talk about stuff. I can't believe no one's done this before. Nobody has ever done interviews while eating hot wings at all. Yeah, can't believe we just invented it. I know, going to be a million-dollar idea for someone. I'm not going to talk with my mouth full for most of this interview, so I am going to finish this wing for a second.
I'll figure out if I'm going to edit some of this out later. Apologies to your audience for having to just hear us chew here. Welcome to the wing chewing podcast. Yes, Wing Chewing Happy Hour. Although wings and happy hour go well together, it actually is kind of shocking that it's taken this long to have a chicken wing on the show before. Thrilled to be on the maiden voyage here of eating wings on the podcast. Is there sauce on my face? You're good, you're pretty good. I think I've got some on mine. I'll get it out of there at some point.
You naturally finished your wing a lot faster than I did. I'm going to set my plate to the side, if you want to put yours on the ground so it's out of eye shot for most of this interview. But I'm glad our first inaugural moment of eating wings on the show went so well, because that could have gone really poorly, and it's been captured well.
While I'm licking my fingers and getting buffalo sauce out of the way, the natural first question I have to ask is: how do you describe the Hospitality Mentality as if you're having wings and beer with someone? Describe the mentality, don't necessarily describe the book yet, we'll get to the book in a second. But what is the Hospitality Mentality?
Excellent question, great note to start on here too. So the Hospitality Mentality is a mindset that anyone in any industry can embrace, and it involves a few different components. The first is where you recognize that the people that you serve, whether you call them customers, guests, clients, partners, vendors, etc., they don't need you, and that they can do anything else aside from do business with you. They can do business elsewhere, they can do anything else with their lives actually aside from doing business with you. And the actions that you take show that individual that you recognize that they don't need you and they could do anything else aside from do business with you.
And I remember you brought that up the first time we had a conversation. And I know you were listening to this before this interview as well, as I was driving down from Milwaukee to Chicago for this discussion, I was listening back through our interview, which took place in May 2020, so it's been over three and a half years.
I think it was before I even got my, like, COVID haircut. I remember watching myself on the screen just being like, God, that hair, Josh.
Well, lucky you, I wasn't recording on video yet at that point in my podcasting career. I too, because I remember I went on a trip to Asheville, North Carolina, to visit a friend out there, but this was like in June or so, the first time like, okay, we kind of know what the protocol is, if you're going to do it, here's how to do it safely. But yeah, because I couldn't get a haircut in San Francisco, so I had to fly across the country to get a haircut in Asheville, North Carolina. So that's why I remember.
You're more resourceful than I was.
Yes, yes. That was a good feeling getting that haircut. Now we're like going back to COVID days, like the way we're nostalgically talking about this. I'm going to give us some credit though. I listened back to that episode and I'm like, you know what, this wasn't like the painful, clunky experience some people get when they go back to one of their earlier pieces of content, 'cause although we had both been doing this for a little while at that point—I had done another podcast and Manufacturing Happy Hour as a podcast had been going for like, I don't know, eight months or so—how long had AttractionPros been running by like May 2020? Doesn't need to be exact, but like an estimation at that point.
Just shy of three years at that point. So we started in late summer of 2017.
Okay, so yeah, we were old pros at that point. You know, there were some things that stuck out in that episode. I'm actually going to pull them up because I wanted to ask you about them. One thing you...
And for context for anyone listening today, definitely go back and listen to Episode 17. Not a prerequisite for this episode, but in that episode we really talked about, hey, what can the manufacturing industry learn from the attractions industry in general. And I feel like we really took a... that was really operations focused in a lot of ways, but from a guest experience lens. And one of the things that you mentioned, like as an amusement park opens, it's so compartmentalized, like you have a checklist for operations as well as guest experience. Like you're looking at the things that operationally need to be functioning, which is something in the manufacturing industry we look at every day. I'm curious, do you see opportunities for other industries as they're doing their, let's say, their operational checklist or their daily checklist, to be doing that with a more guest experience mindset, or, as a lot of people in my industry are probably comfortable calling it, like how can they be thinking about the customer as they're going through that checklist? How do you answer that question now?
Yeah, 100%. So when you think of, if you were to divide this into basically two separate checklists, one is like the functional needs, right? So in an amusement park, I think recalling back to Episode 17, I was saying something like that: are all the gates properly locked around rides that have ride envelopes and low zones, etc., and is this this way, right? All the yes or no, all the binary aspects of it, right? Almost the tangible side of what the operation looks like.
The guest experience checklist goes beyond that to say, what are the intangibles? What do our guests expect when they actually come visit here? What do our customers expect? What do the people who do business with us expect when they do business with us? And that allows you to think in a little bit more abstract terms. So rather than the functional, like are the doors unlocked, yes or no, right, it's more so: is the environment welcoming? Is my attitude a more personable approach rather than just the functional needs of the business, right? Am I offering something that shows that I'm invested in that relationship, that shows the recognition of that Hospitality Mentality? Of recognizing what am I doing that kind of goes beyond the surface level of what needs to be done, to what do I make sure I am doing to show the guest that I am personally invested in their experience, not just financially invested, that I'm genuinely interested in making sure that I'm showing them that they made the right choice by doing business with me.
Mhm. And one thing I'm curious, as you... 'cause as far as I... you're the guest experience guy in my network. You're the person that I'm going to go to to talk about this type of thing, whether it applies to amusement parks, roller coasters, or any other industry. I'm curious, I want to talk a little bit about you before we get too far into the details. So I asked the first question around what is the Hospitality Mentality, like the mentality itself, but why did you decide to write the book to distill all this knowledge as well? Was there a moment that went into it? Because we've been talking about this for now, like we talked about the date earlier, for almost four years, and I know you've been doing it long before that as well. Why the book?
That's a good question. The idea for the book came well over 10 years ago when I was really connecting a lot of dots between what I was observing with guest experience within my industry, which is attractions, it's tourism, it's hospitality, and identifying some gaps where I felt the industry could do better. And it wasn't just a here's where everything's going wrong and here's what you need to fix, but it's more so of outlining what's the whole holistic approach to all of this. So I can tell you, more than 11 years ago I pulled up PowerPoint one night and just used a bunch of shapes and arrows and created a very complex diagram. I was just like, this is it, right? Thankfully that's never seen the light of day in the public eye, right? Because the initial iterations of the book were just like, I'm going to go through this flowchart, where I was able to then really kind of improve upon that.
And that in and of itself helped me in the business that I was building from guest experience consulting for my industry in particular, but looking at something abstract, and just in business in general, and any business that does business with other human beings, which is every single business on the planet, 'cause, you know, humans invented business, I guess we could put. Yeah, I think we can claim that. And what's the flow that someone goes through the business? Maybe they just found out that the business exists, they are a first-time customer, guest, whatever it is. How do we take that person and turn them into a loyal advocate, a customer for life, a guest forever? And I know we could dive off of that entirely, but what happens... everything in between. So I'd always had this idea in the back of my mind of one day this will be a book.
But in the meantime it started as the consulting business, and then I had some people reach out to me and say, hey, can you build a guest service training program for us? And I said, yeah, probably, you know, I'm sure I could. I oversaw guest communications within major theme parks, and I have a master's degree in hospitality and a bachelor's in theme park management. I've done a lot of this, and I've got some ideas of some framework and ways that things can kind of link together. So I did that. That was well over seven years ago that I first started that, and I was able to see the reactions in real time of the individuals. And a lot of these individuals, some of them were in leadership, some of them were owners, some of them were executives within their organization, but some of them were also the frontline staff as well, which means in my industry those are the people who are delivering the experience. They are the ones who are make or break of what is our standard within our organization. And I was able to see where the light bulbs were going off for them and where the light bulbs were going off for the executives of the business, and I was able to continually, I would say, improve upon that in terms of, all right, what are the areas that I'm going to focus on right here when building out this training program.
So this training workshop, you know, that grew and expanded over the years. Like you mentioned, I've got a podcast as well, so I'd interview people on my podcast and ask them and collect more from many of the experts and the smartest people in my industry. I'd be looking at the research and what the data was, and really all of this kind of just was put into a funnel, and out came this framework, which I call the Hospitality Mentality, and that became the book.
Yeah, one thing that you said there really stuck out, and it's going to be something we're going to talk about quite a bit over these next few questions, is you said, how do we turn someone into a customer for life, but what's all the stuff that happens in between that leads up to that? And that's what I want to talk with you about now, because I think there's a lot that we can learn when it comes to the Hospitality Mentality around what does a raving fan look like, and the impact of reviews and word of mouth. And I think that's where I'm going to go with some of these next couple questions, which, let's start with a basic one: what does a raving fan look like? And I've read your book, for context. I've got some stuff I'll throw in there as well, but I want to hear it from the author first.
So I'm sure everyone has their own personal definition of what is a raving fan. You probably imagine like someone at a football game with their shirt off, covered in body paint, and they're screaming, right? Like, it's a good picture of a raving fan. They're a raving fan, right? They got the colors of the team, and like that's their life, right? They wake up and they go to sleep and everything in between is that, right? But if you break it down to what do they actually do, like what are the actual practical components of that, if we were to list that in bullet point form, or death by PowerPoint as some people like to say, what's the raving fan? Well, it's someone who comes back, therefore they do business with you more than once, right? They have the desire to want to keep doing business with you. They influence others as well. Now, the word influence and influencer, I know in the last, I don't know, five, seven years or so, has definitely taken on new terms. You think of someone on TikTok with a million followers saying, hey, I just bought this new pair of shoes, click here, get the discount. Yeah, that's influencing.
You and I probably get pigeonholed into the influencer category every once in a while. I do, for sure. I don't know about you in your industry, probably not, because I think in the attractions industry, influencer versus someone who's a professional in the space like yourself, there's a more fine line, I think, which is a very unique element of the attractions industry.
Well, even, I mean, with any aspect here, I mean, we're sitting here and I'm looking around and we're in a bar and there's a pool table here on the left, we got
...the cameras we got the... if you were to say to me, Josh, if you're going to open a bar, you got to get this pool table and here's why, right? And when it's time for me to get another one, I'm going to get this next pool table, right? Or the tech equipment that we're using, it's here's why I love this microphone. And if you were to say to me, Josh, you're a podcaster too, and if you want to improve your audio quality, use this mic, use this headset, right, use these, etc., that's influencing.
I heard somebody once say, I treat every single guest as an influencer whether they have 10 followers or 10 million followers, because you know people, right? You know people who are of the demographic of the business that you're talking about. So they visit again or they purchase again or they do business with you again, they influence others to visit or they influence others to do business with you. And then I go into a third one, I'm saying they defend you when you need defending, and/or they stick up for you.
And this was sort of kind of inspired by, if let's say you see a business post something on Facebook, and maybe that business is in some sort of PR crisis in some way, shape or form, right? Then the responses on that, if you were just to click on comments, you'd see a whole bunch of people flaming that business, right? Yeah. The loyal ones are the ones who are posting things that maybe the business won't necessarily be able to say because it doesn't fall into their standards of communication, but if somebody else is saying it, then it's okay, right? So I don't dive deep into that. I focus more so on the first two of they do business with you again and they influence others to do business with you. That in a nutshell is a raving fan.
Well, actually, one of the things, I was going through my copy of the book before this interview, and one of the things that I had underlined was actually your third point, that they defend you when something's going on, because I think it's interesting in the manufacturing world, we're probably not going... like, people are loyal, they come back, they do business with people they've done business with for a long time, they're influencing others in the way they talk about, hey, I've had a great experience working with this company, with this vendor, working with this value-added reseller, whatever it is, right? But maybe we're not talking about it online as frequently with the same enthusiasm that someone talks about roller coasters. You and I both enjoy roller coasters a lot, we tweet about it a ton, and it's just a different thing than the B2B world of manufacturing.
But one of the things that really jumped out at me was how people will come to your defense. And I think one of the things that you mentioned in your book that I think is extremely important is they come to your defense, or I shouldn't say they'll come to your defense publicly, but if the loyal fan experience is an issue, they're going to come to you through a private channel. They're not going to knock you on Twitter, or in the manufacturing industry probably those knocks are going to come on LinkedIn and things like that. They're going to send you a message, they're going to send you an email, they're going to say, hey, I love working with you guys, but I'm having an experience that is very out of the norm of what I normally experience with you, because it's normally great. And that's when people have the opportunity to really address, and that's when you can also identify who a raving fan is for your company. Just my thoughts on the parallels with manufacturing.
Well, without question, absolutely, because, Chris, we live in a world these days where if you want to say something negative about a business and have it attract attention beyond people that are within your inner circle, we all have that at our fingertips. We all have no barriers to flaming a business on R, right? To post a negative review or negative social media, or saying I don't do business with this because XYZ. The loyal raving fans, they recognize that the business might not necessarily be perfect, and the reason for speaking up is because they want to continue being loyal.
I mean, I'll give you an example. There was a restaurant down the street, I won't name it, but it's one that ever since it opened I'd been going there very frequently. I love it, it's fantastic. Last time I went there was about seven months or so ago. I had a poor experience, sent an email, because if I have a poor experience, generally I try to make it my standard in life that I'm going to send it as an email, right, or send it through the contact form of the website. You're not going to do it publicly. Exactly, exactly. To say, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that this did not meet the standard that is normal, because I know what the standard that is normal is. Sadly, I didn't get a response back, and now I'm thinking, you know what, I'm not rushing back to go back to that restaurant. It's very easy for me to go there, it's right down the street, I live very close by. If somebody suggests where do we go in this neighborhood, it's probably not going to be top of mind. Yeah. Versus if they would have gotten back to me instantly and said, Josh, I'm so glad you reached out. As you know, because you come here often, this definitely is not the standard we expect, we're going to do XYZ. That would have absolutely regained my satisfaction. I would have built more rapport with that restaurant, that would have actually reinforced my loyalty, and then I would be going there a lot more often and telling people, yeah, let's go there because it's a great experience, and when it's not, they fix it.
Well, you are a more tactful individual when it comes to the ways that you respond to negative experiences. Another thing that jumped out at me in your book was when you talked about the impact of a negative review, that someone that has a negative review on average, and you cited your sources on this, will dissuade 30 other people from going to that place so that they don't have that same negative experience. Am I on the right track in that regard?
You are. And now all we're doing is math. We're actually talking about what does a poor experience cost you. So whether it's a negative review, if it's on TripAdvisor, Google reviews or Yelp, or if you've got a close-knit industry where people talk to each other, honestly you could probably take that number and magnify it. So take that 30, right? So here's what the data says, is that one negative review can turn away up to 30 prospective customers or guests to your business. Mm-hmm. You take that and you multiply it by your average spend. Exactly, by your average transaction. Yeah, I think you gave the example of go to an amusement park, right, which, you know, couple hundred dollars per guest or whatever, guests and their family and things like that. I'm sure manufacturers that are listening to this are doing the math and being like, well, damn, our average person does four, five, six figures of business with us. Do the math there. That is an astronomical amount in that capacity. So if I need to do some kind of recovery, and using your example, if it's $1,000, if it's $5,000, yeah, you're going to get that immediate sting, but think of that impact, think of how much you're saving.
And then there's something called the recovery paradox as well, if we want to go into that, and that's when... Give us the SparkNotes real quick, like the one or two sentence. We've only got a moment before we got to pound our beers and get out of here. To be clear, we have plenty of time in this podcast, but still, I just want to... The bar is not about to close. It is still light outside, even in December. Yes, this is what happens when you both quit your jobs and you can podcast full-time. So, well, you're a consultant full-time, you do more, you're an author now, you have quite a bit wider of a resume than I do right now. I'm very busy, guy, let me tell... let me... I blocked my whole day for this. Let me... All right. I was like, Chris is coming to town! Yes, you were enthusiastic. You were enthusiastic, appreciate that.
All right, recovery paradox. Lot of data on this. I think it started in the '90s and the early 2000s, and with the researchers identified, and this transcends industries. So I know I'm hospitality, I know I'm theme parks, etc. It's true in my business, it's true in your business as well, for you watching, listening to this, etc. A poor experience: somebody has a poor experience and they identify that, right, they speak up about it, and that goes through a proper channel of service recovery and complaint resolution. Mm. The level of satisfaction on the other side of that is higher than those who have a satisfactory experience to begin with.
And I think of this in terms of my business, where I'm like, man, the deck is not stacked in our favor in so many instances of even just getting people in the door. This right here is something we really need to capitalize on, and this is regardless of industry, is that if somebody has a poor experience, we recognize, you know what, we strive to provide a 100% satisfactory experience to every single person that does business with us. That is a no-brainer, that is table stakes, that is entry into the game. We also recognize that a negative experience, or some sort of defect in what we expect the standard for our quality and our product to be, every once in a while those are going to happen. So we've built into our culture, our operation, our organization, service recovery. So not only are we canceling out a bad experience, we're regaining that satisfaction, we're regaining that trust, and in many cases that leads to loyalty.
So earlier this year I was doing a workshop with a family entertainment center, so think arcade bar, like sports bar, like all that, like games, like mini golf spot, things like that. Not an amusement park, but somewhere where you go for small scale. Exactly. And I'm talking about this, and the general manager is in there, and I'm talking to his frontline staff, we're talking high school, college kids, entry-level job, and I'm explaining all this. The GM, he raises his hand and then he stands up and he turns to his team and he goes, guys, what Josh is saying is 100% true. And he starts listing off people's names, and everyone's nodding their heads, like, yeah, those are some of our most loyal guests. They sit at that booth, they come every single Sunday and they get a large cheese pizza and a pitcher of Coke or something, they're like six-year-old kids or whatever it is. And he goes, yeah, they started out with a really poor experience. Their first visit here was really bad, and we took that on, we jumped in front of that and we recovered from it.
So like in your example, people are spending five, six, seven figures on a product, and if something goes wrong, your investment into fixing that is not just, well, that's the cost of doing business, right, or, oh, that's a lost cost because we made a mistake. No, think about the loyalty that you can build from that. Create that raving fan, that now that five, six, seven figure product multiplies over time, because they would have gone somewhere else if you didn't fix it.
And now, and I use this in the context of TripAdvisor, you pull up TripAdvisor and if you see a review that said, I came to this place, etc., whatever, and I had a poor experience, but I reached out and Chris called me the next morning and took care of it, he was the nicest guy in the world, and when he invited us back, and whatever it was, if they put five stars in that review... Yep. That's a five-star review. I look at those. I will look at a review like that and be like, cool, it had an issue, that happens to everyone, right? Did they solve it? Yeah, they did. I'm definitely going to do business with them. If I see something like that towards the front of the reviews, that's usually a deciding factor to be like, sold, done, this is where I'm going to be giving my business.
So I've got a couple more questions on this train of thought that have come up during your excellent answers, and the first one is, you've talked a lot about the frontline staff, which is a big thing in manufacturing as well. I've been telling people we are in the age of the frontline worker, with all the tools that are empowering them, and quite frankly they're making a lot of decisions that drive the way manufacturing companies are operating right now, which is a good thing. How do you instill this customer mentality, or as we're going to call it today, the hospitality mentality, in a frontline staff? I think that's something that manufacturers are always asking themselves. It's like, yes, I'm the executive, I understand that customers are front and center, but when you're out on the plant floor, that's not necessarily where your mindset is, because the attraction industry is very nice in that regard, because you are front and center with the customer every day. You see them when you are on the front line, but that doesn't necessarily happen in the space that I'm in on a regular basis. So what's your advice to get that hospitality mentality to the front line?
I always say that I have two audiences when I'm pitching and trying to make a sale. One is the decision maker, the leader within the business. So this is if I'm doing my training workshops, right, like, this is why you need to bring me in, XYZ, this is why it'll be very beneficial for your organization, because loyalty is revenue and influence and word of mouth and decreased marketing costs. The second audience that I have is the frontline staff, is that I need to pitch to them why this is important. And in one way it aligns with the company's goals, right, of everything you're doing from embracing the hospitality mentality is going to grow revenue and repeat business and influence, and it's going to be great because it helps us build organic growth. Mm-hmm. That isn't totally the message that I really come at it with. I talk about why it's actually very good for them personally, as an individual, as a human being.
And so I can tell you, in instance with my industry, when those who are managing the guest, right, they are interacting with the guests, is that it's one of the most fulfilling things that you can do for yourself. And you spent years on the front line. We kind of glossed over that in this episode, but you've been working in amusement parks since you were 18, basically. 18 and one day. Exactly, the day after I turned 18. Go back and listen to Episode 17 for that story, we're not going to cover that here.
So, and in those instances, think about your drive to work every morning, your commute to work every single morning, and then your drive or commute back home at the end of the day. Going there in the morning, well, maybe you had to hit the snooze button a few times, you missed breakfast, maybe you're just like, this is another day at work. And then on the way home it's like, that was another day at work, I can't wait to go home and decompress and play video games and have a couple drinks and go to bed, right, and now disconnect from it. Everything that happens in between, if you align all of this with how it makes us feel good to do it, then the fact that it's good for the business and it's good for the organization is actually irrelevant.
So in my instance, with my industry in particular, of creating a wow experience or doing that service recovery, your drive home at the end of the day, you're like, man, not only did I do a good job today, but I actually had an impact on someone's life. And maybe it was that visit to a theme park, where on the surface level it seemed like, oh, just a visit to a theme park, but if we think about the intangible benefits of that, and the memories that they're creating, and the fact that now they see the value in that experience, not just for dollars but for
time and how they spent their resources and their energy and all of that, it then kind of recirculates into the next morning of, now I'm not hitting this snooze button, now I'm getting up before the alarm goes off, and now I'm eating a really good breakfast, and now I'm ready to go and just do that again, because that builds momentum.
So in manufacturing, look at that. If you look at, okay, you take all these concepts of the hospitality mentality, driving loyalty, creating fans through your guest experience, your customer experience, or your partner experience, whatever it is, and then distilling that and saying why is it actually good for the individual who is doing that on the front line, that then ramps up the motivation, and then now that increases performance, not just because it's good for the organization but because it's good for themselves individually.
Mhm. No, I like the way that you, I also like the way you talk about having those multiple sets of customers, right? You've got the decision maker, but you also need to make sure that the folks that are going to be really putting this into practice are on board with it as well, and that's something we face in the manufacturing world every day.
Last thing I'm going to say here, last question I'm going to ask for this portion of the conversation before we get a little reflective here at the end, is, I want people to read your book, so we don't want to give away everything, but what's like the one, two or three pieces of advice you'd give to folks, going back to one of our earlier questions: how do you create that raving fan? What are a couple pieces of advice you'd give?
Pull back from your customer experience, because it's very easy to distill it into I need to do this, I need to do this, I need to do this, I need to do this. Pulling back and saying why, what are the implications if I do this? Maybe there is a cost to that, but what is the benefit to that?
The other thing I would challenge everyone listening to think about as well is to say, what do I have to offer that has such high value to the customer but little or no cost to the business? So I look at that in two ways, and one of them is service recovery, in terms of compensation and the way that we are actually resolving certain service failures, but using it on the front end as well, of what are some experiences that we can create that are beyond expectation, beyond what we actually need to do to serve that client, that, you know, they're not going to detract from anybody else, right? It's not going to take away from any other client or customer's experience with us or purchase with us.
And there are so many things, when we look at the intangible aspects of what we have, we recognize that there is so much that the customer or the client sees value in but actually doesn't cost us anything, or at the most very little.
Yeah, and there are a lot of examples in your book that talk to that, because one of the important things that you said there that resonated when I read the book was how, creating that experience when it's little cost to you but extremely valuable to the guest, you need to make sure it's not necessarily impacting other guests in a negative way. You talk about being in line at a hotel or something like that, where the folks at the front desk are really chatty and friendly and things like that, which is great, right? Love it, and above and beyond, that's fine in essence, but when there's a long line, you've got to get people through the queue. At that point in time, hey, maybe don't do all the small talk. The priority there is making it quick for the person at the desk and then the person in line after that and after that and after that.
Which it was a service failure for me in line, and it was before breakfast, I was hungry, then I became hangry from that. That's how that memory had you. Had coffee yet at that point? I don't think so. I think it was just, let me get there and get straight to breakfast. Now I'm standing there watching the friendliest people in the world go above and beyond, and it's like, okay, now here's where hospitality is actually backfiring.
Yeah, no, I mean it's a great point, right? But I think that, I don't want to use the word mentality because that's the word for your book, but like, when you, you can use the word mentality, yeah, when you get in the mentality of thinking, it's like, hey, what's something that I can do that is going to be super, like maybe out of the ordinary, something the customer would really appreciate, but for me is maybe just a little extra thing that I need to do. Like, that's something that, you know, especially now as a business owner myself, I'm thinking about: what are those things that I can do that are high impact for the people I serve, but on my end, you know, something I can turn into, especially something I can turn into a process, and I can replicate and do pretty easily.
So a lot of great advice for everyone out there. I'm going to have a link to the book in the show notes, but definitely check out The Hospitality Mentality. I loved it, as you can tell from this conversation. I've pulled a lot of things from the manufacturing industry.
One thing I always like asking authors that appear on this show, that have also appeared on the show in the past, or, you know, just thinking about the book writing journey, we talked about this at the start, we podcasted three and a half years ago: what's something that has shifted in terms of your mindset around hospitality since when we first had our conversation to now, if you can think of one?
Wow, that's a good question. I know it is. Yeah, yeah, you're a podcaster. I'm a podcaster, this is what we do. Say you're good at this, right?
What has shifted in it? I think maybe what has shifted, I don't know if it's shifted in the mindset, but maybe in the way that I articulate a lot of the concepts that I talked about in the book. So here, I'll pull back a little bit here, and, you know, I said I started writing the book like 11 years ago, the earliest drafts, and like that PowerPoint framework.
Your framework that you don't want anyone to see, which I would love to see a copy of. It's always interesting. You can post it in the show notes if you want to do that.
Yeah, you know, I iterated that to improvement and I got it to the point where I said, all right, this is it. Like, finally, there were a lot of drafts that were discarded and, thankfully, will never ever see the light of day. I had to intentionally decide: am I going to turn my brain off now from writing this book because I've submitted the manuscript, it's done, or am I going to keep my brain on? And well, my brain decided it was going to stay on, right?
So there's nothing in the book that I would say I've shifted my mindset away from, but I have found more and more ways to package a lot of the things that were in the book. And there was one thing that came recently, and we could try to maybe connect some dots here and draw some parallels to manufacturing, but in attractions and in hospitality, we say often that we strive to provide experiences that create memories that last a lifetime. And it is a nice, warm, soft, fuzzy statement that just makes you feel good, but what we don't talk too often about is that that is actually the business model.
So one of the things that I did talk about in the book, and I quoted another researcher from this, is that people don't choose between experiences, they choose between the memory of the experience. Interesting. And you think of memory, it sounds so soft, right? It sounds just very fluffy, right? It sounds just like, oh, we're making memories, right?
But the way we remember something then turns into our action in the future. So the way we remember an experience becomes the way that we perceive what that experience was. That perception determines our satisfaction or our dissatisfaction, and that determines how we then share, and in today's world broadcast, that experience with others, whether it's through online reviews or influence, etc.
So when we say in our industry that we create memories that last a lifetime, it's like, no, actually what we want to do from the hospitality and the service and the experience standpoint is we want to give you something that, as you recall back to it, you're sharing a very positive experience that exceeded your very high expectation, that's going to cause you to want to do it again and tell others to do it as well. So creating memories that last a lifetime isn't just a soft fuzzy statement, it's the business model.
Yeah, yeah. I'm wondering how to apply this to manufacturing right now, because we're not necessarily going to an amusement park with our family in this space, right?
I also have another question for you. Are you wearing your pineapple shirt? Yeah. Did you mean to keep this sweatshirt on this whole time? Are you cold, or were you hoping to display that in the video for this?
So for context to your audience, it's the middle of December and it's like mid 20s, maybe low 30 degrees. Like January, it's not going to be that much warmer by the time January, February comes, sometime around there. So I did decide several days ago, I'm going to wear my pineapple shirt to this interview, because I know we're recording it on video, and then it was actually kind of a last minute decision, maybe I should have one more layer on as well. But I did one that has a good zipper on it, so you can see, as you can obviously pull it out a little bit, because I can't really totally. Yeah, there's, it's a pineapple.
Which, you know, this is a good opportunity. I don't want to move us off the topic of creating memories that last a lifetime, maybe intertwined, yeah, tie this in with that, but what does a pineapple have to do with the hospitality mentality? This is a great conversation over a beer.
The pineapple is the international symbol for hospitality, and this dates back to the colonial days of America, where explorers would leave their homes for weeks or months at a time, and as you can imagine, many of them probably didn't return. But those that did wanted to make sure that they brought back, let's just say, some souvenirs from their experiences. And if they went down to the Caribbean during that time, there probably wasn't exactly a gift shop that they could shop in before coming back home, right? So they would gather a lot of exotic plants and fruits, and of course they had all these epic stories of adventure and triumph, right? But one of the things that a lot of people would bring back home with them was a pineapple.
And when they got back, they would take a pineapple and they would post it on a spear and put that in front of their home, and that served as two things. One, it was an announcement that they're back home, they're back home safe to some extent, maybe not unscathed, but it means that they had a lot of stories to share as well. So not only was it an announcement, but it was an invitation: come to my home, I'm going to share with you these stories, I'm going to share with you all these exotic fruits and these spices, and share with you all of these things that happened to me.
So over time, that then ended up becoming the international symbol for hospitality, and if you look around, you'll see it in hotels, you'll see it in restaurants, you'll see it on websites and marketing material. The pineapple just sort of weaves its way in there, and I thought it would be perfect to put that on the cover of the book. And then when I was planning for the book's launch, I held an event just a couple weeks before the official publication date, and my wife gifted me this shirt actually to wear to that event.
Nice, I love this. Well, I'm actually going to help you out here with our last topic that we were talking about. It's like, okay, creating memories that last a lifetime makes sense for Disney World, the attractions industry; for manufacturing, where does that apply? But your comment about, you know, you put a pineapple on a spear outside of your home to tell people, hey, I've got stories to share from my most recent experience. I don't think this is going too far out on a limb, but if you can create remarkable experiences, stories that people tell of just what the experience working with you was like, those are the things that people tell one another, whether it's a B2C industry or a B2B industry. Those are the things that are transferable.
So by nature of you saying stories, that's what got me thinking of, okay, where does this apply specifically to manufacturing? If you're a type of company that creates something, as Seth Godin, renowned marketer and author, talks about, being remarkable, right? Be a purple cow, something that's worth remarking about. If you can help turn something into a story worth telling, I think that's where some of the things you're saying, I don't want to say at the most lofty level, right, but for manufacturers that might be doubters out there that think, all right, I get it, but I'm not going to Cedar Point tomorrow, I'm trying to get product out the door, I think that's where there's a parallel. What are your thoughts? Am I getting too far out there right now?
No, I think you nailed it. I think that's exactly what it is. The more that you can craft a narrative around something, and something to be able to share with someone else, pulls back from that. I used the term death by PowerPoint earlier, because it's just, here's my presentation, it's got all the bullet points in it of what the thing does. Now let's pull that back and say, what are the success stories that we've seen from other clients with the product? What are some of the benefits with it that aren't just simply, we're going to list this in the brochure? What goes beyond the tangible aspect of the product?
So let's say you're trying to sell something or you're creating something: go into that meeting or that sales pitch or whatever it is thinking about how is this person going to remember their experience with me today. And then when you think about, and going back to the hospitality mentality of, they could buy anywhere else, they could do anywhere else, how is that going to differentiate from when they get the sales pitch from the competitor's product, and they go through the PowerPoint and the bullet points, and it does this and this and this and this and this?
Now of course you need to have the core product, you know, 100% buttoned up and right. You've got to get the basics right before you can do the extras, is the way I look at it. Yeah. And then once you do that, now you're crafting a narrative around it, that when they leave, they're actually thinking wow. And what are you doing for that individual, for that prospective client, or for that client, for that customer, that just makes them say wow?
And I know that, again, that sounds like it's just the, oh, you're just creating wow experiences, right? It's nice, it's service, we'll do that when we're able to. But that wow solidifies a memory, that memory then turns into action with your business in the future and the way that they tell others about it.
Memory, action, future business. I like that formula. So, you know, one of the biggest questions I wanted to ask you, when reflecting on the fact that we talked three and a half years ago, and that was the first time we ever met, like I think that was the very first conversation you and I ever had, one thing that stuck out right at the start of that interview was you talked about how your mission was to help companies enhance their guest experience and the way they deliver guest experience.
I'm like, wow, it's almost four years later and you're still on that mission. Like, your mission hasn't deviated that much. Are you surprised by that? Is that kind of what you'd expect from your career? Like, where did you expect your career to be right now after all that? Like, you're an author now. I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on that. This is a deep bar conversation.
At this point, yeah. Oh man. Where did I... Yeah, I mean, it is something that I've been passionate about for so long, and I think what's amazing about it is that I feel like the story that I'm telling today is very similar to the narrative that I've been constructing for so many years, but I'm finding more and more ways to present it that it keeps on improving upon itself in the way that it resonates with those who I want it to resonate with. And there are some things that are almost verbatim and identical to when I built the first training program for that client who asked me more than seven years ago, seven and a half years ago, "Hey, how can we improve our customer service? How can we be the Chick-fil-A of our attraction segment?" Right, and build upon that and say, okay, here's the idea and here's more ways to be able to fill that in.
So I think what's kind of exciting about it is that I've built that, I've been sharing this message, and I've turned it into a book, and now it's just continuing to grow upon itself. So that's, like you said, it's a very deep question, and even like three and a half years from now, I'm going to invite you to ask the same question.
I was just thinking about that. It's like, because I don't know if a lot of people understand their personal mission to that level, and when I heard that come back up on that first podcast, I'm just like, wow, Josh really believes that, and that's what he continues to execute on and continues to get more knowledgeable on and iterates on, like all of us do, right? I mean, I'm still out here helping manufacturers tell their... manufacturers and like one or two hospitality folks tell their story, sprinkled on a regular basis. So you know, I'm on a similar path.
But you know, it's also crazy to think what that consistency does for someone's career as well, and this is something I want to bring into the conversation as well, because you and I both have our own businesses now. That was not the case when we first talked three and a half years ago. And I think there's something to be said about crystallizing your mission like you have and then just continuing to go at it on a regular basis, like you've done with your podcast on a consistent cadence over the years, and it just goes to show you where your career can go over those times.
Not to mention, like I said, you and I had never met one another when we first podcasted, and I remember it's at the end of that first episode where we said we're going to do a bonus episode where we're just going to talk about roller coasters, and I hear you crack a beer.
I wish I had a can right now. Been drinking draft. 100%, just give me the cracks. I left it in there because that beer crack was like a signal to be like, we're going to keep talking for a while and we're going to talk about something like raving fans, right? We were talking about our passion around roller coasters and amusement parks at that point. That's what that whole other bonus episode was all about. I know we've talked about this a lot. Folks, we're going to have it in the show notes. Just go to the show notes page, you'll be able to find it there if you want to go back in history here.
But I mean, think about us as well. We've become pretty good friends over that time, as we have literally... In fact, this bar that we're sitting at today, the first time I was here, I guess it was 2021, things were just opening up. I was here for a Fall Out Boy/Green Day show later that weekend that you didn't go to, but you could hear the whole thing from your condo. I had a sick infant at that time, actually. Yeah, perfect reason not to go. Perfect.
I was saying that... wait, Guns N' Roses I think was here a week before, and I was like, oh, Axl Rose is just singing lullabies to my son. Yeah, hear it from my home. You know, when I come around... Welcome to the Jungle... Exactly.
But no, we were sitting at this bar and I was asking, it's like, what do I do to get more involved in the attractions industry? And we literally wrote out on a bar napkin here at Tunes, like, hey, one of the first things you got to do, this was your advice to me, it's like, you got to get to IAAPA this year. You got to get to the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions conference, for the acronym for anyone that wanted to know. IAAPA.org, right?
Yep, exactly. I'm using their pen right now to take notes during this conversation. Not accidental, by the way. You got to get to this conference, and I wrote down a couple goals, like I was going to do some podcasts with folks in this industry, and I still have that napkin saved because I'm like, I'm going to want to look back on this someday. But that was here at Tunes.
But it's been like, I guess where I'm going with this rambling story here at the end of the podcast is when you stick with something, you make great connections with other people that are passionate about the things you are. It changes your career, like, maybe it's not a drastic change per se, it could just be an evolution, but if we look back at where we were when we first did a podcast, we're both in very different spots than we were at that point.
If you had an infant during that concert in 2021, that means you didn't have a kid when we did this first podcast back in... So the location where I did that from is now where his crib is, actually. So yeah, a couple months after we did that podcast, that room turned over pretty quickly. Your office has been turned into a nursery. Yes, lots of tangible changes during this time between then and now.
So as we wrap up this conversation, one thing I want to ask, we were texting about this earlier this week: you've learned some stuff from the manufacturing industry as well. What have you learned from the manufacturing industry that has helped you in the attraction space?
I'm so glad you asked. So a number of years ago, maybe about a year or so before you and I first connected, I read the book The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. For those out there watching, listening, if you haven't read it yet, highly recommend it. It's a business book that is largely based on Toyota's manufacturing principles. Now, I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, AKA Ford, right? So we learned about the assembly line, and then learning about Toyota's was the opposite of that.
So again, I'm not a manufacturing guy, I'm going to say this right now, I do not know much about this space, but I took so much from a business standpoint, because the book was very much a business book, where he talked about the way that Toyota produces a single vehicle at a time so that when they notice if there is something that we need to change or fix or alter, they're able to do that in real time, and the only vehicle that's impacted by that is that one that is being produced right there.
And he talked a lot about the idea of feedback loops, and I know I briefly mentioned this in episode 17 when we talked a few years ago, but this idea of the feedback loop is you create a thing, one thing, a single thing, not the assembly line of everything, because if there's something wrong in the assembly line, well, now you need to fix all the things at the point of where that error was, or where that defect or that default was. With this, you create one single thing, and if you notice, or as you... not just if, it is when you notice opportunities for improvement, you make improvement on that individual unit, and then the next unit that goes into production already has the improvements made from the last one, so it is better than the last one, and that process continues to iterate.
How did I apply that to theme parks, right? So in my industry, in the attractions industry, I've always been very passionate about guest feedback, in the way that we put something out there, we open the park, we open the attraction for the day, our guests come in, and we strive to deliver 100% satisfaction, a perfect experience to everyone, but we also acknowledge that that's not the case every single time. We use guest feedback to make improvements. So as we collect the feedback and notice where the deficiencies in guest experience are, we can make improvements based on that. Once we make those improvements, we can measure the success of our implementations, and if that friction or that pain point goes away, something else rises to the surface, because now here's the next biggest thing from that book.
This is going to sound actually very meta: I built a feedback loop collection process for my industry. Yeah, I saw it in there. That allows them to basically optimize their feedback loop. That is the title of chapter nine, I think. To iterate on these continuous improvements within the operation, and what it recognizes is that it's not perfect, but you have the data to know what needs to continually be improved. So the importance of a feedback loop really resonated with me in terms of how do we know what we need to fix? Well, let's collect feedback, let's make improvements, let's collect feedback, let's measure those improvements, let's make more improvements, let's keep iterating on that process so that the guest experience, the operation, we can just say the business in general, just keeps getting better because the product continually improves.
Yeah. And one of the reasons I asked that question is I think one of my big takeaways, or hopefully one of the big takeaways for folks listening to this episode, is that there's a lot you can learn when you get outside your specific bubble. Not every... you run the best attractions industry podcast, but not everything you're learning is from that podcast alone, and not everything that someone should learn about manufacturing should be from the manufacturing space as well. So as we wrap up, is there something you wish I would have asked you that I haven't yet? We covered a lot of ground, good hour-long conversation, our beers are gone. That's like the first goal of these.
So Chris, there was something you asked me the last time we did this podcast, that was more than three and a half years ago. Yeah, I know where this is going. I think I know exactly where this is going. I don't even know, maybe. Go on. You did not ask me just now or at the beginning of this interview what beer I was drinking. Oh, that's right. Is that what you were thinking? No, that wasn't the one I thought. We're going to have to talk about roller coasters, real... Yeah, we can talk about roller coasters. Okay, okay, we're going to extend this a little bit longer. Okay, what beer were you drinking, Josh?
I am drinking B's Christmas Ale. The date of this recording is December, is it 19th? Six days till Christmas. It is. It is my mom's 70th birthday today, as a matter of fact. Wow, happy birthday, Chris's mom. Yeah, happy birthday, Mom. She's listening to this, I guarantee. And she's a listener, I can guarantee she makes it to this part of the podcast as well, so we can say that here.
Oh, I'm so excited. Well, I'm drinking Begy's Christmas Ale. Begy Brewery is one of my favorite breweries. It's actually very close to... it's even closer to where I live. I'm just going to point in that direction for everyone who's out here. I live that way, but it's that way, around equidistant.
So you're just walking to all your favorite spots. When I ran my first podcast, Pubcast Worldwide, it was a requirement that we had to do it at a bar or brewery over a beer. What I started learning over time was most people were just picking a spot that was walkable from their house. They weren't picking the best spot in town, their favorite spot; they were going for convenience. In your case, though, I feel like it happened to be both. You love them and they're close by, which is a great reason to live somewhere, in my opinion.
I thought you were going to bring up the fact that when we did this interview a long time ago, or I should say, it's not like we're doing a reprise per se, we're doing a whole new interview, but when we first spoke to one another, I said my favorite roller coaster was Superman at Six Flags New England. And since then, you and I have traveled together, we've ridden roller coasters together, I've been to Cedar Point twice since the last time we spoke. I'd been there many times before, but I am on the Josh Liebman bandwagon of agreeing that, in fact, Millennium Force is the best roller coaster on the planet.
If you're listening to the audio, he's doing a big victory face at the camera right now. Look, it didn't take much convincing. That lake view, that drop, that overbank turn, it's just a great ride, and the fact that it has aged so well just reminds any roller coaster enthusiast like you or me about why we love roller coasters.
I had the opportunity on my podcast, AttractionPros, to interview Sascha Czibulka, he's the Executive Vice President of Intamin, and we may have strategically made him episode 310, which is the number of feet of Millennium Force. That is the height of Millennium Force, 310. There's no "may." You've told me this like three or four times, that you're like, oh, episode 310 is going to be the guy from Intamin. So it wasn't an accident. And I try not to nerd out too much on my podcast. Yeah, you're a professional in that space, you got to draw a balance. Oh man, did I nerd out on that podcast. I've heard you nerd out on the show before. Hey.
I think one of the cool things about the attractions industry, and now that I've been to IAAPA, not just once when I wrote it on that napkin here, that hey, I'm going to go this year, I went this year, 2023, as well, it is something that I know the industry doesn't take for granted, but they are raving fans in the attractions industry, which is one of the reasons this was the subject of the podcast today. But I can guarantee any other industry wishes they had that type of fanfare. It can be kind of tiring when you're at a trade show and fans are coming up to tell you how much they love your work and you're trying to close a deal, you're trying to get business done, but at the same time, man, you think about any other industry, you don't necessarily get that the same way the attractions industry does, and I think that's very cool, seeing what I like to call an amusement park trade show is like versus a typical industry trade show, if you will. Yeah, 100%. It's a fun industry to be in. It is. It is fun, pun intended.
Well, with that, hey, if you're out there listening, check out The Hospitality Mentality. If you couldn't tell from this episode, there are a lot of lessons for manufacturers, really anyone in any industry that wants to get a guest-centric mindset, a customer-centric mindset. I'll have links to that in the show notes. And with that, Josh, thanks so much for jumping on today's show.
Chris, thanks so much for having me back. I look forward to doing this. Hey, let's not wait three and a half years till next time. Deal. We're not waiting three and a half years, and I know we'll be grabbing wings here at Tunes again well before that as well, and riding some coasters again. Damn right. Cheers. Happy holidays.
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