Mastering Simplicity
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[00:00:00] All right. What is going on? My friends, Mike Walker here with you, client Services director at the Wealthy Consultant, and this of course, is the Wealthy Consultant Podcast. Um, you know, I've got a great topic for you today, one that is definitely, uh, something that I look at every single day in my role and just in life in general.

[00:00:46] This is a, a kind of a. A passion, um, project a, a passion, um, topic, if you will, in my life. Just because I know it, it serves me well, and I know it's gonna serve you well. So I wanna dive right into it with you. Uh, the title for today's podcast is Mastering Simplicity and Unveiling Strategies For Elevating Client Experience.

[00:01:05] I'd, I'd say everybody here listening is probably fairly, you know, uh, Comfortable and, and used to the idea that, hey, you know, there's, there's simplicity, um, the benefits of it, uh, all the different things that you probably already consider in your own life and business. However, I wanna bring the context down even a little bit more high res specifically towards the topic of elevating the client experience.

[00:01:28] And this is critical because today's environment, as I'm sure you're very aware, just looking at your own social newsfeed or. Me, whatever media you consume these days, uh, it's kind of content overload. You know, there's no shortage of content out there, and that's something that, um, we need to consider too as business owners, as col, uh, coaches, consultants, educators, whatever that may be.

[00:01:50] However you identify yourself in the marketplace and bring value to the market, you know, we need to understand that look. It's great if we have a lot of information to share. We typically do, especially if we're passionate and, and an expert in our particular lane or, or, you know, abilities. Um, however, we need to understand where people are coming from, when they're listening to, uh, or accessing the information that we're providing.

[00:02:14] And there's a difference. And oftentimes a, a large gap between what it is that we're delivering both in value and volume and what people are actually absorbing. So you can be, you know, overdelivering and just throwing down extreme value, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's reaching the audience in a way that they can truly assimilate it and then most importantly deploy it into their own business or into their own lives.

[00:02:39] And that's an, uh, really important thing to consider when. Trying to make a difference in the marketplace. We all wanna make that impact. We all wanna make, you know, serve our, our clients well and, and help raise them up or whatever it is. Again, whatever field you are in, it's imperative to understand that.

[00:02:56] Just because it's high value and you know, really, really good stuff that you're giving them, doesn't necessarily mean that it's as easy for them, the client or customer, to then use it, assimilate it, and, and apply it into their own, uh, worlds. And so I want to share with you some ideas for how we can use simplicity to elevate that experience and make sure that we're not confusing again, the the volume for value.

[00:03:20] All right, so, Again, the, the idea here is pretty simple in that people these days are not lacking information. There is no lack of information out there. You've got the Google searches, you've got chat, G b T, you've got, you know, you name it, right? There is no shortage of information out there. I. What is in high demand and in what is in shortage is context, lacking.

[00:03:44] Context. How does this apply to my life or business? And more importantly, how do I actually deploy it? Right? And so we always wanna be thinking in those terms of. Hey, yes, I wanna overdeliver, I want to give my clients, my customers as much value as I possibly can, but how can I do that in a way that's simple for them to actually do that?

[00:04:03] And thinking through the client experience in a very methodical and systems thinking way is, is the really the only way to, to make sure that that happens. I wanna share with you some ideas on that. One thing, a key note here too, is that simplicity doesn't necessarily mean lack of complexity. And I think that's where a lot of people get it wrong, is to think, well, it's simple, so it's gotta be easy or, or basic.

[00:04:25] And that's not necessarily true. You know, we, this is something we deal with all the time, especially with our modern day consultant clients and our top tier clients that we serve here at the company. You know, we're dealing with very complex problems. We're navigating through extremely sophisticated business environments, um, business functions.

[00:04:43] Uh, deliverability elements. There's so many different facets of the business, uh, equation that need to be considered. It's very complex. It is very far from simple, right? However, simplicity can make the complex feel simple and easy to use. Okay? So that's the, the kind of the, the difference here is that we are using, and we are still deploying, you know, exceptionally sophisticated.

[00:05:10] Technology, services, uh, systems, et cetera, however, we're making them accessible and feel easy to use. And so a great example, a very basic one, uh, to help kind of wrap that concept up is just consider, you know, the spaceship, right? Like take, take the old craft, like take Apollo right from the sixties, launch that thing up into the space, get man onto the moon.

[00:05:36] And the type of technology that was required to make that happen naturally would be very, very sophisticated and very complex. And if you look at the manuals and everything that was required in the thousands, literally thousands of people that were required to make that type of mission, you know, come to fruition, was exceptional.

[00:05:54] It was, it was, by no other words, uh, an exceptional human feat. However, the technology that was used to make that happen is in today's terms, quite basic. And so just look at, say the iPhone or the iPad. Now you have something that has just immense amount of, uh, you know, computing ability, memory storage, all the other elements that were non-existent back then.

[00:06:19] Nowadays, they are literally just in our own hands, right? And so you, you can have a child, you can give a child a, an I, uh, an iPad and they can navigate and find videos, find their games, right? It, I mean, you see it all over the place at every restaurant you go to. You see parents and just. Hey kid here, have an iPad, right?

[00:06:35] And, and they can easily and intuitively navigate it. And that's what we're talking about here. It's not that the iPad is basic or simple or lacking complexity far from it, but what they've done so eloquently is make that complexity. Very simple to navigate, and that's what we wanna look at when we're considering.

[00:06:54] How do we elevate our client experience? How can we eat that complexity for them so that they can navigate the environment, navigate our education, our curriculum, whatever it may be, in a way that's as intuitive and simple as possible. That's what we're looking for. So again, don't confuse simplicity. For a lack of complexity.

[00:07:16] It's, it's really the reverse of that. It's actually making the complex feel eloquently simple. That's the magic. That's where mastery comes in, right? I. And so there's a lot of elements here. I've touched on this a little bit too, but I wanna, I wanna make sure that we underline, highlight, redline, this one, circle it, whatever you gotta do in your mind, because this one comes up a lot when I talk with our clients, um, who are typically, again, consulting other companies or, or growing other businesses, et cetera, and a lot of them confuse volume with value.

[00:07:48] In the interest of over-delivering, in the interest of wanting to just give their very best to the world and to the marketplace, to their clients, they tend to. Overdo it and confuse that volume is like, I want to give everything I've got, which is a noble thing. It's, it's, it's an understandable, uh, thing to wanna do.

[00:08:06] But the reality is that it's kind of like, for, for a funny analogy, it's kind of like giving, you know, a flam, mignon or some, some really high quality steak to a baby. It's like, this is the best we got. This is the world's best steak. But to give it to a baby is like, they can't assimilate it. This isn't helping them, you know?

[00:08:23] So it doesn't matter that it's so good or so volumetrically dense in quality or whatnot. If they can't assimilate it, if they can't naturally use it in the environment that they're in. And so it's really important as educators and consultants and coaches that we understand. Where the market sophistication and the market, uh, awareness levels are with the audience that we're in front of, and sometimes holding back and actually delivering less or delivering a more simplified down, uh, version of your training or of your product is sometimes better, at least in the earlier goings.

[00:09:02] And so that's also something you want to consider as you're looking to. Again, improve the client experience and make sure that you're getting the absolute best for your clients is how can I make this easier and, and chunk it down? Typically, you're gonna look at systems or, or use ways of dividing up the information into smaller, um, you know, bite-size pieces, if you will.

[00:09:26] We do this a lot. In fact, we have a template inside of the modern day consulting program called the Flagship Offer Template. And for, for brevity here, we won't go through every single detail of that, but essentially it's a very simple way of breaking down a complex business solution, say an end result, an end desired need.

[00:09:44] You know, whatever it is in the marketplace that your ideal client has. And then we reverse engineer that end result into. Four pillars or tiers or phases, if you will, right? Think of like a stepladder approach, and you take one step, complete that step again into the next third, fourth, and then by the time you've accumulated or accomplished all four of those, uh, tiers or phases, they then equate to or add up to that end result that you're looking for, right?

[00:10:14] And so it's a very simple concept, but it's one that's really imperative to understand, again, from the client's perspective, so many times as, as you know, passionate, uh, excited entrepreneurs that are, you know, typically very skilled in, in your particular lanes. We, we don't necessarily always remember that our level of knowledge is not necessarily the same as the client, obviously, right?

[00:10:36] And so we therefore need to consider, can my client. Take this information and actually deploy it. How can I make this as accessible and simple to navigate? Just like an iPad is, right? You put that person in a rocket ship. Yeah, that rocket ship might be able to get them to the moon, but if they're just looking at a dashboard of buttons and levers and screens and don't know how to use what, when, and how.

[00:10:59] It's not gonna do 'em any good. You hand them an iPad and you just push one button, and then with the drag of your finger, you can navigate across multiple different apps and multiple different functions. Well, naturally that's a better experience, right? That's what we wanna do for, for our business, is how can we make our business, our curriculum, our client experience as easy and intuitive to navigate as an iPad.

[00:11:20] So what I wanna do is I wanna leave you with a few questions that I think will help you as you consider this, and, and look at ways of embracing simplicity as a competitive advantage. And that's a key, you know, word I wanna highlight here is competitive advantage. Again, there is a lot of great information out there.

[00:11:37] Again, there's no shortage of it. But what is in high demand right now is making the complex simple, making information easy to navigate, and then deploy quickly and intuitively. That's where mastery is. That's where you can differentiate yourself in the marketplace place by making the complex simple, and by turning your solution, your offer, your service, whatever it is that you bring to the marketplace, make that as just.

[00:12:03] Amazingly simple and intuitive to navigate as possible. That by far my friends will put you ahead of the pack, for sure. Okay. Because as things, you know, become more and more complicated with AI and all the new tools and SaaS and all these new things that people are constantly being bombarded with, especially in the, you know, economic and marketplaces and business space.

[00:12:25] If you can make things feel simple and feel intuitive and like, wow, that that was easy, awesome. And you can get them a great quality result at the same time, by default you are winning for sure. Alright, so here are uh, just three questions I want you to consider. Hopefully if you're listening, you can write these down.

[00:12:42] If not, revisit this when you can. But these are three key questions that I believe will help you distill these concepts down. Into your own business and deploy them immediately, uh, into your, uh, offering service, et cetera. Question number one is, can you identify the most complex aspect of your current client interaction or business process?

[00:13:03] So here's where you want to kind of take a zoomed out approach to the client experience from start to finish and just start picking it apart. Start at the beginning and sequentially go through every single step or interaction. That's a, an email that's sent, a text that's sent, uh, you know, your website.

[00:13:21] Um, any forms that they fill out, contracts that need to be signed, right? Like every single step, map that out. That can be a little, you know, depending on the complexity of your business environment, that might take some time to do, but I'd highly encourage you do it because if it's hard for you to even write it out, you can imagine what it's like for a client who's just never been in that environment before to try to navigate it on their own.

[00:13:43] Right. It can be very daunting. So, You really want to write this thing out, map it out, the client journey and every step that's required, every click of a button, every entry of a form, consider it from the client's perspective. Is there a way that we can eat this complex complexity for them? Is there a way that we could eliminate this step, you know, entirely, right?

[00:14:04] Like, really look for a way to strip things down, make 'em as simple as possible. Again, knowing that there's no doubt, probably some very, uh, complex or, or important information that needs to get. Taken care of, so you need to consider that as well. But again, think of all the possible ways that you could eat that complexity for the client and eliminate any potential bottlenecks that are happening in that client experience, especially up front where it's so critical to make that first impression.

[00:14:32] Question number two, how aligned are your teams internal teams in understanding the importance of simplicity and a seamless client experience? This is a key one, guys, because where, what I see a lot of, uh, inside of a law business is you kind of these siloed departments. You have, you know, the marketing team and then you have a, a sales team, and then you have a client success team, right?

[00:14:53] And they're all kind of developed and, and working in their own way, in their own, you know, little ecosystems. Which in some aspects is required, of course, but there really needs to be an overarching understanding and appreciation for the need of simplicity throughout the entire experience. You need your marketing team to understand that what a client first sees out in the marketplace, that is the beginning of the client experience.

[00:15:20] The client experience doesn't start once they've signed the dotted line and sent in some money. That's not where the client experience starts. The client experience actually starts at the very first touch that they ever have with your brand. So marketing needs to be thinking in terms of this simplicity factor as well, just like the sales team needs to consider, okay, look, we have this sales process, there's multiple touches.

[00:15:40] Maybe there's multiple communications or steps that are required to vet this person, et cetera, et cetera. Right? You need to think through those terms and go, well, how can we make this experience, this education, uh, you know, experience for the client to vet whether or not this we're in alignment, this is a good fit for them.

[00:15:57] How do we make that as simple as possible? Right? And then thirdly, taking that all the way over into the client experience side. Once they do actually become a client, how do we make that transition as simple as possible? One of the things I've seen a lot is where you have these sales teams that spend an amazing amount of time as needed, of course, to cultivate the relationship and the, the, the trust factor required to turn a, essentially a, you know, a cold market participant into a, a excited pain customer, right?

[00:16:28] Like that there takes a lot of touch points typically, and a lot of effort. And yet, as soon as that happens and they, that person now becomes a customer or client. They just kind of get handed off to client services. Okay, here you go. You know, Joe's ready to start now. And, and that client has no exposure to whoever they just got handed off to.

[00:16:47] And so we really need to think of, in, in the interest of elevating the client experience, we need to consider how can we make these three aspects of my business, marketing, sales, and then client experience. How do we make these seamless for the client? Right? Sure. Internally there's gonna be silos, there's gonna be departments, different people, et cetera.

[00:17:07] But to the client's perspective, it should feel seamless. It should be intuitively easy to navigate through that experience. The more you can do so, the better, and, and that's where you can actually turn. Some of these topics we're talking about in terms of simplicity and. Ease of navigation and whatever it may be, right?

[00:17:24] You can actually turn these into marketing points, sales points. You can actually bring the simplicity and this philosophy of simplicity into your language in marketing and sales so that there's this cohesive common thread that's woven through. These different aspects of your business, these different areas of the client experience, they have this underlying, you know, common theme across all of 'em, which is, hey, we're, we're making the complex simple right now, whether that's verbatim what you say, or some variation thereof, obviously that's up to you, but I think you get my point.

[00:17:59] How aligned are your internal teams? And understanding the importance of simplicity from the very first touch that a client might or prospect may have with your brand all the way through to the point where they are a raving fan and you know, seeing the results in your product or service that you've promised.

[00:18:13] Right? All right. That's question number two. Lastly, question number three here, can you think of examples from other industries or companies where a focus on simplicity transformed the experience from your perspective? So this is a great one to do. Again, we kind of already touched on this as an example, which is why I provided it earlier, which is the iPhone or the iPad, right?

[00:18:32] Consider the amazing amount of complexity that's required, and that's, that's, you know, literally embedded within that device, right? It's, it's exceptional. It's, it's by multitudes higher, uh, complexity than the equipment that was, uh, used to get manned to the moon. So how is it possible that a four year old can use that device to easily navigate to games or videos that it, that they wanna see?

[00:18:53] Right? It's the, the user experience. It's the, the fact that Apple has eaten that complexity for the customer and made it very intuitive to navigate right. Well, there's other industries. This is a little tip for you guys. You know, one of the best ways to stay competitive and kind of be on the leading edge of your industry in, in your niche is to look outside your industry and consider other, uh, Uh, industries, products, services that are completely outside of your realm, right?

[00:19:24] Completely not even close to the same uh, world that you exist in. And look and study those businesses, study those business models, study those systems, and actually adapt them into yours. It's a really great way to kind of, you know, crowdsource essentially new. What would be cutting edge ideas for your industry?

[00:19:46] But to others, they would be commonplace and well proven, right? So that's a really cool way to consider is go to the mall, uh, go online call companies, like whatever you gotta do, go visit other people's websites. Just start looking around, opening your eyes to how are some of the best companies in the world eating complexity and making the customer experience as simple and intuitive as possible.

[00:20:09] If you can adapt some of those ideas and deploy them into your own business, again, you'll be light years ahead of your competition. All right. Excellent guys. This was a big one, but hopefully the topic of, you know, um, simplicity, mastering simplicity and, and elevating the client experience resonates with you.

[00:20:24] Um, ultimately, at the end of the day, our clients are the decision makers, right? They are the ones that dictate. Our, um, success in the marketplace. And so therefore, by default, if we can help them become more successful, if we can help them get their desired results, then naturally we're going to succeed as well as a company, as an entity.

[00:20:43] And so I want to just encourage you to always put the, put the perspective on how does the client experience feel, how does this impact them, and how does, how do they deploy these, uh, my services or products for themselves? And if you can constantly revisit that, I'm very, very confident that you'll continue to evolve and become an absolute dominant leader in your own respective industry and, uh, service category.

[00:21:08] All right, excellent guys. Love talking with you guys. Uh, hopefully you enjoyed this one. Would love a follow, would love any comments that you have, drop 'em, uh, near or around wherever you're listening or, or watching this. And, uh, we, we love you guys and we'll see you on the next episode of T W C Talks.

[00:21:24] All right, take care guys. See ya.