With Megan Huber, a Client Retention Specialist and Business Acceleration Mentor who partners with established, high growth online coaching and education based business owners and their teams to increase client results, retention and revenue leading to greater profitability, scalability, and sustainability. Megan combines her 19 years of experience across public education, athletic coaching, curriculum development, client success management, group coaching, and entrepreneurship in a way to support leaders and teams to provide a superior client experience so that customers never want to leave.

Join us in our conversation as Megan shares her insights on client experience, retention, and business growth. She discusses how businesses can improve operational processes and create a seamless client journey. Megan also offers practical strategies to enhance client success while balancing business scalability. Tune in to learn how to turn your clients into loyal advocates.

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Takeaways & quotes you don’t want to miss from this episode:

• The Importance of Client Retention.
• How to scale without losing client experience?
• What is the “First 100 Days Rule”?
• Business should strive for mastery of service rather than just scaling quickly.
• Why some businesses don’t focus on retention until they reach $10M+ in revenue?
• Client Experience as a Brand Differentiator.

“Marketing and sales will always be important, but if you don’t prioritize client retention, eventually you’ll start losing money—even if you’re making $45 million a year.”

-Megan Huber

Check out these highlights:

• 07:07 Why do businesses resist focusing on client experience?
• 16:52 How different personalities and learning styles affect business success and retention.
• 20:35 Onboarding is the make-or-break phase of client retention. Why?
• 32:45 Who is the “Invisible Marketing Machine”?
• 38:36 Megan shares her personal journey and how she became a specialist in client experience.
• 56:56 Hear Megan’s advice to the listeners…

How to get in touch with Megan on Social Media:

Imperfect Show Notes

We are happy to offer these imperfect show notes to make this podcast more accessible to those who are hearing impaired or those who prefer reading over listening. While we would love to offer more polished show notes, we are currently offering an automated transcription (which likely includes errors, but hopefully will still deliver great value), below:

GGGB Intro  00:00

Here’s what you get on today’s episode of Guts, Grit and Great Business®…

Megan Huber  00:04

We need to define and refine the operational processes, systems and procedures as it relates to client experience, and refine our approach as a company culture around client experience. Because if you’ve got a client experience department like you’re a leg up on everybody, but they cannot do it. But they cannot do it on their own. Client experience, retention renewals, lifetime. I have a client that is a whole company effort, not just a single department effort.

GGGB Intro  00:32

The adventure of entrepreneurship and building a life and business you love, preferably at the same time is not for the faint of heart. That’s why Heather Pearce Campbell is bringing you a dose of guts, grit and great business stories that will inspire and motivate you to create what you want in your business and life. Welcome to the Guts, Grit and Great Business® podcast where endurance is required. Now, here’s your host, The Legal Website Warrior®, Heather Pearce Campbell.

Heather Pearce Campbell  00:59

Alrighty, welcome. I am Heather Pearce Campbell, The Legal Website Warrior®. I’m an attorney and legal coach serving online information entrepreneurs throughout the US and around the world. Welcome to another episode of Guts, Grit and Great Business®. Super excited about our conversation today, and would love to welcome Megan Huber to the podcast. Welcome Megan. 

Megan Huber  01:25

Hey, Heather. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to see where we take this.

Heather Pearce Campbell  01:30

Right? It’s an open book at this point, I feel like there’s a lot that we could talk about. Just for a moment, I want to give a shout out to my friend Nicole. Nicole Jansen of leaders of transformation, if you have not checked out her podcast, hop over and check it out. We are for years, have swapped guests and sent awesome people that we know you know, the other direction. And so Nicole introduced me to Megan, and I’m super happy to have you here today. But Nicole also runs a really tight podcast, and she’s been doing it a few years longer than I have, so she’s like, top 1% in the world. Anyways. Love Nicole. Megan, let’s get you introduced for folks that don’t know you. Client Retention Specialist and Business Acceleration Mentor. Love those titles. Megan Huber partners with established high growth online coaching and education based business owners and their teams to increase client results, retention and revenue, leading to greater profitability, scalability and sustainability. Ding, ding, ding. Megan combines her 19 years of experience across public education, athletic coaching, curriculum development, client success, management, group coaching and entrepreneurship in a way to support leaders and teams to provide a superior client experience so that customers never want to leave. Oh, I love that. That’s so many people are like, Hmm, I’m going to stick around for this. I think that’s huge, like even just listening to the areas of expertise, right? Your coaching, the curriculum development, Client Success management, I think a lot of people struggle with that whole client retention, especially if they’re running programs that are based on groups, right? Based on group enrollment and continuing enrollment. I think that client retention is a real issue. And I know when you and I first connected, we talked briefly. I have a friend. I’ll do a shout out to Mustaf. I’ll have to actually get him on here, who talks about, also from a marketing perspective, client retention and how most businesses like, like 97% of businesses fail to even like have a program in place designed to retain and reach back out to and nurture those clients along. They spend so much time looking for the next lead, the next client, right? And it’s just like so much so many resources are spent in some ways in the wrong direction, when a little bit of nurturing and a little bit of effort really goes a long way in keeping and building that client base with folks you’ve already served.

Megan Huber  04:12

Yeah, it’s so true. Heather, you know, I’ve worked with anybody from the complete newbie who’s never made $1 in their business up to, like, the largest company I’ve worked with on the client retention side. And client experience is about 45 million annually, and everything in between. And no matter where I go, I think I’ve had one client that could actually produce data that they had collected over the years in the category of client retention, xlient results, client success, client experience, whatever you want to call it. Essentially, it’s like everything that happens after the sale. And I was even talking to my own business coach about this not too long ago, and he was like, you know, out of every business owner I’ve ever worked with, that’s doing seven or eight figures. I’ve never one time in P and L statement, seen any company I’ve ever worked with have anything about retention on a P and L and what does that tell us? That tells us they’re not thinking about it. So if it’s not even on a P and L statement, it’s not even it’s barely on a business’s radar. But when we look at how you can make so much more money, and what I mean by that is more profit, like you can actually make more sales, you can make more revenue, you can make more profit, if you would actually put a star beside client retention and and make that a priority. And again, out of all the people in the range that I’ve worked with it, I mean, I’ll be very honest, sometimes it’s like pulling teeth to get a company to make client retention and providing an excellent client experience an actual priority across the company, even the largest size company I’ve worked with, they all still think in their mind that they they still have a marketing problem, or they have a sales team problem, and they still believe that that is, that is the answer marketing and sales to get them to the next level. And if that’s, look, I’m not saying marketing and sales aren’t important. It’s always important. It’s always going to be important. But to your point, it’s like, we’ve got to shift some of our attention over to client retention and client experience. Or there comes a time when it’s like, you’re going to end up being in the red, right? So if our client retention percentage, if that rate is too low, eventually you start losing money. I don’t care for making $45 million a year. I actually my biggest client that was doing 45 million a year, their retention was less than 5% I gave them a year to still be in business with retention that low, that’s just fact. So it’s pretty important.

Heather Pearce Campbell  07:07

Do you think? Like, I’m so curious, for companies that are that resistant to focusing on what’s called initially, client experience, right? Did they have it right at some time, and then, as they grew, like at some point in time, they actually had it right as they grew, they got away from that. Or are you working with clients where you see that like they maybe never really dialed it in to the level that they should? 

Megan Huber  07:33

That’s a really good question. I think it’s a both. And I see a little bit of both. I think it’s a lot easier for people to manage a lower volume of clients, because you have the ability to be more high touch. You can hold their hand a little bit more. It’s not as expensive. You don’t need such a team of human beings back there servicing your clients. And I think where we kind of get lost, is we do start chasing money, like, let’s be honest. I mean, I’m just going to call that out. It’s not that money isn’t important. We all need money to function. We live in a society where if you don’t have money, you you don’t have anything. So I understand it, but it’s like this constant chase to how much bigger can I scale, how much more can I make? How many more people can I serve? And it’s kind of coming from this place of like, let me just beat my chest a little bit and let me just prove that I can get to the next rung on the ladder. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with those people as human beings. These are not bad people. These are good people. But I think we just get a little bit caught up in I want to be the one who can say I have this many zeros. Or I want to be the one who can say I took my company from 500,000 to 5 million in like a year. Or I want to be the one who could say I took my company from 20,000 a month to 200,000 a month. And when I ask people who tell me in a sales conversation, I will ask them, what’s the why behind wanting to go from where you are now to that next level financially, and I’m more times than not, the response I hear is because I can, or because I want to prove that I can. And so when we’re driven by that, we have eyes for what’s the marketing and sales that’s going to generate the leads and then close the clients, no matter what, even if they have to take like, a second mortgage on their house, use 18 credit cards, go through third party financing. I don’t care, because it’s going to get me to my number. And it’s not that these people don’t care about people, because they actually do. They actually do care about people, but they’re just being driven by, let me make more money as fast as I can. And when we’re driven by that, what we lose sight of is, oh, wait, the way that I service 20 clients at a time, or 50 clients at a time looks very different than how I. Us 500 or 5000 or 50,000 clients at a time. And you know, in this day and age, AI automation, it’s all the rage. Scaling is all the rage, and it’s like we’re in this race against each other to see who can get there faster. I believe that if we’re willing to look at and implement what is unscalable, how can we make the unscalable scalable? And I heard a it was actually a business coach I’ve worked with before. She’s got six companies. She does eight figures across her across all her companies combined. And she stopped growing one of her I think it was like a 30 or a $50,000 offer, and they stopped growing it, meaning they stopped allowing more and more people to join it, because they got to this point where they felt like, okay, the number of clients we currently have, and it was the seven figure, multiple, seven figure stream of income we can deliver on what we promised at the point of marketing and sales, but once we start adding more people, can we really, morally and ethically honor the promise that we made at the point of the sale? Can we provide them the same degree of experience? And their answer was no, and they took the route of, okay, well, let’s, let’s cap it at a certain number of people. Let’s not go over it, or else we’re short changing these people who are investing because we cannot deliver the same service. And you really have to think of it that way, like if I’m the 500th person using your product or your service or in your program, I should feel like I’m the only one. I should feel like number one did. So you really have to think of it that way. How can person 500 feel like person number one? And if you can’t do that, then we’ve got to, I’m not saying you’ve got to stop growing, but we’ve really got to question, well, how are we delivering our service? How are we taking care of the client? And What decisions do I need to make very differently, probably with my team, so that we can service clients at the highest level.

Heather Pearce Campbell  12:09

I mean, it’s such an important topic. I began the legal side of so many businesses. I see business systems and processes that aren’t working, because those often involve legal issues that come up, right? And so very often, even when I’m working on the legal side of a business, I’m also helping people dissect let’s talk about this particular business system or this process, or what your client journey looks like, and how you actually get them enrolled. How I mean, I’ve got a couple of questions that come to mind. One, are all of your clients willing to go on that journey with you? Of like, really, really looking at these questions from an ethical perspective? Because I think probably for some, the answer is yes, and some are, like, because I’ve seen it, well, we’re just, you know, focusing on the money and the process, and right now, it’s working. We’re not going to change it.

Megan Huber  13:02

Yeah. I mean, I’ve had a client ask me, it was an on site visit. It was a two day on site visit, and this part of the project. It wasn’t the entire project. It was just one of the projects we were working on, we were having them revamp their curriculum that their students were going through, because they, at this time they had over 4000 students going through a year long training, coaching, online education program, and it was in the real estate investing category. And when you looked, my background is public education, and you’ve got to, I mean, I know it was high school kids, but the way that you teach adults is actually really similar to the same. I mean, a high school kid is basically an adult. So not much changes between the age of 18 and an adult in terms of how you learn, how you process, how you’re going to move through a curriculum like that. Not everybody is the same. And we were on site for two days, and we were having them re record their curriculum, and I remember the CEO was like, I don’t even understand why you’re here. I don’t even understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. Because it wasn’t the CEO who brought me in. It was a COO who brought me in. The CEO had to sign off on it, but someone else in the company, and it was a family oriented company as well. It was a family who runs it. But, yeah, I have certainly had people. What I have found is the bigger the ship is, the harder it is to make a change. It takes a lot of a lot more time. It’s harder because you’ve and I understand it. It’s not like I don’t get it. What got them there, and what gets a lot of people to a certain level financially, is hardcore marketing and selling. They hustled their buns off, and they invested heaps and heaps of money to get there. And that’s the proof. That’s the evidence that they have. And so then when you come in and you start talking to them about the category of client success, your client success department, the size of your team, what your. Your team, who else you need to hire, they kind of don’t get it. And what a lot of folks, at least in the coaching and education space, will say is, you know, a lot of people who are coaching and educating they built a business in a different category first, and they know what it took to get them to where they got in that business. So let’s just take real estate investing as an example, they worked their buttons off to build a $3 million a year, ten million a year, or whatever, real estate investing business. And a lot of them, it was just hustle, it was action, it was messy, it was imperfect, and they just went for it like balls to the wall. I’m gonna go for it until I get there. And what we have to remember when we’re selling to the masses, the masses don’t all operate that way, and you’re going to have a very, very small percentage of people who are buying from you who are going to operate the same way you operated, especially if it’s like men versus women. You know, in this particular example, these are guys, and I love men, so like nothing against men. I hire a lot of men. Most of my coaches historically have been men. They were guys, and when they built their business, they were in their late 20s, not married, no kids, broke as a joke, and just the mentality was like, drive, go after it. But their ideal client is a woman who is over the age of 50, who has been in a career for the last 25 years, and they’re kind of like transitioning into like this is going to be their retirement plan. Well, what do you need to understand about that client? They have been told what to do for the last 25 years, which means they have a very compliant and agreeable personality. So if you go tell them to go knock on 100 doors a day in any given neighborhood, do you think they’re actually going to go do that?

Heather Pearce Campbell  16:52

Right? They’re not catalysts, right? They’re very likely not catalysts. They’re because if they were catalyst, they’d already be doing their own thing. They’re exactly a relator, you know, like, if you look at personality types, like they’re going to fit into a different category, and like what you’re getting at is so, so important, because you either have to know who you’re going to work with, who are your people, and how do you relate to them, or if you are like, across, let’s call it, you know, usually, most personality tests are broken down into like, four or five personalities, right? If you’re talking to all of them, you have to teach to all of them as well. You have to use language that is there for all, and you have to know the difference. It’s very different. Talking to a catalyst is very, very different than talking to a relator or an optimizer or an expert based personality. They’re all different.

Megan Huber  17:47

And that’s the piece that a lot of business owners don’t get. They either don’t want to get it, or they don’t understand it, or they’re, quite frankly, just not educated in that, like they just haven’t been trained to do that themselves. You know, whenever I talk to somebody else who’s like a former educator and now they’re in, like, the course creation world or coaching world, or teaching adults, or whatever, that’s one of the things that we’ve all noticed, at least in the coaching and online educations. And it’s not just limited to coaching and education. That’s just the field I’ve grown up in. But you know, a lot of programs are not as successful as they could be success rate, meaning people are making back the money that they actually invested in, you know, especially if you’re selling like how to make money, or how to grow your business, or real estate investing, you know. But they just don’t understand differences between people. I was giving a presentation earlier today to a company not in the coaching and education space, and that there were about 12 team members on and they were from every department in the company. The whole team was there, and we were talking about this, and I said, look, I know everybody wants to scale, but it doesn’t matter what product, service, package, program you’re selling. No two clients are the same. Now it doesn’t mean that we have to operate our systems and processes and procedures completely different for every single client, like there’s no way you can do that. So operationally, systematically, from a process and procedure perspective, it’s all the same for everybody, but the way that you are navigating conversations with people, the way that you are moving them through the psychological stages of the customer journey, no two clients are the same. I learned that as a high school teacher, no two students were the same, and I had to figure that out within the first 60 seconds of my class starting, how do I interact with each person here? How do I treat them? You can’t treat them all the exact same way because they’re all so unique and different. And my goal wasn’t to make sure every single student passes with an A because that wasn’t going to happen either, but I had to create a fertile environment. For each one of them individually, with 30 of them in a room, such that each individual student could do their best, whatever their best was, and then let it be. But you know, not everybody had a career like that. Not everybody was trained in that. And I think that’s where there’s a very big missing piece that I see, is there’s a lack of understanding and a lack of skill on how do I interact with different types of people in different brains, and how people function in different ways and even different emotional states? Right? Like, not everybody’s in the same emotional state all the time, but you’ve got to be able to navigate that.

Heather Pearce Campbell  20:35

All right, let’s pause for a moment and hear from today’s sponsor. Are you an entrepreneur who is on track to make a million or more in revenue this year in your business? If so, your business is likely facing a host of legal issues that are right for support. And if you are like so many of my clients at this level, you are likely tired of taking unnecessary risks and a DIY approach to legal support in your business. You’re ready to tackle the mess of legal documents, six legal gaps that you have. You want to take care of your IP, your clients, your business, and avoid unnecessary conflict and risk in the process. If this is you, and beyond just being an entrepreneur, you are a catalyst and are committed to your mission and your impact in the world. I invite you to get in touch. You could be a fit for my catalyst club, a small business legal support program that I designed for my high level clients. Just like you, you can find out more at legalwebsitewarrior.com. Just click on the Work with Me tab to learn more about the catalyst club and other ways that I support my clients, a fabulous group of world changing entrepreneurs, I might add, you’ve done the initial legwork in your business. And now you want to soar. And you know that you can only go as high and as far as your legal foundation lets you go. So get in touch today, hop over to legalwebsitewarrior.com, click on the Work with Me tab. And if you have any questions, get in touch through the Contact link on my site, I look forward to connecting it would be a joy to support you on your path.

Heather Pearce Campbell  22:18

I think it starts with really knowing who your program, product, service, training, whatever it is is for, right? Because, like, I have a program, it’s really just for catalysts. I don’t want other personality types in there, and so I’ve learned how to spot those, right? And then there’s like, because there’s partly like, Who are you talking to? But also, how do you design the information so that it can be utilized and accessed by those types? Right? So, for example, if I was talking to a relator, relators want to know you are there with them every step of the way. You’re holding their hand. You have answers for them. You’re not going to ever let them drop or fall like they are. They’re relator. They want the experience of going through it with people that are going to be there for them, right? If you’re talking to an expert like they want to know the system, you prove to me that this works, that this is the best that you know. All of this has been vetted like you talk to them in a different way than a catalyst where you’re like, look, this is the fastest path to cash. This is the fastest path from A to Z, whatever it is that they’re looking for, right? But you can’t just say the words. You have to think about, like, can you actually do that? Does your program, service, offering whatever, right? So, for example, I have an online, you know, I’ve basically a digitized version of my business that is all about expediting legal support to entrepreneurs, right? So they like you can get resources and bundles and video trainings and documents and blah, blah, blah. Well, some of my clients are going to go through video by video by video, and do the stuff that I tell them to do, others are like, give me a huge mug of coffee and two hours, and I want to pound it out on a Saturday morning and be done with it, right? And so, like, for those folks, I recorded a workshop like, Fine, sit down and for two hours. Let’s go through this and do it all at once, because you’re like me, my personality doesn’t want to do video by video by video by video over weeks. I just want to, like, sit down and get it done right. That’s how I am totally right. That’s the catalyst in me. Like, I can’t be bothered to spread this out if I can do it in this amount of time. So even the way that you go back and either, like, update your services, redesign them, rethink the client experience. I think sometimes you don’t get there until you’ve been delivering the thing for a while and you know who it’s for, right? But also, how often do you find that clients want to say the theme, but they don’t want to go back and fix the process or fix the client? Experience and and where do you start with them? For for people that are listening there to going, Oh, I maybe have some things in my client journey to fix. Can you break it down for us? Like, what are the parts you’re looking at? Where do you have them start? What are, what are the areas that you find people get stuck in or do wrong? I’d love to hear just some highlights from your experience in working with your own clients?

Megan Huber  25:22

Yeha, so the first question is, you’re exactly right. They don’t necessarily want to go back, because what I hear them say and again, oftentimes, the person who has built the like, let’s just be honest, somebody who’s built a seven multiple, seven, eight figure business, they’re probably a catalyst, because you don’t get there by going slow. You get there through speed. And so those people do not want to be slowed down. And so in their mind, they think this is going to slow me down, because they’re not connecting the cha ching dots, right? So they’re just wanting to be over here with marketing and sales, because they want the Cha chings, and they want the dopamine hit. They want the car to drive faster. Yeah, they want that. So they think client experience. They’re not connecting the dots. It’s harder for them to connect the dots. So this is actually going to equate to profit. And look, I get it when I come in and I’m working with a team on client experience and client success. The results are not instant. That is a longer play. It’s a longer play. And depending on what you’re selling, it might take a year for you to see incredible results. It may take six months. It may take three it really just depends on the service, the product, the design of it. It really just depends. So I understand that. Again, we’re kind of in a society that’s brainwashed us and drained us to want instant gratification all the time. So yes, I do see people who are hesitant because they think it’s going to slow them down, and they think in their mind they’re going to have to pause and stop marketing and selling. And you do not have to do that in terms of where I have people start, and I have people look, I think the first layer is you’ve got to have a degree of knowledge and understanding about this. So if I take my example from this morning, I gave it an hour long training where I just talked about the eight psychological phases of the client life cycle as it relates to client experience, client happiness and client satisfaction. So number one, your people just need to understand that what are the phases? They are both operational and they are psychological. There’s got to be an understanding that it’s our job as a team and as a company to lead the clients through those phases. No adult is ever going to lead themselves through those phases, operationally or psychologically. If we’re not leading them, they are going to get stuck. If they get stuck in one of those stages, guess what? They never get to the last stage, which is advocacy. What that means is they are a loyal, raving fan who’s probably going to buy a lot more things from you. They’re going to stay longer, so lifetime value of the client goes up and, oh, by the way, they are going to bring referrals into you. They are going to give you reviews, testimonials. If we can’t get the client to there, then we are losing so much money because of what it cost us to acquire the client and what it costs us to service a client who is not going to stay with us longer term, ever give us a review or ever bring a referral in? Right? It’s almost like we’re losing almost like double the money, because you’re losing the potential for that referral that you’ve got to go re spend marketing dollars on and reacquire and reservist so that, I think layer number one is there’s got to be a level of knowledge and information and understanding about it. Then, it really is taking each one of those eight operational and psychological phases one by one, and it’s evaluating how well are we doing in each one of these phases. So if I go back to my training example, this morning, I had everybody on the team score where they thought the company was at in each one of those phases on a scale of one to five, one being the lowest, five being the highest. So we need to get like we need to put it through a test first, and and your team members, if you have a team, people who are directly involved with a certain phase may score it one way, and someone outside of that department may score it another. So then it’s really great to come together and have a conversation. So that is really like a second thing to do. It’s let’s do an evaluation. Where are we currently at as it relates to each one of these phases in client success? Then we’re going to walk through each one of those. If I could, just, like, speed it up a little bit. Let’s say we look at marketing. We look at your sales. Ultimately, we want marketing and sales to be the place where you’re setting the expectation for what someone’s getting once the sale is closed. So we’ll speed up to after the sale. The hands down, the most important thing for any company to be looking at is the first 100 days. And if we wanted you. Some jargon. That’s really onboarding. Onboarding is not a moment, unless you have an app, if you have a SaaS product or you have an app, you have about 90 seconds. You’ve got about 90 seconds to get someone to I’m hooked. I’m in. I’m not leaving. If you’re a department store, if you are a walk in brick and mortar, you’ve got a little bit more time, you’ve got more than 90 seconds, might have an hour, might have a few minutes. So it really just depends on how much time you have in the coaching and education space. Onboarding could take 90 days. It just depends if you’ve got a pretty hefty software that’s gotta be installed, like Salesforce, okay, if we take sales force, that is not an overnight onboarding, that is like a months long onboarding for each one of those companies, depending on what the company invested in, so, depending on what our on what our product, service or business model is, our onboarding process is going to be. Could be really short. It could be really long. It could take months. It could also depend, well, what, which one of my products or services were purchased, and the onboarding process may be shorter or longer depending on what someone purchased. That’s in your suite of offers. But the onboarding process is make or break. So it’s the moment this the purchase was made, the credit card was run, to the point where your client is really reaching their first significant milestone. Did they accomplish the initial goal that they set? Okay, so we’ve got to understand what does that process look like from the point of the sale to the point of them reaching their first major milestone. You’ve got to know how to lead that client from one end to the other, and you’re going to take them through multiple phases. If we can get them to that first major milestone and that accomplishment they wanted to reach the initial one, then we are 1,000,000% more likely to be able to turn that person into an advocate, which is right after they’re kind of accomplishing that initial milestone. One of the biggest mistakes I see people making, business owners making, is they don’t even find out what the client’s goal is. They don’t even know what initial goal the client wants to reach. And so we’re just sort of like pushing people through and we want them to get the result. We want them to get on our timeline. But again, if we go back to no two clients are the same, like, that’s not going to happen. So it’s that that onboarding process really gets the bulk of the attention, because there are about four to six phases that actually constitute as what I consider onboarding, which doesn’t end until someone reaches the initial results that they were looking for. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  32:45

There’s so much good stuff in there to unpack. And this point that you’ve made about the result that we want for them versus the result that they want, you know what I’m visualizing. And I think I had a conversation with somebody else who I loved. It was a great conversation. And he was approaching this that we’re talking about now from a marketing perspective of, are you marketing authentically to and I know authentically gets overused, but he he means really, having done the deep inner work of who your business or you are here to serve, because he also works with a lot of service professionals, are you doing your marketing right? And it gets to your point here, of so that your people go through the process, go through the experience, and become those folks who are shouting your name from the rooftops, so that you don’t have to do all the marketing yourself. That’s the very best form of marketing for so many of you know the folks that he serves, which, again, are expert based businesses, service professionals. And so many of those folks hate marketing, right? And so the irony is, like, you have to get your marketing right to get the right people in the door, but then you’ve got to have the right level of support, the right processes, the right client experience set up so that you have people who are literally growing your business for you.

Megan Huber  34:13

Oh yeah, they become your invisible marketing machine. And that’s the only form of marketing that is not linear, the only form, all the other forms of marketing, are completely linear, so you can exponentially multiply your growth and your scale and your profit by focusing on what we’re talking about from the marketing perspective, and then from the client service and client experience perspective.

Heather Pearce Campbell  34:38

Yeah, well, and it’s so often, it’s interesting in just examining business trends, even language trends in the marketplace, right, which I’m sure you’ve seen over time and I’ve had lots of conversations, even with people on this podcast about businesses and business models, where people are exclusively focusing, I think, on what you called like the hardcore marketing and sales, and that’s it, full stop. They may be increasing in revenue because they’re pouring more money into their marketing, but they’re not creating better client outcomes. They’re not growing a client base that loves them because the refund and the return rate is high, again, because it’s spray and pray marketing, and that I think becomes a really tiresome business model really quickly. Like, is that the business that you want to be in for all of my clients? The answer would be no to that. 

Megan Huber  35:32

Yeah, yeah. And look, I we understand why there is such an emphasis by the business owner on marketing and sales. One of the biggest reasons is because so many entrepreneurs got their start in marketing and sales. They they came up like their career, like the majority of entrepreneurs did, haven’t always been an entrepreneur, like most of us, not all of us. I get it, most of us had some sort of job or career first before we started a business. Obviously, there’s, you know, your examples of people who started their first business when they were seven, and they’ve always been an entrepreneur. But if you look at most business owners, they did most successful ones. They came up in marketing and sales. They were trained to be marketers by wherever they were in corporate or they had a sales job. You don’t have very many entrepreneurs who worked in the customer service department or customer support department or client experience department. You have very few with that background. So that’s one of the other reasons why. Also in most companies, the client success team or person you know who they report to. Oftentimes, the way it’s structured is they report to the marketing director. So then when you have a board meeting with the owner who came up in marketing and sales, so that’s obviously what they want to talk about, then you’ve got the marketing director in the room, well, what are they going to talk about? They’re going to talk about marketing. And then you’ve got your customer success department, who’s reporting to the marketer. So in the boardroom of your company, who is there representing the voice of the customer? It’s probably not going to be your marketing team. It’s not going to be your sales team. Is it going to be your the company owner? Well, maybe they have a client centric perspective, but most companies don’t actually have a client centric culture or client centric perspective. Even in the coaching and education space, people are always like, of course, I have a client centric approach. I’m like, you don’t, though, because you’re not even having team meetings where every single person on the team is talking about client experience. So you can’t have a client centric culture if you’re not cross talk populating about I don’t know the right word, like, you know, but so I understand that, you know. And then the other reason why we’ve already said, but like, psychologically, we want the dopamine hit. We want the dopamine hit as often as we can get it. And you don’t get dopamine hits often in client experience. You get it from marketing and sales all the time.

Heather Pearce Campbell  38:05

Oh, that’s such a such an interesting point to think about. That dopamine, dopamine hit. This is a big conversation. I feel like there’s so many juicy parts of the client journey that we could dig into really quick, though, I want to take a look on how did you end up here. Connect a few dots for us on your personal journey about how this became the thing for you, like your area of expertise, and the thing that you love to support people with. Where did that come from?

Megan Huber  38:36

Such a good question. So my undergrad degree was just like General Business Administration, like, I don’t know business management, business administration. And when I graduated from college, I got a job. So I graduated in 2004 and this is when there was a period of time it was very difficult for any of us to find a job at that time. I don’t remember why. Somebody actually told me recently. I don’t remember what they said,

Heather Pearce Campbell  39:01

Well, you and I talked, 2002 like 911 had happened. Yes, 911 had happened in 2001 and the economy tanked, right? And huge companies, it didn’t matter, law, firm, accounting, financial, whatever, closed doors, put moratoriums on any hiring for quite some time. 

Megan Huber  39:23

It was you, Heather, who shared that with me. So I graduated, oh, four hard to find a job, so I got a job as a manager in training at a Jason’s Deli, and I had moved home. I was working 12 hours a day. I think I had to leave my house at 5am in the morning. I was getting home after dark. I was crying there. I was crying back. And I’m living with my parents, and my mom has had it, and so three weeks in, she’s like, Megan, you just need to resign, like, turn in your resignation letter. This was in 2004 and she goes, you would be a phenomenal teacher. Why don’t you just go back to school and get your master’s degree in education, go work at Northwood, which is the highest score where I graduated from, and like, call it a day. So that’s what I did. I got into a master’s degree program in education. I got a job teaching in the business department, so I didn’t have to have a teaching certification to get hired in the business department. So I was going to school at the same time I was teaching full time. So a lot of it, I think I share this with people. I share this a lot with people. So much of my approach to client experience came from my upbringing in the public education classroom, learning how to navigate working with teenagers, because in my classroom, I taught an elective, which means I could have freshmen to seniors all in one class. I was not teaching AP or honors, so it’s not like I had the creme de la creme of the school in my classroom. I had anything and everything, anything and everything. I had the valedictorian with the person who slept every single day at school and didn’t even want to be there and everything in between, and you have to, I mean, yeah, I went to school for it, but that’s like on the job training, where you are having to navigate very different human beings, not just from a personality perspective, but with kids in public schools. Some of them are homeless. Some of them live with grandma. Some of them watch their dad beat their mom up the night before. Some of them aren’t eating. Then you have IEPs and accommodations and learning disabilities and autism and kids who used to be homeschooled and who broke up with who, who fought, who, like it’s all, it’s all mixed in in your classroom at one time, and I was known for my classroom management skills. So when teachers at the school would have a student, teacher from UNC Chapel Hill, teaching in their classroom, they would send them to my room to observe my classroom management skills. Keep in mind I was a 22 year old when I started, and I was teaching like 1819, year olds, so it’s just something I was very good at. My mother had a classroom right beside mine, so my mom was my mentor as a teacher, and she my mom was a phenomenal teacher. So the way that we work with adults, I mean, I understand that it’s public education, but so many things still apply to business because you are working with people. And again, I taught an elective. You know what goes first in public schools are the electives. So if they want to get rid of a department, they will get rid of an elective department. And one of those departments is arts, and the other was CTE, which is what I was in. So if I couldn’t fill my classes with enough kids, they would chop the classes, which meant my job would be on the line. So I had to learn how to recruit kids to take my like computer programming. What kid wants to take computer programming? But that’s what they told me I had to teach. I would have to recruit kids to take that class, then I wanted kids to take my next class and my next class and my next class, so I had to provide a very epic client experience so that my kids would keep returning back to me, so that I could keep a job. So I apply so much of that learning and training to client experience. So that was pre being a business owner. I also taught for North Carolina virtual public schools, so I was developing online classes as early as 2006 before all this online learning stuff was even popular. That’s a very different way of working with people. It’s all online, it’s all digital, but they still have to have a awesome experience, or else they’re failing out of your class because they’re not showing up, and then that’s on you. So that’s where a lot of my perspective and my lens, it comes through that training. Then I had a daughter. She’s now 14. I got a coaching certification. I realized, wow, this is what I was doing with my teenage kids. I’m going to start a business doing this, and that’s how I got into coaching in 2011. Fast forward, I found a mentor who I then quit my business for, and I worked for her full time for four years. She had a very large scale coaching company. We built that to about 10 million a year, and I was a director of client experience, and I wrote all the programs. Ran all the programs. It was kind of me and her, and, you know, 600 clients at a time. And I left that rebooted my own coaching business all over again, and I was working with a lot of newbies, and I was helping coaches build a coaching business online through organic strategies. And then that just kind of then led me to really starting to focus full time on consulting larger scale companies in the category of client experience. Now, I still work with the newbies. I totally still coach the newbies, but for my consulting, it’s just like two different arms to the business. People don’t really start paying attention to this conversation we’re having. Think, I mean, I’ll be really honest, nobody’s really paying attention to it until they’re around 10 million a year. So the pool of people that are even eligible for to for me to work with is very small. It’s a very small population of people who are even at that level. So I kind of do my one on one consulting work with those larger size companies, and then I do my more business coaching with the with the beginners and the novices and the rookies who are trying to make it, who are definitely not thinking about retention. They’re thinking about like they’re trying to make a sale.

Heather Pearce Campbell  45:33

Right, getting the first clients in the first place. What’s your, do you have some favorite parts of all of that? I mean, that’s quite a journey. And I love, love, love that you were able to apply so much of what you learned in your early work experience and in public education, although part of me is like, oh, that model of getting a teacher to get their own kids to show up like seems a little rough and has served you in this type of business model. Now, what are your favorite parts of what you do? Are there some real highlights that you love?

Megan Huber  46:08

I think my favorite thing, like, I’m just going back to again, like the training that I did today for a team of 12 people, it was the business owner and 11 people, you know, they were already one of the values of this company was already like, wowing the client, but it was like their socks were blown off based on having this conversation around client experience, because it’s just not at the forefront of a company’s everyday conversations. So I think that really takes me back to my teaching days, where, when you’re working with kids in a classroom, you’re exposing them to something for the first time. They’ve never learned it before, for the most part. I mean, some of your kids have because they self taught, because they were interested in that on their own. You know, like computer programming. I had kids who could do better computer programming than me, who I would get to teach some of the chapters in the class because they were saying up till 4am building programs themselves and like competing. I wasn’t doing that. I was self taught. So, you know, you have those instances, but I think it’s so exciting to introduce something new and different and unique to people that I believe in this day and age. I think that client experiences are last standing brand differentiator. I think it is the final way that any of us can be differentiating ourselves and our brands and our companies from the next we can’t really do that anymore with marketing and messaging and positioning like we’ve that’s been played out like so now, what is it? So I think it’s that I am such a teacher at heart. And if I can teach people about this concept and help them, you know, embrace it to the degree that I love it and then really fall in love with it like that’s a teacher’s dream in any classroom. So that’s probably my most favorite part of it.

Heather Pearce Campbell  48:01

I love that. Well, what’s coming to mind for me now is like, I think so often, being somebody in professional services, and a lot of my clients, truthfully, I mean, they’re in the coaching education space. A ton are doing online education, even if they’re coming from a licensed profession or having been some kind of service professional for many years, right? There’s a lot of diverse experiences. So often, like, the assumption is, like you’re you’ve got to be good at what you do. Like, you have to know your craft and be really, really good at it. And in many ways, this whole like, coming full circle to the client journey and really looking at it, I think like looking at it this deeply is actually ties back to that, like be really good at what you do in the first place, and particularly around creating a service or an offer or a training or a model that works for people, right? And I think oftentimes you hear so much like progress over perfection, just get the thing launched, you know, whatever. And people do that, and that’s great, and it can create that forward momentum, but it’s like revisiting those fundamentals of, is what you have created, is the service, is the offer, is the process, is the program, is it really top notch? Is it really top shelf, right? And I think that’s the piece that I love, because for so many people that I work with, like that’s their goal, they want to be the best at what it is that they’re doing, and I don’t think you can sever the client experience from that, right? Right?

Megan Huber  49:42

Yeah, I love that. I love that. Yeah, it’s becoming a master craftsman. Yes, you know, yes and it’s not like you’re perfecting your service and your product and your offer like every single hour of the day. I think there are seasons. Yes, you know, I think there are seasons where we make choices on, you know, maybe this season we do need to double down on training our sales team and improving our sales process. Maybe, you know, because that’s the season that your business in. It is in. I think there are other seasons where you know, if your retention, I mean, this is a really good place to start, start tracking your retention and know your retention percentage. How many you know, if it’s not retention like, how many people are renewing? How many people are you selling other products and services to? What’s the lifetime value of your client? Find out what those numbers are, and if those numbers are below standard for you, then you may be entering a season where maybe we need to not take our foot completely off the marketing and sales gas pedal, but maybe we need to, you know, take a little just a little bit off and slow down just a little bit. Because are we bringing people into an experience that’s actually going to keep them here, or are they entering into an experience where they are just exiting stage left as fast as they can, which means all you’re doing is moving money around. You’re not actually making money. There’s a really big difference between just moving money around. So that looks and feels like you’re making money, and that could be a lot of millions of dollars that you’re moving around. But are you really making any money? If your expenditure to bring people in is whatever it is, and then they’re just exiting state left they just bought one thing from you. There’s no way, there’s no way you’re profiting if that’s what it actually looks like. So maybe there is a season where we need to define and refine the operational processes, systems and procedures as it relates to client experience and and and refine our approach as a company culture around client experience. Because if you’ve got a client experience department like you’re a leg up on everybody, but they cannot do it on their own. Client xxperience, retention renewals, lifetime. Have a client that is a whole company effort, not just a single department effort.

Heather Pearce Campbell  51:58

Oh, that’s right, it’s, you know, the quick talk because legal touches every single one of these points as well. The quick talking point that I give every client at the beginning of us meeting and talking about their business is really your business is a series of touch points with your client or your potential client, and the conversation that you’re having with them begins clear back here at the very first touch point. What is the messaging? What is your branding saying? What is the promise that you’re making about the experience they’re going to have, whether you even know you’re making a promise, right? What is the enrollment conversation like? What is the delivery experience like? And in particular, does the delivery experience match the promises that you’ve made, right? Because this is where so many businesses go wrong and end up having really problematic client experiences, right? And then what does the follow on service, the follow on communication, the follow on like, even if you have to fix something, what does that look like? Right? You’re doing it in a way that retains that client or causes the potential problem or dispute to diffuse and bring them back around. As a fan of your business, which you have a major opportunity to do, but legal touches every one of those points, and you know what you’re saying? Here it is again, like go back to the very beginning, right? You have to look at all of it from a client experience and client journey standpoint, like that is the business.

Megan Huber  53:27

Yeah, your clients are your greatest asset. You know, your team and your clients, they’re your greatest assets because I mean, your clients are the ones paying you right, like they’re the ones paying they’re the reason why you have whatever you have financially. They are your absolute greatest asset. So take care of your greatest asset. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  53:47

Yeah, boom mic drop. Okay, I have totally run you over time. I love this conversation. I love what you’re doing. I love the way you look at it. For folks that are like, Okay, I need to go connect with Megan or follow her. Where would you send people? Where do you first of all, do you like to connect with people? I’ve had plenty of people say no, but if you want them, you do perfect. You want them to come join you in your world. Where would you send them?

Megan Huber  54:17

Yes. So I spend the largest amount of my time probably over on Facebook. So the if you just want to reach out to me, like individually, and you want to get me to respond the fastest, just go send me a DM on Facebook. I am Megan J. Huber over there. Facebook is usually always open. It’s always a tab open, and the reason why is because I’ve built most of my business on Facebook for like, the last eight years. So Facebook is the place. I also have a Facebook group. It’s called Structured Freedom, Inc, so that’s a really great place. And if you like listening to podcasts, if you’re listening to this, you probably do. I have a podcast called Built to Last so if you just want to like binge and Heather’s been on it. If you want to binge a lot on you can kind of take your pick, there’s a lot in there about client experience and this conversation. There’s a lot of things that are for people who are newer in their journey to business. There’s over 215 episodes. That’s a really, just a really great resource. If you want to go learn some more about this topic, and then any way to connect with me is over there.

Heather Pearce Campbell  55:23

Yeah. Oh, I love that. So folks pop over to the show notes page. You know that you can always find that at legalwebsitewarrior.com/podcast. We’re going to share links to Megan’s Facebook individual profile or her business group as well, and then her podcast Built to Last. Love it. I know it was not very long ago that we were on there together, but you will find all of the ways to connect with Megan there. Megan, I can’t remember, did you have something that you wanted to offer the audience or and if not, that’s okay, because I’m all for people not giving away their time.

Megan Huber  56:02

Yeah. So if you are the newer stages of business, so you know, if you are working towards six figures, multiple six figures, your first 500k especially as a coach or a consultant, I do have a really awesome guide called Your Pathway to 500K. I think it’s a 12 to 15 page guide that essentially maps out the 10 core steps that you’re taking to get to 500k and then there’s an accompanying 10 part mini video series that goes along with that. And those are short those are like seven to eight minute long videos. So that’s just something you could go binge in like an hour and know your pathway to 500k.

Heather Pearce Campbell  56:44

Oh I love it. That sounds like a great resource, so we will share that as well. Megan, such a joy to connect with you. What? What final thoughts would you leave our audience with today? 

Megan Huber  56:56

Oh, gosh, make client experience a priority. You know, be become the best. You don’t have to become the biggest, right? We’re not here to be the biggest. Be here to be the best. And you will approach decision making in a very different way, and you will still be wealthy.

Heather Pearce Campbell  57:18

I love that. Oh, it’s so true, so true. Thank you so much. Megan.

Megan Huber  57:23

Thank you.

GGGB Outro  57:25

Thank you for joining us today on the Guts, Grit and Great Business® podcast. We hope that we’ve added a little fuel to your tank, some coffee to your cup and pep in your step to keep you moving forward in your own great adventures. For key takeaways, links to any resources mentioned in today’s show and more, see the show notes which can be found at www.legalwebsitewarrior.com/podcast. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and if you enjoyed today’s conversation, please give us some stars and a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast so others will find us too. Keep up the great work you are doing in the world and we’ll see you next week.