What’s Your WOW Factor?

Melissa: Hey guys, Melissa here and I’m coming to you today from inside my horse trailer. We are down riding and it is today cold and wet and nasty and just an ugly day out. So unfortunately we’re not in the saddle, we’re all kind of holed up into our campers and in our rigs. And so last night we were up and we were kind of going through our Facebook feeds and we saw a comment come through that I really wanted to address with all of you guys today. There’s so many different avenues that we could go down with this particular topic, but I just wanted to share one idea that has worked really well for me and who knows, maybe I’ll come back and share a few other ideas as well. But this is one that really helps build a new clientele and a new business get up on its feet and it’s a way to foster referral-based business and referral based business for our businesses is absolutely the number one and the best way to get customers.

And it doesn’t matter whether you’re a mobile grooming service, a grooming salon, a pet care facility. All of it is service based. And so I want you to kind of think about what I’m going to say here and how can you apply something to your business to make it work. Because all of us are unique, all of us are different. But the biggest thing that you need to do to help really cultivate that referral based business is create that wow factor, that factor that people just go, “Wow, I cannot believe they did that” or “They have a facility like this” or “They did this for my pet,” or “They did this for me,” or whatever it might be. You stop and you think about it and whenever something happens to you that is really positive, that is kind of out of the ordinary, don’t you go to your friends and family and say, “Wow, I just cannot believe what I just experienced.” “Susie, you got to see this. You got to go check it out.”

You’re telling people that you care about and you’re referring that business to someone else. And so I really want you to think about how can you cultivate that. And again, it’s not just in your facility or your van or whatever it might be. It’s in how you interact with those customers as well. And it’s not just you, it’s your entire staff. And so I really want you to think about what can you do today to wow those customers. And I want to, you know, when I first had mobile, I had a fleet of six mobiles at one point in time and that company grew so fast and it’s because we wowed them, we wowed them with way that we handled their dogs. We were right there, we were one of the first mobiles out there. So that was new and that was different.

And we built that business really, really quickly. And another one is Whiskers Resort, which is my full service pet resort. It has boarding, overnight lodging, doggy daycare, grooming, and that one I started it in 2007 and it has grown beyond my wildest dreams. And it’s all done based on referral services by the wow factor, by making clients come in and just go, “Wow,” they can’t believe the facility, they walk in, they don’t smell anything doggy. It’s relatively quiet for a boarding facility. And when I first started it only had 45 rooms and then we were able to easily expand it to 90 rooms, and now we’re up to over 180 rooms and we’re doing another expansion and clients are just waiting. We have a waiting list to get in. Our occupancy rate for the rooms is always over a hundred percent even in our downtime.

And it’s not because there aren’t any other games in town. There are. But it’s because we have been able to have that wow factor and the staff, we’ve got up to 60 staff member maybe a little bit more now, and all of them treat the customers like gold and they all understand the wow factor. They have to make that customer want to go back and tell their friends, their family, have the conversation around the water cooler. They’re always doing small things. And a lot of times it’s not anything expensive. It’s not anything big. It’s just treating people with dignity and respect and making them smile.

And when we first started that business, we had no clientele whatsoever. And so one of the things that we did is the limited staff that we had. I think we started out with, I don’t know, 10 employees or something. All of us brought our dogs into the facility and we literally staged it. We put them in the rooms and all the rooms were designed to look a little bit like a room in a house. So they were already pretty cool. They had all glass fronts. They had flat screen TVs, they had beds, wallpaper, pictures hanging on the wall. So it was a really homey feeling. So we really got the wow factor just from the facility.

But we had to do something to get people into the facility because we knew once we got them there, we could wow them. And so we did postcards. I think we did radio ads, we did little business cards with $10 off their first service. We went everywhere. We passed out those $10 off coupons. I think I even made a cache buck. One of my dog’s name was Cache at the time. And so her little face was on the center of the cache buck. And here it is. We started that business in 2007 and Rebecca, who is now my partner with Whiskers and the president of that organization, she said she had a cache buck just come in last week. It’s been floating out there for well over 10 years and somebody turned it in and we honored it. Hey, why not?

So I want you to think about what you can do for your business, your service to make those clients smile, to make them go wow and want to tell their friends and their family and their coworkers what an amazing experience they just had it your business because that’s what’s going to build your referrals. That’s what’s going to build your clientele. So that you can have success with your business in a very short amount of time. Hey, good luck with it.