How To Disnify Your Business With Vance Morris

I’m super excited to have with me, Vance Morris. He is a Walt Disney World resort management alum. Having spent ten years as a leader in those resorts, he runs the only Disney service and direct response marketing business on the planet. It’s quite a unique combination. I’m excited to know more about that from Vance. He coaches companies to create Disney-style service systems and then helps those companies monetize those Disney-style service systems through direct response marketing. He is the reigning GKIC marketer of the year, which is an awesome thing to receive as an acknowledgment, accomplishment, and award. Vance, thank you for joining us. Your company is called Deliver Service Now. People can find you at DeliverServiceNow.com. Welcome to the show.

I appreciate it. It’s good to be here.

I’m excited to have you with us. I’m sure our readers would love to read a little more about your history spending a significant amount of time there. Give us a little feel for that experience for what you bring as an expert to our show.

Disney, Ritz-Carlton, and Zappo are all companies that are the gold standard as far as the client, patient, and customer experience. When we’re going through this interview, I’m going to use client, patient, and customer probably interchangeably. They all mean the same thing. Disney is tuned into the guest experience to the nth degree. The 100% generator of all of their business is their focus on the guest. I’ve learned firsthand, through not only being an hourly employee at Disney but being a leader, how they do that. On the outside, it looks like it’s an incredibly complex system to generate magic. Nobody believes in magic.

If they do, and I hate to break it to you, but there’s no such thing. Disney creates magic with systems. The biggest takeaway from Disney and any of these companies that are the gold standard for guest experience is that there are tremendous systems behind it. Disney systems are very basic because how else can you get 85,000 people, which is the number of cast members at the Walt Disney property in Orlando, performing at their optimal level, all singing the same song and doing the same dance? You can’t have a complex system. Otherwise, the whole thing will fall apart. This simple system goes through all of their different business models, movies, merchandising, Disney Vacation Club, and cruise lines.

All the systems that are in place are very simple. People leave. I was there for ten years. Central Florida’s a great place to be if you’re in that 25 to 35 age group. It wasn’t, to me, a great place to raise a family. I decided to leave Disney. I worked for a number of different independent hotels, resorts, and restaurant chains. I got laid off once and the second time. I made it through one recession but didn’t make it through the one in 2007. I decided to open my own business. The business I decided on, if anybody can believe it because I know most people do grow up to want to own a carpet cleaning business. That’s everybody’s dream.

I was looking for something, one that there was a definite need in the marketplace. If you think about carpet cleaners, we are on the low end of the home service totem pole. If you think of the top of the pole, it would probably be like air conditioning repair people, might be a plumber, step down, might be an electrician, and down in the basement are carpet cleaners. In 2020, they did an exposé on us showing people stealing the coins from in between the cushions and things like that. I knew that there was a need for a high-end cleaning service. In the area of the country that I live in, we’ve got a lot of waterfront property and very well-to-do people. They deserve and will pay for a premium-level service.

I started that in ‘07, which is a great year to start a business with the financial implosion. It’s great timing on that. The good thing about that was that I didn’t know any better as to finding the next job or in marketing. I used every guerrilla marketing tactic even before I knew the term guerrilla marketing. I soon surpassed a lot of businesses and peers in the business. They started to look at me like, “How are you doing this? Every time we ask you how’s business, you say it’s up and we’re all down or flat.” You got to remember back in 2007 or 2008, Yellow Pages was still a very effective method of marketing. They were used to putting out a Yellow Pages ad and having the business come in.

Once the recession hit, that didn’t work anymore. I used all guerrilla marketing tactics to get the business up and running. I used all of my Disney knowledge in systems and customer service and created that client experience. I implemented all of that in a carpet cleaner. I tell my prospects and clients if a carpet cleaner can Disnify their business, anybody can do it, which brings us to now. Not only do I consult with individual businesses, but I do boot camps down at Walt Disney World, where I take groups of business owners on a three-day excursion of Parks Classroom and the Parks Experience. At the end of the three days, they have a blueprint on how to Disnify their own business. Here we are now.

That’s awesome and timely. You talked about starting your carpet cleaning business in the recession in 2007, 2008, and 2009 and growing successfully during that time. As we’re doing this, we’re right in the early stages of this COVID-19 lockdown we’re all experiencing where businesses are looking around saying, “How are we going to get through this?” Not only got through it, but you started and grew a business during a down economy. I love that you’re talking about the combination of customer and guest experience.

We’ll use those interchange, but let’s call it customer experience. You talk about how to design a cool customer experience, but more importantly, the repeatable systems behind those experiences and then the direct response or guerrilla marketing tactics that you’ve already referenced. That combination is helpful for anyone who’s trying to run or grow a business during the uncertain times that we’re in. I’m grateful to have you on as a guest. People will be fascinated by knowing some of these tactics. Why don’t you share, if you don’t mind, some of the gorilla marketing tactics that you employed to get business during a down economy?

First and foremost, if anybody has a business where they visit homes or businesses, one of the tactics is what we call a five-around. Let’s say we had an appointment at home on the street. After the appointment moved over, we would go to each house on either side and the three houses across the street and attach a little door hanger saying, “We were in the neighborhood at Mrs. McGill’s house. Please ask her how we did for her. We’d love to take care of you.” That one was super simple to put in place and very cost-effective because we were already paying the technicians to be in the field. It took them two minutes to go around and hang those door hangers. If you’re in a business where you’re going to people’s homes, it is certainly a way to be able to do that.

There’s probably an equivalent to that for people who are not going to people’s homes if they’re going to a place of business. The idea is to think about how we can reach the immediate surroundings of this customer and say, “We’ve been here. Ask them about it.”

One of the things that a lot of people don’t have, and Disney does a good job of this, and I like to think I do a good job of it, is creating that referral culture. It’s nice that everyone, “We got a referral program.” Having a referral program and having a culture of referring are two very different things. When I set out on building a business, having a referral culture was something that I implemented right from the start. You could certainly implement it even if you’ve been in business for ten years, but it’s easy when you start it.

Disnify Your Business: When you set out to build your business, having a referral culture is something that you should implement right from the start.

When I say by a culture of referrals, it is almost an expectation of the customer that they refer as a reason for doing business with us. They can’t not do business with us if they’re not going to refer. We say it is a lot nicer. That’s essentially the message that gets across. My office assistant, when they’re doing the scheduling, they answer the phone. Instead of saying, “How did you hear about us?” the first thing they ask is, “Who referred you? Which one of your friends or family referred you to us?”

You built that everywhere.

They automatically start thinking about it. If they give us a name, we dutifully make sure that we take note of who did the referral so that we can send a referral thank you. When the technicians get to the home, they have business cards with their names on them that are designed for the homeowner to give to neighbors. If they pass them out, the technician will say, “My boss recognizes me or loves it if people refer us out and I get recognized. If you wouldn’t mind, if you think I did a great job, would you mind giving these cards to friends and neighbors?”

That starts it going. We have a client welcome package that the technician will give to the homeowner. In there is a referral certificate. In my monthly print newsletter, we have an entire section dedicated to referrals, people that have been referred to us are named. Everybody loves to see their name in print or the newspaper. We continue that. I say thank you to the people that did the referring. I always have a little graph in there that shows the number of new clients that come to us from referrals, which is usually in the 60% to 70% range, then a little sliver of regular marketing. A bulk of my new client acquisition is done through referrals.

That’s a fantastic example of the way that people can think differently about creating a culture of referral for their business. Thank you for sharing that. Let’s move on now to this cool situation you are in, where you lived in, worked in, was a leader at Disney, and that experience, and now you teach other businesses how to Disnify their service offering. Maybe I’m separating these unnecessarily. I’ll look for your guidance, but I see one element of designing a high-level service offering and then another element of systematizing it. Maybe they’re not separate. Is there a design that’s perfect client experience thing first and then systematizing it or is it all in one?

The first thing you come up with is what I call your perfect client experience. This is a story from the first contact somebody a prospect has with your company all the way to the very end when you’re saying, “Thank you very much for your business.” What does the perfect client experience look like? Disney is a big storytelling company, and that’s what makes them more successful than other entertainment companies out there because they have become masters at telling the story. When we were creating Chef Mickey’s, which is the character dining destination that I was on the design and operations team, we created the perfect guest story. It started with the guests making their reservations and how that conversation went.

We called them the Porter Party. The guy who helped write it had a little bit of a sense of humor. If you said it fast enough, it sounded like a porta-potty. It was the Porter Party’s journey through the reservation systems, getting checked at our podium, how they were seated, and how they experienced the characters and food. Once you had the entire perfect story put together, then we supported that with the systems, “How did we greet the Porter Party when they got to our podium?” It was as simple as putting together a chart.

This is how we did it at Disney. This is how simple it is. It’s a what, how, why chart, “What to do?” We had to greet the guests. “How do we do it?” It’s the Porter Party. I appreciate you coming to Chef Mickey’s. It could be a minute. If you could have a seat over here, we’ll get you seated right away, then, “Why do we do it that way?” We do it because we want to make sure the guests feel welcome. The key ingredient that a lot of businesses are missing is the why column. If you want to get your employees engaged, and I know that’s a fufu word sometimes, but if you want your employees to understand what you’re doing, you have to give them the why, “Why are they doing what they’re doing? Why are they doing what you say they have to do?” Once they understand why, they are much more inclined to tow the company line.

Disnify Your Business: If you want your employees to understand what you’re doing, you have to give them the “why.” Why are they doing what they’re doing or what you say they have to do? Once they understand why, they are much more inclined to tow the company line.

I love that you’re talking about it in terms of the story. Let’s talk about how you take that story. I know you can’t get into great detail because it probably completely depends on each company and the story they create, but how do you go about thinking about systematizing that and making simple, repeatable systems that 85,000 cast members on the Disney property in Orlando are all able to plug into the systems and make it go?

Each individual location has this perfect guest experience story. The bus department, monorail department, and groundskeeping folks have this perfect story. It depends on what division or department you’re in. The supporting systems are all the what, how, and why. There is a what, how, why on how to change a bus tire or how to put water in the pool. What you do when you go through your story, you identify those key interaction points where the guest and the cast member, or in other companies’ cases, the customer and the employee, become an interaction point. You have to define what that interaction point looks like.

I usually have the employees do this because, a lot of times, the people that are on the line level employees know this job a heck of a lot better. The secret is you get all of these interaction points and list them out on a chart. In the next column, you say, “What does good service look like? What does our service look like right now?” They’ll dutifully fill everything in, then you come up with a client of, “What does the perfect experience look like for each one of those customer interaction points?”

That gets the employees thinking. If you’ve ever been to a dentist’s office a lot of times, they could care less if you’re standing there. You come in the door, and you’re standing at the desk, and the lady at the desk looks up and says, “Yes?” that would be average to adequate service. That would go in that column. An incredible experience or the perfect guest experience would be you walk in the front door, Jane, behind the desk, immediately gets up, walks around the desk, welcomes you to the office, gets you all checked in, and offers you a cup of espresso.

You’re doing the same thing. You’re greeting the person, but it’s how you do it is completely changed. Once you have that perfect interaction set up, then you go to the average or good column, and you cross that out and say, “We are never doing any of this ever again. We’re only doing the perfect side.” Employees look at each other like, “You got me.” At the same time, they are now delivering that level of service that you wanted.

You talked about the process documentation or script for how we’re going to create these perfect customer or client experiences and use the term what, how, and why. Why do you do it in that order? You talked about the what and the how with the employee writing it out. I’d love for you to take us into the why a little bit.

The what is the greeting. The how is Jane gets up out of the chair, walks around the corner of the desk, and greets the patient with a nice smile and handshake if we’re not doing social distancing, and offers a cup of espresso. The why for that is, one, that’s how we make the patient feel welcome. We break down any fears that they may have in coming to the dentist’s office. We do it also to separate ourselves from all of the other competitors. If you go to six dentist offices, I guarantee you, if at least 6, if not 6 out of the 6, nobody’s going to get up and walk around the side of the desk to greet you with a cup of espresso. That would be the why.

Are you, as the leader need to help team members come up with that why or are you asking them to come up with it and then you review the thing together?

We typically give parameters. You can’t approach this willy-nilly. In your mind, as the business owner or the leader, you’ve got to have your parameters set up, “What is the minimum level of acceptance that I’m going to take here?” Usually, you don’t have to worry about that because you prompt your employees, “When was the last time you went out to eat and you had a great experience? Tell me about that. What did it look like?” They’ll talk about it. They’ll say, “How can we apply that to our office?” The key is getting employee engagement set the parameters and your minimum level of acceptance, but usually, your employees will go well above that minimum level.

Whether or not you read any of our episodes in the past, let me remind our readers that I’m a huge fan of what you’re talking about, Vance. The way to get people to completely buy in on things like this is to get them to weigh in on it and get involved. I know some people might turn off when they hear things like employee engagement. You reference that as well, but that is key to getting people to be all in on something like this and not just a checklist but a culture of serving this way. It’s essential to get people to embrace it fully. If you want that, get them involved. I love the way that you’re coaching our readers by getting team members involved and defining some of this stuff.

Let’s take a step away from Disney. Not everybody goes there on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Think of two quick-service restaurants that you might go to that have great systems. McDonald’s would be one. Regardless of how their food tastes, they have got the franchise model, the systems to generate the same flavored food day in and day out all across the world. They have that system down. They can take sixteen-year-old pre-pubescent teenagers and throw them into this system and it still works. Compare that to Chick-fil-A. They also have fantastic systems. They take that same employee pool that McDonald’s is drawing from, but they also have that culture of service.

I’ve done unscientific tests where I’ve gone into a fast food place, and I have told myself, “I am not going to say anything until I am greeted by the counter person.” I would stand in McDonald’s sometimes for a minute or a minute and a half looking at the cashier. The cashier looked at me, and neither one of us said anything. Finally, I would say something to get the order out. If you contrast that with Chick-fil-A, which is essentially serving the same thing, it’s fast food, but every single one of their employees uses the word guest.

They say, “May I help the next guest?” At the end of a transaction, they’re saying, “My pleasure.” It can be done. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in or people always say, “Disney can hire the best because they’re Disney.” No. In your neighborhood, you got a Chick-fil-A and McDonald’s, both pulling from the same pool of teenage kids, but why is Chick-fil-A ten times more successful? Their average revenue per store is over $3 million a year, and they’re only open six days a week. The average McDonald’s is right around $1.1 million a year, and they’re open seven days a week. It can be done.

Let’s go away from high-touch service businesses. I know what we’re talking about especially applies in a service context. Let’s say you have a product or you do a bunch of B2B stuff. How do we apply some of these principles to other readers who might be saying, “None of those examples relate to me?”

Great experiences belong to any company that has to deal with people. You could be an IT or a pest control company. They all apply. Everybody is a commodity. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. All businesses have become commoditized, including dentists, opticians, carpet cleaners, and IT companies. The only differentiator now is the level of the guest or customer experience. For other businesses to be able to get there, I’ve got what I call Seven Magic Keys to Disnifying Your Business. First and foremost is what I call the wow component. When a customer or a patient is done doing a transaction or business with you, at the end of it, they say, “Wow, that was good.”

An example of that would be if you fly Southwest Airlines. The airline industry is very commoditized. The low-fare carriers are extremely commoditized. I heard a joke the other day that Spirit Airlines’ new tagline is, “Our fares are never low enough,” because of the crappy level of service you get there, but Southwest has perfected the experience of flying for a low-cost carrier. If you think about it, when was the last time you were smiling or laughing when you got off a flight? In Southwest, it happens quite frequently.

I was on a flight a few years ago. When you’re coming in for a landing, the flight attendants come over the PA system and say, “Items have a tendency to shift in flight. Please be careful opening the overhead bins.” The FAA mandates that they make this same. On this particular Southwest flight, as we’re landing and we start taxing to the gate, the flight attendant comes over the PA system, “Be careful opening the overhead bins items have a tendency to shift in flight. As you know, shift happens.”

The whole plane erupts in laughter. We’re all walking off the plane, smiling. Did the flight attendant have to do that? They didn’t have to do that. Did it cost Southwest anything to get the flight attendant to do that? It didn’t cost them anything either. Experience is creating that wow. It doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t have to cost you anything at all. It’s allowing your employees to do what you want them to do to create that wow experience.

Let’s make a shift here as we come to the end of our time together, I would love for you to quickly tell us about this unique combination that you have between helping your clients and people with world-class service experiences and direct response marketing because it sounds like you help monetize that great service design and the systems that you help them create. You help them monetize that through good direct response. That’s a unique combination. I’m genuinely interested in how you help people with both of those things.

If nobody knows about your great service, it’s not going to do you any good to have it because it’s not going to help your business. Once you have this process in place and Disnified your business, now it’s the time to let people know about it, get people talking, and start getting business in. With direct response marketing, it’s a mechanism where you put out an offer and you can tangibly measure the return on that offer. For every dollar spent, you can measure every dollar coming in. I’ll use a lot of times businesses that have worked with me. The headline sometimes on their ad, email, or website will be, “The only Disney-trained air conditioning company in Topeka, Kansas.”

We start off with the headline. If you can get the word Disney, your business, and town in the same headline, that’s huge. You might be a little bit of a stretch, but you can do that even just by studying Disney or the stuff that I have and say, “I’m going to latch onto this process that Disney has for creating a guest experience. I’m going to implement that in my business,” then you can start using that in your marketing. We take all of those headlines that we’ve put together. We typically match it with an offer that’s going on in the world.

We’re in the middle of Coronavirus or COVID-19. I instruct a lot of my clients, “Use the news that’s going on around you.” I’m not saying use it for evil and scare the live daylights out of people, but use it in a way that is part of your service and personality. Part of my personality with the carpet cleaning world, one of the offers that we have out there is a free roll of toilet paper for every job that we book. That has gotten. It’s a direct response because we can measure it. I know the three media that I use to get that message out there. I know the message is being received because usually, I don’t get a lot of return emails, like replying to the offer, but I got a ton on that one saying, “This is funny. I needed a good laugh. Thanks for cheering me up.”

It also brings me to something, and this is a little bit off the subject of direct response, but especially in trying times, a lot of people want to hear good news. They want to be cheered up a little bit. They also don’t want to be sold to. If you have a solid client base, if your customers are with you and have been with you, and they know you, sometimes now is not the time to sell.

If the only time you send an email is to tell somebody about a service, a special, or an offer, you’re abusing your list. One of the promotions that I’m doing right now where people will remember and appreciate me is we’re doing a music video contest because everybody’s stuck at home, they’re running out of things to do, and the kids are driving the parents or the grandparents nuts. I sent out a note inviting people to create a music video, lip sync it, sing it for real, or whatever they want to do limited three minutes.

“Send me the links. We’ll put it up on the website. I’ll have my kids be the judges. We’ll pick the best video. Whoever wins will get a free house full of carpet cleaning.” That’s taking your personality, story, and your guest experience and putting it into a marketing message that addresses what’s going on. You’re not overtly selling to someone, but you are engaging them and giving them useful, resourceful information that they will benefit from without having to make an exact sale.

It’s a great example. I appreciate your real-world experience. We’re not just talking to a service expert. We’re talking to a business owner who knows how to help people Disnify their service experience and then help them in creative ways to get that message out there so that people can opt in and be part of that great experience. I appreciate you making time. When you signed up for this interview, when you said yes to being a guest for us, I knew you were a Disney expert. I didn’t realize you were still actively running a service-based business. It’s fun to know real-time examples of what you’re doing during these times. Thank you for sharing that.

The reason that I can do all this Disney stuff is because I’ve implemented those systems in my oriental rug and carpet cleaning business, which allows me to not be in the business all the time. If I spend 6 to 8 hours a week in that carpet cleaning business, that would be a lot. It runs on the systems. The marketing systems are in place. It’s all automatic. The service systems and the service that we provide, those systems are all in place. All the guys have to do is follow the systems and everything moves along swimmingly.

Give all of our readers the best way to connect with you, to learn more about the help that you provide companies who are trying to Disnify their services or business, and the best ways to learn more.

My website, DeliverServiceNow.com, is the best way to get started. I have a great little tool on there. It’s the CliffNotes version of my book called Systematic Magic. If you download that report, there are a ton of ideas in there that if you did 1 or 2 of them, would put you well above the competitors in your town or city.

Thank you so much for taking the time. We are thrilled that you continue to read the blog and hope that you will continue doing so. Share with others. What we are going to continue to bring are experts and business owners who have the knowledge that you need to continue to grow your seven-figure business. Thanks for reading, and keep reading.

Important Links

• DeliverServiceNow.com
• Systematic Magic