[Music] hi Shannon Waller here with Dan Sullivan and welcome to the inside strategic coach podcast today we're going to talk about the front stage and the backstage and really using this metaphor as a way to look at your entrepreneurial business now Dan you and I both love the front stage backstage concept and the way that we coach people and how to organize their organizations around it can you describe what we mean by front stage and backstage in the form of a company because normally it's applies to theater well in my terms I had a lot of theater experience in my teens and my 20s had aspirations in that direction before I discovered that it wasn't particularly the way that I would spend my career I was very interested in aspects of what theater taught you it wasn't about theater itself but the biggest thing that I got from my theater experience is the sharp differences between what the back back stage is in theater and what the front stage is the front stage is what customers pay for and if there isn't a sharp distinction separating the backstage from the front stage it devalues the experience and what I mean by that there was a very famous case at Disney World in Florida which is really First Class theater if anybody who's been there there was a very famous case of um parents winning a lawsuit against Disney because their child kind of wandered off and he went into an area that wasn't used and there was Mickey Mouse who the child had seen 15 minutes before and had gotten his picture taken with Mickey Mouse Mickey Mouse was standing in a corner with his Mickey Mouse head off smoking a cigarette the child came out screaming and the case was made by the parents that this was traumatic for the child and it forever ruined his experience of anything like Disney World they won the case and the whole point is that at Disney World they have very very good means for people to be backstage in other words there's tunnels underneath the entire amusement park and when you're not performing front stage you shouldn't be seen by the public but there's enormous work that goes on Backstage as a matter of fact the number of individuals in Disney World and I think any theatrical presentation or production the number of individuals actually involved in working backstage to guarantee the quality of the front stage performance where customers are and the value that is created for customers actually takes place that would be true so I think it's a good way to look at an entrepr R preneurial business that the way you look the way you present things but the entire experience from the customers point of view the customer or client how they actually experience with you should be at a very very high level of theatrical packaging and Theatrical presentation and if you're that way you can constantly increase the size of check because it isn't just the specific problem solving thing that's taking place in your business it's the whole experience that surrounds the customer's relationship with you and if that's first class like it would be at Disney World or many other places restaurants Resorts cruise ships wherever people have their experience the wraparound experience the front stage experience has to match the quality of the problem solving or the new value that's being created so I just love this thing because everybody that I've I've ever talked to has a front stage and a backstage experience and they can remember being enormously impressed on the one hand and they can also feel you know the backstage sort of slip through Dan I really love that you use the word experience and I think that's the differentiator between how a typical management model of business would look at a company versus the front stage backstage because it's just what you said you are endeavoring to create a unique experience for people and we are part of the experience economy which is a great term so we need to be really aware of how we're showing up to people and and what I so appreciate about this way of thinking is that you start to become much more aware oh my backstage is showing it's like your slip is showing or something and that's not appropriate because you want to create a really differentiated value creation experience that solves people's problems but it's a much more holistic way of looking at things and I think also for the backstage team which as you said can be much larger they really understand the relevance of what they're doing because it has to support the front stage does it not yeah I mean there are some things just from a strategic coach standpoint that when we're having Workshop days at any of our centers if you're a backstage person you have to dress that day as if there's a possibility you might be in the front stage so even though you may be a FL below and you come in through a different entrance nevertheless because because it's a front stage day for the company you have to be dressed properly because there may be for some reason or another you will have to go into the front stage area where the clients can actually see you and we want to make sure that your presentation in terms of your personal wardrobe is appropriate for the front stage activity so everybody's on alert that day and just a few things I stayed in Washington DC at uh five star hotel and I was walking down my hallway on the floor where I was and the door to the room where they keep their cleaning equipment was open I walked past it then I walked back and I closed the door and I said they goofed but I want to protect them because it was so painful to me that somebody had carelessly left this door open and I said oh you shouldn't be seeing this so I was doing quality control for them because I wanted this experience to be good for everybody else it was good for me and it was almost like I was rescuing their frontstage image and that's how much it meant to me there's sort of a border being crossed in the present world right now with people who are front stage people and by that I mean athletes and entertainers who are crossing the border and they're confusing people because because they will have certain causes that they support and they will use their front stage advantage that their celebrities to voice something which in fact is coming from their private life it's their personal belief I've notice that none of them comes out well when they do this regardless of what the cause is I'm not talking about particular causes here but if people know you as a front stage person then you should keep all of your activity front stage you can do things personally but you should never use your front stage position where people know you one way to bring in something from another world it confuses people and it breaks down your image whether they're actors or athletes if they bring their issues from their personal life into the front stage Arena their image will suffer their career will suffer I've seen no exception to this they always get p penalized over the long run because they've confused the audience about what are we supposed to think about here there are whole number of actors I can't go to any of their movies because I don't find them believable as a character because the impression that they've left in terms of political beliefs or some other kind of belief is so strong that I can't sit there and watch them I can't see them as the character that they're acting out I'm seeing them as this person who has very strong political views and I can't watch it it's a great point that it's really critical for an individual or for a company to not let the backstage bleed onto the front stage because it really affects the credibility of what we're doing remember one of the examples you gave in a workshop Dan or actually was one of our clients he said the image I want to convey and what I want to be true for our clients is when they're dealing with one of our team members it's a one-on-one he said I can't have them in a room with a lot of keyboards clacking then it sounds like they're in a call Center so he said you know I've taken steps to make sure that that's never the impression that we're giving so even something like sound I love with our front stage and you're very you've been a real driver in this with our company to make sure that there's really nice napkins that are personalized in the washrooms with strategic coach logos and flowers and we're very conscious thanks to you about how people experience all of us and any anything that could enhance the experience everything our client could potentially touch is an opportunity grade the front stage and we're very conscious of that yeah and people pick up on this for example I'll go to a restaurant and restrooms are really a way that you can really tell the success level of a particular establishment because first of all it's a very very necessary thing to have restrooms whether it's theater or restaurants or auditoriums or anything the restrooms are really big when they're spotless and they're maintained and it could be that a Mark gets on a wall and if you go back two or 3 weeks later the Mark is still on the wall and it hasn't been corrected it tells you something about the lack of awareness on the part of management and also could tell you something about the state of their finances that they don't have enough money for quality control and you form a real impression on that a worn out rug and you just notice you go back a month later and the rug is still worn out and I says well where's their thinking here they must be really cutting close to the line with their finances we had downtown one of the hotels chain hotel well-known Global chain and you know it's dark in the mornings and evenings for 6 Months of the Year in Toronto because we're in a Northern Area and they have this huge neon sign on the top of the roof and the first letter was out for 6 months and I said you know I wouldn't stay there because I said if they can't notice one of the most visible signs of their presence in the marketplace and they can't correct that in 6 months there's just an enormous number of other things in that hotel that aren't quite right and they're not correcting them and there's no awareness of what's going on how could you do that I mean how could the management not know about that is they probably come in in dark hours and leave in dark hours and they're not noticing that the first letter is and we're being trained in the 21st century through Visual education I think more and more the education of people about what's good what's bad what's excellent what's mediocre we're being taught visually and I think our eyes especially really really pick up um things out of place we notice it in people's wardrobe we notice it in Furnishings we notice it in the care with which things are either clean or not clean orderly or not orderly pictures on the wall that are crooked three visits in a row and I said how can you have crooked pictures on the wall I mean I'm not in the business of giving people advice on Decor or anything else but I'm just a customer you know I'm a customer and client of many different kinds of establishments and I size them up real fast whether there's real care and Consciousness that's being given to their presentation or not so front stage or backstage and The Simple Solution to this is not to say how do we need to present ourselves to the public the real question is if I'm the customer and I'm paying this much money and I'm looking at this what do I have to see to be totally assured that this is the very best experience I can possibly have so you have to stop thinking about you looking out at the customers and think about yourself as the customers looking in and that's the secret of front stage backstage hands down the industry that never fails to disappoint me is the airline industry there's a joke going around about 10 years ago that the marketing strategy of the airline industry is that we're not happy until you're not happy because you can be absolutely consistent with that marketing strategy you know but they're always visiting their backstage problems on your front stage experience whether it's broken down equipment late flights hassled staff overbooking overbooking crappy snacks on the meals charging for everything charging for everything and everything else they're constantly taking their backstage problems and they're making it part of their customers front stage experience but if an airline comes along and goes just against what is common they've got the market to themselves doesn't take much to be systematically friendly doesn't take much to have everybody systematically well presented if you're so close to the loss column in your finances that you can't guarantee those stuff makes me worried about flying on your airline and just to give an example not an airline one but I was walking into actually the office of my accountant who was also a friend this was years and years ago I was bringing in my taxes in my manila folders and then I went to put it on his desk and literally there were hundreds and hundreds of other manila folders and I got very very nervous I could not see his credenza I couldn't see the desk I couldn't see parts of the floor because there were just piles of these what looked like all to me to be the same I'm like oh my gosh his backstage was so front stage that was the last year I did business with yeah I mean and The Simple Solution is they have a meeting room that's always clean if you want your office to be backstage and it can be messy as you can want it I mean that has an impact I think on Backstage morale and that that things are really neat but do not do not bring that into the front stage experience have a special room which is just a customer room and customers never go into the backstage well and that's how I want to finish off our conversation actually is to really talk about how can people take action on improving their front stage or maybe even their backstage and I think your point actually is look at it through the client's eyes what my accountant was counting on was that I was trust his expertise which I did but what he wasn't counting on was just how horrific it was to walk into his space because for him that was his normal that was his backstage that he lived in every day and he wasn't looking at it from my perspective so how can people take action how do people need to think about this in order to improve their front stage and backstage I think the first thing is to identify every contact point where customers and clients actually come in touch with your organization from a phone call to receiving Communications through emails or through FedEx or any contact point where people could develop an image of you you want to make that consistent with what you're saying about yourself the value that you create the quality of what you present every contact point should be maintained at the same level of quality and then you work backwards and say well how do we have to organize ourselves to ensure that all these contact point images that we're giving off are great images it's very very simple but you have to reverse engineer you can never look at it from your standpoint looking out you can only look at things from the customer standpoint point the client standpoint looking in you brought up a topic just before we came on and I said you know in terms of people's experience If you experience a street performer well that's a person who just has a front stage and no backstage what you get is what you see okay and there are people that you give money to and there are people you don't give money to but the ones that I give money to I can think about five or six in the last 5 years most of them in New York City where I thought the person was really funny that it was very very entertaining that he did something very very unusual and the other thing is they were very polite and they were very appreciative so those are front stage contact points I've had rude people that I ignore I've had people who are boring who I ignore I've had people who were just not presented right in terms of their clothing and their hygiene and you don't give them anything so even front stage but the other extreme from that is very very large organizations which have no thought about front stageing government organizations are the chief offenders here and I think that the very notion of bureaucracy is where you have a massive number of people in the backstage who have no comprehension or no care of what happens in the front stage which are taxpayers and everything else they just have a thing that government exists for them and their promotion and their status and who cares what the public thinks they're entitled they're entitled we hate organizations like that my experience over the last 10 15 years when we have the experience of getting things Amazon is teaching us about how fast you can get something if the provider is really good good and I believe every large organization has to look at Amazon and saying is the quality of our service to our particular public keeping up with Amazon and that's a tough standard to meet one of the things that Amazon does really well is it's very consistent you have a great definition of consistency especially in terms of front stage and packaging is that everything fits nothing contradicts so think of your own company that could be your social media it could be what your invoices look like there's nothing worse than having a great personal experience with someone and then getting the paperwork which is very cold there's no relationship in it whatsoever so really making sure that everything is consistent from tone and look and feel one of the things I appreciate about our marketing team with all their post is our images are so consistent and they're all attractive and they're colorful and they're fun there's a certain way that we communicate and we aspire to be very consistent that unique but also consistent so I think that's another great point for people to be able to really build their front stage and have it really well supported by their back spage just enough not too much not too little and that's how to have a great front stage backstage M yes it is and I think as our world proceeds my belief is that what we're talking about here Shannon is far more important than it was 20 years ago and I think each year into the future it becomes more and more important because I think people make snap decisions upon first images so you want to make sure that the first images and all the images after the first image are very very congenial for the customer and client very reassuring for the customer and client and they all support each other everything reinforces everything else you will be judged whether you want to give any thought to this or not and if you don't give any thought to it you will be judged badly I love it thank you very much Dan that's very insightful