I hope mentioning Aretha Franklin is not showing my age.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T. is such a classic song (stunningly reprised by Jennifer Hudson in the 2021 film, Aretha).

Yet respect is not something that's common when we think of professional knowledge firms. Consider a large dinner function where people are mulling around before the doors to the dinner are opened.

You find yourself in a group of people you don't know. And someone acknowledges you with a welcome handshake and then asks, “And what do you do?”

“Oh, I'm an accountant,” you say.

And then they turn to the person next to you with the same question.

“Oh I'm a corporate lawyer,” she says.

And then the final person responds, “I'm a heart surgeon.”

It's more than likely that the heart surgeon automatically gets the respect. And that's because we connect with the impact and meaning of what she does: saving lives.

So let's reset. Same conversation, different answers.

“And what do you do?”

“Well, I'm an accountant and, together with my team, I create better, wealthier, and more fulfilling lives for the 127 business owners we're privileged to work with right now.”

Even the heart surgeon might find it difficult to top that. (True, she could say, “I'm a heart surgeon and I saved three lives today.” But many of us would see that as bragging, not as earning greater respect.)

You'll instantly see here the connection to story—one of the major themes of this book.

We all have a story. Yet we mostly don't tell it well.

You can change that up AND simultaneously change the level of respect by considering the triangle in Figure 4.1. (By the way, triangles make fantastic models because they have just three sides. And that means they fall into this wonderful feature of our language and our brains—we simply love things in threes. As Nikola Tesla once said: “If only you knew the magic of 3, 6, and 9 then you would have the keys to the universe.”)

So … Figure 4.1 shows the triangle.

And in spoken form, “When you become fully on purpose and impact‐driven, you become the company that people love to buy from, that people love to work with, and (the company that) people respect and refer.”

That triangle has such powerful implications for you as you build your subscription model.

Let's consider each aspect one‐by‐one for a moment.

When people love to buy from you, you can say “no” to those that don't fit your criteria. More than that, you can “fire” those existing customers that may not fit your new criteria.

Let's add to that. When you do those things, you'll attract GREAT customers. (As we said in the original The Firm of the Future, “Bad customers drive out good ones.”)

Our great friend and colleague Ric Payne had a magnificent way of illustrating that. He called it not the 80/20 rule but the 80/225 rule. Figure 4.2 illustrates the point.

It's simple to understand. The “A” customers create 225% of your end profit. The D customers (the ones you don't like, the ones you should have said no too early on) are sucking from that super profit. It doesn't have to be that way. And of course, your subscription model creates the super‐profits for you when it's correctly implemented.

In fact, just look back at that earlier triangle. Recognize that when you're attracting great customers, you automatically move from chasing customers to choosing customers. Clearly, that's part of the move from “Pushing to Attracting” that we highlighted in Chapter 3.

Let's go to the right‐hand leg of the triangle. When people love to work with you, you effectively become a magnet for talent (word spreads). And because you're now attracting better talent, you can let those people create what we call “Teams of Income.”

This is so critical. Your job as the owner does not become the “doing”; your job becomes the visioning, the inspiring, and the “master of flow” (see Chapter 5 for more).

Your teams form themselves (well, you do give them some direction on that) into “pods”—each pod consisting of, let's say, five people—five people with appropriate skill sets—to enrich the lives of the customers they're working with.

Crucially, you are not doing the work. As you'll see later in this book, there's an important “reversal of flow” to make sure you really do build the firm you've always wanted—to connect with and belong to.

As you traverse these first two “legs” of the triangle, you move from (just in case you haven't done this step already) being time‐driven to being outcome‐driven and impact‐driven. Your KPIs shift to making certain you're enriching the lives BOTH of your team members and your customers. You're moving from being time‐driven to being outcome‐driven and impact‐driven.

Your morning huddles (more on them later) become much more focused on customer‐centric tasks, and your weekly retro get‐togethers focus very deliberately on your customers' wins—just how well are you enriching their lives.

Those things taken together form the wonderful virtuous circle of your subscription model—it just keeps growing.

You move from the traditional marketing funnel to a customer‐centric flywheel. Hubspot explains it very well in this post (https://www.hubspot.com/flywheel). Figure 4.3 is a diagram that explains it.

Let's look at the three key areas of the flywheel:

• ATTRACT:
  • Here you're earning people's attention as opposed to forcing it. Of course, you're attracting the attention of visitors to your website and/or your LinkedIn posts with useful content, and you're making it very easy for them to connect with you—you're making sure that the first contact is truly outstanding in every way—that each moment really does matter.

    

  • Interestingly though, and to jump ahead on the flywheel for a moment, it's your customers who've turned into promoters who are introducing most people to your firm. They want others, others who are in so many ways just like them, to connect to you. Seth Godin puts it beautifully this way: “People like us do things like this.”
• ENGAGE:
  • Here your focus is to open relationships as opposed to closing deals. You're making sure there's a fit between you and the prospective customer (prospects)—you're making sure they fit your criteria—you're making sure you really can enrich their lives. And, not surprisingly, you're doing that mostly by listening, not by presenting. And uppermost in your mind as you're listening is that lovely quote from Tamsin Wooley‐Barker: “Nature doesn't look for problems, it looks for potential.”
  • You're also making sure potential customers are engaging with you on their preferred timeline and channels. And your people, not you, are leading that entire engaging process.
  • And when these prospects become customers, you're making sure that any incentives you have for your conversion process are not tied to the conversion per se; if there are incentives they are tied to the pod, and they're tied to customer success, not just the customer acquisition itself.
• TRANSFORM:
  • You'll notice that (if you've looked at the HubSpot website we referenced above) this piece of the flywheel is called DELIGHT in the HubSpot model.
  • Certainly, you do have to delight your customers. You make sure your team is fully equipped (and expected) to do that. You know already they've got the basics right—the basics of fast‐response, the basics of respect and kindness, the basics of caring, the basics of being on‐time for meetings (actually, always ahead of time is best), the basics of an “enriching lives” at every interaction. And, like Apple, you're checking that with things like NPS^® (net promoter score) and so on.
  • And in addition to those basics, they know that their key KPI is to transform your customers' businesses.
  • Those transformed customers then become your (in NPS^® terms) promoters, introducing you and your team to the businesses those customers work with, and so on.
  • And at long last, perhaps, you can charge what you're really worth.
  • You transform so that your customers transform. And if Mastercard were your marketing department, they would certainly describe those outcomes as “Priceless.”
  • In our next chapter, we take you even further on that journey.