This week on Winning In Business, Angus Pryor the Practice Growth Specialist will be sharing with you the second part of someone has to be the most expensive, why not make it you with Andrew Griffiths.
Angus: Someone has to be the most expensive, why not you? I imagine there are some people out there who hear this and they go “well, how do I find out if I’m the most expensive?”
Andrew: Right. Well that’s a great question. You ring around, you know? You get someone, you pay someone to do that. It doesn’t matter how you do that. You can find out what people’s prices are. I think we generally know. I think we generally get a bit of a feel for what other people are charging. I think that we have this bit of a differentiation between us. Like we all know the worst dentist, I would imagine, in the area, because we hear all the horror stories, right? The line that we want to hear, and it’s a one that takes a little bit of getting used to, is, “It can be you’re the most expensive, Angus, but you’re the best.”
Angus: Yeah.
Andrew: That’s who we’re looking for, those customers. Who go, “I want to pay for quality because do I want to get my teeth fixed by the cheapest or by the best?” And that means not everyone is your customer.
Angus: So the central premise of the book is someone has to be the most expensive, why not be you? But then, you flip over the pages, it says, “but if you’re going to be the most expensive, you need to be in the best. How are we going to do that?”
Andrew: Well, that’s a simple question, isn’t it? You know, and again, I think you’ve got to go back a step and go, well, what does it actually mean to be the best?
Angus: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: Because that’s really an important part of this. What does it mean to me? What does it mean to you? We all know, and most of us would have this concept of, we go to that place and we know that it’s expensive, but it’s always great. Like a restaurant that you might go and it might be that once a year, you go to this place, it’s always fabulous, but it’s nosebleed expensive.
Angus: I think the book starts with an example of you getting- Can I give a secret?
Andrew: Sure, sure!
Angus: Getting some crumpets? I think from memory.
Andrew: Holy crumpets.
Angus: Holy crumpets.
Andrew: On a rainy Saturday morning in Collingwood, I’m knocking on a nondescript door, like it’s like I’m doing a drug deal with the hipsters, and I get a pack of six crumpets, which costs $14. And you can buy a packet crumpets in Woollies for $2 for six, so it’s seven times the cost.
Angus: 14$, $2.
Andrew: And I bought two packs, $30 for 12 trumpets. You know, it’s like, oh my goodness, me! Were they worth it? Absolutely!
Angus: You know I’d like to try one cause part of me is like wow, how good can it be?
Andrew: Incredible, you know? And again, nosebleed prices, difficult- like they had this mythical way of buying their products, right. You’ve got to wait until like around now or yesterday afternoon on Instagram. Like a message comes out that you can order now. You’ve got to dive in and put your order in because it’ll be filled within an hour and that’s it, that’s it, you know, crumpets are gone. It’s like, I’m ordering crumpets a month in advance. I don’t commit to anything in my life that far in advance. And so now I’ve completely forgotten the question.
Angus: What is best?
Andrew: So, we understand being the best with products. You know, I’ve got a friend of mine who makes walking sticks. You know, we’re all familiar with walking sticks. His walking sticks are $85,000. Okay?
Angus: Good lord.
Andrew: $85,000. He makes desks. You know, nice work desks. His desks start at $300,000 dollars, for a desk.
Angus: Diamond encrusted?
Andrew: Magnificently handcrafted. He makes inlays for Rolls Royce motor vehicles, et cetera. A craftsman, amazing man, amazing business. We get it with products. We understand, you know, you buy a Rolex for 10 grand, all the Rolex stuff, you know, it goes with that kind of watch. So, products we’re a little bit more, I found, often services we’re not as, you know, across in terms of like, okay, what does being the best mean? And again, what I find there though, is a lot of it is about everything that goes around the service as well. Being the best is, you’ve got to be the best at every part of your business.
From the accessibility, from your communication, from your online presence, to your customer service, to your in practice experience, all of these kinds of things. We’ve all heard, we all know this stuff. We all know about touch points. I kind of mention this to anyone listening to this that isn’t aware of touch points and experiences and all of that kind of stuff. It’s just that we’ve got to look at them differently. And this is what these businesses do.
They just get it right all the time. They get the experience, the importance of experience, and they get the fact that there are people that will pay for quality. And we’re living in a world now that actually values quality more than ever, and is actually also looking for value in our purchases of accounting, of legal services, of books, of cheddar cheese, of crumpets. So, being the best means we’ve got to look at every part of our business and we’d got to kind of get it right. We need to take that up.
That needs to go to that next level when we’re around. And that in its own right, is a bit of a challenge too, you know, that’s a bigger thing to do than we realise, because it’s the whole package. It’s not just, oh my god, you’re the best guy at pulling out teeth or filling a tooth or doing enamels or whatever. It’s the whole kit and caboodle.
Angus: Particularly in dentistry where the truth is that Joe Public doesn’t know if you’re a very good dentist or not, because I’ve got no objective way of measuring that. When you were talking about being the best at all those different levels. I mean, for me, the company that pops into my mind, not coincidentally, the highest valued company on the planet at the moment, is Apple. And, in a way, it’s every single dealing with Apple that’s just that little bit better, you know. From literally the experience of opening the box, you know, and how it’s all packaged and laid out inside. And now that’s got anything to do with using the actual product itself. Or when you go to an Apple store and the process they’ve got for booking in, and, you know, you get to speak to a consultant or team member, or whatever they call them. It’s like, it’s really every single point is just consistently just a little bit different, a little bit better, that I guess, provides that aggregate effect.
Andrew: And I mean, Apple is such a great example, Angus and I often talk in my keynotes about the experience effect of opening a box. The phone, as you mentioned there before, the little “pfft” of air that comes out just when you- You know, they spent millions of dollars to design that box, to make it an experience to open. But if you go online, if you’ve got help, I had this last week, my computer is five years old, which makes it a grandfather of computers. So it’s out of warranty, it’s out of everything.
And yet I spent six hours with their Apple team to fix up whatever had gone wrong, which is, you know, rare, rare. No ask for payment, no anything, you know. Just the reason was because I’ve got a history of buying Apple equipment and they said, you’ve been buying Apple equipment for, our records go back 15 years, you’ve bought all this equipment in that time. That’s why we’re doing this. Because I would expect to be giving a credit card to pay for that tech service.
But Apple, even now, if I order, and I bought a new iPad recently, even that arriving, the shipping, the packaging, the whole thing. So even without any interaction with a human, I bought it online, it arrived a few days later, all that kind of stuff. Next day, actually. That experience of getting that was seamless, easy, never been so easy to give away a couple of grand of my money. And you go, totally satisfied customer. Every aspect of that acquisition and purchase. That’s the importance of all the parts, isn’t it? All the bits of the transaction. And we’re moving from transactions to experiences.
Angus: Yeah.
Andrew: That’s a global trend.
Angus: Your premise is, to be the best, is that aggregate of all of these different touch points and what the viewers need to be doing, is to go back to their business, get out the microscope and essentially bit by bit by bit. “How can we be a bit better here? How can we-” Is that essentially the-
Andrew: That’s the summation. And if you look at it, the problem again, that happens for most of us in businesses, is we get a bit blinkered, you know. So, I’m a dentist, my focus is really on delivering the service and treatment of my patients really, really well. And that’s what I focus on. But you know, that’s important, but ironically, the cleanliness of your toilets is just as important, the smell of your toilets, the sounds in your practice, the greeting from the receptionist, the cantankerous old chuck, who’s going to, you know, talk people off, you know, because, you know, whatever it might be, that doesn’t really cut it anymore. The difficult to park, you know, the-
Angus: The dentist walks out, “Angus Pryor!” That kind of, yeah, no, that’s-
Andrew: And everyone’s watching, right. What a great opportunity to do a really nice warm greeting. You know, “welcome, we’re going to go through, it’s going to be kind of easy.” Everything these days is a difference. And you know, anyone again, who’s ever had the fortune of flying first class on Emirates, or business class, you know exactly. Or anyone who’s flying economy on Tiger Air, you know, what’s the difference, right? Sure. You pay a big, there’s a big difference in price, but there’s a hell of a difference in service, right? There’s a hell of a difference in everything.
So touch points. We used to talk about touch points a lot, you know, and I’ll say “we used to”, you know, in the 90s, you know, it was a topic that people. Airlines, American Airlines were quite famous for figuring all this kind of stuff out. And, now, more than ever, people want experiences, they really want an experience. And this is a real shift. And there’s a lot of reasons for that too, when you think about it. But we’ve got so much choice. I’ve got no shortage of dentists. I live in South Yarra in Melbourne. There’s probably a hundred dentists within five kilometres of me, maybe more. And I look at that and go, “wow, that would be, I’ve got the choices. It’s entirely up to me as to where I go.”
So, consumers have got the power, right? So, we’ve got to say, “well, okay, how are we differentiating ourselves?” And that’s what this is about as well. Here’s a book about differentiating who you are and what it is that you do. There’s a differentiation that comes from being the most expensive. And people go “oh my god, that’s terrible!” And you go “no that’s not terrible. It’s a different way of thinking.” It’s like, when I hear someone who has a business, which is about quoting, and they go, “oh I get every job that I quote for.” And I go, “that’s a shame. You know, I’m so sorry for you, you know?” Cause it means they’re too cheap!
If you quote, your business is on quoting. You should get about five out of 10 of those jobs. That means your pricing is probably about right for your current market, you know. So, we come back to the scene, kind of go, well, when it comes to experience, you know, that whole thing is coming to its element now. Whereas I go, okay, well, I want to go somewhere. And I’m that kind of customer that will look for the most expensive. And I expect great service. I expect, you know, I expect great dental work, sure, but I expect the whole thing to be great.
Because we lose customers, not over big things, we lose customers over little things. And the same way we attract the right end of town over the little things. And the little things are the, you know, the smell, the cleanliness, the friendliness, the follow up, the, you know, the detail, the interest, the remembering, the engagement, the, you know, all of those kinds of things that all come into play. And it takes a mental shift to start thinking about that stuff. Cause we all think that we- what we’re selling, I’m a dentist.
People come here because I do the best fillings, as you rightly pointed out before. Who knows? I don’t know what a good filling are, I’m not going to be looking at them. You know, like, I’ve got no idea of what, you know, what does that even mean? So really most of my formulation of ideas and thinking will come around, is it going to hurt? You know? And what’s the rest of it like? Do I walk in and do I feel welcome? Do I feel engaged? Do people remember my name? Do they, you know, whatever it might be, all of those touch, touch, touch points come into play.