CX Solutions for Small Businesses

Hey, I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you'd like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today's guest is Ron Welty, and he's the founder of Customer Optics. Ron, welcome to the show. Thanks, Dan. It's great to be here. All right, Ron. So we got, we got a lot to talk about today. So we're definitely going to get into CX solutions for small businesses. What that means a lot, a lot of business owners, entrepreneurs, executives that listen to this show. And we got, we got a lot of nuggets that we're going to, we're going to get out of here and just to get us started, we'll start this episode, the way that we start them all with what we call our mission matters. Minute. So Ron at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That's what we do. Ron, what mission matters to you? Matters to us that we can help small businesses to improve their quality of their life, their employees experience at their business and their customer experience through the work that we provide. We send people into their locations and anonymously they pose as a customer. They complete a report on their experience and report back to us. And then we polish that up and QA it and turn it around to the client. And we have done that for more than 500 small businesses so far and counting. And it really helps to be the eyes and ears of a small business owner when they have multiple locations and how to know that either everything's going okay or not and how to improve if it's not. Yeah, it's great. Great. Great having you on the show. And I got to ask, where'd you come up with this idea? How, how'd you get into this business? Like where'd all that start? Yeah. So 25 years ago, I started my own company. Based on an experience I had at another company that did something similar and they just didn't walk the talk. And so I thought I could try to do it better. I got lucky, which you need in business. Somebody offered to back me financially that saw something in me. And I'm up on their offer and took that and ran with it. And then about three years ago, four years ago, saw a need in the small business community because everybody in the community for my parent company was going after very large organizations, which we do, but everyone was ignoring small businesses and that's the lifeblood of our country. So we saw a need based on our experience and we really wanted to try to help out. So I want, I want to stay in those early days a little, a little bit longer. I know it was a little bit ago, right? But I want to stay there a little bit longer because and we'll, we're definitely going to get into the transition and I'm, we're gonna, I want to see these parallels and how you saw the need for small businesses started dressing them because I love when that happens, by the way, not just in your business, but in many when you know, a lot of times the model for different businesses is to serve enterprise clients. Then over time through that teaching, sometimes some of the things they're able to do get to now be used with smaller businesses and scaled in a different way because it can finally be done over time. So I want to get into that. But those early days, What was that like, man? Like, you're just starting your business. Was this, was this one of your first businesses or were you always an entrepreneur? Like, how did that, how was that piece of it? Yeah, no, it was my first business. I had worked for an entrepreneur that sold her company to a much larger company. I became part of that organization and quickly realized that that wasn't for me. I wanted to work myself into a life and quit working myself to death. I wanted to prioritize family and personal time, especially and really kind of have it be my own. So you went from a 40 hour week to a 100 hour week in the beginning, or how did that work? Like, give us the real, Ron. Yeah, I probably went from about 60 hours to 80 hours. Okay, got it. All right. I always got to follow that up with that one because that's what we think when we go into it, right? Yeah, and we didn't have any kids at the time, but, you know, we're kind of planning for that. And so I was trying to establish things so that I could prioritize that and be with my family. And then as we grew a little bit and had some success, I added team members, got lucky that some people wanted to come work for us. And some of them are still here. 20 some years later. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Very fortunate to have some long time team members and clients. Structured it so that I could prioritize my personal time and my family. What do you attribute some of that longevity in terms of staff or otherwise, or that just that piece of success. And the reason I asked this question, by the way, Ron is because I'm of the thought process that some of

Mission Matters Business Podcast with Adam Torres