What if the secret to explosive business growth wasn’t just numbers, but leading with heart? In this electrifying episode, Roy Osing reveals how his “Be Different or Be Dead” philosophy turned a startup into a billion-dollar empire. From unlocking the power of customer cravings to redefining leadership, Roy’s insights will challenge everything you thought you knew about business success.
🎧 Don’t miss Roy’s invaluable insights and practical strategies for creating an engaged workforce and achieving incredible business performance. Press play and get ready for a transformative ride!
Key Takeaways from this Episode
- The essence of heart-led business strategies.
- Execution over aspiration: Turning bold ideas into tangible actions.
- The critical role of customer care in driving loyalty and profitability.
- Hiring for goosebumps: Recruiting people who genuinely love serving others.
- Leadership by serving: Creating a culture where leaders are enablers, not just managers.
About the Guest
Meet Roy Osing—the bold leader who turned a startup into a billion-dollar success! With over 40 years of trailblazing executive experience, Roy delivers game-changing strategies that defy convention and produce extraordinary results. As the author of the no-nonsense series Be DIFFERENT or Be Dead and host of the podcast Audacious Moves to a Billion, Roy aims to inspire leaders and entrepreneurs worldwide to embrace his “audacious unheard-of ways” for success.
Additional Resources
- Website: www.bedifferentorbedead.com
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/royosing
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/roy.osing
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/unheardofways
- X: https://x.com/royosing
- Books: www.bedifferentorbedead.com/books
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Explore the Dialogue’s Treasures: Unearth the insights within! Delve into the profound wisdom woven throughout our conversation.
Speaker: Welcome to the Heart-Led Business Show, where compassion meets commerce and leaders lead with love. Join your host, Tom Jackobs, as he delves into the insightful conversations with visionary business leaders who defy the status quo, putting humanity first and profit second. From heartfelt strategies to inspiring stories, this podcast is your compass in the world of conscious capitalism.
So buckle up and let’s go. Let your heart guide your business journey.
Tom Jackobs: Latch on to your laughter belt. We have a lion hearted luminary lined up today. Meet Roy Osing, a business beacon who braved the tidal waves of tech and brought a startup internet company to a breathtaking billion in sales. This audacious author and mentor rocking the world with his be different or be dead mantra is here on the Heart-Led Business Show. Ready and rearing to spill his secrets to success. So buckle up, it’s going to be a ballistic bonanza. Roy, welcome to the show.
Roy Osing: Thanks very much, Tom. I really appreciate the invitation and yeah, I’m looking forward to it.
Tom Jackobs: I’m really looking forward to this conversation as well. And especially, you know, with the numbers that you’re talking about in terms of your business success and how that all relates to, you know, being Heart-Led as well. Want to dive into that. But before we do, what’s your definition of a Heart-Led business?
Roy Osing: Yeah. So, it’s kind of like has two dimensions, right? At the strategic level. Because I believe in, you have to have context to drive activity. It’s not a matter of driving tactics, right? And so why a heart led business is critical for me is, first of all, you have a strategy that defines customer caring is an outcome, right? And the reason for that is you actually believe that customer caring drives loyalty, drives growth, drives profitability. Okay? So it’s a means to an end, right? So there’s a strategic component to it, but the second piece is executional. And so it’s all very well to have an aspiration or an intent and to declare an intent that you want to be heart-led.
It’s quite a different thing to actually put that into action, right? And so you may as well save your breath. If all you have is an aspiration, that’s worthless to me. You need to follow it up with very specifics. And so, for me, Heart-Led businesses believe, okay, that customer caring is a source of competitive advantage, a source of growth, and also is kind of like an umbrella within which activities of the organization and actions in the organization are driven.
Okay. For example, in my particular case we did this. And we had some sort of actions around things like you have to have servers, you’re not pushers. So we had this whole thing about leadership by serving around, not leadership by managing around. We had activities around hiring for goosebumps, which was really fun because what it, what that says is, you know, recruitment in a customer caring environment is hugely important.
Right. And if you don’t have people who have this innate desire to serve human beings, you’re in deep trouble. You will never be Heart-Led It will be simply in your mind and that’s about it. And so we had a number of programs like this in the execution area. And so when I look at businesses that aspire to be you know, provisioners, if you will of gas for the customer experiences, but don’t have anything to back it up in terms of, And I go, yeah, you’re not really serious. So you have to have a customer caring strategy. You have to have a certain elements of execution to drive that home. And if you’re not prepared to do that, then you shouldn’t be talking about yourself in terms of this category of business. You just shouldn’t.
Tom Jackobs: Yeah, so what are some examples of that customer caring strategy?
Roy Osing: Well, first of all, you just have to say. All right, that this business is going to, is going on a journey to care for customers. A lot of people think that sounds corny, right? And that’s because it doesn’t conform to modern textbook pedantics, Tom. That’s why, I mean, the MBAs out there who’ve never run a billion dollar a year business, they don’t talk about caregiving as a strategic imperative. Well, I come from a world of practicality because that’s what I had to do to build this business. And people get what caregiving is like, if I were to ask you, okay, if you think you’re a caregiver, the next question is going to be, well, show me, tell me a story that would prove to me that you’re a caregiver and if that story gave me goosebumps, Tom, I’m going to hire you and then teach you the business. That’s exactly the opposite in terms of what goes on these days. So that whole element. Is exceedingly important declaration from a leadership point of view that customer caring is what we’re here to do with the belief that will drive performance. All right, like, the caring thing isn’t an end result. It’s a means to an end. You’re doing it because you actually believe that it’s going to result in growth and incredible performance. And we bought into that really early on and so we were led by things that did that and we proved that in fact, it worked on the top line, right? just worked and so in a simplistic terms, look at you guys, just say, we’re going to have a customer caring strategy.
The difficult thing is now is to drill that down in terms of what it means. It means hiring people that actually care about Homo sapiens. They actually care about human beings, right? It means having a culture of leadership by serving around. It means creating a service strategy. That emphasizes GASP worthy experiences and declares what that means and just defines it in a way it can be measured, etc. All right. It means having the leaders enter what I call bear pits on a regular basis with frontline people asking the simple question. ” How can I help? ” Because the execution element requires that. Okay. Like you don’t just sort of say, well, we’re in the customer caring business, walk back to your office and call the board and have a conversation. No, it says the attention is supposed to be spent with the people actually doing the work. It means cleaning the inside of your organization.
I call it improving the viscosity of the execution machine. All right. So that delivery of value is more easily done so that frontline people aren’t fighting systems, Tom. They’re not fighting dumb rules. They’re not fighting crap and bureaucracy in the organization that prevents them from doing their job. Okay. That’s a leadership issue. And so leadership and that’s where the tough work happens. And I spent, I mean the declaration of intent was easy and anybody can do that. The hard work, if you really want to be heart-led, is in the next level, which is unpacking that and degenerating that brave idea. If I could use those terms right into a crude deed, brave ideas to crude deeds.
Crude deeds is all about execution and the interesting thing to me is when a leader enters that executional phase, That’s when they light fires in people and when you light fires in people, that’s when you get things done in commitment, right? In terms of, I’m getting goosebumps just talking about this dude. I mean, it’s just like so powerful. It was so powerful. That’s when you get the commitment to do it. And so it starts really simple, but the hard work begins after the declaration. And I find that so many people declare intent, declare aspirations and that’s where they stop or they delegate it to the organization to make it happen, which is absolutely freaking insane because it never happens, right? It never happens without the fingerprints of the leader on this puppy. It will just never happen.
Tom Jackobs: Yeah, I mean, there’s one thing to talk about it. There’s a whole nother thing to actually live it and have it inside of you and in your bones almost.
Roy Osing: That’s a really excellent way to describe it because I believe so strongly, as you probably can tell already in the use of language. Right, to talk about what you’re trying to do and people would say, well, why was that? How does that work? How does that happen? And I say, if you don’t have this whole notion running through your veins, it won’t happen because really strategy is just as much about passion and emotion as it is about anything else. In fact, I would say that passion and emotion Okay, exceed the contribution that logic ever makes. Alright, because the reality is planning never works, Tom. You and I both know that. Planning never works, not because we’re stupid, because the world changes so rapidly. How can it possibly succeed in the long run? You have to have passion and emotion to adjust that strategy on the run. I call it planning on the run to actually sort of earn the right to get to the finish line by actually enduring things along the way. Planning never works, and that requires passion, not logic.
Tom Jackobs: Yeah, well, and execution also, like strategy planning without execution and then else that you said as well is so important because I think a lot of people plan all day and then fail to like actually do what they were planning to do anyway, because things change and they’re not prepared to make those shifts along the way.
Roy Osing: Well, yeah, and I think, you know, my diagnosis of that, which is a major problem in business today, is people spend 80 percent of their time on planning. And at most 20 percent on figuring out how you’re going to execute the plan and the problem with that is, of course, nothing happens, right? So I’m the contrarian in the room, and I will say to you, you should be spending 20 percent of your time on the plan. Get it just about right. Stop seeking perfection. Dude, it doesn’t exist and spend 80 percent of your time on the execution element, which is the planning on the run, the nimbleness, et cetera, et cetera. So I can take a mediocre plan in somebody’s, however that is defined, right in the world, which is another problem and execute it flawlessly and beat the pants off somebody that thinks they have a perfect plan, but are unable to move it along and I think the culprit, if I can be perfectly honest with you is our education system. Our education system has taught people to be intellectually pristine, right? Don’t get your hands dirty. Leaders shouldn’t be micromanaging. We are told and yet the biggest success I’ve ever had is what I call fingerprint leadership, strategic micromanagement, putting my fingerprints on the things of strategy that need leadership, right? You can’t delegate customer caring to the business development guys. You can’t do that, right? You have to be all in.
Tom Jackobs: Well, and the leader has to set the example as well, because, you know, you tell a frontline worker, you know, we, we need to make this goosebump worthy, I’m like,” what the hell does that mean?” You need to actually describe it, show it, be it, and then it sinks into the rest of the organization. So yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a good analogy. Localized, is that what you said? Localized micromanagement? Or strategic micromanagement?
Roy Osing: Strategic micromanagement or fingerprints. I mean, people get fingerprints, right? When we put our fingerprints on it we’re actually designating a part of our biosphere on this. And that, that basically commits us. Holistically, as a human being, to that end result we’re going after, we’re all in. It’s not like, it’s not like part of your left brain committing to the idea, because ideas are worthless, as you say, unless they actually degenerate into crude deeds. And so we need, I’ll look at, I’m the only one that talks about micromanagement and strategic micromanagement is a good thing, Tom.
I’m the only one out there doing it because everybody else thinks that you need to delegate. Okay. Well, I happen to come from a world that says, I think there’s too much delegation. There’s certain things that can be delegated and should but people are delegating strategic things. Which is crazy. It’s an abdication of a leader’s responsibility to do that. You mentioned this translation thing, which I call a line of sight leadership, I sort of created this sort of concept around it.
In my world, what we had to do around customer caring is we translated what that meant to every function and every human being in the organization. And I got to tell you, that took a while, but the results, yeah, I mean, I had thousands of people in this organization, right? But the results were just amazing because first of all, this was my army of advocates.
These people were advocates of the journey because they had a role in a conversation about what they had to do to execute. And so they had a say in that. And at the end of the day, dysfunction in the organization didn’t exist for the most part. I mean, it always exists to a degree. But it’s because when I asked the salesperson, what’s your role? Boom. Marketing. Boom. Internal audit. Boom. Credit and collections. Boom. Advertising. Everybody got it. And so, when they got it, the execution piece flowed rather nicely and we scaled.
Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
Roy Osing: You want a secret to scaling? That’s it.
Tom Jackobs: Get everybody on the boat, rowing in the same direction and knowing the language and yeah. I like that concept of, you know, the customer caring well, how, give us a sense of how long it took for that idea to filter down to the rest of the organization.
Roy Osing: Yeah. It took a while. I mean, we’re talking cultural I mean, this business that, that I was asked to lead was actually sitting in a monopoly telephone company. At a time when the internet just started coming, right? So we were seeing this amazing technology coming in and I was asked to you know, get the rewards of this business.
Well, so it was basically, you’re a monopoly. You need to be a competitive powerhouse. You are technology driven. You had to be customer driven. Right. You’re engineering dominated. You need to be customer service frontline dominated. So it was a metamorphosis of huge proportions that had to be made here and so, that, that did not happen overnight. Okay. And it’s like a series of nano inch. Is basically and as a leader, I find it found it extremely exhausting and extremely painful. That’s when I actually learned that pain, Tom, is a strategic concept. It just because if you can’t tolerate the pain going through this kind of a change, get out of the room because nothing’s going to happen.
And so I don’t know exactly how it was almost like one of these things that like, you kind of know it when you’re, when you feel like you’re sort of there, like, I don’t know how you define always all there and it didn’t matter because I kept looking at the top line because I measure everything in top line. I mean, not doing goosebumps because it’s a cool thing to do. I did boost goosebumps because it drove performance. And so as long as the top line was kicking up and up, I’m thinking, okay. We’re doing the right things. People are buying in. The culture is changing. Although I’ve been asked on podcasts, what were the metrics?
And I say, ” ah, come on, give me a break.” I don’t have metrics on goosebumps, but I can show you what the top of, by the way, that business today is 18 billion a year. And I like to think that our team had a little bit of influence in that, just getting the run rate going, you know, but yeah, it was and it required a constant intervention. Okay. A leadership sort of quality in here that sort of comes through is intervention. And to your point earlier, spotting things, right, that need to be dealt with. And challenges on the moment, in the moment, that have to be dealt with. You can’t do that as a leader if you’re not engaged, if you’re not embedded. In the workforce, you’re going to be useless as a leader in this kind of a change, right? You may get away from it in other kinds of businesses where you’re just kind of managing momentum, but if you want to make a difference, right? And you want to make huge changes, you got to be embedded.
Tom Jackobs: Yeah, absolutely. And about the customer carrying strategy, there also an employee’s carrying strategy as well?
Roy Osing: No, one was a function of the other. I never led with, you see, this is the point I want to make with you is that it’s not about developing a Heart-Led business. It’s about developing a growth machine. Okay, employing the right tactics, the Heart-Led piece, the people piece was a means to an end. Okay, it wasn’t the end result. And that’s part of the issue that I have with some organizations today, because they declare that they want to be put people before profit. I didn’t come from that perspective. I had this vision that said, our job, my job, okay, is to drive front line, is to drive top line revenue and the only way we could do it was to capture the hearts and minds and souls of people. Okay, so it was a means to an end. That defines Heart-Led business to me. You’re not being heart-led because it’s a cool idea. You’re being heart-led because it’s a means to an end. We’re not paid to pump hearts. We’re paid to drive results. And the only way to do that, in my experience, was to have a customer caring strategy. Again, it’s customer focused that required human being lovers, right? And leaders who serve those people and that was the culture of peace. And so that’s where the heart led kind of dimension starts to exude. It’s at that level, but I didn’t start out saying, you know, I’m here to make people feel good. No, that wasn’t it. But they did feel good.
Tom Jackobs: Yeah. Well, and that’s an interesting perspective and quite contrarian. So that’s kind of your theme a lot of heart led business owners are empathetic usually in the health and wellness industry and they go into it because of a passion and a heart- led and it’s that profit piece that is secondary and usually non-existent until they learn that Well, I need to make a profit.
I need to be able to help more people and I can’t help more people if I’m not in business anymore. And it becomes a challenge for them. And I think if people have the thought process of, to drive top end growth and I’m going to do it with heart that’s the best way of building that, that growth in the company. I think that mindset shift do really well for people that are struggling with the heart led, just to be heart- led.
Roy Osing: I love that. I mean, you explained it very well, and I agree with you a hundred percent, but I think there’s a reason for that, Tom. I mean, people are caught up in the narratives of the day. They’re caught up in the gee whiz stuff of the day. They’re told you gotta use social media.
They’re told that you gotta use AI. They’re told that you got to use all sorts of things. And one of the things they’re told because it satisfies the narrative is you need to put people before profit. That’s what they’re told. Okay. Now I’m not making this up. It’s there. You can see it and feel it. And I’ve, you’re my 105th podcast in the last 18 months.
So let me tell you, I hear a lot of that. Okay. I hear a lot of that. And all I say is, You, it’s a means to an end. You have to do that as a way to perform. And if you thought about taking care of people and caring for people and hiring caregivers, if you thought about it in that context, you will do a great job at achieving both.
Okay, because in my experience, the engagement of my teams went through the roof. Now that didn’t happen because we weren’t heart led. It happened because we had an army of advocates who believed in the journey, who were taken care of, who had leaders who actually cared what they have to say and measured their teams on how well we delivered into those frontline and employee aspirations and requirements. And so, yeah, I mean, look at the end of the day, nobody’s going to say, well done, Tom, your heart-led if you go broke.
Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
Roy Osing: Right? Who’s going to thank you? Like get real, guys. Come on, get real. I mean, our job as leaders is to drive performance and growth. What do you think economies will actually thrive? On Heart-Led only, it won’t, but it will thrive. It will thrive if you do the right thing for people and the right thing for customers under a caring strategy.
It will drive loyalty. It will drive growth and it will drive an army of advocates that pushes employee engagement through the roof. Trust me. I’ve done this. It works. This is not theoretical mumbo jumbo. This is a real stuff.
Tom Jackobs: Yeah. And it’s, and your message to be heard loud and clear as well, because, and that’s the point of the podcast here too, is business side is a big part of it because you can’t help people. You can’t have customers if you’re not in business, if you’re not taking care your business and your, and profit is part of that and people need to be okay with making a profit and charging what they’re worth.
Roy Osing: So let’s change the conversation as of right now. Let’s not talk about profit, because to be honest with you, I was never driven by the bottom line, because I can take an income statement and I, just like you can, and I can manipulate it to give you what you want. What I can’t do is I cannot run and hide from top line revenue.
Top line is an expression of how people feel about the value you’re delivering. Let me repeat that. Top line revenue, okay, is an expression of how your customers feel about the value you’re providing. It’s exactly what we need to focus on. So how do we grow top line revenue? We need a customer caring strategy that creates gasp worthy experiences, loyal customers, referrals that will go through the roof. How do we do that? We need employees. Who like human beings. It breaks down to that.
All right, how do we do that? Well, the recruitment piece is huge. And all of these other sort of programs that I put in place. Silly little things like hiring for Goosebumps. All of those things come together and the fire starts to light. The engagement goes up and guess what that results in? Top line growth.
Tom Jackobs: Not profit top growth, right? Now that, that’s good distinction. And you know, my, my business experience at the very beginning of my fitness business, I was very focused on the top line growth almost to, well, not almost to a fault because I also wasn’t looking at the outgoing as well and got into a lot of trouble, but also at the same time, I think I was so focused on money side of it and not the heart side of it. And once I got into that little financial problem, then it clicked on click that I needed to have a better strategy and, you know, really put the people first and serve them because I was bringing in so much revenue that the business just looked chaotic almost. And so for a lot of people they, well, this is really busy here, but, you know, it seems chaotic. And once I simplified the business, the top line came down a little bit, but the profit got a lot better as well. And then people got happier and then, you know, the top line started to grow again.
Roy Osing: Well, I mean, there’s mechanics have to be dealt with. I’ll call them mechanics. Okay. You know, for every dollars worth of growth and the top line, I mean, our job is to make sure that we preserve the amount that gets to the bottom. I mean, that’s going to happen, but you don’t lead your business with maximizing EBITDA. You just don’t. Right? You just don’t. But it’s, it is a consideration. And so if you had five hours of the day, where would you spend the five hours? I’d say you spend four of them, okay, on the customer caring strategy, and you take 60 minutes and make sure that 80 cents out of every dollar with the top line is getting to you. I mean, you just do that, but that’s not a strategy. That’s business mechanics, right? I mean, one of the things I had to do is throw away traditional strategic planning 101 because it wasn’t working for me. I had to create my own, what I call, strategic game planning process that literally can be done in 48 hours.
In fact, I work with generally small to medium sized businesses to do this, right? Because they don’t think they have time to work on their business. They’re so busy working day to day in it. And so the process is really simple. It answers 3 questions. How big do you want to be in terms of top line in 24 months? Not 5 years. 5 year plans don’t exist because the 4th year, you know, never shows up, right? It just a hockey stick prevails. The second question, who do you want to serve? Okay. We’re not in mass markets. Pick the customer group, right? That you think has the potential to deliver your growth goals and then take the next step and figure out what they crave, not what they need.
Needs are, you know, they’re chased by everybody and it leads to price competition and it’s a silly place. Cravings. Yeah. On the other hand, or what does Tom desire? What is he lust for? What is, you know, what is he at that level? And then the fourth thing is how are you going to compete and win that customer group. And that’s all about differential advantage. And I had to create my own process called the only statement, because there’s too many people claiming to be better and best and leaders. And that’s what I call claptrap. What you need to be is the only one who does what you do.
The only one who does what you do. So to make a long story short, we delivered a strategy built around that model and it was brilliant. It didn’t take long to do. We looked at it every four months. Right? Because you had to keep execution in mind all the time and, you know, your pulse on the metrics, etc. And so that’s how we breathe life into this. I mean, we tripped up on the service strategy and we missed things, etc. But because we were kind of like hands on, we were able to catch it, re vector it, you know, and sort of then move on. Correct the missteps because in this world, missteps are a part of the bargain you have as a leader. You’re going to make missteps and the only thing that you have to make sure of, you don’t make the same misstep twice.
That’s all, you know, other than I don’t go for it. And so I think organizations today are so tied up in that intellectual exercise that they’re not able to get to the heartfelt thing. They’re too busy trying to perfect the plan. So simplify the plan to your point.
Tom Jackobs: Analysis. Paralysis at a grand scale, almost.
Roy Osing: It is.
Tom Jackobs: That’s great. And again, going back to that customer your customer carrying strategy, I love that. And I think that’s really the main point. I’d love to drive home on this episode for the listeners is that, that type of strategy is going to take people along and especially the crave finding out what people are really craving and yeah that’s great. That’s some really good golden nuggets.
Roy Osing: Let me give you a quick story. You want stories about, about the craving, So I’m doing a strategic game plan process with his boat selling company in Toronto, Canada. And the CEO gives me a call and says, Roy, I got to take my business to another level. I’m not growing. See, most people will come to me because they’re not growing their business, right? Not because they want a particular strategy. Underneath it at the top line, they’re not growing. So I said, fine. So we took a look at their business. So, so their business is selling boats to boat dealers. So they’re using dealers as a way to get to the end user mark, right? And he’s not growing fast. So we went through my process.
How big do you want to be? Who do you want to serve? And we actually focused. All right, on the boat dealers that actually had pretty good potential. Well, that reduced the market they were busy in considerably. And then we looked at the question, what do those boat dealers crave? Well, the conversation at first was all about what they crave. In terms of boats, and they were having a hard time because I said to them, look it, the boat dealer doesn’t crave boats that don’t stay afloat. They kind of expect that the boats will float and they expect that the electronics will work.
I said, okay, I want to know about that. What kept it, what kept them awake at night was the fact that they were afraid. That they would go out of business because they would lose the ability to grow their business. Right? So I said, okay, why don’t we work with that? Right? What if we said we’re the only ones?
Who provided, we are the only customer service partner who were able to help boat dealers grow their business. And at first they looked at that and they go, yeah, but we sell boats. I said, no, because that’s not a source of advantage for you. The craving piece has got nothing to do with boats. And so we reframed their business. And so now they’re in the business development business, Tom, with these boat dealers. Their job is to grow top line and solve inventory problems, etc. Things that you wouldn’t expect a boat seller to do. And in fact, quite frankly, they’re the only ones that are doing that. They have an amazing competitive advantage and the other boat dealers are going, huh?
Huh? What’s going on over there? And so it’s a good example of actually our minds get trapped into thinking about our business a certain way. I mean, I got a landscaper who thought that they were doing, they were mowing lawns for a business. They now believe they’re in the property development business. And the reason that works for them, right, is they know other sort of trades and contractors that actually work on buildings. They know painters, they know plumbers. They, so I, we simply said, look at let’s craft the business a different way, right? And build it around cravings. So that you’re absolutely right and thank you for catching that. cravings piece is a huge trigger that people simply, aren’t being taught quite frankly, other than this kind of conversation and it’s so important for business success.
Tom Jackobs: If listeners want to check out episode 45 of the show, I had a guest Lori Werner to that point her first job was actually a medical device sales. So she would be in the operating room with the doctors. And one way for her to sell more of the devices was to do marketing. And social media management for the doctors so that they got more patients into the operating room. and that’s exactly, that’s what they craved. It was more patients. That’s what kept them up at night, the doctors. And so her solution to sell more of what she had was to do the marketing for the doctor, which then blossomed into her starting a marketing agency. So it’s, when people do that, it’s so brilliant and so, that business from kind of the core business.
Roy Osing: That’s. That’s, yeah, that’s, I mean, at the end of the day, the differentiation piece is key because generally businesses do not do a good job. As I said, I had to create the only statement is my mechanism to sort of drive away this whole tendency to get to claim things that are ridiculous, like you’re better and best, because I don’t know what that even means and it’s claptrap, right? And so when people talk about what they do, I’m always listening for, okay. How does it answer the question? Why should I do business with you and nobody else? And normally the, and nobody else piece is missing. It’s because the comparative relative to competitors is missing because it’s not taught, right?
If you go, you will check out any USP and I guarantee you, it will not relate to how they compare to the competition. They just don’t and yet business success is all about standing out, breaking away, not fitting in, not being part of the herd. And so that huge, that’s a huge piece. That when people start to think about a caring strategy, you need to keep that in mind.
Because there’s a lot of people who will who will declare that they’re in the business of exceeding customer expectations. Well, that’s hogwash anyways. I mean, it’s so ethereal. It’s just like unbelievable. You got to find a way to give it a little more substance, right? It’s a challenge.
Tom Jackobs: Well, Roy, this has been an awesome conversation. I think we could go on for hours as well, but our time is coming up. How can people learn more about what you’re doing and the great work that you have and get some more goosebumps coming their way?
Roy Osing: Well, I don’t know that they’ll get goosebumps. That’s my hope maybe. But I have a website, it’s www.bedifferentorbedead.com. So you can go there. Look at, I’ve been kicking this stuff around since I wrote my first book in 2009, Tom. So this, a lot of people think this is new and I think that’s kind of like my failure that they think it’s new because I haven’t done a good job spreading my word and having conversations like this to make people more aware.
So I’ve been blogging since 09. So the content on Be Different or Be Dead and the sort of things that we’re talking about now, service strategies, caring strategies, you know, strategic game plan. It’s all on my blog, so you can just go in there and search on a name and you’ll get lots of content. I’ve written seven books. My latest is called Be Different or Be Dead, The Audacious Unheard of Ways I Took a Startup to a Billion in Sales. That book is there and that six other ones, some ebooks, if you wanted to check those out, but look at the end of the day, I’ve also got an email address. It’s roy.osing@gmail.com. And I love to have people give me a, send me an email and have a personal conversation with what’s going on for them. I have people who send me an email and they say, Hey, Roy, I’ve just created my only statement. What do you think about this? And it’s. Awesome. It’s a great way to to actually coach and hopefully add one to the army of be different or be dead advocates that, that I’m so intent of creating.
You know, at the end of the day, I want to be able to take that glut of humans in the Bell distribution curve, right in the middle, right? And move them two points, Tom, just two points to the right. Imagine towards more differentiation, more customer caring. Imagine what would happen in the world if we were able to do that.
Tom Jackobs: That would be amazing. There would be a lot of great companies out there.
Roy Osing: Oh, would there ever be? There would be more Lady Gagas out there, right? You know, with websites for their little monsters. They would have all sorts of fun and caring and people would be engaged. There would be less unemployment. There would be more GDP because performance would be going through. I mean, see, why can’t we do this?
Tom Jackobs: That’s interesting. Yeah, I think we can. And they’re going to help us get there, but Roy, thank so for sharing your wisdom with us. I really appreciate it. And I know our listeners as well.
Roy Osing: You’re very welcome. My pleasure.
Tom Jackobs: And listeners, thank you for watching or listening to the show today. I certainly appreciate it. I know Roy appreciates it as well, but make sure that you’re checking out everything that Roy is doing. And all that’s going to be linked up into the show notes. We’ll put links to his website as well as the book and make sure you check that out and send him an email.
I mean, he just offered that. So, take a mop on that for sure. And then if you could, while you’re on the computer, if you could do me a solid favor and give the show a rating and review that helps spread the word about The Heart Led Business Show and help some people that could use the advice shared on today’s show. And until next time, lead with your heart.
Speaker 2: You’ve been listening to the Heart Led Business Show, hosted by Tom Jackobs. Join us next time for another inspiring journey into the heart of business.
