Interview with Brad Smith, President and Founder of Vector Business Navigation, Inc.

Brad Smith's dad, an Air Force pilot during WWII, was born in1919. So it made sense that Brad had a dream to be a pilot or an astronaut. He met Allan Shepard and Neil Armstrong, found out he was colorblind so had to pursue a new dream. Ended up being the guy giving the go, no-go to the shuttle missions, parlayed that into a tech job, finally becoming the most interesting Customer Experience(CX) Expert ever! Today, he owns and operates Vector Business Navigation and is widely lauded as one of the best CX professionals alive. Listen to his fascinating story. #hoshimo #csuite #csuiteradio

Transcript:

Julie: Welcome back to another episode of The Conversational. Today, I am here with a friend and, for full disclosure, he's also actually doing work for us at Party City now, so I have roped him into doing this for me too. So thank you, Brad Smith. So Brad Smith is the founder, president of Vector Business Navigation, Inc. He has had the privilege of leading many an organization in their customer-centric transformations, including companies like Symantec, [00:00:30] Yahoo, and Sage. He was their CX architect, CCO, and CMO, just in case there were other C's that we're missing. Across his 20 plus years of leadership, Brad has led global support and service functions for Oracle, Openwave, and VeriSign as well as small startups.

Julie: As noted, he is the founder and president of Vector Business Navigation, Inc., but he's also president of the board of directors for the Consortium for Service Innovation, and through the work of the consortium has helped hundreds [00:01:00] of customer service organizations deliver deep value to their customers, as well as better engage their employees. He's also recognized innovator of the Customer Experience Professionals Association and also serves on the CXPA board of directors, class of 2020. He's got many, many awards, including a global CX practitioner coaching platform in 2015 to 2018, and is an alumni member of the Forrester Chief Customer Executive Council, Technical Service Industry Association and [00:01:30] Chief Customer Officer counsels.

Julie: He's also well-written, published many very exclusive and important companies like Forbes, New York Times, Fox Business, Entrepreneur, all of which have spoken very highly of him, which is why I hired him. He's a frequent keynote speaker, and a blogger across the CX and customer service, customer success communities, and he's actually helping us at Party City do our CX journey mapping too.

Brad: [00:02:00] Yes.

Julie: As a CXO myself, I like other people with lots of CXs in their titles, so it's fun. But outside of all the acronyms, and the experience stuff, I have Brad. I asked him to join us because he's got a fascinating background, so being a customer experience people, my background also not engineer, it wasn't a customer experience expert or chief experience officer didn't exist back when we were going to school.

Brad: It's the best made up [00:02:30] title ever.

Julie: Ever. Right, well I've been chief storyteller, too, so there's a couple of good ones out there that you could make up as you run out of things to call yourself.

Brad: Right.

Julie: But I think most of us who are in this role current started off with something totally different.

Brad: Yeah.

Julie: So let's back up to early days of Brad Smith.

Brad: Yes.

Julie: Brad Smith. Where was Brad Smith? Do you know how many Brad Smiths there are in this country?

Brad: There's lots and there's a lot of famous ones. So there's famous [00:03:00] Brad Smiths at Intuit and Microsoft and other places. So when in Silicon Valley I typically can get a table pretty easily. That's nice.

Julie: That's right. That's awesome. That's awesome. So were, where was this Brad Smith born?

Brad: I was born in Columbus, Ohio, which apparently is the gateway for most of my best friends and family. A lot of people come from Ohio. Staying there seems to be a problem, but they're good people. And I lived in Ohio until the age of nine [00:03:30] and then I moved to Merritt Island, Cocoa Beach, Florida, Space Coast. And that kind of ignited my imagination and my quest for adventure, if you will.

Julie: So you had brothers, sisters, tell me about your parents.

Brad: Yeah. So, four brothers, five sisters scattered across fiveish marriages on my dad's side and two on my mom's side. So [00:04:00] dysfunctionality is how I grew up. I embraced it and it's been the key to my corporate success, I think ever since.

Julie: So there's 10 brothers?

Brad: Theoretically there's 10, yes.

Julie: And where did you fit?

Brad: I was the last litter, so my mom and dad were married last and me and my little sister came from that. So my dad got married, had three kids, got married again, had two, adopted two, then married my mom, my mom got married, had a son, [00:04:30] then married my dad.

Julie: Five marriages. Were these divorces?

Brad: Divorces, and my dad would collect the kids. It was a very strange situation back in the 60s. So about every 10 years there was a family and there was kids. And so I grew up in a highly dynamic and diverse environment that I didn't know any better, right?

Julie: So there were 10 of you in total, were they all [00:05:00] in the house at the same time?

Brad: My dad's first three kids were already out on their own before I came to be. His adopted two and birth two came to live with my mom. My mom had her son, and then suddenly I was born, and two and a half years later, my sister was born. So at one point we had seven kids in a three bedroom, two bath house.

Julie: Oh my gosh.

Brad: In Willoughby, Ohio, living double bunk beds, living in the dream.

Julie: Wow. [00:05:30] The dinner table must've been an experience.

Brad: Well, no. And my dad was a traveling salesman, so it was my mom on watch and then we'd wait for my dad to come home on Friday to distribute justice.

Julie: That is hysterical.

Brad: And then we would go off and do our penance and do our chores.

Julie: I had a traditional household like that too. It was like dad was the threat and it was please, mom, don't tell.

Brad: Dad was the threat. And so pretty much as soon as anyone of my older brothers and sisters graduated high school, they were immediately out and on their own, both by design [00:06:00] and by their preference. And so, growing up in the late sixties in Ohio, I had a brother who was a Marine Corps combat photographer on his second tour of duty in Vietnam. I had another brother who dropped out of high school and was a draft dodger. I had another brother who signed up to join the Marine Corps before he was 18 and my dad signed him and let him go. I had a sister who joined Up With People, the singing group in the back sixties.

Julie: Oh my gosh.

Brad: I feel like Forrest [00:06:30] Gump sometimes, when I really think about it. Yeah, it's nuts.

Julie: Up With People. I bet you do. But they all came back from Vietnam?

Brad: Yeah, everybody came home.

Julie: That's amazing, actually.

Brad: Everybody's good and I have the deepest love and appreciation for military because of that. My dad was a World War II air force pilot. He was born in 1919.

Julie: That's crazy.

Brad: So my dad had me in his mid to late forties, which was really not common in the early sixties.

Julie: Yeah, but 1919. So he was, so he was in the service. [00:07:00] You've got at least half of your brethren were in the service. Did you ever have an interest?

Brad: I wanted to be an air force pilot, absolutely. I saw Neil Armstrong step on the moon. I remember looking upside down through my legs when the camera pivoted and I was like, that's something I'd like to be. My dad moves to Merritt Island, Florida, where they launched the Apollo missions and space shuttles and so I pretty much committed my life to the age of 10 to become an astronaut, an air force pilot. I thought that [00:07:30] would be the greatest thing I could possibly do.

Julie: Did you ever get to meet any of the astronauts?

Brad: Yeah, lots of them. My dad stayed at Holiday Inn Cocoa Beach in the year of 1972, from December to November when we moved down to join him, and that's where all the Apollo astronauts hung out. So through my dad's connections, I met Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong, Wally Schirra. I met Gene Cernan, Bob Crippen, who was the first pilot for the space shuttle, [00:08:00] Overmyer. A lot of great astronauts. And then ultimately my life led to a place where I got a job at Kennedy Space Center in 1988.

Julie: Was that your dream? So short of being an astronaut?

Brad: Well, to be flying, not working there, but I had a bit of a come and find out after committing my year, my collegic early years to the pursuit of an aeronautical degree and ultimately becoming an air force pilot. Come to find out I had a color blind issue.

Julie: [00:08:30] How did you not know you were colorblind until then?

Brad: I blame it on my mom, basically.

Julie: She's like, what color is this honey? [crosstalk 00:08:44].

Brad: I thought beige versus melon. Does it matter? Apparently it does. Yeah. So I had to retool.

Julie: That must have been devastating.

Brad: Yeah.

Julie: I mean we talked about these holy shit moments, right? You'd go in, you've got this passion [00:09:00] and this [crosstalk 00:09:02].

Brad: No, seriously, from 10 to 22, everything was focused on that being the thing.

Julie: Yeah.

Brad: And suddenly I find myself with 80 plus hours of college credits that apply to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. At this time I'm working as the general manager of Merritt Island airport, which is a flight school. I'm talking to the Dean of Admissions and said post-graduates, show me [00:09:30] the kind of jobs these graduates will get, because I'm going to have to take out a massive loan to finish my degree. I look at this list of recent graduates, I've employed seven of them as flight trainers at my airport. So I'm like, I don't know that I want to do this. So I decided not to pursue aeronautical engineering, and I had two brothers that were mechanics, and I knew I didn't really want to be a mechanic. So at that time in 1983, computers were the thing. [00:10:00] So I plowed myself into computers and got a computer.

Brad: So I plugged myself into computers and got a computer, AS degree in computer programming, and ultimately finished my bachelor's into management information systems.

Brad: So once I pivoted and I dedicated myself to computers and the pursuit of using computers to drive better business decisions, one of my best friends had a job opening at the Space Center. And at this time, I was now newly married. I had a mortgage. I had-

Julie: How old were you?

Brad: 22.

Julie: Okay.

Brad: [crosstalk 00:10:31] [00:10:30] everyone should ... Yeah. You should always move out of your mom's house to your married house. Great advice.

Julie: No dog first or anything, just right to it.

Brad: Yeah. And after deciding I would never work at the Space Center, I decided Space Center's greatest job ever. And so in '88, this is after Challenger and this is the rebuild to get back to flight. So I had a great hookup. I had the opportunity to work at three different groups. I ended up in the engineering support area. [inaudible 00:00:58], the hiring manager, said [00:11:00] his first job for this interview to run engineering data reports was, "Have you ever worked in the food service industry?"

Julie: What?

Brad: Luckily, I'd worked at the mall pizza joint for two and a half years. So I told him that story. He says, "Okay, good. If you understand service, then I can use you. If you don't get service, I don't have time for you." And that was a forerunner to the rest of my career.

Brad: So from the minute the shuttle would land [00:11:30] until it takes off again, it goes through 27 pre-staged sequence tests. And engineers would run diagnostics and verify that the orbiters' ready for launch. And I'd run all the engineering reports to show that it qualified and if anything anomalous happened then I'd run troubleshooting engineering.

Brad: So in my mid 20s, I cut my teeth on an obsession about data and fact and proving and science. So I finished my degree-

Julie: But wait, wait, wait. So at 25 [00:12:00] years old, you don't have an engineering degree.

Brad: No.

Julie: Yes, and thank God there's engineers, but you're the one who's got to look at the reports-

Brad: I'm the one running all the data-

Julie: Looking for anomalies. And so it's up to you to just-

Brad: No, so the engineer says this doesn't look right. Explain to me why this happened. So I'd run through a battery of different reports to look for the anomalies and the signatures to show this is where it happened, this is why it happened. And we'd solve this murder mystery together.

Julie: Wow.

Brad: So 27 tests for every shuttle flight [00:12:30] and we're flying eight to 10 shuttles a year. And this is my entire job.

Julie: But that's a lot of pressure for a 20 something year old. You're sending people up in space.

Brad: But it's more exciting than that. Because Lockheed Martin paid for my bachelor's degree. So I decided to go full throttle. I took 16 hours a semester. I worked second shift odd work week at the Space Center. And I decided we should have a son. So I would wake up, [00:13:00] change Noah's diaper, feed him, drive to Orlando, go to University of Central Florida, stay all day there, drive straight to the Space Center for my 4:00 PM shift start, get out of work at midnight and then come home and take care of Noah and then wash and repeat. And I did that for two and a half years just to get through my degree.

Julie: Wow.

Brad: The drive was because my dad sacrificed a good many things to give me the best life possible and I felt obliged to do this. Growing up as a boy [00:13:30] scout, I felt equally obliged to get the merit badges to earn that right. And I knew that the short term sacrifice to life, life experience, my 20s, my marriage and everything else would be worth it in the long run. And it paid off.

Brad: So following my degree, I became a software quality engineer for the GLS launch sequencer, ground launch sequencer, which is the math model that runs the shuttle count down from T minus 45 minutes through liftoff. Any change in that, I would sign off on the quality of it. I'd verify run tests against it. And after doing that for like a year, [00:14:00] I got bored and I said, "I could write this code." So then I joined the GLS group, became a GLS programmer and wrote shuttle launch code for two and a half years.

Julie: Oh my God.

Brad: But even that was, it got tedious.

Julie: Monotonous.

Brad: Well, the thing of it is that this code was originally written in 1977. So this tapestry of code has launched every shuttle. And when a new shuttle is put to launchpad, it's got a different payload. It's got a different launch apogee, it's got different weights, [00:14:30] volumes, et cetera. So it's a different vehicle. So what we had to do is go into this tapestry of code, find the specific lines to change and modify so that it would fly true without causing any deadly harm.

Julie: Right. No stress.

Brad: So not a lot of creativity arc and a lot of pressure arc. But the coolest job ever. I wore a headset, I worked in the firing room, GLS [inaudible 00:14:53] launch. It was the greatest job ever. And then I fell into project and program management and did a lot of cool stuff there. But then one [00:15:00] of my best friends got a job at Oracle support services who built a new technical support center in 1996. He said, "Just come, just interview, whatever. It'll be the greatest job ever." And so I interviewed.

Julie: Was this Florida also?

Brad: This is in Florida, in Orlando. And Fred [Nosorello 00:15:15] was a hiring manager. I showed up and it's on a Friday, so it's casual Friday and he's got a velour jumpsuit. And he interviewed me and he said, "You know what? I really like you. I want to make you a team lead. How much money would it take for you to work here?" [00:15:30] And I thought of the biggest dollar value I could possibly imagine. And after working at the Space Center for eight and a half years, I finally made it to over $40,000 a year.

Julie: Right. And this is still the mid 80s, right?

Brad: Yeah. 96.

Julie: Oh, 96. So we were out of ... Okay. Wow. 96. Okay.

Brad: I'm way underpaid.

Julie: Yes.

Brad: So I said, "I don't know. 48,000." and he says, "When can you start?" So then I drive the hour back. The next day I get to my best friend and boss, Ralph [00:16:00] Esposito, my sponsor and inspirer at the Space Center. And I tell him the story. He says, "Brad, this is the greatest news ever." It's like what do you mean? If you leave for 366 days, I can hire you at fair market value. I said, "What does that mean?" "Well, you've been behind the salary curve this entire time because you just started as a tech and then you went to salary because you got your degree." So what does this mean? He says, "Well, I can hire you back at 63." So I'm like, "Wait a second. So I go to [00:16:30] work. I get this huge pay bump. I work at Oracle for a year and then I come back to the Space Center?" He says, "Yes, it's genius. You have to do this."

Brad: And I left a job where I was leading a team of 40 engineers transplanting the latest technology from Houston to Kennedy Space Center. And I was managing a bunch of relationships between both the NASA teams and the contractor team. So it was a great job to leave. So I did this. So I go to Oracle and I felt like I was in a Seinfeld episode. George Costanza. I could do no wrong. Right? So I'm like, "This is crazy. Why [00:17:00] do we do it this way? And whoever thought of that and why do we do .." Because I did not care. I was a made man and I was playing by a set of rules that didn't comply to Oracle.

Brad: Coming to find out, this really endeared me to the Oracle culture of the early 90s.

Julie: That's hysterical. So did you meet Larry Ellison?

Brad: I ultimately did.

Julie: Oh my goodness.

Brad: So three weeks before I'm ready to leave, I have already passed my physicals. I've passed all my job interviews. I have a job offer in my hand [00:17:30] to go back to the Space Center. A brand new VP of North American support outsider comes to Orlando and he's a great guy, amazing guy, well-spoken from Digital Deck. And so Digital Deck in high tech is like the George S. Patton school of leadership, right? Salty, earthy dudes. And he says, "We're getting rid of Follow the Sun. It's a ridiculous thing. I want to build a 24/7 support center in Colorado Springs." And so I stand up in this all hands [00:18:00] meeting of 600 staff and I was like, "That's stupid. We are supporting a Fortune 100. It's English support speaking. It goes from Orlando to Redwood Springs to Melbourne, Australia to Bracco, UK back to us. If we can't do this and do this well flawlessly, we don't deserve the right to support the biggest companies ever."

Brad: He says, "Well shit, Smith, you seem to have a lot of moxy on this. What [00:18:30] do you propose we do?" "Well, I would do this and this and this." He says, "Great. Could you write up a report?" I said, "Absolutely." He says, "When can you write it?" I said, "I don't know. Next Tuesday." "Done."

Brad: So I write this kind of Jerry Maguire of what we should do to fix Follow the Sun.

Julie: That's a mission statement.

Brad: And he sends it out to all the global leaders and headquarters leaders and he says, "I got this guy, Brad Smith. He's on fire and I need one of him at every center and he's going to lead a fix to Follow the Sun." [00:19:00] And my career took off ...

Julie: Exponentially.

Brad: Exponentially. And that led to the Y2K program. So because of my single point of failure manned space flight mission critical software engineering backgrounds, identified a number of faults for Y2K and ended up running the global Y2K program to ensure internal readiness of Oracle as well external readiness of Oracle, and ultimately had to report into Larry Ellison and the board of directors on the readiness of us and all of their top tier customers. So [00:19:30] yes, I had a couple of meetings with Larry Ellison. They were not emotionally gratifying, but they were very much career-

Julie: I doubt Larry's listening to this podcast, but I've heard that.

Brad: They were very much career building.

Julie: Yeah.

Brad: And then as luck would have it right after Y2K, a lot of key leaders left Oracle and I followed Al Snyder to a new company called Openwave. And Openwave basically has all the patents that allowed smartphones to get onto the internet.

Julie: Yeah.

Brad: And my career kind of took off [00:20:00] from there. So went from Openwave to Verisign to-

Brad: From there. So from Openwave to Verisign to InQuira to Semantic, to Yahoo, to Sage, and then to my own company in 2015.

Julie: That's amazing. All of it, which you started really from the CX standpoint or from a customer service standpoint, because you stood up in this meeting because you had nothing to lose because you were wildly underpaid.

Brad: Which I didn't even know or appreciate [crosstalk 00:20:25] I thought I had.

Julie: Ans were like whatever balls to the wall, I'm just going to say what I think.

Brad: [00:20:30] My last days at Oracle, I got assigned a project to roll out their CRM solution against themselves. The product manager that I was working for is Mark Benoiff who kind of did Salesforce. It was a highly charged political environment and cutthroat left and right. One of my mentors Tom Brunnen [inaudible 00:20:52] recommended me into that job. 15 years later I'm having drinks with Tom and I say, "Tom, why did you do [00:21:00] that to me? Why would you push me into that insane nightmare?" He's like, "Because I knew you had talent. You've got to learn how to swim with the sharks." Swimming with the sharks is a big theme.

Brad: What I came to appreciate deeply is what you do as a great senior manager is way different than what you do as a director. What you do as a director is different than a VP in an up and coming company. Which is radically different than what you do as a vice president in a well established [00:21:30] company. My metamorphosis of making it to vice president of global support for Openwave, and then quickly going to vice president of global support for Verisign. And then through a massive restructure, finding myself as a sales director for InQuira. And then a senior director service architect at Semantic. And then winning back the VP stripes at Yahoo, and then becoming an executive vice president at Sage.

Brad: This roller coaster of leadership taught me a lot about power [00:22:00] projection, how to build stakeholder maps. I was benefited with great executive coaching, but the life experiences are priceless. It was at Semantic, you have to understand from 96 to 2007 I was the customer service guy. In high tech what that means is I have to keep everyone else's stupid promises. If the marketing team over promises, if the sales team over sells, [00:22:30] if the PS team under [inaudible 00:00:22:32], it's up to me to keep the lights on. At Openwave, right? We had customers like Sprint that would pay us multiple, multiple million dollars a year. Then they would ask for a refund of all their maintenance and support payments if we didn't deliver five nines of availability. That was my job to own that promise.

Brad: When I got to Semantic, Aisling Hassell [inaudible 00:22:56] was the customer officer at Semantic at that time. She built a business architecture [00:23:00] group, and I got to sit there and see the marketing team, the sales team, the onboarding team, the service team and the renewals team. I got to sit with my peers and understand and see the business horizontally for the first time in my life. In 2007 that's where I declared my major. I said, "I want to be customer experience," because what if we made better promises? What if we all work together horizontally? What if we all understood success? Not from our individual MBOs and quarterly business reviews [00:23:30] point of view, but from the customer's point of view. If we're winning, there should be evidence we're winning.

Julie: Well, in the 2007, I'm going to go back to sort of what was happening in your life life at the same time because you've, kind of thinking through the premise of this is these, "Holy shit," moments define, they can define you in a negative or positive, and for you was this patriotic family, right? The military and the astronaut, and that these things didn't work out and it pushed you into places [00:24:00] and then you kind of found the freedom to have your voice because there was nothing to lose because you had the safety net.

Brad: The fearlessness.

Julie: But it pushed you into this whole new career that was sort of untapped. But in '07, so first of all, are you still in Florida? Are you still with your wife and your child?

Brad: Yeah. Y2K cost me my marriage. I did become a million mile flyer on United. That was great. But I fell in love with the idea of my first wife and people that [00:24:30] young should not get married. But we created Noah and Abby. Two of the most perfect, wonderful human beings on the planet earth. I got divorced in 2000. What I realized was in those early days, my best calling is a part time dad. I rocked at it. I could travel the world for 10 days straight, and be absolutely present for a full weekend. Be there for holidays, be there for school events, be there for family vacations. But when I wasn't that, I could be the greatest corporate employee in the history [00:25:00] of God. And so to be able to throw myself headlong into both of these things was a big deal.

Brad: I spent six years getting to know myself because I never was an adult. I was this thing pretending to be an adult and getting these additional merit badges. I fell into love with one of my best friends and it was an impossible relationship. I got re-engaged in 2006, and got married in 2007, and had Audrey in 2008. And our twin girls in [00:25:30] 2010. In 2007, I found myself living in Savannah, Georgia, working as a telecommuter with a newborn wife. And with a newborn and a new wife.

Julie: Kind of a newborn wife.

Brad: A newborn wife, absolutely. And a golden retriever and two cats just living the dream in Savannah, Georgia.

Julie: I'm just trying to think. A friend of mine, Joe Pine, had reached out recently and he was the author of The Experience Economy. I keep going back, that seems like [00:26:00] it's been around forever. Now he might've actually written that a little earlier in the 2000s but kind of going back on how you used this to sort of be a pioneer. I don't know who actually was the first sort of CXO [inaudible 00:26:14] but you probably do, but to be a pioneer in this space, I think you certainly qualify as that in this timeframe.

Brad: Yeah, no, I think you're right. One of the things in this timeframe, the thing that's [00:26:30] impossible for me to escape is there's 76,000 functional designators that are needed to launch a space shuttle. These sensors are monitoring temperatures, pressures, voltages sometimes up to a thousand times a second. As I marched through a launch countdown, I'm only looking at a handful of those sensors relevant to, "It's T-minus 15 minutes. Can I go to T-minus 14 minutes?" But I'm understanding the entire ecosystem. I also have a clear [00:27:00] understanding of what success looks like. And more importantly, what failure looks like. Everything I've ever done in customer support, and everything I've ever done in customer experience, has been haunted by that truth. It is complex by its nature. If it's not, you can't make it simple.

Brad: Embrace the complexity. Where's the data? Show me the positive behavior. Show me the negative behaviors. Build guardrails to push the negative to the positive. I demand [00:27:30] policy and process and data and training. I also demand a North star. I need a brand promise that governs us. Safely put men in space and land them back on the earth achieving the mission, right? Just give me a brand promise.

Brad: Yahoo was fun, safe and simple. I can get behind that. I can build an entire experience around that. I can also easily see through measurement and interviews, we did not deliver safe today. We did not deliver simple. [00:28:00] We forfeited fun. This idea of, "I have to build a secret system." We have to put analytics and metrics around it. I have to organize all the way from marketing and sales to product, to service, to renewals. I have to do all of this, but it's manageable. That confidence, that innate confidence I have is because I grew up on a launch control room that had seven contractors and 13 critical systems working to launch shuttle safely in my early twenties. [00:28:30] It's funny because CX isn't rocket scientist but is it? It might be rocket science.

Julie: Maybe.

Brad: There might be something to this.

Julie: Thinking about sort of the CX and how you, so you built this, but you also sort of, you had a lot of learnings from your family. You watched your father and his multiple marriages.

Brad: Absolutely. Sure.

Julie: You thought about the experience, certainly of your family. You thought about your own, you've got your first wife, now you've got your second one. [00:29:00] Did you ever see any synergies really with this idea of thinking, so put it this way, let me tell you the reason I'm asking the question. I think about, you think about customer experience and you think about the ecosystem that you talk about. I'll end up in those super geekiest moments thinking through the ecosystem of my children, my family's lives. "Okay. Am I thinking through? What are the most important things?" I don't know because I have a mission statement from my family besides, "Please don't get in a car accident. [00:29:30] Please don't drink and drive," those kinds of things. But you think about, "Okay, am I doing all the right things?" I think all of us who try to manage family and career, you try to figure that out.

Julie: Have you ever tried to apply your own understanding and your form formation of CX, the customer experience, to your own family life and trying to balance that?

Brad: No, for sure.

Julie: Do you? Yeah, I was just curious if that was just me and my own crazy mind.

Brad: No, I mean, one of the most ridiculous things I did is I earned [00:30:00] embarrassingly, and then later proudly the.

Brad: Embarrassingly, and then later proudly, the title of uncle dad, because I was such a part-time dad-

Julie: Oh. For your first two kids.

Brad: And it's odd to me. I grew up with a strong work ethic, right? I had a paper route at 14. I had chores I had to get done. There was accountability taught to me early in. And so, I had chores to do. I had a house in Orlando. I wasn't there all week. So, we'd come and I'd try to build chores and it never went well. And the allowance never went well. So, I decided I was [00:30:30] going to employ an MBO system against my kids. And I'd say, "Okay, look. Here's the jobs to do, and if you do these jobs and I have to come back and do it after you, it's only 10 bucks. And if you do the job and I don't have to do anything, then it's, I'll give you 12 bucks. And if you do it better than I could do it myself, I'll give you 20."

Brad: So, I started scoring and grading my kids. And then later, the thing that frustrated me as we'd go off on a great weekend [00:31:00] and go on a vacation, a special memory, and they wouldn't eat their food, and they wouldn't do this, and they wouldn't do that. It was just, they're teenagers and I'm uncle dad. So I said, "Okay, you know what? Presidents' Day weekend is coming up, it's a school holiday. I'm going to have you Friday through Monday. Our budget is $250. You decide what we're doing and where we're going to go." And so, they decided we're going to drive down to Fort Lauderdale, go into Lion Country Safari. They had to pay for every meal [00:31:30] out of their own pocket. They had to pay for the hotel out of their own pocket. And suddenly, "Well, let's, no, we want the pizza to go. I'm going to eat that for breakfast. And I want..." It just... Trying to inspire accountability and consequence became a central theme. And then later, when I got to be a dad a second time, I wasn't 22, working odd work week.

Julie: Uncle dad.

Brad: Right? I was fully present, fully on, had the capabilities [00:32:00] to do all the right things in all the right ways. And I can't tell you how I suck the marrow out of those moments. Like Madeline, the littlest of my twins, just I'll never forget the moment when she just didn't fit and when you hold her, and it bumps here and her head's here, but she's a little bit too long and your arm a little bit uncomfortable. That moment, I remember it, and I still get melancholy thinking about it. And I'm like, to live your life with that kind of presence, with malice of forethought, is such a [00:32:30] miracle. You look at my ridiculous career and all my beautiful blessings, to live your life in a fearless way is such a gift. And when you start to get scared, just remember, my mom's favorite saying, "Let go and let God." Just relax, and this is the fun part.

Julie: Yeah.

Brad: You know that... you hear? That's the part that happens before the really polar part happens. So forever, I had a lot of people saying, "You should start own business." And [00:33:00] our friend, Fred, recommended that repeatedly when I was at Sage. So, Sage became a global company and it was clear the leadership team needed to be in London and I had already moved my family. Audrey had had five zip codes in seven years and it just wasn't ready to move again from Southern California. We left as best of friends.

Brad: And in the summer of 2015, I took a sabbatical and then suddenly, through my professional network, colleagues reached out to me and says, "Hey, that thing you did it at Samantha, we'd like [00:33:30] you to come and do that here" or "that thing you did at Sage, I'd like you to come..." And I started my own company in September 2015 and now, I help big companies figure out their customer transformations. And I got stopped at a Forrester conference in spring of 2016. A guy named Thomas, who I just met there and I never have seen him since, a great South African guy, we're having drinks at the end of the first day and he says, "So, tell me about yourself. Why are you [00:34:00] here? What's your purpose? Why do you exist? Why are you here right now at this meeting? Why?" And this kid's like 28 years old. I said, "That's a hell of a question."

Brad: And I think, what if the path to greatest long-term profitability and stability for any corporation or organization is the path of customer experience? [00:34:30] What if that path of customer experience generates the greatest benefits for the shareholders, for all the employees, and the customers? And what if that was recognized as the highest goal of any corporation, outside of short-term profits? What if we could teach the algorithms and the machines that determine stock price that this longer-term view is the better metric? And what if empowering our employees and [00:35:00] supporting them is the path to greatest customer satisfaction? What if I could help make that pivot? That would be a planet I want to leave my daughters to.

Julie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brad: What if the golden rule is actually the most profitable and selfish thing you could do? And what if I can demonstrate the data to prove it? I think that's maybe why I'm here. And those words still haunt me to this moment. It's one [00:35:30] of those moments in my life, and I've had probably half a dozen, where you feel words coming into your head from another place. And that's a pretty cool place to be right now.

Julie: I love that. Well, I love that. So, okay, I feel like we need to end on that because I don't know if it gets more powerful than that.

Brad: No, I'm good. I'm good.

Julie: But, I mean, on the golden rule, I'm thinking that that would be the most selfish, and that if the world ran, corporations either, which is a dichotomy, ran [00:36:00] on the golden rule, which is really what we're trying to do with CX is just prove that by doing unto others as we would have done unto ourselves, that we will actually be more-

Brad: For your customers, for your employees, for your partners.

Julie: Across the board. Right?

Brad: Yeah.

Julie: That you can take that forward. So, life lessons.

Brad: Yeah. One of my best friends, I have to give him credit for this, Jim Pendergast, he coined the phrase after becoming the chief customer officer of AARP. He said, "You know what? I think CX needs to be a company's OS, [00:36:30] their operating system."

Julie: Operating system, yeah.

Brad: If they're not running their company by design, by decision, by cost center against CX, they're doing it wrong and it's just a matter of time before they disintegrate into the ether of, nobody cares.

Julie: I love that. So, I think that's great. I think this is also a really nice way to end in terms of, for all people who've ever thought about wanting to be in the customer experience of the game is that, you take all your life experiences [00:37:00] and now you're able to put them to use in terms of just doing the right thing. It isn't rocket science, although it has helped you having some rocket science experience.

Brad: It helps to build the business case to legislate for change, make no mistake, but still.

Julie: An actual rocket science. That's true. So, thank you very much for sharing your backstory with us.

Brad: Absolutely. Thank you.

Julie: Appreciate it. Thank you.

Brad: This has been fun.