Tell us a bit about your entrepreneurial journey and why you are passionate about helping organisations break free?

Wow, that’s a long story.

In short there were two really important things that took place.

The first was growing up and seeing many people in my community and even family members being made redundant. I saw businesses close and the impact that had on people and communities.  Even at 15 years old I could see that the way owners lead their businesses and how they looked after customers had a huge ripple effect that was both positive and negative.

It wasn’t until 15 years later that story came back to haunt me. While running what was a successful growing business at the time, I made the mistakes of the same owners I criticized at 15. The result was a failed business, lost customers, disbanded team and hundreds of thousands in losses. Painful lesson.  However, this story was the one that led me to attend a conference in October of that same year. This conference would shift my world view on customer management forever.

I made a commitment that I would find a way to ensure no company who truly wanted to serve their customers would ever have to suffer the ripple effect of business crippling customer failure or worry about having to let go of their employees because of poor methodologies and customer relationship strategies.

I became relentless in my pursuit of understanding how leaders, teams and organisations deliver repeatable and predictable results with their most important customers in any condition. That research, study and projects my companies ran eventually became the art of customer mastery.

What makes you stand out from your competitors?

In the market today, we tend to read the same things, explore the same ideas and therefore suffer from the same problems.

We’ve taken a different approach to help companies and leaders around the world avoid the pitfalls that cause good companies to lose great customers. All because of flawed methodologies and poor customer relationship strategies.

Instead of pursuing popular practices which are known, easily accessible and frankly not designed for what’s needed in our current environment.

We focus on what we call ‘predictive power’. Predictive power is the process of designing unique root cause solutions that allow a company or customer team to deliver recurring and predictable customer results at scale in any environment.  For leaders, we call this Customer Mastery for companies we call this the Customer Ripple Effect.

What is the mission for your company over the next five years?

We want to help 10,000 companies impact and improve the lives of a million customers.

What have you leaned on to navigate 2020?

We’ve leaned on mentoring, team and solid customer communication.

One thing I, unfortunately, learned late in my entrepreneurial career is when you have a core challenge that impacts your business. In most cases, it’s better to ask who can help? rather than How can we do this?

For some, they may hear this and think. “Jermaine, it sounds like you’re deferring all of your problems to other people, how will you learn?”. That’s the thing. When you bring in help you still have to do the work but you have someone thinking alongside you.  Your learning increases tenfold, time to results decreases and if you’ve picked the right WHO you’ll be able to create new advantages.

That’s essentially what the right team does for you. I’m proud of the team we’re building.  In addition to mentoring and team, it has been a critical practice of ours to maintain a strong cadence of communication with our customers. We’re fortunate that we have not lost a single customer.  We never want to take that for granted.

What one piece of advice would you give someone starting a company?

I think too often starting a business is sold as this lifestyle choice when in fact it is a life-altering choice. It is not for everyone, and should not be taken lightly.

If you do decide to take the plunge, get connected with a community. Do your research, go slow and listen, validate not just by hearing people say yes but asking people to part with money only then you’ll really know if you have something worth committing too. Don’t quit your day job just yet. If you can get good advisors around you. That could mean inside a paid community, programme or a successful, open and capable mentor.

Starting a business is everything you want but nothing you expect. Be prepared to work harder than you did in your job. It isn’t for everyone. Don’t hold all your hopes in your first business to win the first time around. It rarely happens, and it will take time but you can make it.

What experience shaped who you are?

There was not one single experience but many small and a handful of big experiences that have brought me to where I am today.

The one that was strongest in my mind goes back to the failed business in 2015, I had chosen the wrong partner, immature as a leader, lost hundreds of thousands and customers gone. It was one of the hardest moments of my entrepreneurial journey. However that same year, 6 months later I would be sitting in a business conference and hear a person speak that would change my perspective of customers. It became the catalyst for my current companies. I also became a much more practical entrepreneur and began evaluating customers,  risk and opportunities in a more systematic way. That year although extremely difficult taught me a lot about myself and who I needed to become to be a hugely successful entrepreneur in the future.

What invention do you hope to see in your lifetime?

I’d like to see a star trek replicator because I’d love to be able to access good meals and ones I love anywhere in the world.

To what do you attribute your success?

There are a few critical things that have been constant in my life for the last 10 years.

My wife who with our six kids has been a partner that has enabled me to go out and pursue my goals as a business owner.  Mentors past and current who have at different points in my journey been pivotal.  My faith, where I’ve developed my foundation for resilience, hope, patience and perseverance.  A commitment to personal development

An entrepreneurial community of like-minded people makes a huge difference in walking what is a very hard and sometimes lonely road.