Disney taught Vance Morris how to charge more without changing the product. Here's the system behind it ~ for any service business.
GROWTH PILLAR: Sales & Revenue
WHO THIS IS FOR: Service business owners · Solopreneurs · Team leaders · Anyone tired of competing on price
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A clear framework for turning ordinary service into a premium experience ~ plus 52 free ways to wow customers starting this week
Most businesses think they deliver great service. Their customers disagree. by a lot.
Vance Morris spent over a decade at Disney, then built a carpet cleaning business that now runs on 90 minutes a week. He didn't do it by working harder. He did it by building systems that create experiences customers remember and tell others about.
In this East Trade Winds session, Vance walks through the gap between what businesses think they deliver and what customers actually feel. He breaks down the Ladder of Economic Value — from commodity to experience — and shows exactly how service businesses can move up that ladder without a massive budget. An oil change shop. A doll store. A carpet cleaning company. The framework works everywhere.
Key topics covered:
Vance Morris is the owner of Deliver Services Now and a former Disney cast member who now helps service businesses build the systems behind unforgettable customer experiences. Connect with Vance on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook.
Free gift from Vance: 52 Ways to Wow Your Customers — one low or no-cost wow idea for every week of the year.
Co-hosts: Percy Barr and Wayne Pratt
Browse all episodes — K4B / ETW / CGN
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NEXT STEPS
Vance (00:05)
So this is a picture of me and my former boss. worked for the Disney company for a little over 10 years. has anybody been to Disney before?
My my stock price thanks you. you know, it's always good to have people supporting my retirement. one of the things I did when I got out, I worked for a couple of corporations after I left Disney, and I am one of those people that was able to leave the company and not curl up in the fetal position and wither away. I did what every small boy dreams of doing and I started a carpet cleaning business. because hey, why not?
I've had that for 19 years now. I've added a Oriental rug washing facility and a mold remediation company to it. And about eight years ago hired a general manager, put a whole bunch of systems in place, and now I spend about 90 minutes a week managing those three businesses. So that is the power of systems. So if you're putting systems in place, systems give you freedom.
one of the fun things I get to do is take business groups down to Disney for four-day full immersion boot camps. we spend half the day in the classroom, half the day in the theme parks, and at the end of the time, you have a blueprint on how you're going to Disnify your business. these are really fun and they're really powerful. and if you implement just one idea from the event.
guaranteed you'll 5x your investment in the event. and before I really jump into it, a lot of people will say, but my business is different. You know, I don't own a roller coaster. I don't have a Cinderella castle. Why the heck should I want to do anything surrounding Disney? well this screen I share not so much to brag but to get a little bit of street credibility with you. I've worked with businesses all over the spectrum.
real estate, rocket ships, home inspectors, coaches, you name it. and what I'm about to talk to about is applicable to any any business. In your opinion, what is the customer experience?
100% It is how the business makes you feel during the interaction or the use of their product. It's not the you know, the the hours of operation or the widget that you sell, but clearly more than 50% is how you make them feel. So a customer experience is not just about the
speaker-5 (02:29)
What?
Vance (02:30)
How many of you think you deliver great service?
here's the thing. when I ask audiences, it doesn't matter whether there's 10 of us or, you know, 600, about 80% of the audience will raise their hand. What the other 20% are thinking, I don't know. Maybe they think they suck or they know that they have bad, you know, service. but here's the thing.
80% of companies say they deliver great service. Sadly, when they surveyed the customers of those companies, only 8% of the customers think that those businesses deliver great service. So there is a huge gap that needs to be overcome between these perceptions. You know, we think we're doing a great job, our customers don't think that. So we really have to analyze.
what is going on in our business and customer service has gotten so bad right that seven in ten customers or consumers said that they were willing to spend more with a company for the same exact product or service just to get a better experience. All right so competing on price is not the most effective way to build an enduring business right
Great service, great experiences delivered time and again is defensible against really the stiffest and most well well-funded competition. You know, think Disney, think American Express. you know, my carpet cleaning business. We charge, we're about 40% higher than our closest competitor. And so companies with great service are not afraid to charge a premium for it. And you can differentiate yourself from the competition.
by wowing people, okay? You know, Nordstrom's Whole Foods, Ritz-Carlton, you know, Zappos before they were bought up by Amazon. These are all examples of companies, enormous companies that focused on the premium customer experience, and we'll all agree they charge premium prices. So how do we get there, right? People always show me the money, right?
So there is a percentage of the population willing to spend more for the same product or service. I mentioned that already. And way at the tippy top of this pyramid, 10% of the population is willing to spend 31% or more for the same product or service just to get a better experience. So your marketing should be directed at that top 10%, right?
Why wouldn't you? Why would you want to go for the people that aren't willing to spend more? And if you look at these numbers, really, I mean, more than half of the population is willing to spend more just to get a better experience. So I don't know if you guys have read the book The Experience Economy. absolutely brilliant. It's a little bit old, but the everything in it is still certainly applicable.
And they have what they call the ladder of progression of economic value. And as you can see, on the one side you have your competitive position, and on the bottom you have pricing. And as a commodity, and I hate to break it to you guys, we're all commodities. Every one of us, right? I mean a dentist is a dentist is a dentist. There's only so many ways to clean teeth. What separates one dentist from another is really the experience.
But commodities cannot be differentiated. And as a commodity, you do not control your prices. The marketplace dictates the price. Think of iron ore or sugar or pork bellies or whatever the commodities are out there. The market dictates the price. Now, if you go up to the next level, are goods. Goods are made from the commodity.
So there is some leeway in pricing. Services are really the intangible activities. Service providers use the goods that are comprised of the commodities to deliver a specific task. So as we're going up this staircase, your competitive positioning is getting stronger and your pricing is getting higher. And at the top are experiences, right?
And experiences are how you make people feel. And bottom line, experiences are memorable, and no two people can have the same experience. So let me give you a quick example of this. and let's bake a cake. Okay, so for those of us of a certain age, we remember our mothers making our cake from scratch. She actually touched the commodities: flour, cocoa, sugar, eggs, etc.
How much did these things cost? Maybe
speaker-5 (06:59)
Yeah.
Vance (07:00)
a dollar or two to make a cake? I mean, it's only a cup of flour, a cup of sugar, right? So let's just say two dollars, right? Then came along cake in a box, right? This is our good. The commodities became less relevant because they all got pre-packaged, right? And so you now have the cake in a box and the tub of fake frosting, right?
The higher cost is a trade-off for the convenience and the time. And probably, if you were to buy these things, you're probably looking five dollars each, so maybe ten bucks. Same basic commodities, just packaged differently. And now we're getting 5x the price because of the packaging and what how we put it together. Then, of course, you can always go to a bakery or your grocery store and you can get a
Half sheet cake for you know 50 bucks, right? That's I mean at least five to six times the store bought or the box, and it's at least 10x the the base commodities, right? So people think this is a great bargain, right? Time and energy saved. What do families do now? They completely outsource, right?
They go to places like Dave and Busters. I don't know if you guys have ever s been at a Chuck E. Cheese's. I don't recommend it. It's god-awful food. or American Girl. How many of you have daughters and have purchased an American girl? Any of you? None of you. Well, you're in Canada, so you probably buy a Canada girl, right? Well, anyway, American girl are dolls. All right. And they're these plastic things. They're like
Ten bucks at Walmart, but at American Girl they cost fifty. And then you gotta get outfits for the girls, and they're like fifteen, twenty bucks each. And then you and you can't you can't just have one outfit, because you if you gotta get dirty and do laundry, you gotta have a couple outfits. American Girl has the longest amount of time a consumer will spend in one store. And it's just a tick over two hours.
Can you imagine two hours shopping for dolls? Right? What the hell do they do in two hours? Well, one, they get the doll, then they gotta pick out the outfits, then they get their picture taken with the doll at the American Girl Photo Studio, which is another 50 bucks. But wait, they can't get their picture taken yet because they gotta get their hair done. So both the kid and the doll go to the American Girl salon and both get matching hair do's.
Right, which is another 50 bucks. So now that $10 commodity doll is worth over $200 just by creating experiences around the doll. So obviously, satisfied customers defect all the time. Okay? If you have satisfied clients, they're gonna leave you. Somebody's gonna offer a nickel less than you are, and poof, they're gone.
And then certainly nobody raves about average. When was the last time you went home, sat down at the dinner table with the family and said, my God, you'll never guess what happened at the oil change today? Right? That conversation is not happening because oil changes are commodities, they're boring, they are not memorable, and you know, and hope to God they don't screw up the car, but there's just nothing exciting about an oil change unless you
Go to my client, Jaxsons he's got four service stations. All they do is oil changes. But what we did was is we wanted to separate him from everybody else, right? So we could not have him be seen as a commodity. Talk about a commodity, oil, right? And oil changes. And to be clear, he does not have any magic or special oil, right? He just has pens oil or whatever the stuff is. And so
We went and worked with him and we turned all of his service stations into 1950 style service stations, you know, where four guys would run out and they got little bow ties on and gloves and one guy squeegeees your windshield, another one checks the air pressure in your tires, right? And then somebody escorts you into the waiting room where there's actually today's newspaper. Horrors. and there's also a barista in there waiting to make your favorite coffee drink.
And the barista is actually one of the oil change technicians. They just rotate through the job. Now, here's what all of this Mickey Mouse work generates. All right. He is 35% higher in price than his competitor, Jiffy Lube, two doors down. Remember, it's the same stinking oil. It's the same service. But he is commanding a premium price for.
The experience that he delivers. And the bottom line to all that, one, obviously he's more profitable. But two, his employees stick around because they're not getting beat up and busted up, you know, on having to service, you know, 300 cars in a day. Now they can serve 100 cars in a day without all of the pressure. And so there's less wear and tear on the building, less wear and tear on the people.
It's just a win-win all the way around. So, how do we get there? always like to leave people with the directions on how to do this, not just give you all the the fluff. So, what you have to do, first step, is map out your customer journey. Okay? It this is not negotiable. There's no way you're gonna be able to do what I just said without mapping it out. And you start from the customer's point of view.
Right, not your point of view. So what's block number one? What's the first interaction a customer has with your business? And you put that in block one. And then what does the client do? What's next? And you map out the entire thing. Every spot where you interact with a client. Maybe it's sending an email, maybe it's sending a package, maybe it's going over a quote, maybe it's a coaching call, whatever it is.
You map this thing out. And then once you've got it mapped out, you can look and you figure out how we're going to make it better. All right. Walt Disney called it plussing, all right? Constant process improvement. So you'll go back and you'll prioritize because maybe number one is not the most important. Maybe you know, step six is. So you come over here, you put the block number number six, and then you're gonna write down.
What do you currently do? Okay? What's your current mediocre service? And then you're gonna brainstorm. And if you have a team, I highly encourage you to get your team members included in this. And how do we make it better? How do we plus our show? and then you go and you implement it and you do this for each point. And you're gonna see one, you're gonna be able to start creating or commanding.
Premium prices based on the experience that you are delivering. I do have a free gift for everybody if you would like. If you are lacking or not feeling up to coming up with different ways to wow your customers, I did all the work for you and I'll give you 52 ways to wow your clients without breaking the bank. So 52 low, no cost ways. One wow for every week of the year.