Okay, I want to share something with you that might land a little sideways.
Your clients don't care about your process.
They care about how working with you makes them feel. And right now, in a world where AI can generate, automate, and replicate almost everything your business produces, frameworks, deliverables, templates, and marketing content, the one thing that cannot be cloned is the experience you create.
That is your unfair advantage. And this episode is all about how to design it.
The stat I keep coming back to
73% of consumers say experience is a key factor in their purchasing decisions. And yet only about half of companies actually deliver a great one. That gap is not a problem. That gap is an open door.
But the number that really settled into my bones? Emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable as highly satisfied customers.
Satisfied is not the ceiling. Satisfied is transactional. It lives in a checklist and evaporates the moment someone finds a shinier option. Connection is something else entirely. It roots. It compounds. It is the kind of loyalty that no competitor can price-shop away.
If you want retention, referrals, and real brand affinity, you cannot just deliver a service or ship a product. You need to design an experience.
Three levels. Most businesses never leave the first one.
In the episode, I break down the three levels of how businesses show up for their clients, and why most people get stuck at level one, delivering the thing and never make it to level three, which is where the real magic of designing an experience actually lives.
Most businesses deliver a service. Some deliver results. Very few design an experience. The ones that do? They stop being vendors. They become stories people carry.
I walk through exactly what it looks like to move from level one to level three, with real examples from my own business, a brand you definitely know, and a founders' community doing something quietly brilliant.
What we did that I was nervous about (and why it worked)
One of the examples I share in this episode is something we did inside the Planathon VIP experience this past year. Something I had been thinking about for a while, and when we finally did it, I was genuinely a little nervous.
We invited our VIPs to sit in on our actual team planning meetings. Not a polished presentation. Not a highlight reel. Our real, standing internal meetings with the same brainstorms, the same pivots, the same “is this actually a good idea” conversations happening in real time.
What happened changed how I think about experience design entirely. I talk through the whole story in the episode, including what surprised me most, and what you can take from it into your own business whether you run retreats, a digital program, a product line, or something in between.
The five layers worth auditing in your own business
Here is a quick framework I walk through in the episode. Five layers to think about when you are designing or auditing the experience you are creating:
Anticipation. What does someone feel before the experience even begins?
Access. Do people feel like genuine insiders, like they are really part of something?
Interaction. Are people passively consuming, or actively co-creating?
Emotion. What specific feeling do you want threaded through the whole thing?
After. What continues once the experience ends? (This is the layer most businesses skip entirely, and it is where loyalty actually lives.)
Most businesses pour all their energy into the middle, the delivery, the doing. The stickiest experiences are the ones that get intentional about all five. Tune in to hear how each one plays out with real examples, including the one about yacht rock that I will never stop talking about.
One more thing before you go
Whether you are just now thinking about experience design for the first time, or you have been weaving it into your work for years without a name for it, I want you to know: you are right on time.
Designing experiences is not one more thing to add to a packed plate. It is often about removing things, creating space, and trusting that the unscripted moments are doing more work than the scheduled ones ever could.
Go listen, go watch, and then come back and tell me what you are going to design differently. I really want to know.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
If your clients disappear after working with you once, this episode is for you, because let me share something that might make you feel a little uncomfortable. Your clients don’t care about your process.
They care about how working with you makes them feel. In a world where AI can generate, automate, and optimize almost anything, experience is your last unfair advantage. And if you’re not intentionally creating one, you are missing out. Stay with me here because I’m gonna break down exactly how to design experience inside your business, even if you’re virtual, even if you have a physical product, and even if you host in person events.
We are living in a world where almost everything can be replicated. Your frameworks, your deliverables, your templates, your automation, your marketing, AI can write it, systems can deliver it and be automated to do so, someone cheaper can offer it. So what actually makes someone stay with you?
The research shows that 73% of customers say experience is a key factor in purchasing decisions, but only about half of companies are said to actually deliver a great experience. Companies that lead in customer experience outperform those who do not significantly in revenue growth. And here’s a big one. Emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable as highly satisfied customers. Let’s hear that again. Satisfied customers are not even as valuable to your company and to the work that you are doing as emotionally connected customers.
Not satisfied customers, connected customers, and there is a massive difference in that. Satisfaction is transactional. Connection is more relational and leads to long-term results and loyalty with your company and relational business creates the long-term win. So here we go. If you want retention, if you want loyalty, referrals, and brand affinity, you can’t just deliver a service. You can’t just ship a product. You need to design an experience.
There are three levels and ways to think about this. You may, in your company deliver a service or a product. Second, you may deliver results with that service or product, but third, you may design an experience, and most businesses deliver the service. They might deliver the result with that product or service. Some make it there, but very few operate at that level of delivering a clear and engaging experience. And experience is what moves someone from, I hired them. I bought that thing. I used that service to. I love working with them. I love what they do as a company.
I’m gonna share with you three very specific examples of how you can integrate experience into your brick and mortar, your product-based business, your service-based business, your virtual company. In fact, I too operate two virtual companies where we can live and work and serve our clients from anywhere. In fact, my clients live and operate all around the world.
One of the things that I do each year is host an event that is somewhat experiential called the Planathon. We host it in the second half of the year, typically in the final quarter of the year, to partner with business owners and entrepreneurs to plan out their year ahead because I want you to go into the new year ready because we know when people plan, you get better results. So we host this event every year. It’s very interactive. It’s live. We are connecting online virtually, but we wanted to engage and shift our VIP experience tied to this event this year.
So what we decided to do, which was something I had been thinking about for a long time, but we finally were like, okay, now is the time is we invited our Planathon VIPs to join us before the Planathon kicked off to watch us plan the Planathon. So we created this live VIP experience where people were invited to sit in on our actual meetings. It was not polished. It was not scripted. It was like real, real reality business, real reality TV.
It was our standing internal team meeting the same day, the same time, the same agendas, the same brainstorms watching us pivot, watching us laugh, watching us. Is this a good idea? It was the very real and authentic structure of us showing up. Even our typical chit chat that we have at the start of a meeting and going into this idea. I was definitely feeling a little bit nervous. What are we gonna say? How am I going to present myself?
I am sure my team members that I get to work with had additional, very similar concerns. Like, is it okay if I say this? Is it okay if I say that? And what I said to them is, I have full trust in the people that we get to work with, that they’re not gonna judge anything we say, they’re gonna take it with the intention that we communicate it with, they’re gonna take it with positive intention. And I fully trust my team to share appropriately in a very public setting. So, yes, we were feeling vulnerable. We knew we were being watched, but truly something extraordinarily powerful happened.
Those people who decided to plan the Planathon with us didn’t just show up and attend an event. They watched it be built. They were included in that process. They anticipated it differently because they saw and knew like, okay, this is coming. How is it actually going to work? They had the opportunity to engage with it more, but even more so what surprised me is that we laughed together.
We were calling each other out, for example, we were throwing out ideas because we had decided we wanted to make a shift inside of the event and add in a post event workshop. And as we were planning and plotting that workshop and the topic and the content, our community who was planning the Planathon with us, our VIPs were hearing this and they started chatting and they said, oh, good idea. No, don’t call it that. How about this? And they sort of connected with us and we collaborated and worked together. And did we take their feedback? You know it, we absolutely took their feedback.
It was almost like that reality TV show reference, but it was like reality TV, but interactive, like when you’re voting for something, it was like real time votes. So we weren’t just there to present and deliver content. It was very experiential. We shared in creation, and that is what experience design is about. There was bonding. It wasn’t a checklist, it was organic. It was just free flowing, and it happened because we were intentionally transparent and we were very open to engaging and hearing from our community who was planning the Planathon with us, who was a part of that experience.
In doing this, this worked because we connected with, and we checked in on a few different levels. Anticipation was built. Real time. In an experience like this where we are just, yeah, come to this meeting and it’s, here’s our typical agenda. We did share this in advance. Like, listen, this is just gonna happen real time. There are no slides, there’s nothing extra that we’re gonna present or give you as a part of this, but we’re gonna go through our typical project workflow, our typical project agenda.
We did also give people the project tracker that we frequently use for planning our events and our activities. It’s like our project management tool, but in a simple spreadsheet because we go for simple over complicated for sure. So as a part of this, there was anticipation being built. What’s this gonna be like? I don’t know. There was insider access. People were let absolutely way behind the scenes in a way that made us uncomfortable at first, but it ended up being a space where we were co-creating and belonging.
Almost felt instant because there was so much transparency and there was a welcoming in. I will also note that in this event, the Planathon VIP experience, we did not unmute our participants, so I would have loved to have done that. Oh, Elizabeth’s got an idea. Jane’s got an idea, Rachel, I can see in her face something just sparked for her and I wanted to ask questions and engage with that. However, we had one hour for this meeting as a team, and often after that one hour team meeting, I am moving to a client call immediately after.
So there wasn’t space to stretch it and expand. And we also wanted to be really respectful of everyone’s time that was there because we indicated this is a one hour meeting and it’s gonna be a one hour meeting sharp. Now, there was one day inside of this Planathon series, that I did not have a call after, and I said to the community and I said to my team, Hey, I know that we’ve got one hour scheduled for this meeting, but I don’t have a call after this. And we’re kind of really into some good stuff here. Is everyone available to go for about another 15, 20 minutes?
And so whenever I extend a meeting, I am always checking in and asking, is this okay? Do you have bandwidth? Because I wanna be super respectful of everyone’s time. So when someone, when we feel like we’re on the inside of something, we’re really a part of it. You stop being a customer in that experience, it stops being a transactional relationship, and it becomes more of, the relationship becomes more embedded, it is deeper, and it is sticky.
So consider how you could possibly include something like an experiential event in your experiences that you’re creating with your clients. Another example of this, in a product space is Nike. So Nike sells shoes, but they don’t just sell shoes. We know that they also sell other products, of course, like their clothing line and equipment. But they have also started building run clubs, apps. They’re hosting events through this, and they’re creating community challenges because we know there is a community.
When a community element comes into play, we get in connection and it gets sticky. When someone identifies as a runner, they’re not price shopping the same way. And Nike understood this. They understood that if you design the experience, you are reducing price sensitivity, because when we are shopping for something, you know, we could look based on price, but if we start to build an affinity and it starts to be something else, a relationship and a connection, and it’s immersive and experiential, I am more likely to make a higher investment in those cases.
Another example of events that I think is really cool is I came across a company, I believe it is something in this vein, a founder’s club that is very active and their whole premise is, we don’t need to get together for meetings in a boardroom or in a coffee shop. We are building companies. For those people who also want to be active, we are going to connect founders in cities all around the world. I have my eye on the Cape Town South Africa meetup, but what they do is that you participate to be part of this experience for a monthly fee, and then every month you are matched with other founders in your city.
And you’re connected with them and they bring you together and they say, okay, here’s who you’re matched with. Now go do something. Go do something active. Go on a run together. Go on a hike together. Go play racquetball together, whatever it may be. And that is their entire business model. It can be simple when you are creating experiences and in-person events and even these virtual experiences or when you’re weaving experience into your workflow with your clients.
I also wanna caution you and remind you on this line of, keep it simple, don’t overfill it. So I have in the past been guilty of wanting to make sure I’m creating an experience and taking care of every single detail at every single minute for my clients who are a part of that retreat and that event. I’ve seen so many events like that, where the schedule is just packed from 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM at night, and whoa, it is exhausting.
It’s a lot. Session after session, no breathing room, no space to pause and integrate. No space to sit down and just organically connect with people. So as you think about creating experiences and mapping things out, you can leave space in there. You are not necessarily delivering more value by packing it full and planning out every minute because people may actually just leave exhausted and overwhelmed.
Those unscheduled dinner conversations, walks between sessions, jumping in the pool and singing, having someone DJ yacht rock music, and dancing in the pool, not something that was planned, I can promise you, but one of the most joyful, memorable experiences of our retreat last year. Deep conversation after the sessions or something that is sparked in a session that prompts someone to ask a question and then just a beautiful, unscripted, unplanned conversation unfolds.
Because sometimes designing an experience actually means removing some things and that space between becomes part of the experience, the slower pace becomes part of the experience and there’s room to actually process, which is also part of your experience design.
Now, if you are still wondering, is experience design something I really need to be thinking about? Yes, you do. 73% of consumers say that experience is a key factor in purchasing decisions. We’ve got to start thinking about this, especially in a day and an age, in a moment that we are in, where technology is rapidly advancing and things are becoming very quick and very transactional.
So as you think about the five layers of experience design, and you wanna audit or you wanna start to design for yourself, consider anticipation. What happens before the event? What happens before the experience or the working relationship begins? What access do they get to see or experience that feels special? What feels special about this experience? Interaction, will it be passive or will it be participatory?
Emotion? What is the feeling that you want to be sparked and pull through this experience that you’re creating? Will there be laughter? Will there be surprise? Will there be intimacy and connection? Will delight and flavors and smells and sense be part of evoking a specific emotion as well? And the after experience. What continues after this experience ends? Do people continue to connect and meet up? Are people running and meeting back up again and again, and trying out and continuing to purchase your shoes? But it’s not about that. It’s about the experience that builds the depth and the brand loyalty.
Most businesses primarily focus on a small part of this. They forget the emotional layers that come with this. They forget the before and the after of the experience. But when you pull these things through, you will improve your experiences and you will increase the loyalty that your clients and your customers have with you.
And again, virtual businesses are not exempt from this. In fact, I think in virtual businesses there’s almost even more incentive for you to build this in. Zoom, and portals and logins are not the crux of what we want to be doing and what we wanna be creating. I wanna facilitate connection. I wanna facilitate experiential transformation. I want people to have a voice. I want there to be that connection, a special, unique energy, participation.
So are you delivering a service? Are you just shipping a product or are you designing and creating something that prompts feeling and becomes something that people talk about? In a world where AI can replicate output, where we can put systems and automations in place to execute processes, experience is your unfair advantage. And if you are not intentionally creating one, you risk quietly becoming replaceable.
Design those moments, create the space, invite people into your world, get vulnerable. And when you do that, you stop just being someone people buy from and you create a story together. And this is what builds connection and client and customer relationships that last and last. They are memorable, they are fun, they are productive. And they are the thing that you wanna start incorporating into your company and how you deliver to really stand out in this next season of business.
And if you are just thinking about this or you’ve been doing this, I wanna remind you, you are always right on time to step into action.
