Besides Advisory 9, I co-own a small, local sports business, Striker Sports & Social, with my daughter.

Owning Striker is a great way for me to practice and learn about what’s working in marketing and business growth, where to prioritize, and how to really support those of you working hard to build businesses with limited budgets and even more limited time.

We use many of the suggestions and tools you read about in these Friday editions. But this edition is about something Striker taught me.

Last week, we attended our sports association’s annual conference. It’s a 4-day learning, competing (yes, I played beer pong at least once... but with wine because I like to be difficult), celebrating type-of-event. 

One of the best things the association does is encourage members to do an annual NPS survey of their active customers/players. 

It’s very directed - we can’t adjust copy, we can’t encourage participation, we can’t do anything but send via email and resend once as a reminder. 

This is the second year we’ve sent it out, and honestly, we really struggled to find the time to launch it. It’s our busy season for everything else, but we know it is important to get feedback - the good and the not-so-good. 

We didn’t see the results in real-time (probably for the best), but eventually, we received a link to see our score. 

It was a 79. 

My daughter, far more versed in the American grading system, was less than impressed even though it was 20 points higher than last year. I asked ChatGPT to explain NPS, and our score, to someone with this background. She learned this is a “world-class” level and extremely hard to reach. 

Fast forward to Vegas - I forgot there was an award tied to these results. We were just enjoying the fun of the dazzling evening - suddenly we were called to the stage with a handful of others for hitting a certain standard. Then we realized we were being called back up for an individual award for the HIGHEST score in our category!

It was a delight, and a surprise, and a memory I won’t soon forget. So of course I posted it to Instagram.

But the lesson here for Advisory 9, and maybe for all of us, is to 1) consider how to focus on building a Raving Fans culture and 2) measure and get feedback - even when it's "not a good time". 

Last year, we decided we were focused on creating raving fans - improving our training, our technology, our systems, and more. Because it was a key focus, and because we measured it, we made a huge change, and we now know our standard to beat.

Do you regularly solicit feedback from customers? Is it standardized? Do you ask for reviews and referrals? 

If not, when is now a good time to start? ;)

AI tools and reminders:

Raving Fans CustomGPT: we built for responding to issues and questions with clients, prospects, and team members. It’s not been updated recently, but we still use it when we have an issue or complaint we want to respond well to.

Raving Fans CustomGPT

Grok, GPT-4.5, DeepSeek - there's lots of noise in the AI world, and likely always well be. We continue testing models and tools to share back with you what we think matters as business owners and growth leaders. Our best advice is to ensure you have systems set up and documented so you know what technology can most help you automate and create efficiencies or expand services. If you'd like to chat about how AI can help your business, reach out for a free 30-minute session. Schedule here.

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