The Successful Customer Outcome Method with James Dodkins – E13

The CX goalkeeper had the great opportunity to have a smart discussion with James Dodkins

LinkedIn Headliner: Customer Experience Rockstar 🤘 | CX Evangelist @ PEGA 🦄 | International Keynote Speaker 🌍 |

The value he brings to the CX community is outstanding.

James used to be an actual, real-life, legitimate, award-winning rockstar. He played guitar in a heavy metal band, released albums and tore up stages all over the world, James uses this unique experience to energise, empower and inspire his clients and their teams as a ‘Customer Experience Rockstar’.

James’ golden nugget for us (summarized):

“get into the habit to ask yourself what is the successful customer outcome for this customer”

“Get into the habit to ask yourself what is the successful customer outcome for this customer” @JDODKINS on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast
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Transcription:

Gregorio Uglioni 0:03
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the CX goalkeeper smart discussion. Today, it’s really I’m really thrilled because I have James Dodkins here with me. He is the real James, it’s not an hologram. It’s the real James Dodkins. Hi, James!

James Dodkins 0:19
Hello, and thanks for having me.

Gregorio Uglioni 0:21
Thank you very much James, James, for joining my podcasts this discussion, I know that your calendar, your agenda is quite busy. And you’ll find time to to support also other people. And this is what I really like, this time, and it’s already the first time I’m doing that in the mean, in such a podcast, I want to spend the first minute speaking about you because I’m a big, big fan of James. And I want to share my story because it’s really time to explain how much you helped me. And I’m really happy to share that. And for sure the rest of this discussion, then this stage will be yours, you can rock on customer experience and on LinkedIn. And the story to cut it really short is I have been following you since since a while really for several years. And I really enjoyed and liked the way how you are explaining customer experience, but also the simplicity of the example that you are sharing with us. Because these these are really understandable. And if we can understand that, we can also then apply that and and this is really, really great. And then at one webinar, you spoke about the ACXSpecialist Certification accredited customer experience Specialist certification. And I was really keen to understand more to see how you prepare that, how you’re explaining these topics, because I want really to understand it. And then I decided to apply it. And this was really a great decision. Because I fall in love sorry, not with you, but with the methodology. And, and and it was really great. I want to refer certification. And this is the standard that you are doing and I liked it very much. And then you gave me a great opportunity to be the first one worldwide to do also the accredited customer experience Specialist Certification plus, and there was only the the what task was is was to apply this methodology to a private project. And I decided to apply that for my podcast for my LinkedIn setup out is my branding on LinkedIn. And we came up with this idea together because they really value added this also having the opportunity to discuss with you to share with you the ideas, we came up with the idea of the customer experience, goalkeeper, and I think I am really happy of doing that. It’s really my hobby in the in the evening, instead of looking at Netflix or doing other stuff. I focus on customer experience and on my passion. And thanks to this methodology, I was really able to grow my audience, I doubled the people that are following me in the last month on LinkedIn. I know there is quite a lot of people that did that. But really, by applying this methodology and your support, I was able to do that. I had also great success with my customer experience advanced calendar, there we had roughly 600 to 700 people looking at that every day for 24 days in December. And the end, I think this also there I really applied what you are teaching us what you are explaining to to ask. And for sure, if you get the first success, then people get keen interested. And now I’m getting the first invitation for a webinars to write a small article and somebody like that. And this was really key for me to start with a CX goalkeeper, this is my patient. And really thanks to you, I was able to implement my my roadmap. Thank you very much, James.

James Dodkins 4:04
Thanks yourself. Because the thing is, lots of lots of people ask me for advice about this sort of stuff. And I’m the sort of person that I will happily sit down and talk with anyone about this. Hardly anyone actually implements the stuff I talked to them about hardly anyone. So thank yourself for actually doing this stuff you spoke about because there’s one thing learning what to do. And it’s a complete other thing actually doing what you learn. And you did it you walked the talk. And of course the results have shown that so, I mean, I’ll take a little bit in the thanks, I guess, but most of it’s on you. thank yourself.

Gregorio Uglioni 4:45
Thank you, James. And now let’s really go to the main topic of our discussion and really understand what you’re doing and also perhaps your your future future plan. I think you don’t really need big introduction what you’re doing You are the most known UK customer experience influencer, you wrote several books, you have quite a lot of webinars that you are running, you have a big success, you are launching something with more than 700 people that applied to your new courses. And therefore perhaps could you tell us something that people don’t know about you?

James Dodkins 5:29
Something? Okay, I’ll tell you something interesting that I did at the start of the year, I did a 10 day water fast. So for 10 days, I didn’t consume a single calorie. I didn’t eat any food. The only thing that passed my lips was water and black coffee, and sunlight, minerals, like salts and stuff. So I get 10 whole days.

Gregorio Uglioni 5:52
And your feeling after these 10 days?

James Dodkins 5:55
Good. But I mean, well, I mean, at the end of the 10 days, there was, but afterwards, I felt great, a lot more clarity, a lot more focus, and feel better, in general, better moods, lost some weight, of course, as you can imagine. But yeah, it was a good thing, because I did it last year, for seven days at the beginning of the year. So I was like, You know what, I’m gonna push it a little bit further. I don’t think that every year, I’m going to be like, oh, let’s go one day more, because then in like, 10 years time, I’ll just die. But it’s, I think the weird thing is people won’t go hungry first couple of days. Yeah, you are. But after that, the hunger sort of goes away. And it’s a mental challenge with yourself. It’s like, battling against yourself, because your brain wants you to eat stuff. And of course, you see food and if you’ve got a family and preparing food for your family, so it’s a real, sort of like a mental struggle, not to do any was a cool thing to do. So there you go. That’s one thing that people don’t know about me.

Gregorio Uglioni 6:56
And perhaps to get a bit more understanding about that. What was your target? What do you mean, what we wanted to achieve with this 10 days,

James Dodkins 7:08
health benefits at the end of the day, like, the entire month of December, I just completely abused myself with food and drink. And by the end of it, I was like, Oh, I don’t feel very good. I hurt everywhere, things creaking where and I was like, You know what? Let’s do the fast because there’s loads of health benefits. It reduces inflammation, there’s a process called autophagy. That goes on where your cells renew themselves, you go into ketosis, where your body flips over to using the fat for fuel, which supposedly is like the preferred fuel, and there’s tons of benefits to that. So it’s basically just to feel better, because I’ve just, like eaten, like a, you know, one of those medieval kings that you see in Game of Thrones or whatever, for an entire month. And by the end of it, I was feeling like crap. So I was like, Okay, let’s, let’s sort myself out.

Gregorio Uglioni 8:07
Thank you. And I think there is Latins are saying a mens sana in corpore sano, it means you can have mental health, only if you are yourself, helthy. And this is this is really one Key, perhaps let’s let’s go to the main topic, and sharing your wisdom about your strategies about successful customer outcome, and so on. And I spoke about this methodology. And I can confirm it’s really working, it was a small project, it was a small private project, however it works. Where did you discover this this methodology? And how did you or are you leveraging this methodology also for your business.

James Dodkins 8:50
So the, the SCO method was kind of a rebrand of something called the CM method. And the SCO method has been around for close to 20 years now. And it was originally started by a guy called Steve Towers. And so a while back, I was working with Steve Towers on on process improvement training. So we were talking to people about how to create customer centric processes, improvement projects. So improve improve processes, with the actual customer in mind, not just making things faster and more efficient, just making sure they actually deliver success to the customer. And of course, going into the process rather than being like, hey, lean, and Six Sigma master black belts. Think about your customers. They know it’s different than scary. I don’t want to do it. And so it was a bit of a battle at times. And then of course, as the customer experience world grew, you go to customer experience, people say hey, think about your customers, and they go Yeah, okay. So it was a bit like, Oh, I like these guys better. They get it. This. This is far easier. So it can be have flipped over from a customer centric version of process improvement to almost like a process centric view of customer experience improvement. And over the years, the methods been changed and evolved from research with some of the best companies in the world ebook, basically the best customer experience minds in the world. And that’s people like you actually using it on a daily basis, feeding it back saying, hey, you know what, I tried it with this little tweak and got this result. So it’s constantly being evolved and constantly being updated. The SCO method was a break off, though, to give a real basic, sort of replicable and sustainable and scalable methodology that anyone can use in their business to improve their customer experience. You don’t need any fancy degrees, you don’t need any other knowledge. Other than that, you know, what a customer is, that’s like the only prerequisite knowledge you need to know to be able to do it. And the idea was to be able to help people understand that the only reason customer experience exists is to deliver those successful outcomes for the customers. And if what you’re doing on a daily basis doesn’t contribute to that successful outcome, you got to ask, why are you doing it. So of course, as you know, that every single step and stage in the method, the the output from one becomes the input for the next thing. So you’ve got this logical chain of things you can go through that is going to really help you not just understand what successful customer outcome is, but actually deliver it as well.

Gregorio Uglioni 11:40
And I think this is this is key, and I fully agree with you. How are you applying this this method to your business?

James Dodkins 11:50
once you do it over and over again, it becomes second nature to think of the customer’s outcome, first you internalize, it becomes part of the way that you think. And it’s just everyday. Everything I do in the content that I create, in the training that I create, in the webinars that I do in literally in anything I do, my first question is, who is the customer? What is their successful outcome, and then I work backwards from that, try and understand what that successful outcome is, for the person that’s going to be consuming the content or taking the training or attending a webinar or whatever, and then build backwards to what it is that I’m doing. So it’s just each become second nature, that first first thing you need to understand these, what is that successful outcome.

Gregorio Uglioni 12:37
And I think this is important, not only for you or for me, but it is important for all companies thinking about customer needs. And you have great example what we shouldn’t think about what customer wants, but thinking about what what customer or needs really are. And basically, you have quite a different type of businesses. But perhaps can you please explain a bit? Who are your target customer, the personas that you are defining in in your different areas of what you’re doing?

James Dodkins 13:11
Yeah, so my target customer, is people like you, it’s people that are customer experience professionals. And that love customer experience that wants to learn more about customer experience, I don’t really target like C level people, I don’t target specific companies, the stuff I do is all for the actual CX community for the people doing the work every single day. So and that’s one of because the thing is, it’s really easy to fall into the trap of trying to create things for big corporates or for sea level people to try and make them then, you know, hire you in to do a big transformation. But I’m not about that. I don’t, that’s not, there’s plenty of people that are really good at that. That’s not me. What I’m trying to do is help the people that love customer experience that work on customer experience every day, learn stuff and not just learn new stuff, but learn stuff they already know. But think about it in a different way, in a fun way, in an engaging way, in a way that they’re excited to learn about it. Not that it’s a chore, not that it’s a task like, Oh, I’ve got to learn this thing that that when they see one of my videos, they get excited they go, what’s he going to say now? What’s he going to talk about now? How’s he going to explain it in a weird way? And that’s what I want to try and inspire in people. But also, there’s another side of the business with independent CX trainers, coaches and consultants. Because there’s the discipline of customer experience is still quite a young discipline. It’s, there’s people out there that say, I’ve been doing customer experience for 25 years. Yeah, okay. All right. Sure. Sure. I mean, technically we’ve all been doing customer experience the entire time. However, He’s only really been codified as a discipline in the last 10 years, really. So there’s not very many people out there that have managed to achieve. I don’t know, like a level of notoriety, or even successful independent businesses. And as somebody that’s been lucky enough to do both of those things, create a successful customer experience business and gain a relative amount of notoriety in the customer experience world, I kind of feel like our duty, I don’t feel a duty to you, but like, I want to help other people that want to achieve that stuff, too. Because for me, my whole thing is selfish. I’m a selfish person, I want to leave an impact in the customer experience world, I want to impact it, I want to leave a legacy. And there’s part of me that thinks what better way to leave an impact in the customer experience world and by also helping other people create an impact in the customer experience world. So not doing it to be nice, is I’m a selfish person. It’s all all because I want to leave a legacy. But But in all seriousness, now, there’s, there’s certain things that people need to do in certain orders to build a successful independent CX business. And I’ve learned that the hard way I’ve tended, I’ve been doing this for 10 years. Now, a lot of people don’t realize that. Because of course, the whole Rockstar rebrand that I went through is the thing that shocked me, into notoriety, so to speak. But I’ve been behind the scenes plugging away at this fender for for 10 years, and I’ve had a fairly successful CX business for 10 years, I’ve learned a hell of a lot about what to do, and what not to do in that time. And if I can pass that on to people, then that’s good. And I think what I’ve started to realize is especially putting together some of the stuff that I’m going to be, like, for instance, the free training that I’m doing on the fifth of February, called Rockstar CX Academy. The, I kind of realized that, at times, I was probably giving bad advice to people, because I was telling people to do what I was doing. But they weren’t at the stage I was at. So I was giving them like seven figure strategies when they were $7 company. And I sort of raised our crap that there is a, there’s a process that they’ve got to go through, depending on the stage that they’re at, you can’t just jump into doing all the fancy glory stuff, just because you think it looks cool, that there’s steps and stages that you’ve got to go through. And it led me to put together what what I’m calling the rock star roadmap. And I’m calling it that just because it sounds cool. I couldn’t call it anything. But alliteration. And it’s and it’s eight stages, sorry, eight areas that you need to really look at, in your independent customer experience business. And that’s what I’m going to be sharing in the training. Because I feel a little bit guilty that I’ve probably given some people some bad advice over the years, and it’s going to help sort of create that impact as well.

Gregorio Uglioni 18:15
And, and I think this is what I really like from the customer experience community. In particular, also what what you are doing, it’s this inter genuine interest, to share the information to share the learnings and to help other people. And you are not expecting to get something back. We fully understand that you want you want to achieve something, but it’s really key, this genuine sharing of information, sharing of learnings, helping other people to create also their story and continue on this on this customer customer experience. Strategy.

Unknown Speaker 18:51
I mean, that’s, that’s the philosophy I take with it, it’s literally give as much away for free as I can. And knowing that maybe like 1% of the people that enjoy that stuff are going to take that next step and maybe do the training, or join a coaching circle or something like that. But it’s it’s not. If I were to focus on the sale, and the selling of things, I’d be doing things very different. And it would mean I would probably sell less stuff. Whereas again, it’s focused on the outcome. And the money side will look after itself. And that’s that’s the advice I give to businesses. There’s a successful customer outcome and there’s a successful business outcome. If you focus on the successful outcome, the successful business outcome will look after itself and that’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to give so much value for free to people that a tiny percentage will take it upon themselves and decide to go that next step further and help me pay my bills. But that’s not that’s not the goal. That’s the reward. And I think that’s the big thing. People see the sale. As the goal. The sales, not the goal, the sales reward for achieving the successful outcome for your customers.

Gregorio Uglioni 20:04
I think this is the key and it’s in what what we learn or we learn how to during your courses. This is really the discipline to develop this mentality. But now that you’re saying that you’re giving so many things for free, can I have to get her on the left side? The red one?

James Dodkins 20:19
No, you cannot. This is a virtual zoom background anyway.

Gregorio Uglioni 20:23
I’m not so sure.

James Dodkins 20:26
No, the thing is, I, this was my lockdown project, because like, you know what, if I’m going to be on Zoom a lot more, I may as well have a really cool zoom background. And it’s like the world’s most expensive zoom background. But now there’s a couple of these guitars that I want to sell. But I can’t, because it’ll ruin the aesthetic. So I’m stuck with them. They’re there for life.

Gregorio Uglioni 20:49
I think this is also the key to have such a background and you created early your brands to the CX rockstar. And whatever you’d like to ask to understand. You are on LinkedIn, you are on Instagram, you are on TikTok you you are everywhere. What’s your view on this social media and our supporting your your strategy?

James Dodkins 21:13
Thing is social media is now the place where people get information. So a big part of being an independent CX trainer, coach or consultant is about attention. You’ve got to get attention. And if you want to be seen if you want people to follow you and consume your content to to learn that, oh, this, they know what they’re talking about. I like this person, then you need to be where they are. And where they are, is on social media. So it’s, it’s opened up a whole new world of possibilities, really where any person can learn about essentially anything at any time. And I think that’s been, it’s been good. And it’s been bad because it means that any person can teach stuff as well. Which can can be bad. And I think there’s, there’s people out there not in the CX one just in the overall world that I’ve given given advice that’s maybe I don’t want to say that they’re not qualified to give because that’s, that’s not really what I mean. But maybe that they should be the ones doing more learning than teaching, if that makes sense. But I mean, to say that, like, I don’t stop learning, I’m constantly learning, I’m constantly reading Well, listening to new books, going to webinars, going on courses, attending events, just literally anything I can do to learn more about what I’m doing. It excites me, I like one of the one of the things that gives me the biggest thrill is when I read something or hear something that makes me think about something in a different way. I love that. And it’s probably weird. A lot of people don’t like that. They’re like, Oh, no, I don’t want to think of it. But for some reason, when I hear something that I’m like, Whoa, I’ve never thought of it like that before. I love it. And then it makes me think about other things. And it snowballs, and then it’s like, oh, you know what, I want to help other people think that way too. Like, if that person can give me that inspiration, I want to give other people that inspiration too. And that’s again, that’s another selfish motivator for me. It makes me feel good when other people enjoy and get inspired by what I’m doing.

Gregorio Uglioni 23:44
I had the same experience. And I mentioned one book, but it can be quite a lot of other books, when I read the experience economy, really a different view on the market and on the understanding what what will happen in future. And if I speak about future, it’s also related to my questions in 2020. You were really everywhere, LinkedIn, Instagram, and so on. What are your plans for 2021?

James Dodkins 24:16
When it comes to content, it’s a tough one. It’s going to be a mixture. It’s going to be a mixture of scripted content, planned content is going to be a mixture of sort of a fly on the wall documentary style content. There’s not going to be much blog writing in there because I’m not very good at it. So I try not to do but I’m just gonna stick to what I have been doing just trying to give enough content that keeps people interested, but not so much that they’re like boarder this guy which To be fair, last last year there what there was a period where I think I was probably posting a little bit too much. And somebody reached out to me said, James, I can’t, I can’t go on the internet without seeing something from you somewhere. You’re everywhere. And I’m like, Yeah, that’s the point. And he was like, Yeah, but you’re not worried that you’re overwhelming people. And I was like, Look, dude, I’m much more worried about underwhelming people than overwhelming people. And I kind of went with that philosophy. But I do get it, there can be a little bit much where you’re like, Oh, God, this guy again, what’s the once you say no, so I’m going to tone it back a little bit this year be a little bit more selective about the stuff that I’m putting out. But other other than that, it’s pretty much the same strategy.

Gregorio Uglioni 25:43
And I really liked that because I liked to see you to watch your videos. I think it would be boring to read an article for Jim Crow things. I don’t want to be unpolite. But I really like your presence, the way you are explaining stuff and so on. Therefore, please keep doing videos and enrolling related to the videos. I am again perhaps saying a question that you don’t like but you got this question several times. I am following you on the different channels. And I checked this morning on TikTok, you have 25 followers, why am I still on TikTok?

James Dodkins 26:22
Right. So there’s two reasons why I’m still on TikTok. You want to know what those two reasons are?

Gregorio Uglioni 26:27
Yes.

James Dodkins 26:28
Okay. So, reason number one is, if TikTok ever blows up and becomes the hub for customer experience. I’ve already got a bunch of content there. I will have already taken over the TikTok CX world already. Is that going to happen? No. Probably not. So the second reason is, this is this is this is the stupidest reason. On TikTok. When you post a video, it’s really easy to add. You know, like the like when you mean to find something and you put the words above and below. It’s really easy to do that. On TikTok. So before I post to Instagram, right, rather than going through hours of editing, I just posted it to TikTok. With the words above and below, unlike the black banners with the white writing, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. And then that downloads to my phone. But of course, it’s the long thing and it’s got the TikTok logos on it. But then, when I upload it to Instagram, it automatically crops it into a square and craps out those logos. So it’s just, it’s just a little productivity hack that realistically, if I never posted to tic toc again, I don’t think it would be the end of the world. But it’s it’s just an easy way to do that. I’ve only got a few superpower, I think everybody’s got superpowers. Okay, everybody, no matter who you are, no matter where you are in the world, my number one most valuable superpower is that I am lazy. And I will work harder than anyone else on this entire planet, to figure out an easy way to do something, which also my second superpower is that I’m stupid, because I probably spend about as much time like figuring out a shortcut way to do something, as if I were to just do it the traditional way anyway. But of course, that’s good, because it means other people can learn from my stupidity. Because they don’t have to go through the process of figuring out how to do it a quick way. But it seriously, if I can find a quick and easy way to do something. I’m on it.

Gregorio Uglioni 28:38
And this is also related to one of your big webcast and explanation of the C. Six, it must be it must be the first three. easy quick and so on. And therefore I fully understand easy fast, convenient. Exactly. Let’s go back to the to the business track. And you mentioned something on on your academy and the course that you’re doing in February. I think also for the audience because as you said you’re already at a defined level but other people are starting when did you really understand that it was really the job you could do and it was not only a passion but it was something that you were also able to get money salary and monetize what what you are doing.

James Dodkins 29:29
I think it was it wasn’t really a plan to start with it was it was a necessity that so when I got made redundant from the company I was working for back in the day. If you’ve got any American listeners that’s been downsized might say you don’t you don’t you don’t get fired if your job doesn’t exist anymore. So I got made redundant. And while I was at that company, we had loads of really expensive crappy consultants come through So I was like, well, I could be a really expensive crappy consultant. So I just started doing that. It was, there was no real plan. It was a case of just, I guess I’ll try this out. And I got really lucky. I managed to work with some really cool companies along the way. And you people will have heard me reel these companies off time and time again. But if this is the first time you’re listening to me, I’ve worked with people like Disney, Adobe, Lego American Express, IBM, Microsoft, airlines all over the world, governments all over the world banks all over the world. People like Disney. And I already said Disney people like, like, helping train their people in methods to improve customer experience. So I kind of just gravitated towards that really was, I enjoyed the training side, I enjoyed the coaching side. I don’t enjoy the consulting side. I just don’t it’s just not me as I’ve got the patience for this far, far too many, like office politics things? No, that’s not me at all. However, there are some people out there that are amazing at doing that. So that talk to them about consultancy stuff. And just originally, I started making lots of content. Because I was like, Well, if I make more content, people will see and they’ll get to know me, and they’ll get to know that I know what I’m talking about. And it will help me. Like, well, they’ll then come and say, Hey, will you come and do this training? Or hey, will you come and do this talk somewhere? And it was never really the plan to start monetizing. Other things like, like the influence, it was more companies reaching out to me and saying, Hey, can we pay you to run this webinar? And you’re like, well, thank you. Well, no, I mean, it’s, I’m like, Yeah, I guess. So. See, you do that. And you go, how that wasn’t so bad. Now, can we pay you to do post this thing? And like, Yeah, okay. And in the end, I’m like, oh, that’s, that’s pretty cool. And as far as what they’re paying for part is personality. The other part is influence. It’s the fact that, and it goes back to what I said earlier, all of this is about attention. Getting the people that do best in this world, of independent business, or expert business, is the people that get the most attention. So you have to be good at attention getting and I’m lucky that of course, this whole Rockstar thing is pretty good at attention getting another company saying that we’re a boring software company, this guy’s good to get an attention. Let’s partner with him to do that. So. So I never really sat down and said, Oh, how do I monetize this, it kind of just fell into my lap, which is pretty cool, I guess. But as a result, I’ve managed to look back and sort of reverse engineer the things that I did at the time that I did them, that allowed me to do that. But again, it’s as I’m talking about this stages to go for people just starting out in this aren’t going to immediately get paid to run webinars for companies, they’re not immediately going to get paid to host events, they’re not immediately going to get paid to talk at events. It’s it’s the stages you’ve got to go through. And there’s certain activities that you need to focus on, at different levels of the business.

Gregorio Uglioni 33:44
And I think you use the word it’s, it’s a roadmap that you need to go through, it’s a growth path at the end unit to grow, and to be able to manage this, this webinar and create and continue creating the content. Thank you very much, James. Now, on the last part of this discussion, we would like to learn a bit more about James, we learned that that you did this 10 days only with waters. The last time we discussed we I learned that you are an Aston Villa fan. And and for us the the next question is how can you ensure to have a satisfactory life work balance because you’re really everywhere? I think you’re getting quite a lot of requests and so on. How can you ensure that?

James Dodkins 34:35
and it’s a bit of a cliche, but I love what I do. So it doesn’t always sometimes it feels like work when you do like the admin stuff that feels like work. I don’t enjoy that. But it makes like the other stuff makes it worth it. So it’s not it’s not that difficult. I mean, in the past that allowed me to travel as well travel around the world. My family could come with me of course that’s not how With COVID, but it will, again, so there’s there’s swings and roundabouts like being an independent trainer coach or consultant, there’s, there’s positives, and there’s negatives. And that, probably to sum it up it, that the best thing about being an independent entrepreneur, or solopreneur, is, the best thing is that you’re in complete control of everything. The worst thing is that you’re in complete control of everything. So you can, you can have flexibility, you can have a day where you’re like, you know what, I’m just gonna, I’m going to work extra, either side, and I’m going to take a day out to spend time with the family or go somewhere. And I think that the families of people who are in this line of work understand that as well. Sometimes there’s gonna be times when you don’t see a person for days, because they’re locked in a room working, however, that allows for a couple of days next week, where in the middle of the week, you can do something that maybe you wouldn’t have been able to do before. So I don’t I probably didn’t really answer that question as to how to strike a work life balance. So yeah, I think I fluffed that question. I don’t think I really answered it very well, other than saying can you even data? No, that’s a good question. I don’t think I answered it very well. But it’s a good question. How do you do?

Gregorio Uglioni 36:39
I think the the answer, it’s great, because what you’re telling to us, or my interpretation is that you were able to find something where you are not, you are not splitting anymore, this is work. And this is live, and I need to have a clear split, but you are working at something that you are really passionate at. And therefore you you you are doing that and you don’t care, it’s now 7pm, and therefore I need to stop and I need to go because it’s it’s it’s your job. And it’s your really your passion. And, and therefore I think that’s something like in the medicine, the doctors and so on that are working hours and hours, because this is because they are on this world. And perhaps you find you found out your way. And this is your why and therefore you’re doing that.

James Dodkins 37:28
Yeah, because that’s the thing. It’s like, work life and personal life. It’s just life at the end. So I think it said that might have been totally shaped rip, zap us talking about like, the culture zap us that it’s just life. It’s not work life, and like home life is life. And, of course, my family has been on this journey with me to get to where I am. So they’re just as invested in this as I am. So I guess yeah, it’s just it becomes life.

Gregorio Uglioni 38:09
That’s the great, the greatest answer I could I could get because you don’t need to split anymore. That’s the easiest question that you will receive. How is it possible to contact you?

James Dodkins 38:24
Find me on LinkedIn. If you’re not connected to me on LinkedIn already. What are you doing with your life? Just find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, everywhere. If you want to drop me a private message, you can do that through LinkedIn or drop me an email at jd@rockstar.cx

Gregorio Uglioni 38:44
Thank you very much, James. And man, this is my last question. Could you please share your last golden nugget with the audience. It’s something that you already explained or something new that you would leave to the audience.

James Dodkins 38:58
I think probably just going back to the successful customer outcome, before you do anything, just try and make it habit to stop, step back and ask yourself, what is the successful customer outcome? What is the goal, this customer is trying to achieve? What’s their target, and of course, their target isn’t to interact with you, their goal isn’t to interact with you, their goal is going to be something else completely. And if you can understand what that is, you can better understand the role that you play in helping them achieve that. And once you understand that the way you go about doing things will be a lot different your success rate and the customer success rate is going to be a lot better. So I just like to try and get into the habit of asking yourself, what is the successful outcome for this customer.

Gregorio Uglioni 39:46
Thank you very much, James. And as usual, I am not commenting your golden nugget because it’s your golden nugget. And therefore I really, really I want to close and say thank you very much, James.

James Dodkins 39:56
You welcome and thank you so much for having me.

Gregorio Uglioni 39:59
And also to The Audience, Thank you very much for being here. It was really a great pleasure. I hope that you enjoyed this smart discussion with James for me was really great success have James on my podcast. Thank you very much.

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