Brittany Hodak helps businesses and leaders in all industries cultivate passionate, dedicated fans. Brittany is an award-winning entrepreneur, author, and customer experience speaker who has delivered keynotes across the globe to organizations including American Express and the United Nations. She has worked with some of the world’s biggest brands and entertainers, including Walmart, Disney, Katy Perry, and Dolly Parton. She is also the author of the bestselling book, Creating Superfans.
Brittany joined Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to discuss how companies can build an army of raving, passionate fans.
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Brittany Hodak On Creating Superfans Of Your Brand And Business
Welcome to the show. Our quote for this episode is from Robert McAfee Brown. “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put our ideas into the world today.” Our guest is a gifted storyteller who helps others craft their own stories, Brittany Hodak. Brittany is an award-winning entrepreneur, author, and customer experience speaker who has delivered keynotes across the globe for organizations including American Express and the United Nations. She’s also worked with some of the biggest brands and entertainers, including Walmart, Disney, Katy Perry, and Dolly Parton, and is the author of the best-selling book, Creating Superfans.
I’ve gotten to know Brittany over the last couple of years. She’s incredibly smart, really good at what she does, and very insightful. I wanted to have her on because I think we’re in this moment of uncertainty where many brands are hesitant about who to buy from, who to partner with, or who to trust. Trust and loyalty are important counters in times of uncertainty. Brands and people are more inclined to buy from people that we trust and who we like. This is what Brittany’s work is all about. She coaches top brands on how to emotionally engage with people and cultivate fandom.
A lot of those decisions are more about the heart than the head. Sometimes, you need people who want to support you. We see this in entertainment all the time. People will defend an artist from criticism of their work. As you’re going to read, Brittany has an interesting background in the entertainment industry that helps inform her mindset. She started very young in the music industry and got a sense of how to engage and what made fans loyal to musicians.
In our conversation, we’ll talk about a few things, her own entrepreneurial journey, how she grew her business, her creating superfan strategy, which focuses on storytelling and emotional engagement, a little story about how one of Brittany’s employees moms emailed her to let her know that the employee wouldn’t be coming to work that day, and what that looked like. Thank you for tuning in. As always, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Brittany Hodak.
Brittany Hodak, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Bob. It’s great to see you.
Radio Dreams: From Mascot To Music Obsessed Teen
You, too. It’s interesting to start at the beginning and get into the childhood therapy stuff, but you have a particularly interesting childhood anecdote. I read that your first job ever was at a radio station at sixteen. What were you interested in, and how did you end up with that job at the radio station?
I was obsessed with the music industry. From the time I was so small, all I wanted to do was work in the music business.
You didn’t want to be a singer. You wanted to work in the music industry.
I think I did. Very early on, my parents were honest that that was not going to be my path. They were like, “We love you. You have no vocal ability.” It was much like, “Learn an instrument or figure out another way.” I don’t know how I learned about music managers, but I wanted to be one from when I was small. I can remember being 8 or 9 years old. I was interested in fan clubs because back in the day, you would write a letter to your favorite celebrity. Oftentimes, you would get stuff back.
I have an older brother. He’s five and a half years older than I. He was into sports. He was always sending off baseball cards, basketball cards, or whatever to get autographed. Players would send them back in the mail, signed. If you sent a letter to somebody famous, like Michael Jordan, you’d get whatever the standard thing was back that wasn’t signed, but was signed with an autopen. It was like a poster for your wall or whatever. I was very interested in the mechanisms of fame beyond the actual performer.
The closest thing we had to the entertainment industry in the town where I lived was our radio station. I was obsessed with the radio station. I won so many calling contests. Every station knew me. You had to wait. In one of the stations, it was 30 days before you could win again. Another one, it was two weeks before you could win again, but I would always try to win something on whatever day it was.
Finally, when I was sixteen, there was a job shadowing assignment at school where you went to go spend a morning at wherever represented what you wanted to do when you got older. I asked to do it either at the radio station or the TV station. The radio station said yes. I went there. I spent three hours there. It was the first time I’d ever been on the floor where all the magic happened, where all the recording was. I was in the lobby.
Don’t meet your heroes.
I’ve never been past the lobby where they give me the envelope and say, “Your movie tickets, again. Please don’t call for a month, so someone else can win.” I had a great time, and I said, “Please hire me. I will do anything.” They said, “You look like you’re about the right height for our mascot costume. Do you want to be Sting the Bee?”
A radio mascot out in the community or behind the audio?
Not on the radio. That would be funny. One of the ways that you make revenue as a radio station is by selling remotes, where you broadcast live from the car dealership, the furniture store, or whatever. I was the mascot. I would stand by the side of the road with balloons, waving to try to get cars to come to whatever we were broadcasting live.
You were like the sandwich billboard guys.
I was 100% that, but I had to do it with a big giant balloon.
That’s the first job. This makes sense. I find these questions super interesting. I can already see how the fandom stuff and how people responded to you probably made a pretty indelible impression.
It did, and it was cool to see how other people thought those radio DJs were famous. They would come, and they were like, “You’re Cindy? I listen to you every single day on the way home from work,” or “I listen to your show every night.” It was cool to get to see that up close as a teenager.
What was better than your expectations, and what was disappointing from that experience? What did you take away from it?
I remember thinking, “How did I get this lucky?” The job was based in a town called Fort Smith, Arkansas. I grew up right on the state line. I was in Oklahoma, but it was a border town. It would be regularly over 100 degrees in the summer. The rule was I could only spend, depending on the temperature, 10 or 15 minutes of every hour in the suit. I would be in the suit for 15 minutes, and then I would have a 45-minute break.
You would think this is well before OSHA regulations.
I was like, “Where did this come from?” I don’t know if they had somebody faint once upon a time, but that was the rule. That was when they would sell it to whoever was buying the remote. It was like, “You get the bee for three hours,” but that three hours were only 45 minutes. It was 15 minutes on and 45 minutes off. For that 45, I was hidden somewhere in a break room because nobody could see me without the mascot hat on. I remember thinking, “What a cool job.” I would have done it for the full three hours and never complained because I thought it was so fun, but they paid me the whole time. I remember that opened my eyes to the fact that you could pay attention to what the expectation was and what the payout was for jobs.
Teenage Music Journalist: Interviewing Rockstars At 17
After this, you were determined to work for a music magazine or a record label, right?
Yes. I had a good break because my maiden name was Jones. One day at work, the manager said, “I keep seeing ads on TV for this movie, Bridget Jones’s Diary. I keep thinking we have a Brittany Jones. What could we do and call it Brittany Jones’s Diary?” I said, “You’re always trying to get more traffic to the station website. What if I interviewed the bands that came to town and wrote about it?” He said, “Yes, like that other movie that’s about to come out, that almost famous movie that’s starting to get some award show buzz. We should do that. Make a list of all the bands you want to see. We’ll set it up with the labels. You can interview them and write about them. Let’s do that.”
You must have passed out when he said that.
As a seventeen-year-old kid. It became my job to hang out with rockstars and brag about it on the internet. I had a music blog that started at that station. Later, it was syndicated to some of the other stations within the same station group, where it was just me talking about the show, hanging out with the band, or whatever it was that I did. That to me felt truly unbelievable. That’s what made me say, “I can never have a ‘regular’ job again because there are these unbelievable perks that exist in some of these entertainment jobs.”
The Professor Who Changed Everything: Discovering Marketing Passion
Where did the pivot to marketing come?
When I was an undergraduate in college, it was required to take two marketing classes. I had a professor named Scott Markham who was brilliant. He had to be in his 70s. He was a wild gentleman. He was from Louisiana, Cajun, with a super thick Louisiana accent. He had these crazy stories of when he had moved to New York City, worked in marketing, and worked for Dun & Bradstreet, and they had sent him all around to do stuff. I thought, “This is the most fascinating man I’ve ever met. I want to sign up for all of his classes.” I ended up taking every course he taught over the next two years, enough to where I had a marketing minor because I took so many courses.
You were like his groupie.
I was. It was so funny. I’ll never forget. People either loved or hated him because he was a very non-traditional adjunct professor. He didn’t teach from the book. People who were used to getting 4.0s were failing his class because they were like, “There’s nothing to study. What do I do?” I was like, “Listen to it all?” They were like, “How do you even take notes? He rambles.” I was like, “Don’t take notes. Listen to what he’s saying.”
I loved Dr. Markham. He was so fantastic. I fell in love with marketing because of that. I went on to get a Master’s Degree in Marketing and fell in love with it even more. When I was 27, I launched my first marketing agency, which is what has led me down the path that I’m on now. Honestly, I had no idea what marketing was until I took that first course. I’d never heard the term marketing to describe this thing that I was naturally drawn to before I took a class with him.
You started ZinePak, but wasn’t that based on the business plan you wrote in college?
Yes. I went to the University of Central Arkansas. Part of the Honors College assignment was that you had to do this big thesis project. It had to align with what you were going to do after graduation, like in a perfect world. I wrote a business plan for a company and was planning to put out this product. The Brittany Jones’s Diary thing, going on the road with bands, or going to concerts with bands sparked this idea of, “What if we could create a project or a product that would be the ultimate experience of an album for somebody who doesn’t get to go on the road with a band or for somebody who’s not backstage?”
I was like, “How do I take all of these experiences that I am fortunate enough to have, invite everybody into them, and make everybody feel like they get all of this behind-the-scenes magic?” There was a band called GoodNight City that went on the road with. I had written this thesis project, which I’m going to help this band launch their debut album. I spent a couple of weeks over the course of the summer with the band, taking pictures, doing interviews, and doing all of these things. The culmination of my thesis project was going to be their major label debut. The label had said, “Yes, this is cool. We can do this as a part of our promo project.”
Bold Vision: Redefining Music Packaging With Superstars
I worked on this for three semesters, and then in my final semester, the band broke up. There was going to be no album. There was going to be nothing for me to graduate with this Interdisciplinary Honors minor that required this thesis, this capstone project. It blew up. A funny side note to that story is that I needed a new thesis that I could put together and say that it was tied to something. I ended up setting a Guinness World Record to satisfy the thesis requirement. I got several friends to help me, and we created the world’s largest Christmas stocking.
We made a Christmas stocking that was nearly 60 feet tall. We filled it with about 11,000 toys that we collected throughout the community to donate to local charities and kids in need. That business plan that I had written became my first business 5 or 6 years later. I graduated. I had this idea. I was trying to sell this idea to the first couple of record labels that I worked at. I was like, “I think this would work. I know this would work. I did all of this groundwork. I have everything we need. I just need someone to say yes.” I couldn’t get anybody to say yes.
I’d become friends with one of the music buyers at Walmart. Her name was Jenny Radio, and she was so incredible. I worked with her as I worked at these different companies. I was like, “I want to do this. I know this will work. I couldn’t get it done at company A. I couldn’t get it done at company B. I can’t get it done here at company C. I’m about to go try something else.” She said, “Brittany, stop. Do this yourself.”
Go do it. What was the “it”, and what did the company do?
The word ZinePak is the first several words that we wanted to call the company, but we weren’t able to get the trademark for it. ZinePak was short for magazine package. It was the idea of taking an album and making somebody want to buy it in a time when digital music was taking off, and it was easier to download a song than to go buy a CD. How could we make somebody want to own physical music again? The idea was that we took a coffee table book and packaged music inside it. It was all the things that I was mentioning before, the exclusive interviews that you’re only going to see here, the behind-the-scenes photos, really cool collectible merchandise, whether it’s bumper stickers, patches, or whatever, all packaged together with the album. That was the idea.
Each one is different?
Yes. We became essentially the marketing packaging agency of record for Walmart. We partnered with record labels and management companies to put together these super over-the-top collector edition versions of albums for superstar artists for their fans at general retail. By partnering with Walmart, the fewest we ever made of anything was usually 25,000 copies. Sometimes, when we were working with artists like Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, or Justin Bieber, we were making a quarter of a million of them.
That’s still a limited edition. Once it was gone, it was gone.
All of them were one-time prepping. It was a huge quantity. When we’re talking about there are 100,000 of them that exist, we were still able to say, “About 100 of them are going to have secret autographs, 1,000 of them are going to have a code to get something, and 1,500 of them are going to have this extra special collectible.” There was this Easter egg golden ticket component, even though we were doing them on a large scale. It was on a huge scale because we were putting them in Walmart stores. They had to be available at 4,000 different stores simultaneously. What was cool about it was that it created something that people were so excited to do, like unboxing videos on YouTube.
It is because there were different things in each one.
I created this agency. It was essentially a marketing packaging agency where we were partnering with companies that didn’t have the infrastructure to do this. They were built to record and release an album. We said, “We’re going to come alongside you. We have access to all the best music journalists. We have access to companies that are going to be able to create this cool package.”
What’s been fun is to see the only people who are embracing physical packaging anymore for media are K-pop bands, and what has happened. If you look at physical music sales in any given month in the United States, it’s almost always K-pop and J-pop titles. That was the business I started by accident. Over the arc of that story and getting to work alongside some of the greatest musicians on the planet, I’ve been able to do a lot of other cool things with giant brands and interesting, fun people.
It got you connected to this concept of fandom and understanding what engages the fans and what makes brands have great fans. When did you start double-clicking on that, because then your career started to shift towards that from the music aspect?
As the configuration for ZinePak took off, we became known as, “Work with them, and Walmart will buy a lot of copies of your album.” We had to get good at saying, “Who do we want to work with, and who do we not want to work with, from an artist standpoint? Who is somebody who has the necessary layers of being interesting enough? Who are the ones that we’re going to be able to create a compelling package and story around? We tried to come up with a litmus test of, “How do we know?” It is what the entertainment industry has been trying to do for a long time.
Was it still just music, or were people asking you to do this outside of music?
Cracking The Fandom Code: What Truly Makes Fans Loyal?
The majority of the projects that we did were music, but we did some stuff for Hollywood. We did some stuff with video games. We were taking a swing at what we thought was going to be a hit. There were some times when somebody who was already an established celebrity came to us. It was like, “How cool can we make this in whatever we’re doing?” On some of the up-and-coming ones, we had to decide if we thought the interest was there and the fandom was there. Now, it’s so easy because you can look at a thousand different metrics online. You can see how many people are streaming something on Spotify. You can see how many people are pre-ordering tickets to a movie release before it comes out.
There are still things that you’ve got to make an educated guess on. As somebody who was obsessed with consumer behavior and the psychology behind why people love the things that we love, why we want to spend more time, and why we see our identity in some of these things, I started to try to figure out what it is. What are those markers that we can find in an artist that predict whether or not they are going to have this active fan base down the line? What I started to see again and again was that the artists who took the most interest in their fan bases, who were the most engaged with their fans and knew their fans best, were the ones who had that reciprocity of those fans caring the most.
I was like, “Fandom is a two-way street.” When you’re looking at dozens or hundreds of examples, there is always a correlation between the fans who feel like they matter to the bands being the most loyal to the bands or the artist long-term. I started to get curious and say, “Does that extrapolate beyond music?” Do we care that the things that we feel an affinity toward feel an affinity toward us? Do we have a desire to matter to all of the things that we want to give money to, not just the things that entertain us?
Does it matter to us if we matter to a brand or not? What does that look like from an ROI standpoint to that brand? That’s when I started asking these questions and having the wheels turned that became what I’m doing now, talking about creating superfans or the things that organizations and employees can do at scale that help make customers not just come back, but also tell their friends.
There’s so much focus on the acquisition and getting them. Everyone knows about referral programs or Net Promoter, but you’re raving fans, having a full-time member of your business development team.
I sometimes say that every company on the planet wants to acquire customers. The good companies talk about keeping them not with acquisition, but retention. The truly great companies, the ones that understand it, don’t set the bar at just retention. They set it at advocacy. They want to know what percentage of their new customers are being referred by existing customers. This is true on the employee side as well. It is a great indicator of the health of your business if the majority of your new employees are being referred by your existing employees. Are you tracking how much of the growth you’re earning through advocacy versus what you’re buying through other means?
There are the thousand raving fans. People are focused on an Instagram world, and they’re fooled by some of these numbers. “I have a million followers or thousands of friends,” not the ones that matter. Companies are obsessed with the Net Promoter Score. B2B companies think about that more than B2C companies and measure it in terms of understanding which of these customers are constantly recruiting other people and keep coming back.
A great indicator of your business’s health: if most new hires are referred by current employees.
B2B companies do, and probably because Net Promoter Score, which has been around for years, started in that B2B space. Net Promoter Score has done a lot. It has certainly become the standard for a reason, but I don’t believe it goes nearly far enough, even in B2B and especially not in B2C, for a few reasons. It’s a hypothetical question being posed about something that could happen in the future. How likely are you to recommend this to a friend? It’s a potential future measure of a behavior rather than looking at something that’s happening? It is much better for you to know right now what percentage of your business was referred by customers than what percentage of the 1% of people who did your survey say that they might recommend you to a friend in the future.
I’ve seen companies where they have referral sources that they’re not doing anything for, that provide more sales than some of their sales.
There’s a company called Mention Me that is in the B2C space, but they do a lot with affiliate referral and advocacy marketing. In this big meta study that they did over a course of several years, what they found is that somebody who is referred to your business by an existing customer is up to five times more likely to refer another customer. It’s this idea that when somebody finds you because a friend said you’re awesome, they are several times more likely to refer another friend.
Whether they’re justifying their own decision or not, it helps you.
It’s the amount of revenue that you stand to earn through the network effect of people telling their friends that becomes very big and fast.
Advocacy Vs. Acquisition: Building Real Customer Relationships
You wrote this book, Creating Superfans, using emotional engagement to create brand loyalty and customer relationship fans. I know a big part of it’s storytelling. What is the key to superfans, and who are some companies or key studies that do this well?
There are a lot of companies that do it well. One of my favorite examples that I talk about in the book is a company called Chewy that sells pet food online. They do a great job of making you feel truly valued as a customer. Because of that, they go viral all the time. They send notes. If you lose a pet, the SOP is to refund the last food that was purchased and tell the customer to donate it, and then send flowers or something else. It is not signed “from Chewy,” but there’s always a name of someone. It could be “Hannah and your friends at Chewy” or “Jonathan.”
Eighty percent of these people are going to get another dog and never buy another dog food.
Exactly, once you feel loyal to that brand. The brands that do it well, either on the B2B side or the B2C side, are the ones that understand that apathy is the enemy. Something that is not understood by nearly enough leaders is that the single biggest threat facing your business is not a lack of awareness. That’s what people think sometimes. “It’s a marketing problem. It’s a promotion problem. It’s a throw-money-at-it-buy-eyeballs problem.” It is not an awareness problem.
Plenty of people know. They just don’t care. You have an apathy problem. Until you can connect your story to the story of those people and give them compelling evidence to care more about your brand than all of the competitors out there doing the same thing, you can fall victim to being seen as a commodity provider and not as a category of one.
Is the apathy from your current customers or prospective customers?
Oftentimes, both. The bigger problem is the apathy from current customers, somebody who doesn’t care enough to come back to you again. This is where I know all of the work that you’ve done and all of the great insights that you have in your world. Very often, that is driven by an apathetic employee or a set of employees. When you have employees who see their work as a paycheck instead of a passion or a purpose, it is difficult for your customer base to be engaged because apathetic employees do not lead to engaged customers.
When employees view their work solely as a paycheck, lacking passion or purpose, it significantly hinders customer engagement.
It’s hard to have raving fans if you don’t like what you do. An example, we ski up in New Hampshire for years, and the complex has a bus system. Each complex takes you to the mountain because they don’t have enough parking. For the first three years, we had a bus driver. I don’t remember the bus driver’s name, but they stay on the same route. For the last couple of years, it’s Jessica. If I could refer someone for a bus, Jessica is the friendliest person.
She has a Venmo thing on there that we always give to. She does Girl Scout cookie sales on the bus, where you buy them, and then she brings them to you. She remembers everyone’s name and everyone’s house. If I get on, she’s like, “Where are the other four people that came with you this morning?” It’s such a pleasure watching someone engage and enjoy their job. I have to assume it’s more enjoyable for her than being, “I don’t want to drive this route today.” I’m shocked at how well she does her job.
Jessica is what I would call the acting chief of experience. In the world we live in, whether you’re a service-driven business or not, you ultimately have to lean into experience as your competitive advantage because everything else can be copied. The experience of your business is so much harder to copy than everything else around it. Every single employee has to know that at any given time, they are the ones that people are going to not just remember, but base their perception of the entire company on. I guarantee you that there’s now a halo effect in your mind. When you think about Jessica, it colors the way you think, not just about that bus ride, but about the entire experience, the entire few days that you’re at that resort.
Can you teach that, or is that something you have to interview for?
It’s a combination. It’s like saying, “Can you teach basketball?” You can. There are things that you can coach anyone to be better by teaching them the fundamentals, by giving them the skills that they need, but you cannot teach anyone to be Steph Curry or LeBron James. There are people who are born with talents that will lead them to be better than 99% of the other people. Part of it is interviewing. I’m a big proponent that every single job description should start with the words “to serve our customers by” because, regardless of what you’re doing, whether you’re in a customer-facing role or not, ultimately your job is to serve customers. The customers are the reason your business exists.
I have a set of interview questions that I encourage people to ask around service, around the idea of creating experiences, and around continuous learning to help weed out people who don’t have an experience mindset in the way that they think about their role. You can teach everyone to be better and give them guardrails, if they want to be better. You wrote the book on how we help some of those people who aren’t a great fit find their next fit. What I have found over the years is that the majority of people do want to do this. People want to feel connected to a purpose. They do want to serve in a capacity. It’s about framing it in a way that they see how their unique talents can be best utilized.
I know something you’ve done well. A big part of this is storytelling. Talk about how storytelling is a big part of the experience.
Our brains are hardwired to react to stories much more than facts or figures. We are emotional beings by design, and stories are the mechanism that we have passed down information since long before we were recording history in any other way. Because of that, storytelling is a very important tool for leaders to use with their teams and for them to teach their teams to use with customers. When you can create a story that customers see themselves within, they’re more likely to share it, but they’re also more likely to remember it and want to come back and experience it again.
One of the things that I say all the time is that superfans are created at the intersection of your story and every customer’s story. The reason your story matters is that if you want to break it down, fundamentally, your story is the only thing that separates you from your competitors. Your story is what sets the framework for your brand, for the uniqueness that makes you different. If you were going to strip everything that was not narrative or story away from your product or service, what would you be left with? It would probably be a product or service that looks very similar to a lot of other products and services out there.
Superfans are created where your story meets every customer’s story.
That’s where it starts. Being able to understand your customer story, what are they struggling with? What is it that they want? What is it that they are looking for from a transformational standpoint? Whether it’s a very simple interaction or an elongated one, being able to meet them where they’re at and make them feel like they are the most important customer that you have is a good business model. Every customer is an influencer in the world that we’re living in, which is so interconnected.
You’re making me think of my pediatrician when we were younger. She was good at making us think that each of our kids was her favorite patient. I know you speak a lot. I gave a speech on something I don’t normally talk about, but it was a specific technical conference. I told a very personal story. It was super short. It was twenty minutes. It’s funny, I got a lot of comments afterwards. People were like, “I love that.” I was like, “I feel like I said the same stuff as the guy before me.”
They didn’t have everyone coordinate. It was the authenticity piece of it. There’s this yin and yang between storytelling. I told a story, but it was authentic around, “This is where I screwed up. This is where I see a lot of people being unrealistic.” Sometimes, it’s a balance. Not only that you have to make it real, but it’s also a good performance.
The reason storytelling works well when it does is because of the way that our brains operate. I live in Nashville, where we are known for many things. Country music songwriting is one of the things that Nashville is known for. We have the most talented musicians, songwriters, and artists in the world. One of the great paradoxes about all music, but country is the lens that I learned this from, is that the more specific a lyric, the more universal its power and its appeal, because of the way our brains think. When you hear me talk about my kids, Bob, what do you see in your mind? You see your kids. When you hear me talk about my first job, what are you thinking about?
It’s all about us.
In storytelling, one of the mistakes that people can make, and sometimes when it doesn’t work, is that there’s not enough specificity.
It seems like relatability. I’m guessing you start your presentations with a story. Is that how you start all of them?
I do. It’s not always the same story. It’s different stories for different audiences. You’ll probably enjoy this. One of my favorite ways to start is about a time someone said to me that only fat people run on treadmills because people who are in shape run outside. I then say it would be a very bizarre and inappropriate thing for anyone to say. It took me off guard because of who said it, the guy delivering my brand new treadmill. I go on to talk about this person who told me that he had worked at that company for seventeen years, and I know that because he said, “I’ve been here seventeen years. I got a sick company discount. I could get one of these things for free, and I don’t even want one. That’s how much I hate treadmills.”
One of my presentations opens with my report cards from fourth or fifth grade, around these teachers not saying complimentary things, but all being very consistent. It resonates with the people who remember that. A story doesn’t work if it’s like, “That time when I made my first million.” The other person needs to see themselves in it. That’s an interesting insight. I probably knew some part of that intuitively, but I’ve never verbalized that.
They’re powerful at accelerating the path to connection, and for that to work, you’re right. People have to be able to see at least an element of themselves. If somebody is telling a story about the first time they made their first million, and they start by acknowledging, “I know that maybe the specifics of the story don’t relate to where you’re at but what I do know is that you have had something that you cared about accomplishing more than anything and you had a setback.”
You’ve had an accomplishment that didn’t provide as much satisfaction as you thought it might.
By framing it that way, what you’re doing is inviting people in to say, “I want you to see yourself in this story even if the specifics that I’m describing don’t match your life.”
Let’s flip this 180 for a minute because we had this talk when we were talking about maybe it was a kids these days story. It’s probably a good idea to create a superfan in your boss or in the people that you work with, not the other way around, which is, “What can you do for me?” We were talking about some of the parenting these days and how there’s no firewall at companies. I was telling you I was working on this book. You told me this amazing story that I included in the book.
I was talking to some parents with kids a little younger who don’t have your viewpoint of hiring the kids out of college. They don’t see this phenomenon in parenting. There’s no firewall at college anymore. It used to be that the kid went to college and the parents were involved, and now, there’s no firewall in the workplace. This, to me, is an anti-superfan story. Why don’t you tell me?
The Parent Email Incident: Workplace Boundaries Gone Wild
I was having a conversation with a friend the other day. Her kids are a little bit older than mine, and she was saying, “Of course, I’m involved. I’m paying $100,000 a year for my kid to get their education.” I think back, before college was so expensive, it was goodbye and good luck.
That’s why some of the customer service demands come, “I want the pool.” Colleges have lost the plot of, “Are we delivering you a service, and you take it? You are our customers. Tell us what you want.” They’re stuck. I agree with you on that.
I had started this company. I was 28 or 29 years old at this point. I had been running it for a little while, was hiring people, and had about a dozen employees. It wasn’t my first time hiring someone. I’d interviewed this candidate and thought that they would be great in the job. They also had a unique set of experiences. They hadn’t worked in the music industry before, but I thought that there was some transferable skill set from this other job that they had had. We hired them, and the very first week, I got an email on a Wednesday from that employee’s mom. It was a brand new employee in his first or second week.
Very specifically, we got an email on a Wednesday from the parent who introduced themselves. This is somebody I’d never spoken to, never met with, and had no idea that this employee even had parents. This was out of the blue from the parent saying, “I wanted to inform you that my child will not be at work on Friday. We’ll be taking the day off,” because on Thursday, they were going to a midnight movie premiere with a friend group. The parent thought it was not appropriate for the child to come to work that next day, Friday, because they were afraid that they would be overly tired, both for the train ride into the city and then the ensuing workday.
It’s the seventeen-minute train ride into the city. This is not a two-hour.
This was not like you’ve got to drive an hour to the train station. This was the PATH train from New Jersey to Manhattan. They were going to be taking the day off on Friday, or alternatively could work from home, but we’re not going to be in a state to be in the office. This was not a request. This was not even something that the employee was copied on. This was an email from a parent to the CEO of the organization.
Clearly, the employee gave the CEO’s email to their mother, knowing what they were going to do with it. There was clear intent.
There was no, “Let me try to handle this.” It was, “I’m going to have my mom email my boss to say that I will not be at work.” You could have stopped it there, but “I’m going to a midnight movie premiere and will be tired.”
“I’m going to a personal thing on a weeknight, and therefore I can’t be at my job the next day.” For those people who don’t think that this permissive and overbearing pandemic that we have going on in parenting is problematic, this is how it’s showing up at the workplace.
I remember being so shocked by that email. It was an entertainment agency. First of all, it was a huge red flag for the employee. I was like, “Did they think that because this is an entertainment-based job that saying, ‘I’m going to be in a movie’ was going to get you points and that’s why you shared it with me?” There were so many layers of me being like, “What was the thought process that went into asking your parents to write this email and letting your parent send?”
How did you reply, and who did you reply to on this email?
I thought about whether or not to reply at all. I even texted some friends and was like, “What do I do? Have you ever been in a crazy situation like this? Am I the only one who thinks that this is absolutely wild?” Very quickly, my friends were like, “No, this is not normal.”
I’ve seen the college stuff. These college Facebook groups that these parents are in are terrible. With the conversations they’re having and stuff, their kids would die, or maybe they wouldn’t die if they knew it. I’ve heard of them showing up to jobs and job interviews, but this is the tip of the iceberg. What did we do next?
I replied to the email to the parent, copied in the employee, and said, “If your child wants to continue to be employed here, they will be at work on Friday. It is up to your child to decide.”
Did you use the word child because that would be appropriate?
I probably used the word son or daughter, but “Let it be known that this child would decide if they wanted to continue to be employed in my workplace and would let me know directly, as it was outside of the confines of my job as CEO to coordinate employee attendance with my employee’s parents.”
Did they or the employee reply to you? What happened on Friday?
No. The employee came to work on Friday, a little bit grumbly but was at work.
Were they embarrassed? Would they not look you in the eye, or was this normal to them?
Yes, there was a lot of avoidance. This employee very quickly had several colleagues’ complaints logged. There was somebody whom we’d hired a few months earlier, whose job title was Coordinator. We had hired this employee with the title of Senior Coordinator because they had a little bit more experience, even though in a different industry, and were a little bit older. They were making a few thousand dollars a year more or whatever.
We’d given them the title of Senior Coordinator. The coordinator came to our office, trying not to cry, but you could tell there were tears welling in the eyes that were like, “I have done everything I can. I’ve tried everything I can, but I keep being told by this person, ‘I’m a senior coordinator, and I don’t need somebody who’s just a coordinator trying to tell me how to do my job.’ I can’t. I don’t know how to reply. I don’t know how to respond. I’ve tried to be diplomatic. I’ve tried everything. I don’t know how to handle somebody saying, ‘I’m not going to listen to you or learn from you because you are just a coordinator and I am a senior coordinator.’ We were like, “We’ve got to figure out how to handle that person.”
This person’s mom came and made their lunch every day for them, or something like that. This did not last.
They were not employed for that much longer. It was six or seven weeks that we said, “This is not working. This is not a cultural fit. It is clearly also possibly not for your parents. This is maybe not a good fit. We need to talk about what we need to do.” The employee said, “I’ve been trying to apply for new jobs since the movie incident.” We assumed. It was like, “Let’s figure out what this looks like because this has become disruptive to the entire office for you to be here, because the bad vibes were certainly being felt. There were lots of aftershocks from each incident.”
That is still the most ridiculous. I bet you there are some people reading this. Feel free to write in. I’d like to hear more of these stories. You have younger kids, but again, you see the workplace side. Some people don’t believe that some of these parenting things are turning into this. I hear more stories like this. We need to change this because it’s becoming a problem in the workplace.
It’s bizarre because I wonder what the intended outcome of these overly involved parents is. What are you hoping? Are you hoping that you continue to remain in a very engaged role in your kid’s life forever? From a psychological standpoint, what is missing in these parents’ lives that they are trying to fill with continuing to be the parent of an adult child? Can you get a puppy or a hobby?
Their own purpose is usually the answer. I know you’re good at it, with speaking and otherwise. You saved me some great tips. People look at the transaction or the first interaction. You put a lot of focus on what happens after. It’s not that you just got the person hired, you sold something, or they hired you to speak. You’re trying to always be reinforcing that that was the right decision, that you’re there to help them. That’s a big part of this.
Our brains crave simplicity, not complexity. We want to constantly have the reinforcement that the thing we believe is true. That’s part of why we see some of the problems that we see across the world, but specifically in the United States. Things are becoming increasingly polarized, and people are increasingly feeling like it’s black or it’s white. It’s this or it’s that. It’s because the brain hates cognitive dissonance. We hate feeling like something is challenging to this thing that I believe, think, or feel, and that’s not correct. They’re rooted in every single issue.
It is true with every part of everything for an employee or for a customer. Am I getting reinforcement of a narrative that this is a great place to work, and I love it here? Am I getting reinforcement of the idea that this isn’t for me, and I don’t feel safe? I don’t want to be a part of this, I don’t like this, I’m miserable, or whatever. These little tiny micro moments that in the course of things should mean very little become another proof point, another tally mark on this side or the other side.
In my book, I describe this as intentional experience design. How can I find lots of little ways to reinforce and show you made a great decision to come work here? You are a valued part of the team. Things work better when you’re a part of it. All of those little things versus somebody who painted my house a couple of months ago, and it was a terrible experience. Some things got painted the wrong color, brown instead of white. I was like, “Look at the scope of work. Look at this.”
I came home, and all my doors were the wrong color. The deck had all of these things. It was terrible. Because of that, I was like, “I need to micromanage.” Before, I would have been like, “It looks great, fine, thanks.” I was now looking for things. I was like, “There’s paint all over the sidewalk. You didn’t put a drop cloth down, and now my sidewalk has paint all over it. I need you to fix that.”
They deserve it. We had a vendor years ago that screwed up our first bill and overcharged us by $15,000 or something like that. Nine months later, we had a very detail-oriented operations person. She was going through all the bills, and she was like, “You’ve got to stop harassing us on these things,” and, “Nicole, I’m sorry, you screwed up in the beginning and now, there’s low trust. I don’t think they’d be going through these with a fine-tooth comb if you hadn’t so blown the first bill.”
It’s very much like if you can exceed someone’s expectations early, and then you continue to reinforce it, they are much less likely to go looking for those things. Their brain wants to believe that they are right. Their brain wants to believe, “I made the right decision. This is awesome. This is great.” When you can continue to reinforce that, then you do not create a space for that cognitive dissonance to take root.
Navigating ‘No’ & Finding The Decision Maker: Entrepreneurial Lessons
Brittany, last question for you. This can be multivariant. It can be personal, professional, singular, or repeated. What’s a mistake you’ve made that you’ve learned the most from?
It is probably asking the person without the ultimate authority to say yes and then being impacted by the no. I think so much of success in life, but also specifically entrepreneurship, is not accepting the no from the person who didn’t have the ultimate authority to say yes. It’s getting better at figuring out how to get to the person who has the authority to give the yes.
So much of success in life, and specifically entrepreneurship, is about not accepting “no” from someone who doesn’t have the ultimate authority to say “yes.”.
You can feel bad when they say no.
It’s also knowing that a no today is not a no forever. If you think about many of the nos that you got in your life, it wasn’t a ‘no, never.’ It was a ‘no, not now.’
Noes means more swings at the bat. More noes, more yeses.
It is getting to the person with the authority to say yes and understanding that no is not a no forever.
That’s a great takeaway. Don’t let the wrong person’s no bother you. That’s an excellent takeaway. Brittany, where can people learn more about you and your work?
You can learn more and find everything at BrittanyHodak.com. The book, Creating Superfans, is available everywhere books are sold.
Brittany, thank you for joining us and sharing your story.
Thanks, Bob.
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That was my conversation with Brittany Hodak. I continue to think that we’re in a time where we need to stand out and we need to be different. This fandom and storytelling approach that Brittany talks about can help any brand develop a differentiator. Hopefully, you also learned how to reply to any employee whose mom reaches out to you and tells them that they won’t come to work. I still can’t get over that story. Thank you again for tuning in to the show.
If you enjoyed this episode and the show in general, I’d appreciate it if you could leave us a review, as it helps new users discover the show. If you’re tuning in on Apple Podcasts, this is all you have to do. Select the library icon. Click on Elevate, scroll down to the bottom, and you can leave a rating review in just a few seconds. Until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
- Brittany Hodak’s Website
- Creating Superfans
- Mention Me | Salesforce: Welcome to the Advocacy Era
- Elevate with Robert Glazer on Apple Podcasts
