The best leaders of today recognize the importance of excellent customer experience. They do their due diligence when designing great experiences and taking the steps needed for those experiences to happen. At my company, we add meaning to our customer experience by maintaining our Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is an active, fluid way of measuring customer loyalty.

The Dollar Shave Club is a prime example of a company with an above-average NPS score that contributed greatly to its value. With a consistent commitment to enhancing their core customer experience, it recently sold to Unilever for $1 billion. Here are three ways you can add value to your own customer experience and start building an above-average NPS of your own:

Empower Employees Not to Take a Customer’s Emotions Personally

Most businesses will provide tools and education to help employees boost their knowledge and emotional intelligence, but they often leave out a key skillset that sets the stage for the best customer experience: personal control (AKA the control quotient). This is the ability to stay calm when things become challenging — not just once — but when handling every challenge as they come.

The key to increasing your employee’s CQ is creating the right environment. The Effortless Experience, a method for building stronger customer loyalty, defines the three necessities an employee needs to up their CQ. They include: the need to feel trusted to make the right choices, the need to feel connected to the company’s bigger mission, and a strong peer network for support. Businesses that create support and education around these three factors create a positive and supportive environment where customer experience can thrive.

Don’t Aim for Customer Satisfaction. Aim for Customer Loyalty.

If you want an NPS that tells you your customers feel great about the experience they’re having with your business, you have to go beyond simply meeting their needs. After all, customer satisfaction is only one part of the customer experience. Without focusing on how the customer feels throughout their entire experience with your business, customer loyalty is much harder to achieve.

Reduce the amount of effort required on your customer’s end to get the experience they expect. Customer experience requires constant proactive thinking to identify and prevent the next issue before it happens. This can be attained through client feedback, but a business must also continuously discover what its customers’ pain points and goals are, and apply this knowledge. Another way businesses can ensure a proactive experience is by putting together tutorials, guides and other information that answer questions your customer is likely to ask. This way, solutions are easy to find. Again, it’s about constantly getting to know and understand your customer, and nuture that relationship continuously.

Take Care of Your Employees

Happy employees take care of customers. As Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, once said: “If you want the people in the stores to take care of customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores.”

If you truly want to serve your customers and offer them the best solutions, you must adopt an employee-centric management strategy. When employees aren’t treated well, they’re too frustrated to focus their time and energy on providing a good customer experience. Richard Branson said it best: “If the person who works at your company is not appreciated, they are not going to do things with a smile.”

Employees also give customers clues into what your company really stands for. If your customers see employees who are mistreated and undervalued, it speaks volumes far beyond what any marketing campaign or product solution could repair.

In order to achieve the highest NPS score, businesses need to prioritize employees first, customers second and shareholders third. When you follow this model, all three stakeholders get exactly what they were looking for out of your brand.

Survey Findings

The survey found that today’s entrepreneurs are very optimistic about the current and future state of their business, including the potential to grow. Many attribute this confidence to the current economic climate. Yet, there are issues related to digital transformation processes, a lack of government support and the need for more resources. This includes the need to improve infrastructure, minimize the regulatory environment and continue improving the tax structure.

The survey also revealed that female entrepreneurs tend to struggle more during their first year of business than their male counterparts. Many noted that the challenge of leaving the confidence and financial security of their jobs to create their startups was the biggest issue. However, over time, this faded and those that have continued to build out their startups have mostly been able to survive and continue growing.

Struggling for Support

Over a quarter of black first-year startups and a quarter of Hispanic first-year startups have one or fewer business owners they can turn to for support or advice within their network. Financial support also appears to be an area where all entrepreneurs, including startups and older businesses, could use greater assistance.

There is a lack of support when it comes to understanding the basics of business setup, such as how to get payment systems and benefits for employees up and running, selecting a business structure, getting the appropriate licenses and becoming compliant with all regulations. Lack of advisory and support has even prohibited many from pursuing loans or grants that might help them continue to grow their startups and businesses during an economic environment they view as positive.

Room for Advisors

In serving as a business advisor myself, I see that there is a big opportunity for more current and retired business leaders to take on roles and fill in these gaps, providing support in the form of mentoring, networking and connections, education and strategic direction. First, you need to locate these entrepreneurs like those within this survey.

Reach out online through networking groups and share your interest in advising or mentoring any startup or company that needs help. If you participate in conferences, this is another good place to announce on stage or throughout networking at these trade shows.

Fill the Gap

Focus on an industry where you believe you can provide the type of support these entrepreneurs are seeking. Or, if you have any type of regulatory or government experience with lobbying or other connections, you could focus on this level of support. Look for the places where you can deliver the support rather than seek out a leadership role just because that’s where your experience lies. This goes beyond making a list of recommendations. Any consultant can do that.

I realized early on as an advisor that businesses didn’t necessarily need another leader — they could really benefit from an expert who could bring them up to speed on a particular area or build plans to propel the business forward. That means rolling up your sleeves and working wherever needed to help that entrepreneur. Even if you are pitching in with someone who has considerable experience, identify what they may not see and focus your assistance there. It’s a temporary position where you are filling a gap, not taking over the company.

Bring Results to the Table

Entrepreneurs are very much like the customers you seek among a consumer or business audience. They are unsure, untrusting and unaware that they may need a business advisor. That means presenting your value-add to them. Personalize what you can provide for them. Utilize past experiences and provide specific examples of what you have done in terms of various types of support. It helps to put together a list of references they can check. All this points to your capabilities and builds a case for how you can help.

Other Ways to Help

If you don’t want to go it alone as a business advisor, work as part of nonprofit or operate in conjunction with other organizations designed to help these entrepreneurs. Getting involved gives you more opportunities to build knowledge and experience across an industry or business niche. Also, it provides you with a sense of satisfaction that you are giving back or paying it forward in relation to all the support you might have received when you were in the same shoes.

For example, Techstars is an accelerator who created a nonprofit division called the Techstars Foundation to directly support minority tech entrepreneurs. They offer financial support, such as grants and scholarships. They also partner with numerous other organizations that have initiatives, programs and advisors directed at helping minority entrepreneurs. They are always seeking business experts and seasoned entrepreneurs to assist their efforts to support these entrepreneurs and work past these issues.

While the reality is that most people do not dream about being in an office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., what if they were able to make steps toward fulfilling their personal goals while meeting the goals and necessities of the business? This may seem taboo, but I believe there’s something here.

When co-founding my e-learning company in 2012, the No. 1 goal I knew I wanted to embed into our culture was employee happiness. I asked myself, “What do people need to be happy?” With this top of mind, my co-founder and I developed a culture that allows employees to feel like they don’t have to hide plans to travel — or maybe even start their own company one day — from their bosses.

This leads us to one of the most important pieces of designing a business with a focus on employee happiness: Leadership must be 100% committed to this vision, and have a willingness to see people succeed at what they love doing.

With this commitment, we then adopted a management philosophy supporting this vision called Positive Leader, developed by Paul Fayad (my father and business partner) and Chak Fu Lam, which helps businesses design a positive work environment that promotes creativity, happiness and positive thinking. Here are five takeaways we’ve gleaned from this experience.

1. Hire For Culture Fit

We realized that personality was as much a part of the hiring process as education and experience. We use a personality assessment called the Positive Assessment Tool (PAT) that allows us to hire individuals with who have high amounts of empathy and compassion, embodying a service attitude. We call our team members “rowers,” because they are constantly in motion, steering the company in the right direction.

2. Prioritize The Onboarding Process

This is where you get to know an employee, and they get to know you. This window of time filled with enthusiasm is often squandered and neglected by businesses. We’ve found great success in pairing our new hires with mentors. It’s also important to make sure you take this time to educate them about whatever else they need to be successful, such as your company’s culture, policies and products.

3. Use On-the-Ground Leadership

To put it simply, being an “on-the-ground” leader means being both visible and available to your team. To understand what employees want and need, you have to be around — which is why we work alongside our teams in all three of our offices across the country. We make ourselves available via office hours every day, and also conduct weekly one-on-one meetings with leaders on our team. Never underestimate the impact of employee facetime.

4. Be Transparent When You Communicate 

Communication is the “make or break” component of every company: communicate too sparingly, and your employees will feel like they have no say in the company. Unless you’re dealing with personal, private information, there shouldn’t be an element of secrecy in the company. You either have transparency or you don’t. Transparency only works when everyone is on board and comfortable being open with their communication. 

In one-on-one meetings, we not only set company and department-specific goals, but we have employees write out their personal achievement aspirations so we can understand what gets them excited. We also have found great success in our monthly all-hands meetings for company-wide transparency, and Slack communication for the day-to-day transparency.

5. Look Towards The Future

One of the most important elements of our company’s culture is that it gives employees the freedom to be able to create and shape their future. This includes reinventing their job duties and responsibilities.  

Throughout my career, I’ve made it my personal mission to seek out what it means to be a leader and develop a culture where employees don’t drag their feet every morning to wake up. Now more than ever, we’re choosing to embrace the dreams and goals that employees have outside of the office, and empower them to work towards those and apply them to their work for us. This is what will open up the floodgates for engaged, fulfilled, and happy employees contributing to the success and future of your business.

There are different levels of intrapreneurship: Unofficial intrapreneurs are individuals in an organization who take responsibility for driving end-to-end product development — potentially up to and including bringing the product to market. These are essentially the “star product managers” in an organization. In some instances though, these intrapreneurs may spin up independent businesses within the parent organization. These quasi-independent intrapreneurship situations are the ones that have the most potential, but also pose the greatest danger.

Keeping this in mind, here are the five most common issues plaguing intrapreneurship today:

Strategy Conflicts

Intrapreneurs usually start out by identifying a new or previously missed opportunity for the parent organization, and then pull together the resources to capture the opportunity. In these instances, the strategic alignment between the intrapreneur and the organization is obvious. The problem is traditional entrepreneurs at the idea/seed stage rarely (if ever) make it to market with the original product they envisioned.

As an intrapreneur, my team and I developed an interesting piece of advertising technology that modestly surpassed our industry’s benchmarks. We soon realized the modest improvements we could deliver weren’t compelling to our customers, but our ability to gather data across tens of thousands of websites was. Unfortunately, our parent organization was averse to data-centric business models and we weren’t given the freedom to pivot. Intrapreneurs are plagued with an inability to respond to the needs and demands of the market, which takes an already difficult task (finding product-market fit) and makes it almost impossible.

Leadership Conflicts 

One of the few red flags that will always kill an investment deal with a venture capitalist is when a company’s founders claim to be “co-CEOs.” This doesn’t work. In the context of intrapreneurship, there are always multiple CEOs. At a minimum, there are two: the intrapreneur and the parent organization’s CEO. In some instances, there might be someone like a VP of Product, complicating matters even further.

With multiple CEOs, strategy and priorities are bound to shift over time, and team members could get confused and ultimately frustrated with dealing with inconsistent leadership. The parent organization’s CEO of one intrapreneur I have worked with dictated a list of product development priorities to the intrapreneur’s team, while the intrapreneur gave the team another set of priorities. In an environment like this, progress cannot be made.

Hiring Issues 

Top talent can choose between two kinds of companies: They can pick blue chip organizations, which while maybe less interesting can offer larger salaries and clear paths to advancement and stability. On the other hand, they can pick a startup where they will earn less in salary and where advancement options are less obvious, but they’ll have substantial control over company’s direction. Intrapreneurial companies usually end up with the worst of both worlds.

As an intrapreneur trying to hire talent, I was always asked what kind of equity package we could put together for prospective hires. Unfortunately, the answer wasn’t a particularly attractive one. This meant we couldn’t attract the kind of diehard talent startups typically seek. Rather, we attracted people interested in a corporate culture. Without the tools or structure to hire and retain top talent, intrapreneurial endeavors are operating at a disadvantage from the start.

Resource Conflicts

Intrapreneurial companies have complicated capitalization issues. Often, they are funded from corporate cash flows. This can be great when times are good, but it introduces uncertainties entirely outside the intrapreneur’s control. If the parent has a bad quarter, funding may dry up for the intrapreneurial endeavor. Similarly, a slight shift in the parent organization’s priorities may result in engineers or other resources being taken from the intrepreneur and put into other projects. I’ll admit that when I was overseeing intrapreneurial teams, I would occasionally “steal” resources for other projects I was working on. Even with the best of intentions, these kinds of resource shifts happen all the time.

Culture Problems 

If you’re an intrapreneur and you manage to avoid all the above problems, you’re then likely to fall victim to culture issues. Running an intrapreneurial endeavor inside a larger organization successfully requires setting your own culture and following your own strategy. It might mean different face-time expectations, and it almost certainly means a more nimble operation. People in the parent organization who are not part of the intrapreneurial endeavor could potentially develop feelings of resentment.

Being an entrepreneur is extremely difficult, so it’s not surprising many are attracted to the idea of intrapreneurship. It promises the same creative outlet as entrepreneurship with the stability of a traditional career. However, given the additional hurdles faced by intrapreneurs, most entrepreneurs would be better off taking the plunge and launching their business as an independent company.

1. The extra yard is the most important one. Anyone who has played soccer will remember a moment when someone is a yard ahead of you and about to receive the ball in front of goal. In that split second, you have the choice to push yourself to make up that gap or give it up and hope they miss. No matter how much you run in the full 90 minutes, the outcome of the game could be based on whether you run that extra yard or not. That said, I didn’t always run that extra yard. But the point has stayed with me in business. The day or even entire companies can be made or lost based on whether you push yourself through that extra step your competitors might give up to chance.
2. Even days have a halftime. No matter how rough the first half of any game has been, you still have even the slimmest chance of turning it around until it is officially over. In soccer, you usually have halftime to get yourself reset for the second half. Work is the same. No matter how bad the morning goes, you can still turn it around in the afternoon. And at least you don’t usually have a coach screaming in your face during your lunch break…
3. Take it one ball at a time. This is something I tried to remind myself of when batting at cricket, very much a confidence game, where when it’s going badly, it seems impossible, and when it goes well, the ball seems as easy to hit as a beach ball. As long as you are still there, each ball is a new start. Sometimes on tough days, it’s good to remind yourself at work that the results of the last thing you did have no impact on the thing you’re about to do – it’s a new chance to achieve something.
4. The team collective is vital. Maybe less so with individual sports such as golf and tennis, but in team sports, a good team that doesn’t have to always see eye-to-eye but has a strong bond and works closely together will always produce a product greater than the sum of its parts. The perfect example of this is my home team Leicester City. They gave their viewers the biggest shock in 25 years by winning the Premier League in 2016 – as far as I’m concerned, the greatest story in sports history!
5. Putting the work in pays off. Aside from the mercurially gifted, which I’ve never been, if you train harder and work harder than your opponents, you increase your chances of winning. Though I am trying to manage my energy better as I just older, if I return from a work trip at 2 a.m., the thought that few of my competitors will be in first thing pushes me to my desk at 8:30 a.m. that morning. It’s more of a mental and muscle reaction than a conscious thought, knowing that extra push may just give you the chance you are looking for to succeed.

These are lessons I take with me every day. They provide a general framework to help push me through whatever each day throws at me.

In our quest for growth, we often find ourselves overlooking simplicity. Now, I’m not suggesting that you take a shortcut down the path of least resistance. Instead, embrace the chaos of entrepreneurship, look for patterns, make sense of the details and adjust and refine your approach.

One way to start is by learning some key truths about business. Here are 10 things you should never forget in business – useful reminders to keep you sharp.

1. It’s Just Lip Service: After the handshake and before you begin, put it in writing. Verbal contracts aren’t worth the paper they are written on. It’s not only a professional and responsible way of doing business, it ensures you start and end every endeavor on the right footing. Don’t let people tell you a contract is just a piece of paper. So is money, and I’ve yet to see a dollar in the trash.
2. Build Your Business and a Life: As you build your dreams don’t forget to design your life. Develop business goals and life goals. Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative care nurse, recorded her patients’ epiphanies in the last 12 weeks of their lives in her book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Chief among them was this: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
3. Seize Your Kairos Moment: As a keynote speaker on topics related to women in business, I’m honored when asked to speak at universities and conferences. While I can’t say yes to every request, I proactively decide if it’s a space where I can add value. It’s not always clear how days, events and opportunities connect to the bigger picture. But don’t let indecision rob you of powerful outcomes. Take full advantage of the opportunities set before you. Seize your Kairos moment: the appointed time where opportunity is in sight and decisive action is required. Gather facts, trust your instincts, seek wise counsel, keep emotions in check and act swiftly.
4. Revisit Day One: The quickest route to simplicity is day one. Day one represents a time in business when you were figuring everything out. Think back to this place. You may have tried to reinvent the wheel or thought your way into a box. Whatever the case may be, take a solid look at what you’ve learned since day one and simplify it. Day one has a tendency to linger; you find yourself doing things the same outdated way. Instead, revisit day one and merge it with lessons learned. This approach will shorten learning curves and help you play a smarter long game.
5. Celebrate and Get Back to Business: It feels good to win. For me, however, wins like these are short lived. They are not the end game. Instead they contribute to my larger mission to make entrepreneurship accessible. So, throw a party, celebrate and get back to business. It’s easy to think success is measured in milestones or a destination. But in reality, success is a journey. Don’t celebrate your last victory for so long that you fail to create new ones.
6. Life Is a Negotiation: Ask for More: Never take a no from someone who doesn’t have the power to tell you yes. More often than not, the person who tells you no is not qualified to tell you yes. As such, I spend very little time entertaining “no” people. Courteously work with gatekeepers but get to the decision makers quickly.
7. Let the Cash Flow: Cash flow – money in, money out – is the lifeblood of business. If you’re not keen on financial aspects of your business, sit down with a CPA or accountant and give your business a financial exam. Be aware of what you spend, negotiate contracts with suppliers, employ cost-saving receivables practices and proactively create payment strategies that favor your business needs.
8. Work Yourself Out of Your Role: How easily would the daily operations of your company run if you took a sabbatical? Effective leaders build companies that can operate successfully without them. Give your team the actionable knowledge they need (with defined processes and systems) and empower them to make decisions. If you don’t do this, you run the risk of inefficiencies brought about by a huge bottleneck: yourself.
9. Be Thankful: Develop an attitude of gratitude in business. Whether you’ve raked in 10 sales or 1M, be thankful. There are a number of aspiring business owners who would gladly celebrate a mere portion of what you have obtained. In practice, I’ll often share personalized thank-you notes with key partners. Gratitude brings about a deeper sense of purpose and humility.
10. Never Major on Minor Things: Growing up my mother used to say, “Everything that’s important isn’t necessarily urgent.” I didn’t truly understand this until I became an entrepreneur. She was referring to the Eisenhower Principle, which suggests we all have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important and the important are never urgent. Urgent things require our immediate attention and make us reactionary, defensive and narrowly focused. Important things contribute to our long-term mission. Sometimes important tasks are urgent, but typically they’re not. In a nutshell, spend time on things that are important and not just what seems urgent.

It’s often the simple things that we learn along the way that make the most impact in our lives. Consider what entrepreneurship has taught you so far. Simple reminders are often hidden it what seems to be chaotic complexity.

When I launched my online travel company back in 2008, I got serious about networking, and it helped me create the successful company I have today.

Since then, I’ve gathered some of my favorite networking methods that continue to work for me. 

Be Mindful of Your Online Presence

Modern-day networking begins with a strong online presence across your company’s website and social media channels. Thousands of worldwide connections can be made in a click, so make sure your online presence is up to par.

Keep your web platforms seamless and consistent with your brand’s image. From LinkedIn to Facebook and your company’s website, make sure they each consistently tell the story of your brand. Your personal social media channels should be even sharper: After all, this is where most connections will come from, so make sure you have a clean profile void of any nonsense on these platforms.

A few of our latest business partners came from my personal LinkedIn connections. For business-oriented social media, you can’t beat LinkedIn. Start there with a strong personal profile, and build connections with notable names in your industry.

Remember: You’re the Product

When networking, keep in mind that you’re the product. People want value, and a first-person view of the person running the company is what they will see first. Regardless of whether you’re selling wine or travel arrangements, you’re at the front line, so be knowledgeable and enthusiastic. This means respectfully carrying yourself both online and at events.

At events in the past, there have been a few people I couldn’t wait to meet based on their success, but once I met them, the idea of creating any type of business relationship with them — or even meeting them for dinner — went out the door.

Always Be on the Lookout 

Don’t just wait for planned events to network. Frequent places where others mingle and build a rapport there. Go to as many events as possible in your industry, from fundraisers to major conferences.

The travel industry is loaded with events all around the world. If I’m at a conference or meeting in one city, I’m always checking to see if something is happening in that area. I’ve made some of my biggest connections at events I initially didn’t even plan on attending; I ended up there simply from being in the right place at the right time.

Create a Strategy With Planned Goals

So far, we’ve discussed opportunities for serendipitous networking. But what if you’re looking to meet someone specific? First, find out where you can meet, then create a strategy with planned goals. Treat it as if it were a meeting. But remember, sometimes events or even social media messages can get chatty, and many leaders and CEOs are extremely pressed for time.

When creating your strategy, ask yourself a few questions: How will this person add value to your company? When’s the best time to reach them? How will you open up a rapport with them? The biggest question you need to answer — mostly for them — is why you are creating rapport. It’s not just about what type of value they can bring, but what type of value you can deliver.

Stay Connected

Networking never ends. Whenever you make a new connection, make it a habit to immediately follow up, either that day or the next. It can be a simple email, text or call, as long as you make sure to follow up while you’re still fresh in their minds. This shows motivation and further solidifies your passion, not just for your company, but also your personal brand.

If content is king, then networking is queen. Never miss an opportunity to network, whether it’s a huge industry event or meeting with someone who reached out on LinkedIn. Put your personal brand out there and keep it at the top of everyone’s minds.