WEBVTT
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This is the one I was telling you about.
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It is the You will not believe this play so that I just found literally a big link to literally the second cheaper.
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Tell my sentence is my biggest one.
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Girl.
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Ten out of ten would recommend.
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In an effort to make more adult friends this year, which greatest fear from high school, coming back here, I joined my local pickleball club.
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Now I wasn't a complete stranger to the game.
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I had played a few times when I went down south to visit my parents at their place down there.
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And I, you know, I knew the general vibe, but it wasn't something I was ever being coached on.
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But a few months into the club, I was playing fairly regularly.
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I was making these adult friends, and I was starting to feel a little bit more of that main character energy on the court.
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I thought to myself, Nikki, I think you are ready for the next step.
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So I booked a pickleball assessment with our club pro.
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And if you don't really know what a what a pickleball assessment entails, pickleball has a rating system.
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And this rating system in my club determines what sessions you get access to and what other people you can play with.
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So I was sitting at a 2.5, which lovingly known as established beginner, really.
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And the goal of the assessment that I was taking was I was trying to get bumped up to a 3.0, which is the shiny early intermediate rating.
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It is a scored test, a scored assessment.
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You have to hit certain shots, you have to aim for specific targets on the court, you have to show control, and you have to prove that you have an understanding of the mechanics beyond get ball over net.
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And at the end of it, if you've scored enough points across all the drills, you get to move up to that next level.
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And most of the drills I felt pretty good with.
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Not perfect, but I was doing okay.
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And then we got to this one drill, and I swear to God, this almost broke me.
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And it was the speed up.
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So here's the deal with the speed up.
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If you are not a pickler like me, uh you and the other player are standing at the kitchen line, which is that little zone in front of the net, and you're dinking, which means you're you're hitting these soft, calm, casual little shots back and forth, very civilized, very drinking rose on the patio energy.
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And then at some point, one of the players, me or the person I was I was getting obsessed with, has to speed it up.
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Now, a speed up is not a smash, it is not a desperate whack.
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The goal of a speed up is strategy.
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It is fired to a very specific spot on your opponent's body.
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And the point of the speed up isn't to end the rally right there.
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The the point is to put your opponent in a terrible position for the next shot.
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So my brain, not really having done many speed up drills, defaulted to the most caveman logic imaginable, which was okay, ball go faster, me hit harder.
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And I did.
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I was whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack.
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Every ball as hard as I could hit it, which essentially is the equivalent of someone button mashing Super Smash Bros., which my nephew is making me play with him a lot these days.
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It's lots of energy, it's lots of noise, and it's very little control and very little planning.
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And the pros stopped me mid-drill and said, Nikki, slow down.
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A speed up is not about hitting it harder.
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It is an intentional shot, it is a strategic shot.
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And I nodded very calmly, very maturely, like a person who is, of course, taking feedback well.
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Uh, but inside I was full pulling a full-on Johnny McEnroe uh tantrum because I'm very competitive and I was very frustrated that I was not getting this.
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So the second we were done, I trudged home and I texted my dad, who, by the way, is a US open gold medal winner in pickleball for his age group.
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And I just said, yeah, I bombed it.
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And I went home and I sulked.
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I don't like losing.
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But then, to my surprise, a few days later, I got the email.
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I had passed.
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Thank God my serves and my long game had carried me over the line and I officially had that shiny 3.0 rating.
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But the the rating isn't what stuck with me because the the thing I immediately went home and started thinking about how to improve was that speed up drill.
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And it was the pros voice saying, slow down.
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Because if you want to be elite, if you want to be competitive, a real speed up isn't about swinging harder at all.
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It is about choosing your moment, it's aiming with precision, and it's setting yourself up for the shot that matters.
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And that, of course, brings us to today's episode.
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Welcome to Would Recommend.
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I'm Nikki McKnight, a customer experience and operations strategist.
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And this is the show about the businesses that customers can't stop talking about and what they actually did to earn it.
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Today is a Nikki talks episode, and we're talking about the speed up, which in business is going to look a lot like resisting the urge to work harder and do more, and choosing instead to hit with intention so that whatever you do, whatever shot you take, is going to land hard enough for your customer to feel it.
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Because here's what here's what I've noticed, both in my own business and in the businesses I get to work with.
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When founders want to give their customers a better experience, the reflex is almost always more.
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More bonuses, more resources, more templates, more check-ins, more communication, more videos, more.
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Oh, I'll just throw this in too.
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We hear add value so often that it starts to sound like a math problem or a complicated flow chart where every new thing we and we hand over makes the experience a little bit better, and the most generous business is the one that is going to win.
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And I know this really well because I have been the whack, whack, whack when it comes to offers and what I give people.
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When I went back to running my business in 2020, I had this offer that I was so sure was going to be a winner.
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And it covered a lot of stuff because clearly I thought the more things I can do for people, the more information I give them, clearly the more value there is going to be.
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And they are going to love me and be like, oh my gosh, Nikki is so generous.
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She's so good.
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I got everything I needed.
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And that offer lasted maybe two months.
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And honestly, it should have lasted a shorter amount of time because it was too much.
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My clients felt overwhelmed.
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There wasn't enough time to action it.
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A lot of them were solo printers and a lot of the things they could not action because they didn't have someone who could support them in that.
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And I realized by trying to create a value stack, what I actually created was a value lack.
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There was no value in my more, more, more, more, more because it couldn't be navigated.
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It couldn't be used.
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It couldn't be integrated.
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Every time I had a new idea, a new resource, a new framework, a new way to help, I just kept adding it in because I wanted my clients to feel like they were getting so much more that they paid for.
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And in my head, that was the experience, right?
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More is generosity, and generosity is the point.
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And as I said, I learned pretty quickly that it was overwhelming.
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From my client's side of the net, to kind of go back to this pickleball metaphor, all of that value just landed as homework, as overwhelm, and as noise.
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They couldn't do it because there was too much of it.
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And every new thing I added was one more thing they hadn't gotten to yet.
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One more open tab in their brain and one more, you know, little pang, little stabbing in the chest.
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I'm paying for this and I'm not even using half of it.
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What I thought was abundance was showing up as a backlog.
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And on my side of the net, I just felt so scattered.
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I was trying to be everything everywhere all at once and not in the fun hot dog finger googly eye, Michelle, yo, multiverse way.
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I was building and adding and explaining and following up on things that really nobody had asked for, and I was exhausted.
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And the people I was doing it for were all too overwhelmed to see or do any of it.
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You can pour an enormous amount of effort into an experience.
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And if your customer can't take it in, the impact does not land.
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It's me and that drill.
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I'm hitting every single ball as hard as I could, tons of effort, tons of noise, and none of it was putting anybody in a different position.
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And it sure as hell wasn't helping me win.
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What my clients actually needed was constraint.
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They needed fewer things to start, chosen on purpose, handed to them at the moment they could actually use it.
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They needed me to make decisions for them instead of handing them a buffet and saying, good luck, choose whatever you want.
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Do you want the jello and the spaghetti and the spring rolls?
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It's all there for you.
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Think about the difference between the Cheesecake Factory menu, which is 75 million pages, and a prefix menu where you get three courses and three options for each.
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Cheesecake technically offers more, but a prefix you get to the good stuff quicker.
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When I made the shift in how I worked with people, my clients could finish things.
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They could feel progress.
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They could experience winning.
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They could use what I gave them, which means they got results, which means they had something to talk about.
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And I stopped feeling like I was sprinting between 17 versions of my own business.
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People recommend what they experience.
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Nobody tells a friend, you have to work with her.
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She's so great.
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She gave me 42 resources I've never opened.
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They're gonna say, you have to work with her.
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She helped me finally get this done.
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Unused value doesn't create a referral.
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And the impact your customer can feel is the only impact that can travel.
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So let's let's go back to the pickleball court for a second, because I'm about to draw a parallel here with pickleball.
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The first part of a speed up is choosing your moment.
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Just like the pro told me in this assessment, you don't speed up every ball.
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You wait for one ball that gives you a very specific opportunity.
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In your client experience, this means you stop handing everything over on day one and you start asking and you start thinking and you start designing when your customer could be ready for each piece.
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The resource that is so overwhelming in week one might be exactly what she needs in week six.
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It's the same thing, but it's a different moment, it's a different ball, it's a completely different impact.
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The second part is aiming with precision.
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And this is something I'm definitely trying to get better at in pickleball.
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A speedup goes to one specific spot.
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In your business, this means knowing the one thing that your customer needs the most right now and giving her that instead of three things that are kind of related and could be really cool.
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Something that took me a really long time to learn is that precision is generous in a way that volume never is because precision does the sorting and the deciding for her.
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The third part is setting up the next shot.
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The speed up is not trying to win the point on its own.
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It's designed to create the momentum, the opening, the positioning for what comes next.
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So when your customer gets a one clear win, she's got the momentum and the confidence for the next step and the step after that.
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And eventually, by good design, the shot that matters is one that you don't even hit yourself when she turns to someone in her life and says your name.
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So how can you find your speed up time?
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When is that moment for you to speed things up a little bit without whack, whack, whack, whack, whacking?
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I'd start, honestly, first place is looking at everything you've added to your offer or to your client experience within the last year, right?
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Take a look at the bonuses, the extras, the while I'm at it.
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This this is super easy to add in.
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This just makes sense.
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Ask yourself which of those your clients actually use.
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If you've got data, look at it.
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If you don't, ask a few of your favorite clients what they've used, what they skipped, what they wish you just told them to do first.
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Your next way to find uh the speed up moment is to look at what your best clients talk about when they rave about you.
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Because I'd bet really good money that they're talking about a specific moment, a tool, a conversation, a result, rather than the sheer volume of what you gave them.
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Because that's where your impact is landing.
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That's where your energy deserves to go.
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It's to that shot.
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And then I'd ask the question the pro was asking me on the court, what would happen if I did less on purpose and aimed it better?
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I'll be honest with you, I still catch myself reaching for more on the court and off of it.
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There's a part of me, and I suspect there's a part of you that believes the answer to almost everything is to try harder and to give more.
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Shout out to all my elder millennial eldest daughters here.
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And sometimes it is the answer.
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But a lot of the time, more is what we reach for because it's easier than deciding what matters most, and deciding is the real work.
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That's ultimately what the pro is teaching me.
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It was slow down, it was pay attention to intention and strategy, pick your moment, pick your spot, pick your shot, and hit it.
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So the impact is what you want, and the impact is felt.
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Anybody can whack a ball.
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The businesses that people can't stop talking about are the ones that know exactly which shot to take.
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That is it, y'all, for this week's episode of Would Recommend.
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If this one landed for you, two things I would love for you to do for me.
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Number one, rate, review, subscribe on your podcast provider of choice.
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It helps the algorithmic gods do their thing, helps more people find out about us.
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I am so close from another milestone on Spotify in terms of number of reviews.
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So if you want to head on over, you know, just tap a couple star icons.
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That's all you gotta do on Spotify.
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And on Apple, I think I'm just like two reviews away from another milestone.
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So if you're listening to this in Apple Podcasts, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it.
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You can also send this episode to a founder friend who needs to hear it, especially the one who's currently up until midnight trying to outwork and out hit a problem.
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That is how this show grows.
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One recommendation at a time.
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And if you're listening to this and you already have a hunch that your business is maybe swinging harder instead of smarter, that's exactly what a spark session is for.
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90 minutes, just you and me, and we're gonna walk around to your customer's side of the net and find your next best speed up.
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You can find it at the link in the show notes.
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I'm Nikki McKnight.
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This is Would Recommend, and I will see you next week with more on how to help your business become the one that people can't stop talking about.
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Bye!
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This is the one I was telling you about.
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It is the You will not believe this play so that I just found literally a big link to literally the second cheaper.
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Tell my sentence is my biggest one.
00:00:17.199 --> 00:00:17.679
Girl.
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Ten out of ten would recommend.
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In an effort to make more adult friends this year, which greatest fear from high school, coming back here, I joined my local pickleball club.
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Now I wasn't a complete stranger to the game.
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I had played a few times when I went down south to visit my parents at their place down there.
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And I, you know, I knew the general vibe, but it wasn't something I was ever being coached on.
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But a few months into the club, I was playing fairly regularly.
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I was making these adult friends, and I was starting to feel a little bit more of that main character energy on the court.
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I thought to myself, Nikki, I think you are ready for the next step.
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So I booked a pickleball assessment with our club pro.
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And if you don't really know what a what a pickleball assessment entails, pickleball has a rating system.
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And this rating system in my club determines what sessions you get access to and what other people you can play with.
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So I was sitting at a 2.5, which lovingly known as established beginner, really.
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And the goal of the assessment that I was taking was I was trying to get bumped up to a 3.0, which is the shiny early intermediate rating.
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It is a scored test, a scored assessment.
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You have to hit certain shots, you have to aim for specific targets on the court, you have to show control, and you have to prove that you have an understanding of the mechanics beyond get ball over net.
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And at the end of it, if you've scored enough points across all the drills, you get to move up to that next level.
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And most of the drills I felt pretty good with.
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Not perfect, but I was doing okay.
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And then we got to this one drill, and I swear to God, this almost broke me.
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And it was the speed up.
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So here's the deal with the speed up.
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If you are not a pickler like me, uh you and the other player are standing at the kitchen line, which is that little zone in front of the net, and you're dinking, which means you're you're hitting these soft, calm, casual little shots back and forth, very civilized, very drinking rose on the patio energy.
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And then at some point, one of the players, me or the person I was I was getting obsessed with, has to speed it up.
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Now, a speed up is not a smash, it is not a desperate whack.
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The goal of a speed up is strategy.
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It is fired to a very specific spot on your opponent's body.
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And the point of the speed up isn't to end the rally right there.
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The the point is to put your opponent in a terrible position for the next shot.
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So my brain, not really having done many speed up drills, defaulted to the most caveman logic imaginable, which was okay, ball go faster, me hit harder.
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And I did.
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I was whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack.
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Every ball as hard as I could hit it, which essentially is the equivalent of someone button mashing Super Smash Bros., which my nephew is making me play with him a lot these days.
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It's lots of energy, it's lots of noise, and it's very little control and very little planning.
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And the pros stopped me mid-drill and said, Nikki, slow down.
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A speed up is not about hitting it harder.
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It is an intentional shot, it is a strategic shot.
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And I nodded very calmly, very maturely, like a person who is, of course, taking feedback well.
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Uh, but inside I was full pulling a full-on Johnny McEnroe uh tantrum because I'm very competitive and I was very frustrated that I was not getting this.
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So the second we were done, I trudged home and I texted my dad, who, by the way, is a US open gold medal winner in pickleball for his age group.
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And I just said, yeah, I bombed it.
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And I went home and I sulked.
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I don't like losing.
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But then, to my surprise, a few days later, I got the email.
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I had passed.
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Thank God my serves and my long game had carried me over the line and I officially had that shiny 3.0 rating.
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But the the rating isn't what stuck with me because the the thing I immediately went home and started thinking about how to improve was that speed up drill.
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And it was the pros voice saying, slow down.
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Because if you want to be elite, if you want to be competitive, a real speed up isn't about swinging harder at all.
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It is about choosing your moment, it's aiming with precision, and it's setting yourself up for the shot that matters.
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And that, of course, brings us to today's episode.
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Welcome to Would Recommend.
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I'm Nikki McKnight, a customer experience and operations strategist.
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And this is the show about the businesses that customers can't stop talking about and what they actually did to earn it.
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Today is a Nikki talks episode, and we're talking about the speed up, which in business is going to look a lot like resisting the urge to work harder and do more, and choosing instead to hit with intention so that whatever you do, whatever shot you take, is going to land hard enough for your customer to feel it.
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Because here's what here's what I've noticed, both in my own business and in the businesses I get to work with.
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When founders want to give their customers a better experience, the reflex is almost always more.
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More bonuses, more resources, more templates, more check-ins, more communication, more videos, more.
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Oh, I'll just throw this in too.
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We hear add value so often that it starts to sound like a math problem or a complicated flow chart where every new thing we and we hand over makes the experience a little bit better, and the most generous business is the one that is going to win.
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And I know this really well because I have been the whack, whack, whack when it comes to offers and what I give people.
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When I went back to running my business in 2020, I had this offer that I was so sure was going to be a winner.
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And it covered a lot of stuff because clearly I thought the more things I can do for people, the more information I give them, clearly the more value there is going to be.
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And they are going to love me and be like, oh my gosh, Nikki is so generous.
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She's so good.
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I got everything I needed.
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And that offer lasted maybe two months.
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And honestly, it should have lasted a shorter amount of time because it was too much.
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My clients felt overwhelmed.
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There wasn't enough time to action it.
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A lot of them were solo printers and a lot of the things they could not action because they didn't have someone who could support them in that.
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And I realized by trying to create a value stack, what I actually created was a value lack.
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There was no value in my more, more, more, more, more because it couldn't be navigated.
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It couldn't be used.
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It couldn't be integrated.
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Every time I had a new idea, a new resource, a new framework, a new way to help, I just kept adding it in because I wanted my clients to feel like they were getting so much more that they paid for.
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And in my head, that was the experience, right?
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More is generosity, and generosity is the point.
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And as I said, I learned pretty quickly that it was overwhelming.
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From my client's side of the net, to kind of go back to this pickleball metaphor, all of that value just landed as homework, as overwhelm, and as noise.
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They couldn't do it because there was too much of it.
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And every new thing I added was one more thing they hadn't gotten to yet.
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One more open tab in their brain and one more, you know, little pang, little stabbing in the chest.
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I'm paying for this and I'm not even using half of it.
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What I thought was abundance was showing up as a backlog.
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And on my side of the net, I just felt so scattered.
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I was trying to be everything everywhere all at once and not in the fun hot dog finger googly eye, Michelle, yo, multiverse way.
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I was building and adding and explaining and following up on things that really nobody had asked for, and I was exhausted.
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And the people I was doing it for were all too overwhelmed to see or do any of it.
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You can pour an enormous amount of effort into an experience.
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And if your customer can't take it in, the impact does not land.
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It's me and that drill.
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I'm hitting every single ball as hard as I could, tons of effort, tons of noise, and none of it was putting anybody in a different position.
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And it sure as hell wasn't helping me win.
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What my clients actually needed was constraint.
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They needed fewer things to start, chosen on purpose, handed to them at the moment they could actually use it.
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They needed me to make decisions for them instead of handing them a buffet and saying, good luck, choose whatever you want.
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Do you want the jello and the spaghetti and the spring rolls?
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It's all there for you.
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Think about the difference between the Cheesecake Factory menu, which is 75 million pages, and a prefix menu where you get three courses and three options for each.
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Cheesecake technically offers more, but a prefix you get to the good stuff quicker.
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When I made the shift in how I worked with people, my clients could finish things.
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They could feel progress.
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They could experience winning.
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They could use what I gave them, which means they got results, which means they had something to talk about.
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And I stopped feeling like I was sprinting between 17 versions of my own business.
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People recommend what they experience.
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Nobody tells a friend, you have to work with her.
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She's so great.
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She gave me 42 resources I've never opened.
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They're gonna say, you have to work with her.
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She helped me finally get this done.
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Unused value doesn't create a referral.
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And the impact your customer can feel is the only impact that can travel.
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So let's let's go back to the pickleball court for a second, because I'm about to draw a parallel here with pickleball.
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The first part of a speed up is choosing your moment.
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Just like the pro told me in this assessment, you don't speed up every ball.
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You wait for one ball that gives you a very specific opportunity.
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In your client experience, this means you stop handing everything over on day one and you start asking and you start thinking and you start designing when your customer could be ready for each piece.
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The resource that is so overwhelming in week one might be exactly what she needs in week six.
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It's the same thing, but it's a different moment, it's a different ball, it's a completely different impact.
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The second part is aiming with precision.
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And this is something I'm definitely trying to get better at in pickleball.
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A speedup goes to one specific spot.
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In your business, this means knowing the one thing that your customer needs the most right now and giving her that instead of three things that are kind of related and could be really cool.
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Something that took me a really long time to learn is that precision is generous in a way that volume never is because precision does the sorting and the deciding for her.
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The third part is setting up the next shot.
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The speed up is not trying to win the point on its own.
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It's designed to create the momentum, the opening, the positioning for what comes next.
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So when your customer gets a one clear win, she's got the momentum and the confidence for the next step and the step after that.
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And eventually, by good design, the shot that matters is one that you don't even hit yourself when she turns to someone in her life and says your name.
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So how can you find your speed up time?
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When is that moment for you to speed things up a little bit without whack, whack, whack, whack, whacking?
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I'd start, honestly, first place is looking at everything you've added to your offer or to your client experience within the last year, right?
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Take a look at the bonuses, the extras, the while I'm at it.
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This this is super easy to add in.
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This just makes sense.
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Ask yourself which of those your clients actually use.
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If you've got data, look at it.
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If you don't, ask a few of your favorite clients what they've used, what they skipped, what they wish you just told them to do first.
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Your next way to find uh the speed up moment is to look at what your best clients talk about when they rave about you.
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Because I'd bet really good money that they're talking about a specific moment, a tool, a conversation, a result, rather than the sheer volume of what you gave them.
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Because that's where your impact is landing.
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That's where your energy deserves to go.
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It's to that shot.
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And then I'd ask the question the pro was asking me on the court, what would happen if I did less on purpose and aimed it better?
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I'll be honest with you, I still catch myself reaching for more on the court and off of it.
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There's a part of me, and I suspect there's a part of you that believes the answer to almost everything is to try harder and to give more.
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Shout out to all my elder millennial eldest daughters here.
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And sometimes it is the answer.
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But a lot of the time, more is what we reach for because it's easier than deciding what matters most, and deciding is the real work.
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That's ultimately what the pro is teaching me.
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It was slow down, it was pay attention to intention and strategy, pick your moment, pick your spot, pick your shot, and hit it.
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So the impact is what you want, and the impact is felt.
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Anybody can whack a ball.
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The businesses that people can't stop talking about are the ones that know exactly which shot to take.
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That is it, y'all, for this week's episode of Would Recommend.
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If this one landed for you, two things I would love for you to do for me.
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Number one, rate, review, subscribe on your podcast provider of choice.
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It helps the algorithmic gods do their thing, helps more people find out about us.
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I am so close from another milestone on Spotify in terms of number of reviews.
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So if you want to head on over, you know, just tap a couple star icons.
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That's all you gotta do on Spotify.
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And on Apple, I think I'm just like two reviews away from another milestone.
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So if you're listening to this in Apple Podcasts, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it.
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You can also send this episode to a founder friend who needs to hear it, especially the one who's currently up until midnight trying to outwork and out hit a problem.
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That is how this show grows.
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One recommendation at a time.
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And if you're listening to this and you already have a hunch that your business is maybe swinging harder instead of smarter, that's exactly what a spark session is for.
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90 minutes, just you and me, and we're gonna walk around to your customer's side of the net and find your next best speed up.
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You can find it at the link in the show notes.
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I'm Nikki McKnight.
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This is Would Recommend, and I will see you next week with more on how to help your business become the one that people can't stop talking about.
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Bye!
