Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dkeith Wilson. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

DKeith, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the best thing you’ve ever seen (or done yourself) to show a customer that you appreciate them?

A stat and two quotes. I developed my philosophy around customer appreciation based on statistics I’d read somewhere and two quotes I’d learned over my years of business experience. First, the stat: 90 percent of businesses fail. That’s a scary number you’re supposed to ignore as an entrepreneur, but ignoring it is silly. I didn’t want to be silly; I tried to figure out how not to fail. Let’s put a pin in that. Quote 1: “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” – Peter Drucker. Quote 2: “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care” – Theodore Roosevelt. Okay, what does all this mean? Well, it meant that if I’m lucky enough to create a customer, I can’t take that for granted and risk failure. How do I accomplish this? By focusing on showing my customers that I care about them. Did I start there? I started where most people start: branded Tchotchkes. I branded everything from pens to t-shirts and pushed them to clients every chance I could. In my mind, I was killing two birds with one stone, but I was really trying to use my customers to do my marketing. I had made the act of appreciation about me. Around that time, I came across a book called Giftology. This pointed me in the right direction. Now, I put more time into developing valued relationships with customers, figuring out what’s important to them- beyond the typical jobs-to-be-done assessment. For me, this means learning more about them and adding value to places businesses would normally miss. For some customers, that might mean a free tutorial for some software they are having issues with; for others, that might mean connecting them with my lawn guy because I heard them complain that theirs sucks. I know this all seems like it’s not the typical “customer appreciation day coffee and donuts,” but that’s the point. Customers should feel like you care about them and their problems as much as they do. That’s why they hired us in the first place.

DKeith, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m DKeith Wilson, Founder and Senior Consultant at Ytechnology. We’re a growth consultancy, which is a fancy way of saying we help small to mid-sized businesses figure out how to get to their next level of growth. We aren’t the go-big, creative thinker people; we’re the people who connect the dots to get more from what you have. Looking back on my corporate experience, I can best describe myself as an expert generalist. Meaning I’d take on roles entirely outside my “career path” so I could slay dragons. It worked out. I had a great run, but I’m most proud of being able to take what I learned at big companies and help small companies with expertise they usually wouldn’t be exposed to. You can’t imagine a business owner’s look when they can see something as simple as CRM automation doing things they would generally have to hire other team members to do- if they could find the right talent. I love that you can see the possibilities running through their minds. It reminds me that I’m in the right place.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest thing I had to unlearn was defaulting to the crowd. So much of what we experience in life and business nowadays is about following others: trends and status on social media, lumping in with others politically, etc. We’re social creatures, and at some level, that makes sense, but in business, the last thing you want to do is “fit in.” If a customer can’t see the difference between you and your competitor, it will be hard to build something great. I understood that when going into business, but I somehow lost that lesson while trying to find ways to get traction on social media. I put time and resources into all the social platforms, not because I’d established where my customers were and the best path to reach them, but because it’s what everyone is doing. All my competitors were going hard in this area, so I thought I also needed to be there. There was all this advice about what I should post, how often, and what time, and it was all crap. One could argue whether this is useful for anyone else, but it certainly wasn’t valuable to me. I followed, and it failed. It’s my fault because nothing I’ve done in my previous career was successful by following someone’s predetermined path; I mistakenly thought that that was the right choice here, and it cost me a lot of time and resources.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I’m a fan of what I call the BDF model. Read BROADLY, go DEEP on the topic, and do it FREQUENTLY. That means I could read about anything from large language models to nuclear energy policy on any given day. Neither are related to my day job (or will be), but I would argue that compounded years of this have made me better at everything I’ve done. I look at books as being mentored by people that I would never have met: Peter Drucker, Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, and the list goes on. I’ve gained a lot from their business expertise, but so much more by reading about things outside my expertise. There’s nothing more fun than getting labeled the tech guy, quoting Seneca or Plato, or relating the project to the evolution of sales techniques in America. The puzzled looks? Priceless.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ytechnology.co/about-us/
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• Other: https://dkeithwilson.com/about-dkeith-wilson/

Image Credits

i have the rights. these are my photos