Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:00:01] What does employee disconnection have to do with customer reviews? This episode’s guests say both can pose a threat to trust, but handled well, they can really supercharge business performance. In today’s episode, Melinda McCormack joins me first up to explain the rising crisis of emotional disconnection at work. Then serial entrepreneur and founder of Reputable, Karl Schwantes, reveals how businesses can transform customer reviews into lead generators without spending on ads. These two conversations are packed with modern leadership insight and low cost growth strategies for business owners navigating an AI driven world. From SoundCartel. I’m Grace Jennings-Edquist, and this is Business Essentials.
Why disconnection is the quiet crisis shaping leadership today
Our first guest is Melinda McCormack, founder of Impact with Empathy. Employee disengagement is often blamed on workload or culture. But what if the real issue is something deeper and less visible? Melinda McCormack joins us to explore why emotional disconnection is becoming a quiet crisis in leadership, and how empathetic human first leadership can rebuild trust, alignment, and performance. To get the interview started. Senior producer Nicole Goodman asked why Melinda believes there’s a disconnection crisis in business today.
Melinda McCormack: [00:01:27] Well, statistics are telling us that 82% of people are feeling emotionally disconnected, and 1 in 2 people are feeling undervalued. This is obviously an organization’s. So for me, that means that there is a leadership crisis because people are checking out. So when we see what are some of those signs that a team or organization is suffering from. Well, they’re doing the job, but they’re not feeling sane. There doesn’t seem to be a clear purpose or clarity. There’s low engagement scores. So organization who are more progressive may be measuring like psychological safety, for example. But what it’s telling us is that people are afraid to speak up and because they aren’t trusting their leaders.
Nicole Goodman: [00:02:27] Are there any other signs that you can think of that highlight the disconnection that organizations are suffering from?
Melinda McCormack: [00:02:33] Well, one of the big ones is our mental health statistics. At the moment, mental health and claims for mental health in terms of insurance claims are the highest it’s ever been. So this feeling of disconnection, you know, lends itself to anxiety, stress, burnout, And really it’s about, you know, the trust that employees are feeling with their leaders.
Nicole Goodman: [00:03:04] So how can leaders then begin to rebuild trust and alignment in disconnected environments?
Melinda McCormack: [00:03:11] Well, I talk about human first leadership. So we talk about it’s about compassion. It means leading with emotional clarity and strategic intent. So it’s using both sides of the brain, the rational with the emotional. Recognizing that people aren’t resources to manage, but that they’re humans to understand, inspire and align. And I really look at three things for the shift to really start. We’re moving from process to purpose. So we need to lead through meaning, not just procedure. And when people understand why their work matters, they unlock the energy that drives creativity and commitment. And we also want to move from control to connection. So replacing those rigid hierarchies with trust. So listening deeply but co-creating decisions that builds shared ownership. That no policy can really enforce and perfection to progress. So the future is all about learning and learning with agility. So curiosity and humility has to replace the fear of being wrong.
Nicole Goodman: [00:04:36] Well, Melinda, your new book, pulse, introduces a five step framework for turning disconnection into trust and impact. Can you give us an overview of what pulse actually stands for?
Melinda McCormack: [00:04:48] Yeah, pulse is my sort of groundbreaking what I call Groundbreaking framework or roadmap. And it’s an acronym. So Pulse stands for P and P stands for purpose. So really aligning to what really matters. And I talk a lot about there as well, aligning that to our values because that’s a really important step. And then when we talk about you, it’s actually unlocking your, what I call emotional DNA. So everyone has their own unique code, emotional code, which is shaped by our experiences and our thoughts. So key in this step is really understanding our emotions and how we learn to master our emotions so that we’re not always in the resistant behaviors. So I have developed a 25 step emotion map, and it goes through sort of the five stages of resistant to then more accepting behaviors. So this is a step that is, for me, fundamental. So it’s that emotional awareness and that self-awareness that everyone needs. L it’s about actually how we learn, how we learn using different emotional tools to help us with our new awareness around our emotions. How is it that we really learn to shift into those understanding adaptive behaviors that will help us cope with change or uncertainty? And so that is where we look at humility, vulnerability.
Melinda McCormack: [00:06:50] And I’ve got a saying in this particular chapter around out of failure comes great learning. So that we’re actually building that trust in ourselves, that it’s not about being perfect, and it’s about how we continually learn every day. And then S is all about shifting. So it’s actually how we shift. And we know that it’s the intentional actions and behaviors. So we actually start to rewire our neural pathways. So getting into my neuroscience, but it really does prove a point that if you practice certain actions and behaviors that will get you to the shifts that you actually want to make. And that creates the actual momentum. And E is actually about how you embrace that change. And when I talk about embracing that change, it’s actually being agile emotionally. So it’s actually about how you’re able to balance what I call the heart that feels with the mind that leads. And this is where it all kind of comes together.
Nicole Goodman: [00:08:04] There’s such important and pertinent ideas that you’ve managed to capture in one word. It really makes a lot of sense. Tell me, what’s one pulse principle that leaders tend to overlook? But that’s pretty crucial for sustainable change.
Melinda McCormack: [00:08:20] I think I mentioned it before, it’s really that step around emotional awareness and self-awareness. We are rewarded and have been since we’re young. It’s all the technical mastery, and that’s really what helps us progress in organizations and progress in life, right? It’s what you know. But really, we don’t spend the time to understand our emotional side. So what I call your, our emotional brain and how we need to build that emotional fitness. So that whole around the actual letter you it’s about how we understand our emotional DNA so that we’re mastering our emotions rather than reacting. So, you know, we’re actually responding from a place from calm rather than reacting out of anger or frustration. And I think that’s the biggest concept that leaders struggle with nowadays. So they think that, oh, this emotional fitness is all about ticking a box again. But it’s not we don’t tick boxes, it’s all about reflection. And we’ve got to learn new skills and new practices that will help us build our emotional fitness. So I really talk a lot about that. So this book is really about helping you shape your new emotional fitness program.
Nicole Goodman: [00:09:47] And particularly important in a world of AI, which is becoming more and more prolific and slightly concerning.
Melinda McCormack: [00:09:54] Exactly. And that’s what I was going to talk about further. But that’s right. So AI is already replacing the technical components of a job, and that’s why it’s so important that we start looking at our human skills, our humanity. And really that’s all it’s about, isn’t it? Change. It’s all about the people. Yeah.
Nicole Goodman: [00:10:17] You know, humans at the end of the day.
Melinda McCormack: [00:10:19] Yeah, exactly. We’re humans. And it’s not about the shifts in technology. It’s about humanity and how we bring that back into the center of how we operate in life and work.
Nicole Goodman: [00:10:32] Well, the idea then that empathy is your edge challenges traditional leadership models. What inspired you to write the book with that core message?
Melinda McCormack: [00:10:42] Yeah, sadly, as in most, I guess, inspirations. It does come from a personal loss and for me that was the case. So when I always say the love of my life and partner passed away, it was my son. So he was only young. He was only ten when he lost his father. And you know, I didn’t know I had all these fears. I thought, how am I going to do this? You know, am I going to be strong enough? And at ten years of age, he never experienced anything bad in his life, right? Everything was happiness. And so how could I bring and strengthen his emotional framework so that he could cope with life’s challenges? And so that really became my purpose. And so I basically turned empathy. And most people think of empathy. Oh yeah, you’re nice. You’re a nice person. You listen and you understand. But it’s a lot more than that. I’ve now made that like a practice and a system. So it’s actually showing up and providing an environment where, for example, my son could experiment and fail. And I linked that back to learning. So every time he made a mistake, I’d say, what did you learn from that? And interestingly enough, I was leading this program because I’m an organisational change specialist in one of the large corporates across thousands of people around new ways of working. And I had to give them a new purpose and a new identity as well, because all the roles were changing. So that’s exactly what I did there at work. As I was doing with my son. And people don’t realize how important empathy is because for me, that’s that bridge that helps you build the self self-trust the belief and that psychological safety to really connect your rational brain with your emotional brain.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:12:51] That was Melinda McCormack, founder of Impact with Empathy.
How to turn customer reviews into leads (without paid ads)
Now to online reviews and how to turn them into leads. Customer reviews are often seen as simple feedback, but what if they were actually your most powerful marketing asset? Serial entrepreneur Carl Schwantes joins me to explain how businesses can turn reviews into a steady stream of leads, build trust, and grow without relying on paid ads. Carl, who is managing director of Xenox Diamonds and founder of reputable, says he’s built a system where Google reviews generate consistent leads without paid ads. To kick the interview off, I asked Carl to walk us through the core principles of how that actually works.
Karl Schwantes: [00:13:37] So where this all came through, this this light bulb moment came actually out of Covid. So my family business is Xenox diamonds, where this is actually our 50th year in business. And I don’t know about you, but when this funny little thing called Covid came along, it pretty much decimated our business. We lost 97% of our revenue overnight for about eight weeks. Now. The hard thing was we just didn’t know how long it was going to go for. And so as a business owner, I said, well, I need more leads. Where do I go to find more leads? Well, I went to my point of sale and I pulled up a report to say, where are leads coming from? And what I found was, and I was totally shocked by this, was that in the previous year, we’d had 173 sales. That’s at least three sales a week and more than $1 million in top line revenue without spending a dollar on ads. Now, without the ads, there’s still a bit of cost. We all know in business there’s costs with everything, but when you work out the ROI for every dollar that I spent, we were getting $326 back. And I’ve yet to find any kind of marketing out there that can beat that kind of reputation marketing.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:14:40] So how do you position reviews so that they feel like, I suppose, pre-sold introductions rather than just social proof?
Karl Schwantes: [00:14:47] The problem is, I speak with so many business owners and they say, do you know what? I did a great job and I did it on time. And I go, congratulations, you just did what the client paid you for. The client wasn’t expecting late and crappy. So we’ve all got this thing in our pocket these days, these little phones. And I remember as a little boy waiting for the Sunday mail paper because I would look and see what the the movie next Sunday was. And I had to wait all week, do my homework. The weekly chores. And then finally we got to sit down. We had the popcorn ready and then guess what? Ten minutes in commercial break. Right. And I couldn’t even watch the whole movie to the end. But these days we’ve got Netflix, Spotify, Disney, everything on demand when you want it how you want it in your pocket. And so what’s happened is the client journey experience expectation has gone to here, but most businesses are still doing what they did five years ago. They’re not meeting or exceeding it. So we all think that what we do is amazing. I get that, but by and large, any of your clients could walk down the road and find someone else who can do almost exactly the same thing for the same money. The best way to differentiate yourself in the market is to wrap what I call an experience element around your business. And when you do that, it transitions you from one of those bottom two Google reviews up into the top level of Google reviews, which is what Google is looking for, especially in the world of AI search.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:16:05] Fascinating. So it sounds great. And I think a lot of business owners will be listening saying, you know, thinking, how do I get started with this? So for businesses who are just starting to build reviews, what are the first three practical steps they should take to make reviews, start generating inquiries?
Karl Schwantes: [00:16:21] So number one is it can’t be just about your product or service. There has to be an experience element around it. So in my diamond shop, I built a whiskey bar. Now number one, I like whiskey. So that’s a great tax write off. But it also becomes such a prominent part of the client journey experience. So you need to wrap whatever it is for you. It could be the footy, it could be anything. Wrap an experience element around what you do. The second thing is, is that you have to train your team to have at some level, from a core value point of view, an element of to be of service. Okay, so I hate it when I see businesses and they go, uh, integrity is our core value. Well guess what? That’s just part of being a good human being. Okay? So you have to be of service to go above and beyond. And how can I help this client in a way that they would never expect? And the third one is, and this is this is the deal breaker. And this is so, so simple. Just ask. I can’t believe how many businesses out there. Just do not ask for a Google review. It’s like for me, it’s a digital high five. It’s like I love someone telling me how great my business was and what we did. So just ask, okay. So the more you ask, the more reviews you’re going to get.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:17:28] I want to go back to one thing you mentioned, which was the idea of wrapping an experience element around your business. It can’t just be the service or business itself. Can you just give me 1 or 2 more examples because that’s fascinating. And I just want listeners to be able to visualize what you mean by that.
Karl Schwantes: [00:17:43] So in my book that I’ve just finished writing, which is about 80,000 words, I wrote it in three weeks because I’m a nutter. Basically, I talk about this concept of what I call experience silos. And most businesses think of a of a business client experience as an end to end experience. The reality is it’s made up of individual client experiences that happen along the journey. And so we have like the welcome experience. We have the whiskey experience. And all of those experiences are not only choreographed, they’re scripted and they’re trained. So it’s like when you walk into my diamond shop, there’s a spot on the floor that the team have to stand and welcome. Their body orientation has to be in a certain way. There’s a script of what they’ve got to say when it comes to the whiskey. We take a lid off the whiskey and we let you smell it. We then put it into a Japanese hand-blown whiskey glass. So we’re trying to hit multi modalities. So there is just so much more. There’s always the phrase that I always use is that there’s always another level, like just don’t stop. You can just keep going down and down and down, but do what your competition is not willing to do. That is the key differentiator is the experience, like the pendulum of AI and all that kind of stuff.
Karl Schwantes: [00:18:52] People actually swinging back. Now, they want a human experience and they want somebody like whether you’re a mechanic, whether you’re an electrician or whatever it is, there are lots of little things that are often very simple that you can do that leave a remarkable impression. Now, I love the word remarkable and I use it a lot. And when you look at the word remarkable, what does it have inside it? It has the word remark. So when we’re asking for a Google review, what are we asking the client to do is to remark on the client experience. So if your experience isn’t exceptional beyond what the client thought was just what they paid for, you’re not going to get a great review. Most businesses that I talk to have, probably if they’re a good business, they have a 10% conversion rate, but most businesses have less than 1%. The reality is when I work with clients, I tried to get them to the minimum standard of 30% and then try to ratchet it up to 50. You’re never going to get 100. Number one, there’s some people out there that never leave reviews. Number two, there are people out there that just don’t have a gmail account. And number three, to be fair to you, if the experience isn’t remarkable enough, they’re just not going to leave that review.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:19:56] Now I want to talk about negative reviews because some businesses fear negative reviews. How should they handle them so that they don’t derail. Lead flow and maybe even turn them into opportunities if that’s possible.
Karl Schwantes: [00:20:09] So this is a really interesting world. So usually when I talk with business owners, I put it as a triangle, right? And it’s either businesses come to me, they say, I want to fix my Google profile and Google business reviews because I either have none or I want to protect myself. So I’m worried about getting bad reviews or I want to dominate the market in the protect category. What you need to really do is you really need to look at a bad reviews, almost like free business coaching. So most, in most cases, clients will give you the opportunity to make something right before they just go online. Not always, but sometimes they do. How you handle that is so important. And unfortunately most business owners handle it poorly. What you have to understand about one star reviews now is they are there till the end of time. Okay. So when I ask people, what do you think I’m going to ask you now, Grace? Because we’re talking. Grace. What do you think a one star review is worth to a business. Just give me a dollar figure. I don’t care what it is. Pluck a figure.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:21:07] Gosh, I think it depends on the business. Um, let’s say it cost you, I don’t know, 200 bucks. Every one star review?
Karl Schwantes: [00:21:14] Nope. Imagine if it cost you $100,000. The reality is, is that for every one star review, two out of ten clients are going to not use your business. Now, if you had a thousand people in a year and 200 of them now don’t want to use your business. Okay, multiply that by your average dollar spend. That makes a lot of money now about 63%. And I’m one of these people. When I look at a Google profile, I sort by lowest first, okay. Because I want to see what is the worst case scenario look like with this business. And how did the business owner respond to that? But I’ve also turned one star reviews into five star reviews many times over because of the way that I’ve handled it. So what you need to do is you need to have acknowledgement of what happened. You’re not saying that what the client’s saying is right. You’re just acknowledging that it’s true for them. You need to have empathy And then you need to have a remedy. So like, what am I going to do to make this right by the client? But what you have to be thinking is imagine if every one star review that you got was going to cost your business $100,000.
Karl Schwantes: [00:22:17] I’ve seen so many business owners go absolute keyboard warrior going, you know, we can find no record of you in our system. How many of you have a second fake email address that you use for spam stuff? I’m one of them. Like if you’re going to leave a bad review, guess what? You’re going to use that one. All right. So half of what you do when you respond to a one star review is you’re responding to the person that left the review. But the other half of what you’re doing is you’re responding to everybody else that’s reading your response to that one star review. And as a business owner, I think sometimes what we do in business when things are not going right says more about our business than when things are going right. So what I try and teach business owners how to do is it’s almost like a PR damage control, but it’s like the way to write it is in a way that really makes the person who’s left the one star review feel seen, heard and acknowledged and understood and that you’re willing to make it right.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:23:11] That’s great. And then in terms of, you mentioned, sometimes you can even turn a one star review into a five star review. Say, is that about directing them in your response to talk with you privately, like send us an email? Or is that all happening in the public forum of the comments review section?
Karl Schwantes: [00:23:26] Yeah. So here’s the thing. Like the stuff that I teach people how to turn one star reviews into five star reviews is there’s a natural fear. Let’s just say you’re a restaurant and you say, look, hey, I was unhappy with the the pasta came out cold. And you say, look, I’m so sorry that you had that experience. We’re an Italian family. We love our pasta. We’d love to welcome you back. And here’s my email. Please let me know. I’d love to have the next meal on the house. The fear that most business owners have is that everyone’s going to read that and go, well, I’m just going to do the same thing to get a free meal. The reality is that almost never happens, right? But what people do is they say, you know what? This business owner really cares. And that’s what’s really important. So it’s this fear based that people have, rather than actually just operating from a place of authenticity and trying to do the best, absolute best you can by your clients.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:24:20] That was Karl Schwantes, serial entrepreneur, managing director of Xennox Diamonds and founder of Reputable. Thanks for joining us for this week’s episode. Follow Business Essentials Podcast across social media and head to www.BusinessEssentialsPodcast.au for more. Business Essentials is a SoundCartel podcast. Producers are Nick Schildberger, Nicole Goodman and myself. Technical production is by Pete Letts. I’m Grace Jennings-Edquist thanks for listening. We’ll bring you more business essentials next week.
