Shownotes
Episode 180 Frederick Dudek (Freddy D)
Employee engagement takes center field in this powerful conversation with John Guaspari, a former aerospace engineer turned legendary voice on leadership, customer value, and workplace culture. John reveals why most engagement initiatives fail and why respect is the real playbook behind high-performing teams.
Too many organizations chase the next management trend while ignoring the fundamentals. In this episode, John breaks down how respect, trust, and empowerment create an unstoppable internal culture—one where employees show up like die-hard sports fans. When people understand how their role impacts the customer, they stop acting like employees and start thinking like owners.
This episode is a locker-room talk for leaders who want higher performance, stronger retention, and customers who feel the difference every time they interact with your brand.
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Key Takeaways
- Respect is the foundation of employee engagement: Engagement isn’t a tactic—it’s the result of leaders consistently showing due consideration to their people.
- Empowerment requires psychological safety: People feel empowered only when they know mistakes won’t lead to public humiliation or punishment.
- Employees engage faster when they see customer impact: When back-office teams understand how they affect the customer, energy and ownership skyrocket.
- Trust compounds performance: Public criticism destroys trust; private coaching builds championship cultures.
- Culture is proven in moments of crisis:: The insurance company fire story shows how aligned teams respond like playoff veterans under pressure.
- Internal superfans create external superfans: When employees believe, customers feel it—and loyalty follows.
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Guest Bio:
John Guaspari is a management consultant, keynote speaker, and author of eight books, including If Engagement Is the What, Then Respect Is the How. With a 30+ year career helping organizations improve employee engagement and customer value, John is known for making complex ideas practical, human, and actionable. His work bridges leadership, culture, and hard business results.
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Freddy D’s Take
fundamentals that win championships. Respect isn’t soft. It’s the blocking and tackling of leadership. Miss it, and your team fumbles trust, empowerment, and engagement.
The stories John shared—from the insurance claim center fire to empowering frontline employees—prove one thing: culture shows up when it’s game time. This is exactly the type of strategy I help clients implement through my SUPERFANS Framework™ inside Prosperity Pathway coaching. Build internal belief first, and your customers will feel it every single time.
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The Action:
Show respect publicly, coach privately
Who: Business owners & leaders
Why: Respect builds trust, trust enables empowerment, and empowerment fuels engagement
How:
- Pause before reacting emotionally
- Address mistakes one-on-one
- Reinforce how roles impact customers
- Share positive stories that spread internally
Guest Contact
Connect with John Guaspari:
Website: https://johnguaspari.com
Resources & Tools
If Engagement Is the What, Then Respect Is the How – John’s latest book on leadership and culture
Customer Value Conversations – Framework for connecting employees to customer impact
This podcast is hosted by Captivate, try it yourself for free.
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- Honeywell
- Ninja Prospecting
- Raytheon
Copyright 2025 Prosperous Ventures, LLC
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
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Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy
Transcripts
If you can only do one thing, you should manifest respect in every way you can for everyone you can.
Intro/Outro:But I am the world's biggest super fan.
John Guaspari:You're like a super fan.
Intro/Outro:Welcome to the Business Superfans podcast. We will discuss how establishing business superfans from customers, employees and business partners can elevate your success exponentially.
Learn why these advocates are a key factor to achieving excellence in the world of commerce. This is the Business Superfans Podcast with your host, Freddy D. Freddy, Freddy.
Freddy D:Hey, super fans.
Freddy D:Superstar.
Freddy D:Freddy D. Here in this episode 180, we're joined by John G. A former aerospace engineer who made the sky a safer place by pivoting early in his career. And we're glad he did.
With both bachelor and master's degrees in aerospace engineering, John transitioned from technical work to the world of marketing, where his first book took off and launched a remarkable 30 year journey in management consulting.
Known for his ability to make complex technical concepts accessible to everyone, John has become a respected voice in the realms of customer value and employee engagement. His eighth and latest book, if Engagement is the what, Then Respect is the How Dives into what truly drives workplace connection and performance.
Freddy D:Welcome, John, to the Business Superfans podcast, the Service Provider's Edge. We had a great conversation before we started record some very similar backgrounds. Welcome to the show.
John Guaspari:Thank you. I'm very happy to be here. I appreciate the opportunity.
Freddy D:Before we start recording, we both started in the tech space way back when. It began in a little bit different roles.
But how did that take you to having your consulting business, working with a multitude of different businesses and then writing eight books?
John Guaspari:My background I have both bachelor's and master's degrees in aerospace engineering and I was an engineer for a couple of years. I realized I didn't much care to do it for a career. And if it's possible to evince Wisdom when you're 25 or 26 years old, I did.
When I remember thinking, I don't want to wait five years from now and discover that I'm married and have small children and I can't wait, I decided to quit and go down a different career path. I wound up marrying. I've always wanted to be a writer and I wrote some freelance things. But it wasn't enough to make a living.
So I took a job at Honeywell in their marketing communications department as a Swiss army knife. As a writer, I wrote product descriptions, marketing material, executive speeches. Whatever needed writing, I wrote.
The best thing about that job is that's where I met my future Wife. I then moved on to another company in a similar role. And I won't bore you with the details.
What was a very big deal at that company was the notion of total quality management. TQM movement had made landfall in the electronics industry and the company I worked for made automatic test equipment.
One of the tenets of the TQM movement was you really shouldn't have to test as much as you've been testing in the past. If you have processes that are robust and reliable, you shouldn't have to do a lot of testing.
We made testers, so this was a significant strategic import to us. Learn what you can about this stuff and see if we can figure out a way that we can navigate these water, these choppy waters more effectively.
And in the process of doing so, one of the things that struck me was another tenet of tqm, which is that quality is everybody's job, not just the job of the quality department. I saw that all the materials that were out there, books, seminars, training videos, tended to be aimed at quality professionals.
The books were 700 page tomes full of statistical process control. That had to be the core technology. But if everybody didn't need to know all that, I would describe it later on in my career.
I would say to people, I care a great deal about my health. I need to know my weight, my cholesterol level, my blood pressure, my doctor's phone number. I don't need medical text, I don't need a medical degree.
Similarly, there's a handful of things that people needed to know about TQM. They didn't need the PhD in quality management.
I saw an opportunity and I wrote a very short book, the idea of which was, in essence, to write the equivalent of weight, blood pressure, cholesterol level, aimed at everybody, and wrote it in a way that I hope would be engaging and fun to read. It turned out to be the right product at the right place at the right time, and it sold like crazy.
How that drew me into the consulting world was a couple of months after the book was published. I got laid off because the company I worked for was in trouble because of the TQM movement.
And the day after I got laid off, I got a phone call from someone saying, we're having our big quality conference in October. We need a keynote speaker. We loved your book. By any chance, are you available?
I took a couple of sheets of paper and rippled them in front of the phone. This is free Internet, free smartphone time by returning the pages of my calendar. And I said, yes, that date's available.
He didn't know is my next 10 years were available.
I gave the speech, which I gave other speeches and I developed a seminar and that led me to do consulting work which led to other books and so on and so forth. In retrospect, my new book that just came out a few months ago is called if Engagement Is the what, Then Respect Is the How.
It's only in retrospect that I realized that the topic all along has been engagement. How do you get employees engaged in the effort?
The definition of engagement that the proper definition is the extent to which employees will invest incremental effort and energy on the job no matter what the next big thing was. Whether it was tqm, next was re engineering. Then came customer focus, then came lean. There will always be a neck big thing coming along.
But in every case, the challenge the leader faces is we know the technology. How do we get my people to want to go along for the ride enthusiastically?
That's the path my career took from an engineering beginning to leadership development engagement.
Freddy D:Toward the end let's take a quick.
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S k o o l.com forward/ninja: Freddy D:Great backstory and you're absolutely right. Engagement is critical and really needs to be on all levels. In my mind, it needs to be from the management down to the team.
The team is in turn engaging with outside sources.
So they're dealing with contractors, they're dealing with suppliers, they're dealing with distributors, they're dealing with complementary businesses, and they're even dealing with ancillary businesses. So if they're not engaged, that comes across and you can't hide it, you can't fake it. And that affects momentum in an organization dramatically.
Both of us are on the kind of same page. We talk about it very different. The result is the same is you got to get everybody, what I call into a racing rowing boat.
Everybody has got a single oar and you got to get everybody in synchronization behind the mission. And once you accomplish that, that boat flies through the water. But until then, it doesn't even go in a circle.
It's just wobbling because nobody's in sync and nobody's engaged.
John Guaspari:In the middle of my consulting career, I spent a lot of time, I found that the best way to get employees highly engaged is to help them understand how what they do affects the customer. They could be in backroom functions, they may never see a customer.
What tends to happen is unless you take some time to help people understand how they affect the customer, they will tend to see themselves as drones.
I come in and I do my job and I pick up my paycheck and one way or another, that's going to find its way out to the customer in terms of inefficiencies.
On the plus side of it, I have many store many examples of getting people from backroom functions to understand how they affect the customer and their energy level goes through the roof. I always thought I was just a drawn back here. I see how I can bring value and I'm constantly looking for ways to bring more value.
When you got people thinking that way, you've hit the jackpot. The single most effective way to get people more highly engaged is, is to make them understand how what they do affects the customer.
Freddy D:I had somebody on the show, shared a really cool story was that they were talking to a janitor in the hospital and the janitor basically says, what's your role here? And he goes, I save lives. I make sure that the doctors have a room, that it's clean, that they can save lives.
Their whole mindset was they had their chest out and everything else.
According to the description, the guy was proud because he knew his job as a janitor, janitor was paramount because he had to keep the rooms clean for the safety. And so he helped his doctors save lives. Completely different mind shift.
John Guaspari:It would be very easy to go to a different hospital and find a different janitor and say, what's your job? I mop the floors, I empty the waste basket. That's task wise, that's what you do. But that's not your purpose. Let me hear an example.
We did some work, my business partner and I.
This goes back maybe 20 years, but we did some work with a medium sized property casualty insurance company that sold up and down the east coast of the us. Their business model was that they sold everything through independent agent. They viewed the independent agent as their customer.
Everything was around getting the independent agent to select them versus the four or five other insurance carriers the agent might carry. Engaging with them in a project whereby we trained.
It's been a while, so don't hold me to these numbers, but I think it was like 42 non traditional customer contact people, accountants, HR people, actuaries, how to conduct what we call value conversations with customers. Wasn't an interview, it wasn't a survey. Truly a conversation.
Learn how to ask questions, listen hard, let it go where it wants to go so the customer feels genuinely that they've been listened to. They wound up. We put these 42, three person teams, 14 different teams went out and visited again, conducted 120 of these value conversations.
So eight or nine each. We then pulled all that information together with them and we generated what we called their customer value statements.
Six statements were the crux of their business.
And then the chairman of the company and I went around and did a half day seminar at every facility for every employee and said, this is what you guys found out. And so this is how we're going to base our business. These six statements and so on.
One of the things they wound up doing from an operational point of view, our recommendation was they had been handling claims at the regional level. Thinking that local was better, we persuaded them to handle claims at a national claim center, leaving the regional offices free to handle the cases.
You don't want regional centers handling routine stuff. Let the national center handle routine stuff. The local sites.
The regional sites can be on site to handle a more personal touch and a more complicated thing. That worked really well. Postscript and story. About two years after they opened the national Claim center, it burned to the ground.
So instantly they have no claims processing capability. And the insurance business claims is the lifeblood of the business. Anybody listening to this podcast knows pay your insurance premiums.
Only time they have your attention is when you have a claim and they better come through. That is the moment of truth for that company. I remember talking to the president of the company a day after the burn down.
We're the ones who persuaded them to do this. I have to face the music and talk to him. And he said, yeah, it wasn't great.
And I got the news and I remember burying my head in my hands and I looked up in my doorway, there were people from hr Accounting Actuary and all those people who've gone out and talked to customers, heard what happened. How can we help? They all pitched in and helped set up a temporary claim center in the headquarters training room.
They were only down for three hours and he said that never would have happened had we not changed the mindset and had people really get up close and personal with customers and really engage with customers. What could have been a disastrous situation and turned out to be a proof statement of the validity of the work that they have done.
Freddy D:A couple of things took place there.
One is you created a super fan out of the president of that company because when that took place, that was his validation that it worked because the team stepped up. And more importantly, you created super fans out of the customers of that agency because they knew that stuff would be taken care of.
Because everybody going back to the racing rowboat was aligned on the mission. That was really the key thing. And everybody had buy in and they knew their importance and contribution to the aspect.
Because a lot of times, and I've seen it, and I'm sure you have too, people hire people and says, this is your role, this is your responsibility. This is what we do. See a by you screwed up here. I told you, I trained you last week. Why are you making these type of mistakes right here?
More importantly, they do it in front of everybody. So everybody got chastised out.
John Guaspari:I manage people. I hope I haven't done it quite to that extent. I maybe not wasn't as patient as I could have been. At times you bring up a great.
Freddy D:Point because we get caught up and then we're in the moment instead of taking quick time out. Let me handle this. Let me take a deep breath before I react and then step into it.
Because I shared that story because I was involved with the company. That's what they did. And they were wondering every 90 days people were quitting because they couldn't handle the way that was being handled.
And more importantly, when you're chastising somebody in public, you're really chastising the whole team. And that turns that culture into garbage.
John Guaspari:In my book I talk about four intangibles, one of which is engagement. But the others are empowerment, trust and respect. So treating a person like that is disrespectful.
Reaming them out in front of everybody else is disrespectful. What does that do to trust? They're going to say the definition of respect that I give in the book is giving due consideration to others.
And the word do is in there because I'm not saying you need to to throw rose petals in everybody's path. You have a business to run. But did you stop to think about what you said or didn't say? What you did or didn't do affected others.
And you said it a minute ago. Take a breath, take a beat before you blow up.
Because you're going to buy a lot of bad will in the next 30 seconds if you just let your emotions run wild, right? And you're going to get people talking. You're going to erode respect, you're going to erode trust.
If you don't have respect and trust, you're never going to get to empowerment. If you don't have empowerment, you're not going to get to engagement. Can I give you an example of empowerment?
Freddy D:Yes.
John Guaspari:It's another one of the big ones. People talk about empowerment all the time.
I was doing work for a large company and they had just completed a survey in which they asked their employees the extent to which they felt empowered. If you see me reaching over here, I'm petting a cat so that he doesn't jump up in front on my desk and block the camera.
They had just done this survey about the extent to which people felt empowered. And the results came back and the results are very disappointing. So this is a meeting of the president, his direct reports, and their direct reports.
This is about 100, 120 people, a multibillion dollar company. So these are high level people. The results were disappointing. So the president got up and he said he was a good guy, smart guy.
He got up and he said, I need you folks to understand something. You are all empowered. I need you to go back now and make sure all of your people understand that they are all empowered.
I was sitting in the back of the room and I could see in the front row, one of his vice presidents started to put his hand up and then pulled it down. And then right after that session, there was a coffee break. So I went up to that guy and I said, you look like you wanted to say something.
He said, yeah, I did. What was it you wanted to say?
He said, what I wanted to say was, we can tell people till we're blue in the face that they're empowered, but if they don't feel empowered, they're not empowered. I said, why didn't you say it? He said, oh, no, too risky.
So think of the irony of that, he didn't feel empowered to say to his boss that I don't think your approach to empowerment is right. If you can't get over those kinds of hurdles. He wasn't empowered.
And the definition of empowerment that I give is a feeling of safety while exercising judgment. If you have a decision to make on the job, you make the decision and things go south. That happens.
Will your boss say to you, that didn't quite work out the way we had hoped. Let's do a forensic analysis of what happened and what might you have overlooked. How might we avoid this in the future?
That's good management, good leadership. If, on the other hand, the reaction of the boss is to rip your face off, that's not a good reaction.
Freddy D:It's going to transcend to the whole team. And all of a sudden you've got everybody talking behind the boss's back. Fly like rocket.
And people are going to be looking for other jobs right off the bat because of the fact that they're going, I don't want to be that person that gets her chewed out in that fashion.
John Guaspari:And I'm an engineer by training and by disposition. If you had told me that I was going to spend the bulk of my career in this, quote, soft stuff, I would have said, you're nuts.
I look at this and there's nothing soft about this. People, people leave. It's costly to hire people. Institutional knowledge walks out the door. Hiring people is expensive. It affects the business.
It's good for the business if you have people who stay, who are engaged, who like their work. And there's nothing at all soft about this.
Freddy D:You're right. Because I was running a company a couple years ago, and talk about empowerment.
There was a lady there that worked at the company and she got chastised a couple of times in public, and she was crying and debating. She ended up having some. Some depression challenges.
So there's days that she just couldn't make it to the office because one, she was already dreading the fact that this might happen again. And it just happened the next day. All of a sudden, she went mia and she was really looking to quit. And she actually came into my office.
I was director of operations at the time. And she basically said, I'm leaving, I'm quitting. I said to hang on, wait a minute, time out. So we had a talk and some things took place.
And I became running the company as general manager. There was days where she still had some tough days.
I turned around and put her in charge of a particular department the opposite of what you would do and put her in charge and gave her more responsibility. She all of a sudden started to perk up, and then she would be hesitant, but she goes, I got an idea.
I'm not sure if you bring it over here and took a look at it. Go run with it. She ended up really changing that whole department, growing that department, and her whole outlook to herself transformed.
An issue came up and we got scammed. She's the one that got scammed on it. And she didn't catch it. Nobody caught it. Accounting guy caught it.
Someone called up and said they needed some work done and they were going to send over a cashier's check. It was for more than the amount that was quoted for the project because they said they were going to do a second project.
There was money covered for both projects because they got a quote for both. We got the cashier's check deposited. She did the work, called them up and says, okay, we're ready. The work is done. And they call us. You know what?
Things have changed. We're not going to go with that second project. We want a refund of the difference that we sent. It turned out that was a bogus casher's check.
And so the account went negative. We had enough money. I don't mean it went negative. We lost some money on the deal because we had to pay contractors to do the work, et cetera.
So she was all in distraught. I says, hey, you know what? It's not the end of the world. You didn't do anything wrong. You didn't know. Our accounting guy caught it.
It was something small, fishy. Why did they want their money back instead of saying et cetera? We figured it out. I didn't ruin her day.
She felt horrible about it on her own, but I basically still lifted her up. The bottom line is you didn't know. You did what you thought was right. Best for the company. You were looking out for the company and we all learned.
This is the first time it's happened. We'll put in some mechanism. What do you suggest we do? I turn around. What do you suggest we do to prevent this happening? So I empowered her more.
She's still a super fan. We don't work at the same company anymore. I help scale up by a million bucks in a year and then we can get it sold. But she's still a super fan of me.
We're still friends today and we're talking.
Freddy D:Over a year plus later and go.
John Guaspari:All the way back.
I think I'm A big believer if the goal is to have employees engaged, because there's a lot of reasons which shows higher levels of employee engagement lead to all kinds of good business productivity, profitability, employee retention rates, et cetera. They said, what's the one thing that a leader can do, a business should do?
If you can only do one thing, you should manifest respect in every way you can for everyone you can. Because that has people pay attention. People see it giving due consideration to the others. And you treated her as a human being, not a cipher.
You understood that stuff happens. You could have had a bad day and made a mess of the situation, made it even worse, but you did.
And instead of it being a bad story, it turned out to be a good story. People probably said, hey, I like the way Freddie handle that. This is the kind of place I want to be.
Freddy D:That's how you call superfans. You create superfans internally, then their job is to create superfans externally. And it all begins internally.
John Guaspari:I told the story about the insurance company with the fire, and the people said they got the temporary claim center set up. The people that they viewed as customers, the independent agents up and down the east coast, they knew that the claim center had burned down.
They were wowed by the fact they called the president of the company or their local contacts, said, I'm amazing. Guys were able to do this. It was transparent to us. He said, it's got some work we had done to change the culture around here.
What could have been a negative. They said their customers now had become super fans because now their customers said, that's the kind of place I want to do business with.
They've got some secret sauce that they were able to take this disaster and make it invisible to me because that's all that mattered to me. The agent on Main street selling an auto policy to some jabroni down the block. I just want to make sure that he gets paid his auto claim.
And you got it done. Even though you're building it burned down. A lot of loyalty goes with that.
Freddy D:That's how you create super fans of those customers.
John Guaspari:Those.
Freddy D:That's your best sales team. That's why I keep. That's why I talk about it. If you transform, the way I look at it, we're on the same page.
Is if you transform just 15% of your entire business ecosystem. Let's go real conservative.
Number 15% of that into a sports team with the super fans with the faces painted, the jerseys, the banners, the tailgate parties. Those are. They're promoting their Sports team.
If you can transform 15% of your ecosystem into super fans of your business, imagine what happens if that 15% is promoting your business to everybody they know it explodes and it didn't cost you any money.
John Guaspari:Internal to the company, when a situation arises, somebody handles it really poorly or handles it really well, the story spreads and you can take that. And this is not soft stuff. This is in the interest of hard business results.
You can get really good results or you can make a mess of things really easily.
Freddy D:I look back over my career and the success was really, as I mentioned before we started recording was I recognized and empowered sales teams in other countries to represent my products.
So I was out there with them for 10 days at the trade show in Milan or Hanover or Mannheim and in those different towns, I was in the trenches with them. Here I am director of global sales and I'm sitting in a booth with them talking to prospective customers and then taking them out to dinner.
I took out the owners of the agencies, but I spent my time with the sales team because that was the front line.
John Guaspari:One other little postscript to the story about the insurance company. I told you that we trained 42 people to do these value conversations.
The first of these training sessions of the these people to do the value conversations was to take place in Syracuse, New York. The day before. I was in Philadelphia on other business. That day and night, massive snowstorm hit Philadelphia. The airport was closed.
There was no way I was going to fly from Philadelphia to Syracuse. I was on. I don't know if they still have them, the phones, banks where you tried to get rental cars in those days, no rental cars.
I finally found one. So I got a rental car. I drove through a blizzard from Philadelphia to syracuse from like 8pm to 5.
Checked into my hotel, just flopped down on the bed. I don't think I even undressed. I just closed my eyes for about an hour, got a wake up call. Remember those wake up calls?
I had to meet these people for breakfast. I didn't start out by saying I drove all night to be here.
But I made sure that worked its way into the conversation because I wanted to make sure they understood that I wasn't going to let them down. I also knew that story would spread, that they would tell their colleagues.
That consultant that was working with us drove all night from Philadelphia to be with us. I knew that was another bit of leverage. I don't want to sound cynical, but I also, by the way, knew I have no choice.
I couldn't say, sorry, can't make it I knew I had to do everything I could to get there. I'm not a hero for having made the drive. You'd have done the same thing and everybody listening to this would do the same thing.
But that was another opportunity to demonstrate that I'm not going to let you guys down.
Freddy D:When it's game time, you show up and that's really the bottom line. That's how I look at it. It's game time and got to step into the game. You and I could share a lot of good stories of that.
I think we overlook some of these basic fundamentals because at the end of the day, a lot of it's become transactional in the sense we talked before we started recording. You go to the website, you go look for some software, some technology, you give it a try, you get trial. You typically don't hear from anybody.
And if you like it or if you don't like it, if you're out of there, you quit. Just unsubscribe. And if they would just incorporate a little bit of some relationship building and some reaching out completely be different game.
John Guaspari:One more quick example.
Freddy D:Yep.
John Guaspari:You baseball fan by chance I'm a.
Freddy D:Cubs guy, but I laugh and share the story that here's a perfect example of superfans. Those guys have had super fans forever and it took him 100 years to win a world championship.
But those superfans, once you create super fans, they stick with you through thick and thin.
John Guaspari:The jam of the Red Sox became the jam of the Cubs. And he broke the curse in Boston. He broke the curse in Chicago. I was invited to give a talk at a quality conference for Raytheon.
I got a call in like March of:Are you available on thus and such a date to give the keynote after dinner talk on customer focused quality? Because they knew that's what I had done a lot of in previous years. Do you still do that sort of thing? Yes, I do.
Yes, I am. We did. October of:Both teams needed Theo Epstein to be the gm. My topic was customer focused quality. I was supposed to talk after dinner. My talk was scheduled to go from 7 to 7:45pm Dallas time.
The first pitch of the World Series which was being played in Boston that night against the Cardinals, supposed to be at 8:35 Eastern Time. Or 7:35 Dallas Time, or 10 minutes before I was scheduled to be done. So I get introduced. I said thank you very much. My topic is customer focused.
I should add it's a Boston based company, they're a worldwide company, but they got a lot of Boston, New England employees. And even though the meeting was in Dallas, there was a large contingent from Boston and New England at this meeting.
Freddy D:I got an idea where this is going.
John Guaspari:My topic is customer focus quality. You are my customers. I know you want to see the first pitch of the World Series, which is at 7:35. You have my word I will be done by 7:30.
I got a huge ovation before I had said more than those 25 words. 7:30 came. I said, thank you very much for your time and your attention. Go have a beer. Go socks.
They all streamed out of the ballroom and made beeline to the bar, to their rooms to watch the game. I turned to the guy who was sitting next to me on the dais, the guy who had hired me. I said, I hope it's okay cut 15 minutes off of this.
But I think it was the right thing to do. He said, no, that was perfect. That was exactly the right thing to do.
And I did it because by then I was comfortable enough in my skin to know it was the right thing to do. Right early in my career I never would have done that. But there was a case where now those people thought that guy gets it.
By doing that, you create superfans out of those people. I could probably just have shut up then and it would have made the point about customer focused quality.
Everything that followed didn't matter because that made a bigger impact to my customer focus quality than anything I said after.
Freddy D:Because you proved it.
John Guaspari:Lived it.
Freddy D:So that's great conversation. John, as we come to the end here, how can people find your book.
John Guaspari:And how can people find they can find me website. It's john gasparry.com Will there be show notes? John gasparry.com is my website.
My books are there also on the website I've written over the years hundreds and hundreds of articles. They're not all there, but there's a good cross section of articles about leadership, about customer value, about engagement.
I also did a while I was on the road so much just to keep my sanity. I wrote a humor column for my local newspaper for about three years. And there's some samples of those that I think hold up pretty well.
People might enjoy reading those. There's on the website is email address if people want to reach out to me.
Freddy D:We'll make sure that's in the show. Notes. Thank you so much for your time. Great conversation. We definitely love to have you on the show down the road again.
John Guaspari:Thank you Freddie. I really appreciate the opportunity. I enjoyed it as well.
Freddy D:What really stood out in today's conversation with John is the simple but powerful truth. Engagement doesn't start with tactics. It starts with respect.
When leaders consistently show respect, create trust, and help people understand how their work truly impacts the customer, something incredible happens. Employees start acting like doers and start showing up as owners.
When that shift happens internally, it's only a matter of time before customers feel it too. For service based business owners, this matters more than ever. You don't scale super fans with systems alone.
You build them by empowering people, creating psychological safety, and aligning everyone around a shared purpose. That's how cultures are built, loyalty is earned and businesses grow predictably and profitably.
If you enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss future episodes backed by insights that help you build stronger teams and lasting client relationships. And before you go Join the Entrepreneur Prosperity Hub on Skool.
It's free to join and you'll get your free Service Provider Prosperity Playbook at skool sk o l.com eprosperityhub Inside you'll find tools, weekly growth plays and live virtual networking events designed to help you connect, collaborate and build business that runs smoothly, predictably and profitably.
Freddy D:Thanks for tuning in today.
Freddy D:I'm grateful you're part of the Business Superfans movement. Every listen, every action brings you closer to building your own superfans. Be sure to subscribe to the show.
We've got another great guest coming up focused on what really moves the needle for service based entrepreneurs. I'll talk to you in the next episode. Remember, one action, one stakeholder, one superfan closer to lasting prosperity.
Intro/Outro:We hope you took away some useful knowledge from today's episode of the Business of Super Fans podcast. Join us on the next episode as we continue guiding you on your journey to achieve flourishing success in business.
