Transcript: Rob Markey on Leadership, Customer Loyalty, and Lessons from University School

Good morning, and welcome back to the show. We are here with Mr. Rob Markey, author, speaker, podcast host, and management consultant at Bain & Company. How are you, Mr.

Markey? I'm very well, thank you. How are you? We're doing great.

We're doing great. Yeah, busy day, but hanging in there. Well, Mr. Markey, something amazing about university school is the unique journey that everyone has to get there.

It's different for everyone. And so for you, what was your journey to U.S. like? Well, I was very young. I came to U.S. in first grade.

And so what I remember of it is, you know, taking the entrance test. And I remember showing up, you know, as a little kid to this new school and thinking, man, this is a strange place compared to where I was in public school for a kindergarten. You know, looking back... Looking back at your time at university school, whether it was the lower school, the middle school, or the high school, what really stands out the most?

Like, was there a specific moment, teacher experience that had a really major impact on your life and even shaped the way that you think about your life today? Well, there were a lot, right? I mean, I was there for 12 years. So there were a ton of things that were impactful and that ended up being a part of who I am today.

I think, like, U.S. instills a set of values in you, at least it aspires to, and in many cases it works. You know, the motto of responsibility, loyalty, consideration, here I am, what is this, 55 years after I first heard that. And I still think about it sometimes. Like, it's an important part of the experience because I feel like when I was there, like, I was at least, you know, the school lived its values.

I had some amazing teachers. I probably won't do justice to the primary and middle school teachers, the high school teachers, obviously the recency bias and the fact that I was just old enough to remember. But I had Rick Hawley for a bunch of classes. I had Mr.

Sanders, who was the longtime Spanish teacher. I had a guy named Rob Thomas for English. And then I took some elective courses with him and he was a great mentor and advisor. So the experiences with individual teachers who were really impactful.

And then just, I think U.S. instilled in me a curiosity and a love for learning that became important in learning. And that's how I got my college education and my business career. Yeah, that's great. Well, I have an interesting question.

Back when you went to U.S., how much of the curriculum did you spend maybe outside or working with your hands versus just traditional in the classroom? Back then, it was very little. I mean, if I think about it, you know, I didn't work with with Terry Harmon, for example. I did not do that.

I did not do that. I did not do that. I didn't work in the woodshop. And back then, we didn't have as many experiences, experiential learning opportunities outside of the classroom.

The thing that was probably most prominent in my experience that way was the, well, there was two things. It was the extracurricular stuff I did. I was the photo editor. And then the editor of, I don't know, like maybe the, the, the print, like, I don't know, my sister's own studio.

And then I did of the Maybian, the yearbook. And that was a lot of time outside of the classroom, but, and a lot of learning. And then I also did a Stranod fellowship with one of my classmates, my senior year, where we actually traveled around the country, visiting other independent boys' schools and doing a sort of compare and contrast versus U.S. in the eighth grade. That was, it was just really, there were very few of those opportunities at that time.

I think there are a lot more now, but it was a really impactful part of the experience. You know, what's one of those memories from your time at U.S. that really kind of sticks with you? Maybe like a funny moment or challenge you overcame or just some event that made a lasting impact on your life? I mean, again, there's so many.

I'll give you one funny one. When I was in seventh or eighth grade, I can't remember which, I got called into the office of the, or, you know, like the classroom of the, I think he was one of the science teachers who was responsible for discipline for our class. And he showed me something on a piece of paper and he said, do you recognize this? Now, what it was is something that a friend of mine had told me.

He said, do you recognize this? Now, what it was is something that a friend of mine had told me. And he thought it was very funny. And I had agreed.

And I wrote on the wall over the urinal in room eight, which is the bathroom in the middle, in the lower school, lower campus. And it said something like, gentlemen, in your hands lies the future of our nation. And so when I saw that on that piece of paper, I don't think that the teacher thought that I had written it. But I instantly was like, oh yeah, I read it.

That's a great one. You know, were there any subject activities going on to your time, kind of the high school and going forward? Were there any subject or activities at U.S. that really sparked your interest in business, leadership, or customer experience? And who were some of your biggest mentors or role models during high school, whether at U.S. or then even beyond a college?

And how did they influence your journey? Good question. You know, I think that probably my involvement with the Maybian, which started when I was in my ninth grade, my freshman year, gave me a real interest in communication and marketing. And that then led to like a summer job that was in marketing.

And that then got built on by another summer job that I was a bellman in a hotel. There was, I don't know if there still is, a Marriott hotel in Beachwood near 271. And during the summer, I worked as a bellman there. And I did that for two different summers, the year after my senior year at U.S. and the year between my freshman and sophomore year at Brown.

And I think in, and I'd also worked for my grandfather, who had a meat company. That all those experiences kind of led me down this path of having an appreciation for building relationships with customers, both on an individual level as a bellman, on a kind of mass level as working in advertising and marketing and thinking about the Maybian and how to make it appeal to a lot of people. And then on kind of an intermediate level, working for my grandfather, who had this philosophy about how to build long-term relationships with his customers. There were restaurants and hotels and stuff like that.

And I think a lot of that was kind of encouraged and supported and informed by relationships I had with professors or teachers at U.S. Like there was a guy named Phil Thornton who taught calculus and he had been an engineer and worked in business for a long time before he became a teacher. There was a teacher who was the advisor to the Maybian who kind of had a really good perspective on career and things like that. So those things all kind of came together to give me an appreciation for those things that then led to, some career choices.

And moving past high school and into college, what led you to choose your college? I know you mentioned you went to Brown and then past that, what led you to choose your major? Well, Brown was an interesting one because my father was very much against me going to Brown. He had gone to Brown and he graduated in 1961.

He thought Brown was not good enough for me. He really wanted me to go to Harvard. And I went on a school visit trip during my junior year, spring break with a couple of friends. We visited all these colleges.

And during that process, I was looking for people who disliked their school so that I could understand. Because you can hear all the great things about a college. You can, you can read about college. Okay.

So he wanted me. about them. They put their best foot forward in all the information sessions. I wanted to know when people don't like it, why don't they like it? And so at all these colleges, I was able to easily find a few people who could tell me what the real dirt was on that school.

At Brown, it was impossible. People just loved it. They loved it. And the worst things they could say about it were things that I was like, oh, that's appealing to me.

And so over my father's objection, I applied and I refused to apply to the schools he wanted me to go to just so that I had no choice. You asked what led me to choose my major. One of the things that I had developed at U.S. was a love of writing. And I think that's one of the great things about the way the education at U.S. was structured was that there was a ton of writing.

You got a lot of feedback on it. You came to college very well prepared. But I came with a sort of passion for it. So I wanted for a while to be like a creative writing major.

The problem was that at Brown at the time, it was very hard to get into those creative writing courses because the ratio of students to professors is really low. You couldn't, you know, a professor can't read and give feedback on a gazillion pieces of writing every week. And you have to write a lot in these writing courses. So they just limited the enrollment and I couldn't get into enough.

And so when I had to actually lock in a major, like there was no choice left, I was staring at the requirements for all the different majors. And I was like, oh, computer science, I like that. But that requires all these courses and I can't do comparative literature because that's too many courses. I was like, well, econ, econ, I can't do that.

I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't do that.

I can't do that. Because I've taken enough courses and the requirements actually aren't that rigorous. So I ended up being an econ major almost by default. You know, as a high school student, did you ever envision like kind of the career path and like that idea that you have today?

Or did your career path even past college evolve in ways you just didn't expect? I had no idea what I was going to do after college. I think that my, my father was a, was a corporate attorney and he had clients who are kind of ran from small businesses to medium and even a couple of big businesses. And I got a little through him, I got a lens into what business people do.

And, you know, he had a lot of friends who were business owners. And stuff. And then my grandfather owned a business, right? So I kind of had this sense that I wanted to do something in business and being a overconfident, somewhat arrogant person.

I was like, I'm going to run a big company one day. And so that was kind of my, my hope at some point. I don't know if that was right out of college or later. But what, what happened?

What happened is I was working part-time for IBM. At the time, IBM was a really, really hot company, like a hard company to get a job with. They were, they had a great training program. They were really big.

Like, kind of think about what, what it might be like to, to want to work at Apple today. That's kind of what IBM was like. And so I had this part-time job and a summer job there and they kept me on. And, um, it turned out that a couple, A couple of the folks who ran my division of IBM went to run another company that was based in Southern Ohio.

It was called LexisNexis. And it was, you know, this was before the internet existed. It was an online computer-aided legal research company. So they had all of the history, like all of the legal decisions from the Supreme Court and appellate courts and, you know, all the way back to. the 17 and 1800s, that you could search and get immediate access to, which was a massive improvement in productivity.

And so these guys from IBM, from my division, had gone to run it. And one of them showed up on campus and happened to be in the career services office to do interviews on a day I was in the career services office. They used to have all the job descriptions that you could sign up for in these big notebooks, these three-ring notebooks. And I was paging through looking for investment bank and consulting jobs.

And I overheard this guy say to the greeter, the receptionist, hey, I have a pretty empty schedule of interviews. Why don't you send students down for practice interviews? And I had heard of this company because my dad was a lawyer. And I was like, yeah, I'll go do a practice interview.

And then it turned out he worked in the division of IBM I was working in, and he knew my boss, and that turned into my job. Like I went and worked in Dayton, Ohio for this company for a couple of years. Turned out to be a rough experience for me, but a good learning experience. And it kind of set in motion this vision I had of eventually becoming a...

A business leader, like a CEO or something. So when I went to business school, I went knowing I did not want to go into consulting or iBanking. I wanted to go work in real companies because I had done that before. And the reason I ended up at Bain in consulting was because I was in my summer job between years of business school.

It was a chemical company. My... My... My office mate was somebody who shared, we were in the same section at business school.

And like halfway through the summer, she was like, Rob, I know you say you don't want to be a consultant, but you're just wrong. Like you are a consultant. You belong at Bain and Company. That's where you belong.

And I'm going to prove it to you. And I owe my career to her because she dragged me kind of kicking and screaming to meet a bunch of folks from Bain. And I ended up going. And then with the intent of like, yeah, I'll stay.

I'll stay either until they fire me or, you know, a couple of years and then I'll go work in a real company again. And I just, I think I forgot that I was supposed to leave because I'm still there 35 years later. Yeah. In those early jobs, were there any unexpected skills that you had to kind of develop quickly that they didn't teach you in school?

Well, I think, I think there were some good things that I was well prepared for. Let me start there. There is a lot, there is a tremendous need to communicate in written form in business, maybe more than people recognize or use sometimes. And being an effective communicator in writing has always been hugely advantageous.

And I think US and Brown, but, you know, both really prepared me well on that. And it, Part of it is because when you're writing and writing in a structured way, you're forced to clarify your own thinking and organize it in a logical form that exposes misconceptions or, or logic flaws or things like that. And so it forces you to actually think in a more rigorous way when you have to write it down. So that, that, that was one really good thing.

And another good thing is I think both US, Brown and then, and then my experience in business school, um, helped prepare me for verbal communication, you know, for being articulate in, in reasonably logical as a storyteller and as a communicator. I think those are probably the most important things that I learned where I think I, I learned on the job much more, um, was the prioritization. Um, there's an infinite number of things you can do in any given day. And there's a lot of pressure to do things that aren't really going to end up being super valuable.

So having the self-confidence to choose the handful of things you're going, to do, and to say no to the things that you're not going to do turns out to be a massive, massively important skill. I think having a heavy workload in, in high school actually helps you learn how to prioritize, you know, doing that with other activities and sports is even better. Um, but even all of that doesn't come close to what it's like when you are in your, you know, say late twenties, early thirties, you're not going to be able to do the things that you're not going to do. Maybe you're married and you have a young kid and you have a demanding job with all kinds of people reporting to you.

Like if you don't have the ability to prioritize, you will melt down. What are your best tips for prioritizing? Because I know Charlie and I, we have all these clubs and activities and we always get these new ideas. They seem great.

Um, so we want to do them, but what's your best advice for prioritizing? Um, well, first of all, I think as a, as a young person, I would, I recommend something I recommended to my son and actually he, he likes a lot. Um, there's a book that's reasonably old these days called the seven habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey. And whether you read the whole book or you just get the gist of it is less important than the basic, the core fundamental, um, point, which is unless you have clarity about what you're trying to accomplish, it's hard to prioritize.

So setting goals, being clear about where, what your objective is, is the starting point. And that can be done on a macro level and it can be done on a micro level. Macro, you know, there's a certain set of things I want to accomplish in my career. And even, you know, in this last few years of my career, I have a couple of things that I really want to accomplish.

And I have to keep reminding myself of that because those things, nobody's, going to hold me to that. Like it's just self-motivated. And so all the pressure to do other things is going to drag me away from that. Then there's the micro level, which is, um, today I have this step that I've figured out I need to do eventually on this path to that longer goal.

And how am I going to, how am I going to choose to do that versus something that comes from another goal? Like, I don't know, I have to, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I want to make my podcast better. And there's a certain amount of invest time investment I need to put into that. So how do I balance those two things against each other and against the inbound flow, a flood of emails that I get asking me to do things or the demand I have from a client to be in a certain place at a certain time.

That's, that's where the, that's where you, you, you have honestly invest the time and energy in building your confidence, confidence through repetition. But, but start, I mean, headline, start with the objective. What am I trying to do? And what are the important steps to getting there?

Even if they're not urgent. You know, during your time at Bain Company, we talk about that culture and that approach to the culture. When you think about U.S., I mean, you brought up that responsibility, loyalty, and consideration. That idea kind of stands strong.

Was there anything about the culture or the approach to it at Bain Company that you really just drew you in and really kept you there for how long you've been? Yeah, there, there are a number of things. One of the things I developed when I was in business school was a framework for how I thought about what, what I wanted out of my career choice. And what I, what I came up with was I, I, number one, I want to be in a place where the work I do, creates real value in the world.

Like I want to be in the place where I can, knowing what I know, what I, what my skills are, what I'm capable of. I want to be in the place where I can create the most value in the world. Number two, I want to be in a place where the velocity of learning is such that I will be in a position to add orders of magnitude, more value in the future. So I want to be in a place where I'm learning and growing.

And number three, I want to be in a place where I can create the most value in the world. Number three, I want to be in a place where I like and trust the people that I'm working with every day. That kind of balance, those three things is actually hard to find. What I think about Bain, what, what matches up about Bain for me in that is number one, the, the firm was founded on the, this sort of saying results, not reports.

And it's ethos is about delivering impact and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, measurable results, measurable change. Right. That's the thing. That's, that's what motivates me at its core.

So check. And second thing is the, the culture of the firm is built around developing people. And it's specifically there, there are parts of the culture, some of them, even at the, in the early days, they were unspoken. Now we kind of recognize them, but we have a saying now, like a Bainy never lets another Bain. fail.

And it's recognition of the fact that if somebody asks you for help on something and you are in a position to help them, you just do it. You figure out how to do it. Or if somebody is struggling, instead of criticizing them, you help them succeed. That helps accelerate learning.

And that again, check. And then finally, the people at Bain are people. And the clients I've been fortunate enough to work with are actually people that I trust. I like them.

I have enjoyed being with them. So part of the reason I never left over 35 years is because all three of those things have always been true for me in this place. I've never felt like there was somewhere I could go where I could have more impact. I've never felt like I would learn more somewhere else or like there would be a place where I would trust and like the people I'm working with more.

Yeah, that's amazing. So consulting, as I understand it, you get to work with a lot of different companies and clients. If that's true, how do you like that aspect of the job of being able to kind of learn from and see different companies and not just being stuck into one field? Well, I think when you're young, when you're in this stage of your life where you're choosing careers, there's this appeal to consulting that comes from this idea that it's not going to be boring.

You're going to be doing all these different things and seeing all these different companies. And it's a little bit like shopping around for industries and things like that. And so in a way, there's a comfort in not choosing a particular company to go work in, but getting exposure to lots of them. That's not...

Wrong. But actually, I think for me, some of the most rewarding experiences I've had have been in long-term client relationships where I got to work in the same company. I had one client that I worked with on and off, but mostly on for 20 years. And what was so rewarding about that was that I got to see the impact of the work that I did.

And I got to learn which things I recommended worked. Which ones kind of sort of worked, but needed to be adapted. And which ones were just abject failures. And there's a tremendous amount of satisfaction that comes from that and a lot of learning.

So I don't think that my enjoyment of this job has been as much... Has been derived as much from the variety that I have. It's actually... In terms of different companies and things like that.

It's been the ability to master something. Like, I've gotten to do variations on similar projects over and over and over again, many times in many different environments. And by doing that, I've been able to become a real expert in certain things. And that is tremendously rewarding and validating.

And then people come... Instead of me beating down the door trying to get into places, I've been able to become a real expert in certain things. I've been able to become a real expert in certain places. I have clients come to me and ask, can you help me on this thing?

That, again, very rewarding to feel like, hey, people value what I do. So it's a little bit of a misconception, not entirely, but a little bit of a misconception that the enjoyment of consulting comes from the variety. You know, one of your many books, The Ultimate Question 2.0, right, has reshaped how some businesses think about customer loyalty and NPS. What inspired you to write and write about this?

And looking back, how have the concepts in the book held up over time? And could you kind of explain some of that book? Yeah. So first of all, I should just...

For people who don't know, NPS, that acronym stands for Net Promoter Score. And it's actually something that was developed by a colleague of mine, my mentor, who, by the way, grew up in Cleveland. And Fred, had this idea that we should measure customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in a really rigorous way. And in the 90s, we developed this thing that we called the loyalty acid test.

It was a multi-question kind of index that created this model that you could use to identify how loyal a customer was and predict the extent to which they were going to be. And what that meant was they would stay longer with a company, buy more, tell their friends, be lower cost to serve, things that make a company more profitable. I was very deep in helping develop that. And then in the late 90s, Fred got exposed to a company called Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

And the CEO of that company said, Fred, this loyalty acid test you have is too complicated. We use one question, one question, and we get everything we need in order to drive the kind of improvement that has made us the fastest growing, most profitable rental car company in the U.S. And so Fred became convinced that this single question based metric was the way to go. Now, I was leading, I had founded the customer practice at Bain, and so Fred was now, now my mentor was actually working for me.

And I was like, no way, this is not a good idea, it's too simple, it's not a good, and it turned out, I was wrong, he was right, the simplicity was actually what made it powerful. So we spent several years helping companies adopt this radicalism. It was a radically simple approach to gathering feedback from customers. Basically what the net promoter score is, is you ask customers, how likely would you be to recommend this company to a friend or a colleague or relative?

And you give them a zero to 10 scale, zero, not at all going to recommend, 10, extremely likely to recommend. And it just turns out empirically, the customers who give nines and tens generally are... Are very valuable. They do stay longer, buy more, tell their friends.

People who give zero through six do just the opposite. And in fact, some of them are really unhappy. Like they say bad things about you. And then the sevens and eights are what we call passively satisfied.

Like they're fine, but they're not gonna go convince anybody to do business with you. Well, in the early days, we got a lot of companies that we were working with to adopt it. American Express, General Electric. Lego.

A bunch of really great companies. And then some companies adopted it and found that it just wasn't working. Now in the meantime, Fred was writing articles and doing all this stuff. And I was just doing work with these companies.

And I developed a perspective on what made the successful companies successful. Because I had this ability to see all the work we were doing across the board. Yeah. And that's what led us to our firm in this area.

I went to Fred and said, hey, we should change the name of NPS to stand for Net Promoter System, not Net Promoter Score. Because there's all these other things you need to do in order to make use of this metric. And so that led to us writing this book, The Ultimate Question 2.0, which laid out what the Net Promoter System is. And contrary to what we expected, it ended up being like this huge bestseller all over the world.

I ended up spending three and a half years traveling around the world, talking to companies about how to implement it and working with clients. And it just, it kind of became, it took off beyond anything we could have imagined. Now, 75, 80% of the Fortune 1000 companies say that they measure their net promoter score in some significant way. And I don't know, it's just, it's become the way people tend to gauge their relationships with their customers.

Do you think that the findings you found back then still hold true today? Or if you wrote an updated version, would you change anything? I'd change a bunch of things. Back then, I still believed that a customer feedback-based, like a survey-based metric could serve as a, under the right conditions, could serve as a useful incentive or basis for evaluating the performance of, you know, managers and customer service representatives and things like that.

Over time, I became convinced that there are no circumstances under which that's a good idea in the long run. So I would change that. Second thing is, the world has changed in some important ways. Back then, it was novel.

It was new to send out emails and have people provide feedback in surveys that were executed on the web. Then it became novel to do that on smartphones. Now, your inbox is bombed with requests to give feedback. And it's ridiculous.

Like, there's just too much. So response rates are reasonably low in most situations. Today, what we do is we actually recommend that our clients develop what we call synthetic feedback to supplement the feedback that they get directly from customers. What we do is we create sophisticated models using machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence to predict or estimate what a customer would have said if they responded to the survey.

So how likely they would be to recommend and why they would be likely or unlikely, and what about their experience contributed to that. By doing that, using data, and instead of putting a burden on the customer to respond, you can get much more data. Much faster. And enable your organization to take action much faster.

That wasn't an option in 2011 when we published the ultimate question 2.0. In 2025, it's absolutely necessary. But it's still kind of new. Another thing that's new that I would do differently is we now have with large language models and generative AI, the AI.

The ability to have more of an interactive discussion with customers at scale. So a company like American Express or, you know, just name the large, Comcast, Verizon, like when they're gathering feedback from their customers, instead of just having a static survey, they could actually use, they can actually use an interactive agent to ask follow-up questions and things like that. Well, that changes the game. It allows you to get much richer feedback from customers in a more engaging way that is more relevant to the way the customer is experienced working with your business.

The final thing, and this is maybe the most important. Instead of having people gauge their success by their net promoter score, I would have them gauge success by the underlying metrics of customer value, or customer lifetime value that they are trying to improve. Am I keeping customers longer? Am I getting them to buy more?

Am I getting better price realization? Am I selling more stuff to them in different categories? Are they lower cost to serve? Is their credit performance better?

Like those are the things that drive economic value. And these days, again, unlike, you know, 15, 20 years ago, these days, almost every organization has the ability to monitor that in real time and see the impact of the actions they're taking on the value of their customer base. That's a much better way to gauge success than through a survey. You know, going off of your own fish business, another work of yours is the fact that you've been running a podcast since 2014, which means you've obviously had over a decade of experience interviewing leaders, exploring business strategies, and diving deeper into just customer loyalty.

And I'm sure you've listened to every single episode. Every single episode, all 200 and something. What has been the biggest lesson you've learned from hosting your podcast, both in terms of the insights you've gained and just the process of running a podcast like ours? I guess there are a few things I've learned.

One is that I'm a terrible interviewer, and I could be a lot better. And, you know, here I'm 10 years in, and I still think I have a ton to learn about how to interview people. Effectively. Second thing I would say, maybe more important, is almost everybody has a story.

Almost everybody has something that you can learn from. And the trick is figuring out what is that? What's the thing that this person can share that would really be powerful for other folks? And going in, you have to have a theory or a hypothesis about what that is going to be if you're going to be effective at interviewing them.

And you have to be flexible and able to seize on something they say to create an engaging dialogue. Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, if you could go back and consult a freshman, Rob Markey, what do you think you would say to him? A freshman in high school?

Yeah. Oh, man. I'd tell you a few things I would probably say. One is, it's going to be okay.

Like, all the stuff that you're going through in high school, you know, you're forming relationships and maybe not very good at it in some ways, or you're dealing with your place in the community at U.S. and the larger community, and sometimes it's not exactly where you think you want to be. It's all going to work out. And some of the people that you compare yourself to, who today you think, man, if I could only be like that person, they're not the right people to be comparing yourself to. Some of them.

So that's number one is, you know, be you. It's okay. And not everybody's going to be your best buddy. You're not going to be necessarily the most popular person in your, you know, whatever.

Pursue your interests. Be yourself. I think the second thing I would probably say is, it's important to maintain balance. And it can be tempting when you're at a competitive school like U.S., if you have motivated parents and, you know, motivated friends and stuff like that.

It can be tempting to push yourself close to the breaking point. And there are moments when actually the best thing you can do to improve your grades, to improve your ability to learn, to advance your goals towards getting into the right college and getting there, the best thing you can do is go to bed. Sleep. There are moments when that's not the right answer, but they're mostly, most of the time, you're pulling an all-nighter or you're doing something where you're just dead tired.

Most of the time, the right answer is go to sleep, to a point, I guess. And then I guess the final thing I would say is, success in life is not about what your grades are. It's not about where you go to college. It's not about what job you get.

Those things are helpful in some ways, but happiness and, you know, fulfillment come from the contributions you make to making other people's lives better. And I think those are, I think the enduring things you'll remember, the things that will make you feel good about yourself when you're my age, are the things that you do to contribute to other people and their happiness. And so, yeah, you got to, you know, yeah, you got to do your schoolwork. Yeah, you got to apply to college.

Yeah, that's all going to work out. You're going to end up in a good place. It's going to feel terrible for a little while. You're not going to maybe get into the very place you want to go.

You're not going to necessarily get the job you want. It's all going to work out if you are making other people's lives better. It will all come back. Well, Mr.

Markey, I know this is one of our last questions, but me and Jack always talk about, what is our why? We talk about what kind of pushes us through all these different boundaries and just motivates us to do everything we've done. You've actually been called the Vince Lombardi of customer loyalty, which really speaks to the impact you've had in just shaping how businesses think about these customer relationships. Mr.

Markey, as you continue forward, what keeps you motivated to push the boundaries of what's possible in customer experience and leadership and just push the boundaries in your own life? So from a business perspective, let me start. My mission has been and continues to be with this goal of helping more and more business leaders discover the value of their customer base as the primary source of value in their company and therefore the most important thing to manage. And the reason I focus on that is because if people are making their customers' lives better, then customers will gladly, gladly take money out of their pocket and pay for their products.

They will gladly bring their friends to do business with that company. Their employees will feel good about making their customers' lives better. Like everything falls into place. And companies competing to make customers' lives better makes the world a better place.

Like that's all good stuff. Companies that are competing to deliver the most earnings today are, are tempted to exploit customers and exploit employees. And that's not a good thing. So that's, that's my why.

I want to counteract that force that leads people to be exploitative and leads them into being, you know, more about making other people's lives better. So that's, that's what I, that's why I get up in the morning and do this stuff. That's great. Well, Mr.

Markey, it has been great having you on the show today. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your experiences and insights and all of your great stories. And to our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. And we'll see you next Wednesday for another episode of Late Start Show.

Thank you, Mr. Markey.