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R3
Retention, referrals, and raving fans. Free to learn, all of it.
Stop stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.
Almost everything you need to make more is already in the building. It doesn't require a new product or new spend. It requires better communication of what's already there.
The new trap
In 2016 I wanted to make more money, so I told my banker friend I was going to buy a rental property. He asked what a new member was worth to me. Five to six hundred a month. How many could I let in off the waitlist right now? Eight to ten. So which is the better use of two hours: letting eight people in at five hundred a month, or answering phone calls about broken toilets for an extra four hundred? It hit me right away.
Most business owners are stuck in the same trap, mistaking getting new clients in new ways for being more profitable than just keeping more of the ones they already have. It's the new trap, and you're going to feel it, because something stupid that feels good feels a lot better than something smart that doesn't.
Nothing grows revenue like retention and referrals. You've already paid to acquire them. One good referrer can bring you hundreds of customers for free.
The three pillars
Moving a human through anything takes three things: a pull in the direction you want, clarity and trust along the way, and the human actually changing their behavior. The pillars aren't marketing things. They're human things.
Pillar 1 · Allegiance
Clarity, certainty, and trust
Answer four questions at every step and you build Allegiance Capital: trust, at speed. Why am I here? Am I in the right place? What should I do next? And then what happens? Tell someone what's about to happen, and then it happens exactly as you said. They learn, without noticing, that what you say happens. You've built trust faster than any brand, by making one assumption explicit.
Tell them how they'll feel before they feel it, and you seem like a mind reader.
Pillar 2 · Gravity
The magnetic pull
People like your ideas. They like their own better. Stealth Influence is the skill of putting a crack in a limiting belief and letting them arrive at the better one themselves. The black swan, the four trust lenses, turning innovation into information. A warning: if you need the credit, you'll struggle with it.
The full skill has its own home. Stealth Influence, in Engage the Field →
Pillar 3 · Reliability & behavior
Build the system that manages emotion
Your business is a system, and reliability is the product of its parts, and more components always drive it down. The human is the least reliable part, so simplify to only what's required. Then turn each step into a moment worth talking about (the HFM), and never say the same thing on two channels. Combine them so each pushes to the one you're best on. Little hinges swing big doors.
The three black holes
The biggest profit killers in your business are the ones you can't see. Customers don't complain about them. They just leave, because uncertainty makes people feel stupid and people would rather leave than feel stupid. The three biggest are the same in almost every business, because they're emotional.
Black hole 1
The Honeymoon
Right after the sale. The peak is followed by a valley. You can't fix an emotional valley with logic.
Black hole 2
The Handoff
Onboarding. The person or the tone changes and no one explains it, so the customer feels confused, or worse, stupid.
Black hole 3
The Helper
The raving fan who wants to share and doesn't know how. Left uncertain, they do nothing and feel bad about it.
Each one is a question, not a build: How are you managing their emotional state? How are you making them feel smarter each time something new appears? Can you spot the ones who already love you, and are you making it easy for them to share?
Invert
Charlie Munger says invert, always invert. Marketing has a cost. Before you turn the faucet on to fill the bucket, plug the holes. Start with your raving fans and work right to left. Your best buyers are the best source of new business: they buy more, refer more, and shout from the mountaintop. The front end isn't neglected. It gets optimized when it's the thing most worth optimizing, and it works better once the holes are plugged.
The four stages
These are the largest emotional shifts a customer moves through. Know which one someone is in and you have the map.
Stage 1
The Prospect
Marketing and sales. Assuage the fear of what happens when they give up leverage.
Stage 2
The New Customer
The sale, buyer's remorse, delivery. The biggest black hole lives here.
Stage 3
The Established
Familiarity, achievement, continuance. Celebrate their win, not yours.
Stage 4
The Raving Fan
Human billboards. Engineer referrals from the social norm, never the market norm.
Bucketing: everyone sits in one of three: Good Fit Now, Good Fit Later, Not a Good Fit, sorted by what you know, not what they think. Address one stage a quarter and the return on your time is massive. Each stage runs on its own campaigns, six in all: Silver Bullet, Be Helpful, Second Chance, Stay-Focused, Perspective, and Continuance.
R3 through the year
In season now · Summer
The system is the what. The season is the when. The same population turns through the year together, and each turn wants a different lens and rewards a different move. This is the Foundry part: run the right R3 move in the season that's already primed to receive it.
Spring · Wood · Aspirational
Lead with the mission, not the features. Have the aim conversation with clients, and run the Allegiance Capital audit and Bucketing while energy is high and the work is welcome.
Summer · Fire · Actionable
Give them something to do. Deploy the campaigns spring aimed at, host the gatherings, and make your raving fans' advocacy easy while the room is loud.
Late summer · Earth · Grounded
Lead with substance, not hype. Address the fear of being disconnected by leaning into brand and identity. People like us do stuff like this. That's the game in late summer, and it's where the Perspective campaign lands.
Autumn · Metal · Analytical
Lead with the mechanism. Make the precise cuts, formalize what summer ran on instinct, and run the autumn Allegiance move: name the standard that's about to rise before it does.
Winter · Water · Anthropological
Lead with depth. The piece without a CTA. Hold the deepest one-on-one conversations, and choose restraint over the urgency a quiet market sees straight through.
Spring, summer, autumn, and winter run your four Trust Lenses, one per season; late summer is the grounded read in between. Which one is live right now is your Three Clocks reading.
There's a physical version, too. Arena members get an R3 seasonal collectible, a card made for each season.
The tools · apply it
Everything above is yours to run. The interactive versions are free with a free account. No holding back.
Audit
The Allegiance Capital Audit
Walk your own journey and answer the four questions at every touchpoint. The list of free fixes is usually the longest one.
Run it free →
Campaign
The Silver Bullet
Five questions that qualify a prospect, showcase your competence, and build trust. Deployable this week.
Deploy it free →
Reading
Your Three Clocks reading
Read your sailor, your boat, and the wind, then the one place two of them disagree. The four lenses tell you which language the season wants.
Read your clocks →
Build
The World Builder
Map your own content and offers to the seasons, and see how many products you actually have. This is how these worlds get built.
Build yours free →
Free with a free account. The teaching stays open on this page; the account just saves your work.
Free resources
About This Book
This is an accidental book, and that's a feature, not a bug. I taught the R3 methodology about a dozen times as a live class before it became a book, and each time I taught it in the order it should be implemented: reverse order.
It came from the field, not from a writer sitting alone trying to make something sound good. Every concept in here has been taught, tested, argued about, and refined through real businesses with real customers.
Read the whole book, free →Draws on Stealth Influence (its home is Engage the Field) and the Three Clocks (its home is the Seasonal Intelligence world).
R3, applied
The same system, pointed at one channel by the people who run it best. Their books have their own homes. This is the door to them.
R3 for Advertising
Laurel Portié & Nic Peterson
See the advertising expression →
R3 for Email
Joseph Robertson
See the email expression →
More expressions as other lens keepers write their own.
Start using it
Free with a free account
You've seen where the money leaks out. The tools that plug the holes are free.
Create a free account and run the Allegiance Capital audit, the Silver Bullet, your Three Clocks reading, and the World Builder. Your work saves as you go, and the whole book stays open to read.
Create a free account →There's a physical edition of R3, too: 540 numbered copies, at experiencer3.com. Free in the Arena for the first 540.