Let’s jump out of the gate first with the new podcast.
I was asked to be the first guest on my friend Leo Schnotess’s brand new podcast, Lifting with Leo.

 
Leo is the manager of CrossFit Central London, an experienced weightlifter who dabbles in Strongman and a lover of hardcore music. She’s also an AWESOME coach with tons of passion.
Knowing all of this how could I say no when she asked me to be on her show?
Give it a listen.
We talk training, programming, injuries and more. I’m pretty sure you’ll all like at least one thing, but hopefully the whole thing.
Give her a follow on the IG too, her at is: @latslikeleo

Listen to my drivel here. 

NEXT UP:
Online Review Stuff

If you own a business, your online reviews are pretty important. You should take them seriously.
Good reviews can help a business to thrive while too many bad ones can kill it.
How many is too many bad ones?
In a perfect world, one. But owning a business makes you realize that there is no way you can make every person happy. All you can do is your best and hope people see that. You’re bound to get a couple over the years.
Another thing on reviews; read and reply to all of them, it’s just good business. Someone took the time to give you a great review online, the least you can do is type back a thank you.

 
What about the bad reviews?
(To me any review less than 5 stars is bad.)
You need to reply to them,  but differently.

When I see 3 or 4 stars with mostly positive comments I’ll always thank them for giving the review and the feedback. Then I’ll add in that they can contact me to see what we can do to make it a 5 star review.
If the review is bad and they had a truly awful experience I’ll apologize first, address the issue and then ask if they will allow us to make it right.
You then obviously try to make it right and win them over as a happy customer.
This works more than you would think.
It is almost never a good idea to respond negatively to the reviewer. It makes you look petty.

I’ve learned over the years that it is always a bad idea to feed trolls online too.

Well, I had a miserable troll who lives under a bridge and seeks people to boil in his pot to eat troll me the other day on the big internet machine.

 
We had a 1 star review filled with lies, yes lies.

 
I followed up on it with my team to see what happened because if what he said was true I would have flipped out and heads would have rolled. The issue is that it was too preposterous to believe.
I’ve also learned that if something looks like shit, smells like shit and squishes on your shoe when you step in it like shit, it is most likely shit. His review checked all of the boxes.
How do I know?
I was left the building about 5 minutes before he showed up. I also ran attendance reports and talked to my team to verify things.
Turns out it was shit.
My initial reaction was anger, then I figured it would be best to send the usual sorry you had a bad experience response.
My gut said different so I waited a day.

 
I reviewed all of his issues again and verified that they were either:
A: wrong
Or
B: Lies
What did I do then?
Yup.

 
I replied back with a very lengthy, but p-r-o-f-e-s-s-i-o-n-a-l reply taking his issues into account one by one and refuting them with facts supported by evidence. I felt this was needed because some of what he said could have actually gotten us in trouble with the city and some would scare off new people from coming.
My gut was settled after. I did the right thing and waited until a cooler head prevailed. I didn’t let emotion control my response.
The guy actually emailed me very soon after the review went up complain about my response!
Seriously kehd?
You attack me and try to ruin my business and I reply professionally, then you are butthurt?
Grow up. Realize that just because you can say something, doesn’t mean you should. Realize that you need to present your argument truthfully to be taken seriously.
The internet can be a powerful place, especially to a business that can be made or broken by reviews.
So, a word of advice to all.
If you have a bad experience at a business, especially a small business, before you write a horrible review, think. And then contact the owner of the business.

 
I’m willing to bet that 99.9% of small business owners will want to know about your bad experience and they will want to fix it.
I know I fall into that category.

 
Give the owner a chance to fix the problem. As owners, if we have problems in our businesses and we don’t know about them, we cannot fix them. I’ll tell you that there are virtually none of us that put our efforts into building our businesses that do not want to know about shitty employees or unclean conditions or whatever else a customer service issue may be.

 
Give us the chance to fix it before you ruin us. It’s the decent human being thing to do.

 
If we truly do our best to fix it and we can’t, feel free to write what you like.

Did you miss last week’s log?
Read it here

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Vincere vel mori

C.J. Murphy

April 1, 2021