Why Customer Obsession Builds Businesses That Last

The minute you stop caring about the customer, the minute your business model is down the drain.

I don't care who you are, what you think that is how it works. And if you can't take care of them and make every customer happy, I'm not saying you won't occasionally have one that maybe be indifficult. But whatever, if you care about your business, bend over backwards and fix it. Anders Olafsen is an army veteran, master craftsman, and successful business owner who founded AF and F. Carpentry, a high end remodeling company known for its luxury coastal homes and historic restoration projects.

One thing I've noticed is that every customer is substantially different in every aspect. One person may like, you know, wood slats like that, person might like wallpaper. One person, again, it is very fine-tuned. And the more we fine-tuned it to each individual customer, the better the feedback we get from those customers. Because I mean, I could pitch, you know, the same thing to everyone.

And a lot of the customers will take my recommendation.

I have a different approach on how I run my business.

I follow heavily esoteric, romantic and probabilistic studies.

“I think that's a huge aspect on why I'm successful.”

Give me an example of like, what's a key implementation that you have in your life that leads to more success. So... Ready, fire, fire. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone. It's not over, I'm telling how we're...

The living your legacy podcast for those who live to leave a legacy. As it's streaming, it's awesome to watch it. Oh, that is sensational, took. Open. She called it with the lead.

You said, "Oh, it's the bottom of the planet." You can live your dreams. Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Living Your Legacy podcast. Today I am joined by Anders Olafsen. Did I get that pronunciation correct?

You did. Perfect. Perfect. I can breathe a breath of fresh air now. But Anders, how are you doing today? Good. Doing good, doing good, the weather's nice down here.

Sunny South Florida. Coming from Maine. So we were snowing when we last. Oh, you were snowing all the way. My sister's based out of Toronto.

And she told me she hasn't left the house in six weeks. Yeah, no, it's bad. Yes, it's rough up there. But you just finished filming your episode.

“Talk to me a little bit about what can the audience expect to learn about you in your episode?”

I have a different approach on how I run my business. I follow heavily esoteric, romantic, and cobbleistic studies. I think that's a huge aspect on why I'm successful. What I've looked into what I've studied. I mean, I'm up early every day reading specifically about those three things.

And I know it's not the most exciting thing to most people. But once you start to read it, it is life changing. I think you know what's funny. It's funny that you bring that up that it's like not exciting to most people. When I think about the the term excitement, excitement for me comes from curiosity.

Right. So like if I don't know about something and I'm curious about it, then I can get excited for it. So anything that I don't know about, I can get excited for it. So in that, I hope you guys out there in the audience can get excited about learning about how does that inform the way that you structure your business, the way that you do business, the way that you deal with people?

It covers a lot of how the world works. Down to quantum physics to manifestation, to what you need to implement in your life.

“If you want to be successful, what creates good habits?”

What creates good discipline?

What rewires your brain in a way that you will be able to implement and create basically whatever life you want.

It is that easy in my opinion, but it's just it's not easy to get started. But once you get into it, it becomes extremely addicted. Like once you get that ball rolling, it gets very addictive. It's hard not to want to read about it every day all the time, because when you understand that there's a lot more to how the world operates than just your nine to five job or how everything around you seems to be operating. It isn't quite, the world isn't quite what it seems like it's going to be the best way to put it.

Give me an example of like, what's a key implementation that you have in your life that leads to more success. Again, your body clean, truly treating it like a temple. Again, your whole body is a electric electric. The cleaner your body is, the better the electrical electrical signals travel from your neurons that you have in your feet, your knees, you have neurons everywhere in your body, not just your brain, like everybody associates neurons with.

You take care of your body, the better you eat, the more you exercise, the better and clear your thought process is. I mean, you can solve problems that most people wouldn't even dream of be on the figure out in 15 minutes.

“It really is taking care of your body treating it like a temple and then implementing everything else that you're learning through that process.”

Then after you see how much more efficiently your brain works doing this, you know, cutting out don't eat fast food. I mean, I don't ever eat any fast food.

I'm vegetarian. I know that's a little that's a little intense for some people. I will eat meat if it's kosher, but that's the only exception to make. Meditate in the morning workout. That's a big one for me. Absolutely. 100%. And for me, it needs to be in the morning specifically. I have to get a win in earlier early in the day. I did the whole thing of, you know, you work in nine to five and you'll think to yourself, like, I gotta go through traffic in the morning. I'm not going to wake up at four to be at the gym at five to then be in traffic by six or seven and then.

But once I implemented it earlier in the day, because before I used to do it afterwards, come home from work. I'm already exhausted. I'm going to go into the gym. I'm going to give like 70% effort. I'm not going to get the proper workout in that I know I need and I'm operating off of like brain fog. So I don't even remember like my workout plan. I'm not writing things down. I'm not tracking my progress.

Right. It bleeds into everything. It's funny that you bring up, you know, keeping your body clean, but not only that, the way that it functions towards your nervous system.

You ever see a diagram of the human nervous system? It had central nervous system, absolutely. So the brain and central nervous system is that is the truth of what we as humans are. Everything else is just kind of a flesh suit. Yeah. You are a nervous system piloting this fleshy suit. That's all just protection for the core of what we are is the nervous system. So keeping that part on lock and key is like super super important.

“The key to being successful and being able to navigate life successfully and being happy and feeling good about yourself. Absolutely. Again, yes, everything else is just a shell.”

You sound so nervous systems where your consciousness, your subconsciousness, where everything that makes you you thought process wise operates from 100%.

Now, I have a little bit of a background in psychology. My dad's sports psychologist. He works with the Olympic Committee for Jamaica and a big thing that he always preaches to me is to try and get in control of your limit cortical region of your brain, which is your emotional center. Right. You have your processing center, the the computer that is your brain and then you have the emotional center, which is the one that tells you, oh, you're not good enough. You're not going to be able to do this.

I'm too tired to do that. If you can get ahead of that part of your brain, then you can achieve a lot more than you would if you were just kind of letting that part of your brain do whatever it wants. You're lower in your higher self. And again, you have that voice in the back of your brain, but you're the shot collar. You get to make the decision on, again, everybody has intrusive thoughts. Everybody has things that put themselves down or, you know, you come up with excuses to not take the hard road.

And every time you accept that excuse like, oh, you know, I should make my bed, I should do my laundry, but I'm not going to, is, is you making an excuse in your brain to not do what you know you need to. And then your brain becomes wired that way. And you implemented over every other aspect of your life. How you do one thing is how you do everything. Absolutely 100%. Now, I want to take a moment here. We're going to kind of pivot a little and I want to just talk about your business specifically because I can tell that you're very organized.

You're, you're a very conscious person in the way that you do things. Talk to me about your business and the way that you're helping people out in the world. So I want to general contracting company AFNF Carpentry and we cater to mostly high end homes. So I have a strict hiring process where I hire very good high end carpenters that are paid very well. So we're usually chasing the high end work and they're organized ordered clean people.

“That's an important thing for me because if you can't implement the policies and structure that I need to know that it's going to expand and excel this business, which they don't have to believe everything that I believe of course.”

Everybody can have their own, be their own individual, but you have to be clean, ordered, organized, aligned with company policy values and what we're trying to do with the mission is. That, that is it is finding people, or at least form in that are on that level. And again, good people, good family men or don't have to have kids of course, but if they do, all that matters.

It's interesting that you bring up, you know, just having that sort of core mission, right, and making sure that people are aligned with your core mission. I think the number one thing for, you know, a lot of our audience there entrepreneurial their business minded, they want to be the next big CEO, the next big founder.

“I think an important distinction to make is that as the CEO, you, in the beginning you wear a lot of hats, right, you wear pretty much every hat, but once you're able to create structure and create, you know, systems standards procedures.”

And you have a core crew operating around you. I think the biggest thing for CEO at that level, once you get there, is to make sure that you are a leader that others will follow. Like you have a core mission, you have a core standard that you can align people with your fine people that align with that core mission, you know, I built a company with the body of mine and we had said in an event we were speaking at that.

The key and I had the exact same mission, so we wanted to go to the same destination, so we might as well just carpool.

I used to say that all the time, find the people that will carpool with you because they want to go to the same place you want to go. That's a good analogy, 100%. That makes perfect sense, but yeah, it makes lines right up exactly with what I'm saying. Yes.

You get your take on just where do you see, you know, a lot of CEOs are in the business of expansion and you know, rapid expansion at that.

“What is your take on the way that you see your business unfolding in the next five, 10, maybe 15 years?”

So we will always cater to high end coastal homes for building and remodels as that's what we love to do and it's nice to be able to take nothing and make something beautiful, you know, beautiful, Wayne's caught in crown molding high end cabinetry custom bill by us. Let's just see it go from nothing. Now, we're in commercial work also, isn't as rewarding seeing commercial work go up now, but it's still you're building something from nothing and then what we also are going to start transitioning to is government contracting probably throughout New England.

So again, those buildings can be depending on you know, rewarding, but I just I don't find commercial work as rewarding as I do the high end stuff because those customers at the end are you know,

ecstatic about the work you've done super happy the commercial work the business owners just want the job done and I mean they want to understand it and done well, but they're not you know, I mean you actually get to see the smile on the customer's faces for the actual home builds and whatnot. It makes a difference that personal connection you have with them compared to what you know a business owner would do, but we do want to expand and do government are currently actively, just about to start going into government contracting just to expand the business on that side to hopefully have you know 10 crews doing government contracting a commercial work 10 crews doing high end home builds and then obviously the office staff and whatnot, but that is that's that's that's the future and that's where we are going just.

“Your part of the build process are you also a part of the design process at all? Yes, so yet we do design I actually have a secretary who does some of our designing also she's gotten really good at it.”

Just out of just me telling her over the last year to hey practice this practice this but I paid to do it so that's not she's doing it on her own time, but she has been doing it on time because she's so interested in it. The design process. There's so many programs in apps out there nowadays it's not super complex like it used to be. With AI now there's so many ways to get like a cool render of something. You can do anything with AI nowadays. I mean there's a there's an upper program for just about ever. I'm you I'm utilizing it in film.

I'm right now actually working on like creating a mock ad that I want to pitch to Nike and I've just made the whole ad like just through AI and you can do a lot like there's entire sub sex that you can build out where you'll take. Clean 2.5 and then take a screenshot from that run it through nano banana and run it back through clean 2.5 and there's so many different apps and space that I'm using kind of like playing AI against other AI to make it better as you keep downloading it. Certain models are better for building you know stills and then there's a different model that you'll send that still to to get motion to add motion and then there's a different model even that you can send it to to craft lighting. So if I want the scene to be lit in a particular way like I could shoot this right now send it into nano banana nano banana now has a 360 degree lighting app that you can change the lighting in a room.

It'll create a screenshot with that lighting then you'll take the video that you're trying to apply that lighting to and it'll create an AI version of that same video but with your updated lighting setting.

Yeah, we we've cut our estimating process down using AI drastically so it's called hand-off AI as we'll use and it has cut what what would use to take three days to do an estimate can be done in a couple hours now and that's with you fine tune fine going over with a fine comb.

“You still want to confirm everything's correct because if you send out a contract with incorrect anything on it you still have to eat whatever it says so.”

Yeah still takes but the fact that goes over it's so much faster some of you can upload blue prints to and it can do an estimate of that again you still have to go over everything but AI has definitely. Mainline and so substantially easier faster and still does it relatively efficiently but the time it saves you is not crazy. Yeah absolutely. The reason that I had asked about the design process is because I I for the last couple of years I designed spaces like this as far as like podcast rooms podcast build out stuff like that so like production design is where my head is at.

Yeah, but I always want to you know touch base with people who are in that world because like when I'm designing a space like this I'm trying to think about ways that light is going to interact with different things so I know what paints I want to use on the wall what kind of textures I like behind. In the backgrounds it seems but I always like to talk to designers about like what their ethos is as far as you know how to design a space to elicit a certain feeling. Yeah it depends on if the homeowners looking for functionality or aesthetics for me it's all I said it.

Some people it is and then some it just depends because it depends on what what they need the room for or what what the layout of the house is going to be whatever reason some people have special needs children.

“And then functionality becomes a lot more important to them than aesthetics and that's just one house we're working on now so that's why an example I had in the top.”

But it gets depends on on the customer because one one thing I've noticed is that every customer is substantially different in every aspect one person may like.

Wood slats like that person might like wallpaper person again it is very fine tuned and the more we find tuned it to each individual customer the better the feedback we get from those customers because I mean I could pitch. You know the same thing to everyone and a lot of the customers will take my recommendation let's say about 80% of the time if I say I think this would be better. Yeah, because you're the expert I want to go to the expert and I don't know anything about this arena you tell me you have to learn them you have to learn the customer and learn learn their aesthetics sit down with them.

What colors do you like what what would do you like and then go through their house with they have currently you know and it makes that will give you a good idea if they've done work already.

Or if not you say how do you feel about these lights, but it's just it's just get to spend a good four hours with them to walk around the house discuss on what what makes sense to them some of them even have photos of their old homes. And that'll give you a really good idea on what they like for aesthetics and functionality and whatever it is they're they're going for and that's the biggest thing once you can fine tune that process to. You know, efficiently talk to somebody and figure out either via personality or them telling you directly because again you can tell a lot of stuff on people's personalities on which they might like more.

And you recommend this and because I really do like that I'm glad you mentioned that glad we went that route instead of the way I wanted to do it. It's learning them it goes back to even when you were saying just at the beginning being able to operate at a high level you do a lot of work that involves having a high degree of intuition. You've got to be able to be intuitive in different scenarios like you're dealing with a different for every person is a different completely different scenario and so you need to be able to follow your intuition on a lot of different decision make decisions that you make.

So like being operating at that high level leads you to have a lot of good intuition because you don't have to worry about whether my brain is going to send me a good idea or not. I take care of my brain. I expect it to send me pretty good ideas exactly and in 99% of the time it does I mean you every once in a great while I'm going to wake up wasn't the best idea and you reflect on it but like I must not do that. It's usually halfway through the job you're like, I don't know if this was a good idea.

No it does it does but they just happen to have a couple of times not often but then we're okay we'll change this for you at no cost if it was special it was my idea and like yeah I don't like that's okay no problem.

You know what I mean again the goal is to keep the customers happy in all aspects man we've never had a bad review from any customer and we're going to keep it that way.

“That you have to again because the minute you stop caring about the customer the minute your business models down the drain.”

I don't care who you are what what you think that is how it works and if you can't take care of them and make every customer happy. I'm not saying you won't occasionally have one that maybe be indifficult but whatever if you care about your business spend other backwards and fix it. You know my next question was going to be for the CEOs for the business owners out there what's the best key piece of advice that you'd give them but I think that's it that would be it that is it.

I want to make sure you check out Anders episode that is going to be coming out shortly after this podcast drops so keep an eye on that you're going to get a full dive deep dive into his story into how his business came to be.

“You are you're doing incredible work and I think putting the customer first putting your client first is you know the biggest lesson that we can impart on any of you who want to get into the world of business.”

Want to be able to put and offer out to market.

Keep your customers needs at the forefront of everything that it is you do and you're going to succeed in some way shape or form. I think that's like the best piece of advice you can give anybody.

“Absolutely. Now for people who want to connect with you online find you on social media work and they find you.”

Yeah, we're on Facebook AFF Coventry.

We have a website affconstruction.com. Those are the best places Google. We're on Google.

We're on like 42 different platforms.

“So if you look up our company, it'll pop up on a lot of side apps also too.”

So pretty easy to find. Perfect. We'll make sure we throw that in a little drop down somewhere here on the screen. I don't know where we put it. But guys again, make sure that you check his episode out. It's going to be coming out shortly. This has been another episode of the living your legacy podcast and brother, it has been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much.

Thank you. I'm looking forward to seeing the work that you continue to do with those government contracts and with everything you have moving forward. Thank you. Thank you for being on the show. And guys, again, I'm your host Jason Tyler and we will catch you guys in the next one.