The Experience Strategy Podcast: Meaningful Experiences at Milk Bar Brooklyn

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Welcome to this episode of The Experience Strategy Podcast! Aransas and Dave are joined today by Kylie Sachs, the owner of two thriving Milk Bar Cafes in Brooklyn, New York. Kylie’s café venture started in 2016 as a significant career and lifestyle change. Prior to making the switch to café/restaurant life, Kylie spent more than 20 years in management and finance at growing companies. Tune in to this episode as Aransas and Dave talk with Kylie about her “Team First” approach to running a business and how she achieves positive customer experiences. You don’t want to miss this insightful episode! 

Aransas: Hi, and welcome to the Experience Strategy podcast. I'm Aransas Savas. Today we are stopping off for a cup of coffee with Kylie Sachs. Kylie is the owner of the Milk Bar cafes in Brooklyn, New York. These little cafes are truly neighborhood institutions, charming, warm, and inviting. Kylie has owned them since 2016 and we are so excited to talk to her about her experience running these spaces.

[00:01:00] But I'm also pretty interested in hearing how she made the transition into her cafe life prior to the cafes. Kylie spent more than 20 years in management and finance with really some of the biggest names in finance. We are so excited to have her on the show to tell us all about what she's learning and how she's translating her past life into her current life.

So Kylie, welcome. Hi, let's start off with this massive career transition you had. What motivated that?

Kylie: Yeah, the right or the left turn as I like to call it. It was one of those moments of wow, this was really served up to me on a platter. If we go back a little bit to 2016, [00:02:00] it was March 2016 and I'd been doing a bunch of different things, but at that time I was primarily CFO consulting for a couple of different companies and I'd been doing it for a while. I was like, yeah, you know, it's okay. I like these companies. I like the people, but I was a little tired of it and my husband came home one day, March 2016, and he goes, guess what? Milk Bar is for sale.

And I said, oh, that's a bummer. And he goes, why is it a bummer? It's going to become like a hair salon or something like that. You know, it’s just too bad. It was a nice thing in the neighborhood. And he goes, well, I was kind of thinking we should look at it. And I was like, for what purpose? And he goes, well, potentially to buy it.

And I was like, you have lost your mind. We've never done this before. We don't know anything about running cafes and he’s like, [00:03:00] yeah, but it could be cool. It's an operating business. I'm like, you know, you see the current owner go up there with his dogs and dash in and be charming and then leave.

I guarantee that is not all there is to running these cafes. Somebody has to run it and he goes, well, I was thinking you could run it. I'm like, dude, I have a job. He goes, well, you don't and I said, well, that's true. Yay for husbands in their truth bomb. Right. Total truth bomb. You know, also he is just one of those people that sees opportunities like that and he defaults yes. I see opportunities like that and I default no. It's very easy to find 20 reasons why certain things won't work. Fast forward two weeks later after we ended up, of course, having the meeting with the guy who was selling them. Two weeks later, we were in a term sheet to buy, not just one, but two of the cafes that he was selling.

[00:04:00] The owner who built them was moving to Des Moines with his wife so he wanted to sell his cafes and it was insane. We met first in March and we closed on the two of them in July, 2016. It was literally like getting on a moving train. Like we didn't close the doors at all.

One-day things went into his bank account. The next day things went into our bank account. One day he fixed everything that was broken the next day I had to figure out how to fix everything that was broken and things break every day. It was kind of insane. I'll just add a quick other note again, to my husband's level of optimism in some insanity.

We did this in July 2016 and when I say we, it was really me because he has a job and actually continued to do it. Well, he came home again a [00:05:00] few months later and said, I've found our next location and I said, again, you have lost your mind. This is a hard transition. I'm going a little insane.

I question it every day. You know, we've spent our kid's college funds, so maybe they won't go to college, but there'll be baristas. I guess there's that. He said, no, no, no, we have to consider this location. It's amazing. He was right. We took that lease a couple of months later, and that was totally different from acquiring these businesses that we fully built it out ourselves, and in October 2017 the second Milk Bar and our third cafe were opened.

Aransas: Wow. Wow, incredible. What's been the biggest surprise about running a business like that?

Kylie: I was giving that a lot of thought and what's so interesting is that for so long I had these businesses where they were high pressure and you were always on, but they had an element that the cafes [00:06:00] didn't have, or the cafes have an element that my other businesses didn't have.

These are hyper-local, meaning I felt tremendous pressure for at least the first year or two to literally not leave. The square miles that I live in, in Brooklyn and they felt like a tether and I just hadn't had that physical need before in a business. There were so many times when things would break every day, every day at the shops.

I learned how to ask different questions, but if I wasn't physically there literally saying, how's everything going you can't actually say so how are things because they say fine and then you find out that the toilet's been broken all day. I'm like, guys when I say how's everything going, I'm asking what's broken. I actually learned to ask what's broken, but if I don't physically go I don't find that stuff out and it's different now because I have a relationship with [00:07:00] them. I think the biggest surprise is for so long, they felt like a tether. But now, and I only have two of them now, post COVID we shuttered one, but now they feel they're more like an anchor for me personally. I didn't really expect that. They're really just nice places and they afford me a number of opportunities every day to just provide a pleasant experience, just to be nice, just a lot of different small opportunities to be nice and boy is that additive to my mental health.

Aransas: I'm translating everything you're saying to raising children. Like in the beginning they did feel like a tether and now they feel like an anchor and an opportunity to practice kindness as they enter their tween and teen years.

Kylie: That answer is that's so true [00:08:00] because that's the way I thought of them. I think of them in some ways, like not to diminish them because it's not really what I'm getting at, but it's just what you said. I think of them like kids. Sometimes they drive you insane and other times you just love them. They're my elixir. Whenever they are driving me crazy. The cafes. If I go to them, I feel better. I just feel better and also opening a third from the very beginning, as opposed to acquiring an operating business was literally harder than birthing a child, which is a whole other story, but it did open, but it undid me.

Aransas: What made that so much harder?

Kylie: You know, I loved it. loved planning it. I loved the design of it but that gets into a whole other set of issues. I have a business partner who I absolutely adore. I have worked with him since 1995 on all sorts of things and he came into these cafes with me, primarily as an investor, but he also does a fair amount of the backend work. [00:09:00] He does a lot of the finance and accounting. I'm not sure it took a toll on our relationship, but it definitely re-established what our relationship needed to be. I mean, he'd hired me, I'd worked for him. He knew me when I was a kid like, like a 22-year-old and I had to be in charge. I had to really run them. So he would kind of come in and he's just that kind of guy, who's a take-charge person, which is great, but you can't have to take charge people when decisions need to be made at a certain level of building out a cafe. There are so many little decisions that happen every single day.

It was really that was the hardest part, probably just continuing to battle through his communication style versus my newfound communication style and relationship dynamic with him. It's better now. I mean, it's, it's much better now and I'm glad for it again.

Aransas: that sounds like marriage.

[00:10:00] Dave: True. It's interesting how being a small business entrepreneur just changes you and it sounds like it's changed you quite a bit.

Kylie: Yeah, I think it has and it's funny because I think what it's really done for me, it's done a few different things, but the main thing is it's helped me redefine success kind of for myself. Also generally like a lot of us who live in these neighborhoods, you have a fairly pedigreed background, went to big schools and, you know, I always kind of thought of myself as a certain type of career track person. I started as an investment banker and was an investor in all that kind of stuff. My definition of success was related to the trappings that typically come with those career paths. And though this has just been eye-opening. I've met so many people, [00:11:00] who've really built lives and they live here in different kinds of styles and neighborhoods, et cetera, but they live here and they they're successful. They really work really, really hard. I have tremendous respect for the team and the cooks. It's been humbling for me and it's been eye-opening and this is a little bit embarrassing, but I'll just go ahead and say it, it was even after 20 years of kind of being on boards and investing in things. Being a CFO. It was just with running the cafes that I finally understood what it felt like to feel capable because problems happen every single day. For the first year and a half, it was figuring out how to solve them. Now I have a much better sense of how to solve them and every day you're able to, okay, here's this, this is broken. Here's how we're going to fix it. You get these [00:12:00] little, and sometimes big opportunities to problem solve. For me, I was like, oh, I didn't know really what capable felt like and now I do.

Aransas: It sounds like it's probably an agency that you have here that you didn't have inside a system.

Kylie: Yeah. You can see the causality of your decisions, right? Yeah, yeah. No, it's true. It's true. You know, I was always kind of intimidated by larger environments and it did take me back at one point, because when you go to a place like, you know, Harvard business school, you end up meeting all these people where the end of the day, what they want to do, they'll say, you know, they want to be a banker. They want to be this, or they want to start their own business. I just never had that inkling, but not really, but there was a time when I was thinking about it. I remember probably 15, or 20 years ago. I thought, you know, if I ever do start my own business, My gut tells me it's [00:13:00] going to be small. It's going to be small.

I don't think I could see myself running something big, but I could see myself running something small. So here we are.

Dave: You've arrived. You've arrived. That's fantastic.

Kylie: I mean, it's not without its challenges though. It's interesting. You hear these stories of people who kind of leave their career and then go do something small and I think what is often not told in that story and everybody has different circumstances, but to be perfectly honest, there's just no way I could have done this without my husband having a job that kind of picks up the bills. These are teeny businesses, they contribute, but nobody's in certain parts of Brooklyn by running a couple of small cafes unless you have some other form of support and it kind of came at me at the right time. We just had always kind of depended on both of our incomes and then we didn't [00:14:00] have to as much so now this has been something that I've been able to do.

It feels like a gift and I do love it. I do, They do bother me at times, but I do love it. I think a lot of times when people talk about that big career switch, they kind of gloss over the fact that there is sacrifice involved and we just have a very different vacation profile than we used to have.

I have a different kind of bank account than we used to have. And that's okay. That kind of goes back to the whole redefining of success.

Dave: It sounds like you've done a fantastic job of doing that redefinition, which is so hard for a lot of people to kind of get through. Talk a little bit about how you think about creating experiences? Maybe let's start with, what were some of the goals that you had for your shops when you were first getting started?

Kylie: Yeah, sure. So the first thing I wanted to do was just make sure they [00:15:00] didn't close. Like just survive when I took them over and then now it's kind of the same, like the first goal, especially through COVID is just survive open every day, operate.

Luckily we've been able to do that and then the next kind of goal, personally, it's less of a goal for the shop, but it transfers through, is keep as many people on the team as I can. That was one of my goals from the very beginning because hiring is so hard in this arena.

I'd hired for a lot of different positions before, you know, you're hiring an accountant, a director of marketing, like something like that and you need to go through various sources and people show up for interviews and you go through your process and you find some. That is so not the case in hospitality. My first goal is always to keep the team because if people leave, [00:16:00] what I have learned is you have to get a hundred resumes to get 10 people to show up to interviews and of the 20, by the way, that say they will show up. Then you have to hire three people, knowing that two of them, when they're actually on the schedule, literally just will send you some crazy email, which I've gotten - it's really hot outside today and I just won't be able to make it. I'm like what? That happens. It happens. It's insane. So my first goal was always just to do what I can to keep the teams. I kind of took from that to not just keep the teams, but keep the teams happy.

And then what I learned was okay, well, if I can keep them relatively happy, the cooks and front of the house. Well, that makes guests happy. I had always historically thought that the goal of restaurants and cafes and everybody runs them differently, is guests first. I didn't think of it that way. I was most nervous about the team.

[00:17:00] I kind of said team first and when I did that, it kept people happy. It made customers happy.

Dave: Yeah. You know, are you familiar with the concept of employee engagement? Have you thought about that at all? Because it sounds like a perfect example of focus on the team first, the team will take care of the customer.

Is that kind of how you approached it?

Kylie: It sounds like it is. Yeah. Or at least I like to think so. I hope that they would not say something different than that. That is how at least I've thought about it and engagement is an interesting word. Because I don't know that I think about it in those terms. Traditionally with other companies, I've thought about and I have talked about this a few different times, so many companies start with a mission, start with a vision and how do you institutionalize that and push that through to your employees. I think that works for larger [00:18:00] companies in these environments.

It's funny if I were to write something down, they would ignore it. So the instant I try to institutionalize something or formalize something, I don't think that would work. My level of engagement with them has been literally just going in and saying hi, asking what they need, and making sure that they have what they need.

Their jobs are easier because those are hard jobs. If that makes any sense.

Dave: it totally does it. I actually worked as a waiter for a number of years as a kid and kind of ran food in a hotel room service and it's amazing to have somebody like that.

Who's looking out for you. It doesn't happen all that often. I'm sure that they enjoy that more than anything else. So that's fantastic.

[00:19:00] Kylie: Yeah. I mean, I hope because it is so hard to get the right people in place, but I like them. Like I just like them all as people. They're interesting.

We've been lucky. We've been able to keep people for years. My cooks have worked there for more than a decade, which predates me. Then I just try to loop people back in. I just had one guy who left in December 2019. He'd worked for me for two years in the shops and we have this running joke with the teams because I, I group text them all the time. I said, you know, you're leaving, but one of these days I'm hoping to get a text from you that you're back in New York so let me know if you want shifts. He sent me a text a couple of months ago. He's like, guess what? This is the text.

He was moving back and now he's working down at the shop today.

Dave: Fantastic. Wow. When you think about the experience that you and your team create, what are some of the things that you think about? When I think about [00:20:00] restaurants and cafes, the first thing that comes to mind is kind of like a functional kind of need like cleanliness or something like that.

But tell me a little bit about what you're thinking about.

Kylie: That's a good question. When I walk into the shops and it starts before I walk into the shops, actually I do look around for things like is garbage around the sidewalk, which is terrible, but it's Brooklyn and that happens.

So I'm constantly out there literally just picking up trash, making sure that there's no garbage. The team's sometimes too busy to do it so cleanliness is really the first thing. My mom used to have this thing on our refrigerator that says, housekeeping is something that nobody notices until it's not done.

That always kind of stuck with me. I just literally make sure that they look good that we Windex the door like every hour. It was kind of a running joke. When I go in with [00:21:00] the Windex, they're like we’re Windexing the door. You know, they always know that I'm going to tell them to please Windex the door or I do it.

The other things are interesting because they're kind of these intangibles like I want somebody to walk in and walk out and certainly not have a bad experience, but the good experience they should feel friendly. They should be bright. They should have a nice vibe to them. And what does that mean?

They should be playing nice music. It can be jazz. It can be a station. I did actually create a playlist for them though once. I will tell you a quick story. I walked in Saturday morning, brunch in park slope, and it felt off to me. Something felt off and it was super busy and there were kids everywhere, and families and every seat was taken.

I was looking around as if something was wrong. I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was because everything looked like it was working. I stood there for a minute and I'm like, oh, they're playing explicit Cardi B. [00:22:00] Yeah. I like Cardi B, but it's really, you know, explicit Cardi B at 10:00 AM on a Saturday with toddlers.

Like that's, you know, kind of not the vibe that we were going for. So I made a playlist. I'm like, dude if you don't know what to play, like default to Jamiroquai like just Stevie Wonder, always works. Like something like that.

Aransas: What message were you trying to send with that playlist?

What was the vibe?

Kylie: To sum it up in a couple of words. Yeah. One of my favorite parts is actually putting the music together and other people like to do it too in the shop. So I kind of let them rip as long as it's not explicit Cardi B or something like that, by the way I worked in hip hop just not around certain toddlers at 10:00 AM. I want people in the shops to hear songs and be like I want to add that to my playlist or, oh my God, I haven't heard that song since I was in high school. That's a good [00:23:00] song. There is no mood that is kind of consistent on the playlist that I've put together.

It's all over the place. I kind of like it that way, but I want people toe-tapping. I want people humming. That's what I would like. When people to leave, I want them to just think of those as they're just pleasant places to be. You know, if you have someplace you want to drop in for a sandwich and meet a friend for lunch it's just, you know what you're going to get. It's going to be clean. You're going to have friendly service. It should be cool and friendly. Just, it's a nice place that’s simple. We're not innovating. I'm not trying to be clever. It's just nice.

Aransas: Yeah, let’s talk to that. I think there is a pervasive message in our culture right now that if you're not innovating, you're dying and it sounds like you are innovating by improving the music choices.

Maybe [00:24:00] you're changing out the technology. I don't know, but there are certainly ways that you are growing and changing, but when you say not innovating, what do you really mean by that?

Kylie: There's is a law, and I think it's partly my background in a venture where you meet people constantly. You literally don't see anything as ever good enough.

Everything could always be better. Everything can be improved upon and there's just this kind of forward-looking posture that pervades society, and that's, in many ways it's a good thing. Like that's how we grow and have new things, but for places like these, I've spent a lot of time and people have asked, what's next? I'm like, I don't know. What's next. I'm going to focus on what's here right now. And that's the only thing I know what to focus on. I'm not really a whole cloth person, if [00:25:00] that makes sense, and also as an individual, I'm not the person who's going to come up with some app that's going to change the world.

I like patterns. I can work from a pattern. I'm a plan person. That's why purchasing the two cafes first before building my own was really the only way to do it. I could never have built my own or I mean, maybe I could have, but I don't think it would have worked the way that it did. And it worked well.

I don't think of myself as an innovator. I think of myself as an execution to the plan kind of person, but it takes a lot of discipline to not want to do more. I mean, I'm married to a do more person. He is always still to this day, looking around for new shops and new locations and I might want to open another one or two. I don't know, but I like the experience now and I feel personally that I'm able to do for the cafes, what I'm able to do for them, because I don't have too many. That's it, it's not really my [00:26:00] personality to kind of operate differently and I would feel too stretched.

I write a business plan to build these up to probably, but that's a very different day. It's just a very different day and that gets to a whole other thing I'm kind of anti-up and out culture in corporate landscapes. I think it's just a total recipe for hiring and promoting disaster on some levels.

But for me, this has been an exercise in staying in place.

Aransas: It sounds like your innovation is an iteration and refinement versus a radical rethinking of the core values.

Dave: What seems to be resonating a lot is the trust and the kind of authenticity that just comes from knowing people, and being a part of the community.

I love this comment that you made, that you like the experience now. That you're [00:27:00] present, that you're kind of, this is about being present, being in the moment rather than being in the future or something along that line. Trust is a big thing. Authenticity is a really big thing in experience design, I think.

And sometimes we try to fabricate it, but you've come to it naturally. It sounds like.

Aransas: Dave, it'd be interesting for you to talk for a minute about what you found through all the research you've been doing in terms of the influence of trust and authenticity in relationship building between brands and consumers.

Dave: How critical is it that this last year has dramatically changed the way that people think about their lives and what they really want out of their lives. Of course, I'm talking about shifts because of COVID and people have realized that there are things that they really value [00:28:00] more than just being always on the move, always kind of moving forward. I imagine that you're tapping into some really deep-seated needs that people have for consistency, continuity, friendship and so forth. These are attributes that make experiences meaningful. Sometimes we think of experiences in terms of, are they memorable? And by that, sometimes we tend to think that we're talking about, was it exciting? Did I surprise you in some way, shape, or form, but increasingly consumers are focused on what makes things meaningful in their lives and they're really looking for the little things.

I love the fact that you picked up on the fact that the music was wrong for the moment and you changed that little piece. It's those little things that make people stop and say, [00:29:00] this is a place that I want to make a part of my life. I think that that's probably what you get. Do you have any idea what your numbers are in terms of returning folks who come back on a regular basis?

I don't even want to call them returning customers because it sounds too corporate, but tell us a little bit.

Kylie: We don't actually track people's names, so I can't run some analysis on it though. I'm so tempted to try to do that. After this, I'm sure square will call me or other vendors and be like, oh, we can, but here's I guess what I would say, I don't think I almost ever go to the shops and I, again, I only have two now, but that's fine when I don't see people.

Almost every time is an anecdotal data point, but there are always people in there. They're there [00:30:00] every other day, the staff has built relationships with a bunch of our customers where they have met out outside of the cafe and they hang out, they play pool big back in the day when you could do things like that.

And we're getting back there, but that gives me the most joy. You get to see kids grow up. You talk to people about how their business is going, because you've asked about it for the last six months and you've nailed it. You've heard it. You've heard their stories. So do I have a number for it?

I don't. I just know that every time I go in, I see somebody that I know, which is a really great thing.

Aransas: I think a cafe is probably more than your average restaurant or a relationship business would be my gut because it is ritualized for so many people to have coffee at the same time on a daily basis.

We know that habits form with frequency and you certainly see the people in the diners in New York City where it replaces home cooking, but [00:31:00] there's just a much bigger sample of people who are interested in a daily routine relationship with you and a cafe.

Kylie: I think that's when we go back to how this all started. My first reaction when my husband came home and said it was for sale was I was a little heartbroken.

I was like, oh, wow. Okay. Like, what does that actually mean? That place may not be there. It might become something different. I didn't realize really that we relied upon it. I mean it was the first place I went the first time I dropped my daughter off for a play date. Normally when you have little kids, you stay at the play date at this one, she was three or four, and the mom, she was like, enjoy an hour. I went to Milk Bar. I went and I sat there and I remember thinking, huh, I'm alone. [00:32:00] And I'm sitting here with a lovely cup of coffee and I have breakfast and I'm able to sit and watch the traffic go by and wow. That just meant everything to me, you know? And so I think that's why I actually decided to take the meeting because while I was curious about the business, but also what if that's not there? I didn't know that I relied upon it and then it could have been swept away.

Aransas: Yeah. It's interesting as you're talking, your own relationship with the cafes, as well as your customer's relationship with the cafes and Dave's ride. I probably shouldn't call them customers, your guest’s relationship to the cafe. There is this, this sense of meaning-making in the relationship formation that, that deepens over time.

And. Dave talked about the influence of integrity [00:33:00] and consistency in relationship building and in meaning making and inexperience. But the other thing that I hear you doing in several ways is, is triggering reflection. That we know from the work that Dave led is really central to people, attributing a sense of meaning to an experience and whether it's the, oh I heard this song. I'm going to add it to my playlist and sort of retaining that connection to the feeling that was a vote at that moment, or whether it's through attaching big moments. The first time you leave your daughter and you go and sit alone and stare off into the distance without worrying that somebody is going to need something from you.

Those are big meaningful moments and they really do take something that could be transactional and they transform it into something that is [00:34:00] meaningful in a sense.

Dave: Yeah. And that element of reflection is just key. Like you said it's key to moving it from what could be a functional cup of coffee right here.

Here's your Joe to a place that is a part of your life without a lot of tricks. You're not trying to be over the top in any way, shape, or form. So, wow. What a great place I want to come to visit. I'm not in New York. That would be a blast. We'd do it.

Aransas: I think too there's such beauty in the simplicity of it, right? You're not working with a ton of complex ingredients. You have a sweet location. You have some sensory stimulation through the music and the lighting and the probably great air conditioning.

Kylie: Yes. Right. You're good. [00:35:00] Very good ventilation that keeps everybody safe.

There you go.

Aransas: Okay. Important more now than ever, but it's these really simple elements and yet from them, you're creating something rich and powerful and meaningful. I think it's just such a good reminder to all of us. This isn't about fancy tricks and it's not about a big ta-da nobody's busting out of a cake in the middle of dinner.

I don't know what I would think of that happening. It's not about surprises, right?

Kylie: Yeah.

Aransas: That's the steadiness and it's about trust.

Kylie: I have a number of running jokes with the cooks, but one of them, he just always makes perfect poached eggs.

Like that's one of our things poached eggs, and I don't know how he can have 20 poached eggs going at one time in the pot [00:36:00] and make sure that he knows which ones are right. Then puts it on a plate and I have a special dish that I always like getting a Milk Bar. I've said to him, I know I can make this at home, but it always tastes better when you make it. Like, why is that? He's like, it's love and you know, he's worked there since 2009. He's like, it's love, I love Milk Bar and they care, you know, they actually care.

I mean they come up with more solutions than I do. I went in the other day and there was a whole situation on the shelves ad these are the things that I have to manage, which is kind of amazing. No more spreadsheets, manage the shelves. She said to me, she's like, you know, this could be so much better if we just did this, this and this.

And I'm like, you know what, I'm going to do that for you. Absolutely. They just go for the best things and now it's transformed. They all work there now. They're like, oh my God so much better. It's just the little [00:37:00] things you're right. You're right. I don't think we should underestimate how much those little things really kind of impact us in our workplaces and our relationships.

Dave: Yeah.

Aransas: Kylie, I have always admired you as a human, but getting to talk to you about how you lead and how you think about your business makes me admire you even more deeply, because of what I see in you as integrity. Between how you live, how you mother. We have children the same age, go to school together, and how you lead is I think a really rare gift in life to have that degree of consistency and integrity across and throughout our lives and hear the ways in which you not just lead your team, which certainly, you know, you, you know, better than anyone that [00:38:00] trust that you were building with your customers is a direct result of the trust you have built with your team. Your customers feel the love and the eggs coming through every touch point from the sound design to the seating chart, to the menu design.

It is that integrity and that consistency that is creating trust. I think for so many small business owners, as a really powerful lesson to be learned about naming and knowing, and holding to our values and certainly, there is a core values that come through in the way that you run your business, that is rooted in authenticity, trust, and consistency.

It's just so inspiring to hear the ways in which you've really, whether [00:39:00] consciously or unconsciously designed for that time.

Kylie: Well, that's so nice to hear and it's very flattering. Thank you, Aransas and obviously I'm in awe of you, and Dave has been so fun to hear your take on this as well. I kind of view this whole opportunity as a gift to have.

I mean, I've been able to think about it and put some things down on paper, which I hadn't really done, but it's been a pleasant and positive experience. If we think about experience design. Well done guys. Yay.

Aransas: Dave, anything else you would add to our takeaways for this episode?

Dave: I just learned so much from being a part of this. I learned the importance of doing the little things of really connecting with people and that leads to powerful engagement first with your employees and then with your customers. Lots of. [00:40:00] great things happen when companies prioritize their employees.

Aransas: It is a virtuous and powerful circle. Kylie, thank you so much for sharing your experience and your expertise. Thank you, Dave. Thank you for your insights for our listeners. Thank you for listening. We can't wait to bring you more inspiring experiences.

Voiceover: Thank you for listening to the experience strategy podcast.

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