Shaping The Future You Want To Create – Exclusive Interview With Jermaine Edwards
Jermaine Edwards is a multi-business owner, author, speaker and founder of Customer Transformation and the Irreplaceable Advisory Group. Helping B2B organisations around the world become the kind of place their customers never want to leave through the power of Customer transformation thinking.
Jermaine Edwards, The Irreplaceable Advisory Group
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better. (Feel free to share your hobbies, your passions, your family life, your pets and anything that makes you unique.)
I’m Jermaine Edwards, Jamaican farm boy, grew up in London, finished my university education in Germany, married to an amazing wife from South Carolina, father of 6. Lived in four countries.
Was in sales and customer leadership roles most of my career. To date, I’d call myself a customer growth fanatic, positive ruckus maker, Dr Pepper obsessive, a former fake dance instructor in Germany (my first true entrepreneurial story for another day),
Important to me is I'm passionate about job creation for underserved communities and particularly serving young fathers. I ran a mentoring program for 5 years serving over 200 young men who are changing the course of their family history.
Most of my time today is spent leading my current businesses, serving my family and local community.
What is your business name and how do you help your clients?
I’m the founder and owner of three companies that sit under the banner of the Irreplaceable Advisory Group. We work with our clients around the world to become the kind of organization their customers never want to leave.
We do this by helping them to build, grow and scale their customer impact through what we call customer transformation thinking.
We’re often asked, What is customer transformation thinking?
In a nutshell, it is the process of identifying, integrating and leveraging the areas in your business that influences the likelihood of any customer result happening consistently and at scale.
Where most businesses begin with ‘What do we do?’ We begin with the evaluation of ‘What influences the result?’
Once you understand what elements influence the area or what we call ‘environment’ you can transform your results and ultimately your entire business.
We show you the critical influences missed by organizations around the world to be THE sought-after place for their customers and see RESULTS with any and as many customers they want.
What kind of audience do you target your business towards?
Over the years this has changed based on what our customers fed back to us and market changes we knew would have a large impact on companies around the world.
Today we work with growing companies in highly competitive markets, with a large concentration of customers. They have teams that tend to struggle to engage and gain customer commitments from the right people at scale; there is an over reliance on a handful of accounts, not enough customers growing or moving into higher and more profitable positions; no consistently working operational structure in place to help serve customers strategically, grow lifetime value, retention and meet growing and more complex customer demands.
Customer transformation is our solution to helping companies solve for this and operationalise repeatability of growth in their business.
What would you like to achieve for yourself and your business in the future?
We have a vision to create 1 million sustainable jobs and economic vehicles for vulnerable families in underserved communities in the UK, Africa and US. We’ve got some super exciting plans to make this happen and partner with our customers to make this happen.
What is your work inspired by?
That story goes back as far as 1993
I didn’t know what the implications of this moment would do 20 years later
In 1993 I walked into one of the largest paint manufacturing companies in the UK.
It was my first time being inside a big business and I got to sit in the boss's office.
Not even an hour into my time there, I remember a woman rushing into the office with a note and the panicked look of the owner as he read it.
He immediately picked up the phone and I could tell the conversation was important. His hands were animated, his voice began to get louder and more harsh. Then he shouted, ‘the customers are gone, we’ve run out of cash and we’re letting everyone go’.
That was the day I saw my mum and hundreds of employees lose their jobs
I was 11 years old when it happened
What stuck with me was the phrase, the ‘customers are gone and we’re letting everyone go’
I don’t know why.
22 years later I would start companies to address the challenge of customers and job creation.
To date, we’ve been able to help thousands of leaders and our customers not only generate millions in new revenue with their customers but save and create hundreds of jobs.
If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?
The one thing I’d like to see changed about my industry is the move from customer management to customer leadership.
I believe helping customers shape the future they want to create is not a management activity but a leadership one. This may sound like a play on semantics, but the shift in language is a critical reference point to speaking with our teams regarding how they approach their work with clients.
You should not think of yourself as a customer manager, but as a customer leader, because your customers are coming to you for a specific reason, which is to give them guided and appropriate advice to help them navigate uncertainty and provide them with a particular result.
Today we have more at our fingertips for free to engage with others than we had collectively over the last thousand years. We’re using customer transformation as a vehicle to enable organizations to lead. The key question for every owner, executive and organization anywhere is how well are you leading your customers today?
Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info!
