Deputize your team to blow people’s minds.
Not “do a nice job.” Not “hit the SLA.” Not “send the deck.” Blow their minds — then make that the expectation for every seat that touches a customer, a partner, or a prospect. If only the owner can create the wow, you do not have a company. You have a bottleneck with a brand.
What “deputize” actually means
Deputize is not a pep talk. It is authority plus standard. Your people get permission to go past the script when the moment calls for it — and they get held to a culture where ordinary is not the product. They do not wait for you to approve delight. They are hired, trained, and trusted to create it.
That only works if you have already built a house where thinkers belong — a thinking game, not an SOP religion — and where innovation is the evidence. You cannot deputize mind-blowing work to people you hired to never color outside the lines.
It’s a system
Mind-blowing client experience is not a personality trait of your best salesperson. It’s a system.
- Inputs — real knowledge of the client: what they fear, what they already tried, what would feel like magic on a Tuesday.
- Judgment — people allowed to decide in the moment without a permission chain that kills the surprise.
- Craft — tools, brand, tech, and rehearsal good enough that the surprise is excellent, not chaotic.
- Review — after every wow, ask what worked, what was luck, and what becomes repeatable without becoming boring.
Systems without soul become scripts. Soul without systems becomes occasional genius and frequent misses. The culture you want is both: client-first enough to care, operational enough to deliver when you are not in the room.
Outside the lines — never the same presentation
The work that blows minds lives outside the lines. It is never the same thing. It is never the same presentation. The moment your “wow” becomes a template you recycle for every room, it stops being a wow and starts being a show your competitors can photocopy.
That does not mean chaos. It means customized courage. Same values, different expression. Same standard of excellence, different proof for this client, this stage, this problem. I have given more than a thousand talks — and the ones that land are never a canned keynote with a new logo slapped on slide one. Rooms can smell a rerun. So can customers.
If your team is optimizing for sameness because sameness feels safe, you are training them for rocking-chair motion — busy, polished, and going nowhere. See The Rocking Chair Syndrome. Outside-the-lines work is how you get off the porch.
How do you blow your clients’ minds?
Ask it as a standing question, not a brainstorm once a year:
- What would make this client tell a peer without being asked?
- What did they expect — and what can we deliver that makes that expectation look small?
- Where is everyone else sending a PDF… and where can we send a working system?
- What would feel personal without being performative?
- Who on our team is closest to the truth — and have we deputized them to act on it?
Sometimes the answer is speed. Sometimes it is honesty. Sometimes it is a prototype overnight while the other vendor is still scheduling discovery. Sometimes it is showing up suited up — prepared, participatory, more than an appetite — the partnership standard from that same essay. The form changes. The intent does not: leave them changed, not merely served.
It has to become your culture
If mind-blowing work is a special project, it will die when you get busy. It has to become your culture.
Culture means the new hire learns it in week one. The quiet operator practices it without a spotlight. The review meeting asks “who did we amaze?” the way mediocre companies ask “who closed?” Culture means you reward the attempt that stretched — and you do not punish the honest miss that came from trying to be remarkable. Culture means your brand, tools, and training are good enough that people are proud to work there — because pride is fuel for going outside the lines.
You cannot fake this with a values poster. Clients feel the difference between a company that performs delight and a company that is built for it.
What fails when only the owner can wow
- You don’t scale. Every special moment waits on your calendar.
- Your team shrinks. Adults do not stay where they are not trusted to be excellent.
- Your “wow” gets stale. One person’s tricks repeat. A deputized culture keeps inventing.
- Clients get the average version of you. The version that exists when you are in another city, on another stage, in another firefight.
Action — build the deputizing system
- Write the mandate. One page: “You are deputized to blow their minds — within these values, with this budget discretion, with this escalation only when safety/legal requires it.”
- Ban the identical deck. For the next five client touches, require a fresh angle customized to that room. Same standard, different expression.
- Ritualize the question. In every weekly meeting: “Whose mind did we blow — and how do we teach the system what we learned?”
- Reward the deputies. Publicly celebrate outside-the-lines excellence. Make innovation and client awe the scoreboard, not hours logged.
If your leadership team needs that culture spoken into a room, Leading in the AI Era or book the keynote. If they need practice, not a speech, start at /training. If you want the longer letter on judgment and courage, read Hands Up.
Stop being the only magician. Build a company where blowing minds is the system — outside the lines, never the same presentation, every time.