Would Recommend: Real Stories From Businesses Worth Talking About with Nikki McKnight
Some businesses get reviewed. Others get raved about.
Would Recommend goes behind the five stars with the founders who earned them. Every episode is a real story from a real business that figured out how to turn their client experience into their most powerful growth engine, without more ad spend, without more content, just by designing something worth talking about.
Host Nikki McKnight is a CX and operations strategist with 15+ years across wildly different industries and geographies. Each week, she talks with founders about the specific decisions, the costly experiments, and the moments of truth that separate a satisfied client from a raving one. Some episodes are solo deep-dives into a CX principle or framework. Others bring two founders from the same industry together to show how the same problem can be solved two completely different ways, and why both work.
This is not a marketing podcast. Client experience is not a layer on top of your marketing strategy; it is the growth engine your marketing can't replace. If your clients are happy but not referring you, this show is for you.
Would Recommend is for founder-led businesses in retail, hospitality, food and beverage, professional services, wellness, events, and beyond.
Would Recommend: Real Stories From Businesses Worth Talking About with Nikki McKnight
Latest Episodes
80% of Businesses Think They Deliver Great CX. Only 8% of Customers Agree ft. Erica Wood & Katrina Scarlett
Eighty percent of businesses believe they deliver a superior client experience but only eight percent of their customers agree. Is this a delusion, or an urgent gap in perception?Nikki is joined by two of her new favourite people, Erica ...
Marketing Earns the Yes. Then What? [Would Recommend Part 2]
What actually happens between the yes on the sales page and the moment the engagement falls apart two weeks later? Nikki opens this episode with a five-figure cautionary tale, the kind most founders have lived through on both ...
5 Event Ideas That Change How Guests Feel Before They Walk In
Nikki has been going to business events since she was five (retail-exec dad, family vacations spent at produce marketing conventions with 40,000 of her closest friends), she spent a decade running them, and she once managed a half-million-dolla...
How Do You Design a Business Clients Choose, and Keep Choosing? ft. Alli Arruda
Some gyms are places you have to go, but some? People choose to go, and this becomes the entire brand promise. In this episode, Nikki sits down with Alli Arruda, co-owner of Benchmark Fitness in downtown Burlington, to unpack how sh...
What Disney, Lego, and Eleven Madison Park Know About Growing a Business [Would Recommend Part 1]
How does any of this actually make me money? That's the question that eventually shows up in almost every conversation Nikki has with a founder, and it's exactly where this Nikki Talks episode lands. Kicking off a minise...