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.
Episodes
12 episodes
Are You Deepening the Relationship, or Just Maintaining the Connection?
Nikki wore a homemade costume to a Jurassic Park movie with six other grown adults, and it turned into the clearest lesson she's got on the difference between a business that deepens relationships and one that just maintains connections. This i...
How Do You Keep an Experience Special as More People Want In?
Some events you attend once while others you reorganize your whole year around. Nikki sits down with Maria Tassi and Kristina Bartold of High Vibe Women and Janette Downie of The Chill Space, three women who design live experiences for ambitiou...
What You Think You Know About Your Customers
Your brain is trying to protect you but it's also, unfortunately, making things up about your customers.In this solo episode, Nikki takes a therapy homework assignment (yes, really) and turns it into one of the most practical frameworks ...
How Brand Photographers Build Trust Before Anyone Picks Up a Camera
Most founders spend a lot of time thinking about how to attract the right clients but very few spend time thinking about whether the right clients can actually find them. Nikki sits down with two brand photographers who have cracked...
Pokémon Battle Academy Solved Onboarding Without Calling It Onboarding
Nikki hates board games. The rulebook comes out, the energy dies, and the fun sits three feet away behind a wall of logistics. Except once: a Pokémon card game showed up at Christmas and broke every rule she thought was inevitable and it quietl...
What Professional Organizers Know About Getting Clients to Maintain the Work
Every service business owner has felt it: you do the work, the client is thrilled, and six months later it's like you were never there. Nikki sits down with two professional organizers: Brittnei Gaudio of wellnested living Co. and AnnMarie Zezi...
How to Layer Surprise and Delight For a Big Payoff (Without a Big Budget or a Big System)
Two years ago I walked into a steakhouse for my birthday and walked out with a story I apparently cannot stop telling. This episode is that story, and more importantly, it's layers of surprise and delight that we can take into our o...
What Agencies Know About Human Nature That Every Founder Needs to Hear (And Can't Automate Away) ft. Andréa Jones & Natalia Kaplan
Scope creep. Client reliance. The quiet chaos of selling a service to a human being who doesn't always know what they want. Call them agency problems if you want, but if you've ever said yes to something and spent three weeks wondering why, thi...
What Would Mr. Rogers Do? How to Stress-Test Any Client Touchpoint
There is a 1970s children's television show that had a more rigorous empathy standard than most businesses apply to their client communication. And the test its head writer used on every single sentence before it could air is one of the ...
How Do You Build a Physical Product Brand That Creates Real Word of Mouth? ft. Lisa Simone Richards and Cheryl Sutherland
What does it mean to design something a customer will hold in their hands every single day? Nikki sits down with two founders who built physical products rooted in confidence, clarity, and self-belief, and who both obsess ove...
What Is Customer Experience and Why Does It Matter for Your Business?
This is the first episode of Would Recommend, and Nikki is starting here on purpose: because customer experience is one of the most used and least understood terms in business, and getting it wrong is quietly costing founders more than they rea...