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
20 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...
The Conversations Founders Avoid That Are Costing You Your Best People (and Your Best Clients) ft. Lia Garvin
Four out of five people at work right now are checked out. That is not a Threads hot take, that is Gallup, and it is the exact deficit most founder-led businesses are running on while trying to deliver a five-star client experience out the fron...
Loyalty Programs: Reward the Relationship, Not the Receipt
Most loyalty programs get designed from the business's side of the counter: more repeat purchases, more lock-in, more rewards for the customers who already spend the most. In this Nikki Talks episode, Nikki names the reframe that ch...
How Do You Listen to Your Customers Without Letting Them Run Your Business? ft. Lyrik Fryer
WorkPlay Branding started in 2019 as a six-step signature branding process with a photo shoot bolted on at the end. Today it's a subscription content model with almost one hundred certified creators across four continents, and it got there beca...
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? ft. Maria Tassi, Kristina Barold, & Janette Downie
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 ft. Victoria Mae & Dana Castro
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 ft. Britt Gaudio & AnnMarie Zezima
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...