#193 Vance Morris: How Disney Parks Mastered Employee Engagement

Vance Morris is the Founder of Deliver Service Now!, a consulting and coaching firm that teaches small and midsize businesses how to implement Disney-caliber customer experience systems combined with direct response marketing. Rising to prominence through a decade of leadership at Walt Disney World, he became the creative lead behind Chef Mickey’s — Disney’s flagship character dining experience at the Contemporary Resort — a concept whose systems have remained largely unchanged for more than 25 years. He also built and systematized three home service businesses in Maryland (a carpet cleaning company, a mold remediation company, and an Oriental rug washing facility) to operate on 90 minutes of his attention per week.

Previously, as a manager and trainer at Walt Disney World through the 1990s expansion era, Morris served on the opening teams of the Yacht & Beach Club Resorts and Animal Kingdom, and acted as All-Island Duty Manager at Pleasure Island. He was recognized for generating $125,000 in business from a single marketing campaign, earning the Marketer of the Year award at a GKIC competition in 2015 and an International Marketing Award in a Dan Kennedy competition.

His consulting client roster has included NASA, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Legal Seafoods, Tyson, Rainforest Café, and Compass Group. He has shared stages with Daymond John, Dan Kennedy, Joe Polish, and Jack Canfield across more than 40 years of speaking experience.

Morris is also the creator of 52 Ways to WOW Your Customer, a free resource delivering one customer experience tactic per week of the year.

Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.

So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.

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