Filip Novák

I started on the phone and behind the counter, not with slide decks. That's how I know the difference between a company chasing customers and a company customers return to isn't budget or cleverer advertising.

Most companies burn money on ads to bring in new customers. And then let them walk away. I look at what happens after the purchase: so the customer comes again, on their own, and ideally brings someone along.

The 36-crown strap

I earned my first money at twelve, collecting waste paper in Šternberk. But I come from a family of entrepreneurs: my grandfather was a saddler and ran a shoe shop with my grandmother. He mastered the craft and had plenty of customers, yet the business never reached a real profit.

I remember my grandmother bringing over a repaired strap and suggesting they charge 80 crowns. My grandfather cut her off firmly: "No, that's too much. Make it 36." He was a respected saddler, but a worse merchant. He never could ask for the price people would have gladly paid him.

Only while studying marketing did I understand what I had seen back then: mastering a craft isn't enough. Whoever won't ask for a fair price has nothing to grow from and ends up sabotaging their own business. It's not just the customer who should be happy, but the person behind the counter too.

Quality isn't luck, it's a system

I spent six years at IBM on a team that received the Delivery Centre CE Quality Award for its contribution to quality and efficiency. There I learned that quality doesn't come from effort but from processes: a system should catch a mistake before it has a chance to repeat.

That's exactly what I build in companies today. Just with customers instead of enterprise systems: so a comeback isn't luck, but the result of a process you can repeat.

50,000 Kč and one client

In 2012 I left IBM to run my own business. 50,000 Kč in the account and one client paying me a thousand a month for SEO. Lunches on meal vouchers, canned lentils for dinner, a mattress on the floor. And still I smiled, because I knew I was headed the right way.

Since then I've clocked over 7,000 hours of consulting and mentoring for companies in forty industries. And what I took from the corporate world still holds: I wanted to master my work so well that replacing me would be hard.

ZeptejSeFilipa

In 2016 I launched the ZeptejSeFilipa show, today the most extensive marketing show on Czech YouTube. Over 2,500 free videos and streams: strategy teardowns, current cases, interviews.

For nine years, with clients and on the show, I kept meeting the same mistakes. Everyone kept discovering from scratch why their customers were leaving. So I wrote it down. The book Opakovaný prodejis nine years of experience on 528 pages.

What I do today

I wrote the book because it doesn't fit into one article, and training gets forgotten. I run the club, because the book can't answer the question you'll only have in three months. And for companies that don't want to build the system themselves, I build it to measure: a repeat sales systembuilt and deployed directly in your company in 90 days.

I don't have a monopoly on wisdom and I won't promise overnight miracles. I have twenty-two years of experience with what works in a small company and what doesn't, and I can say it straight.