A Getting to Hell Yes! conversation with John McCahan
Some guests arrive with insights. John McCahan arrived with clarity.
From the moment we started talking, it felt like someone had turned the lights on in a room most companies tend to dim: the room where customer experience, operations, revenue, and leadership all collide.
John has lived more versions of that room than most executives ever will. Military officer, global customer experience leader, EVP at FTD Flowers, transformation architect in industries from banking to automotive to health and beauty.
But what struck me wasn’t the résumé, it was the pattern.
Everywhere he goes, he inherits chaos… and turns it into clarity, culture, and cashflow.
And when he started talking about how FTD (a company that once needed 2,500 agents to survive Valentine’s Day) went from an 89% contact rate to 17%, you tend to realize:
CX isn’t a department. It’s a strategic weapon.
“I kept getting put into the hardest situations. It took me 20 years to realize… that was the job.”
John started with a story about being a high school safety shouting play calls at linebackers twice his size. Then about being assigned the worst-performing platoon in his first Army role. Then about being handed broken teams inside billion-dollar companies.
Every time he asked the same question: “Why me?” And eventually he learned the truth:
He wasn’t being punished. He was being trusted.
Because there are people who maintain systems and there are people who transform them.
John brings the change.
The Scale of the Problem: 2.7 Million Contacts, 89% Failure State
When John joined FTD, the numbers didn’t just tell a story, they screamed!
Every 100 floral orders generated 89 customer contacts. That’s not “customer service.” That’s “customer rescue.”
Valentine’s Day alone required 2,500 temporary agents to manage the chaos.
Late deliveries. Wrong bouquets. Mismatched inventory. Confused florists. Emotional customers calling from funeral homes or hospital rooms or first dates gone sideways.
This wasn’t inefficient. This was an existential threat but John didn’t start with technology. He started with the truth.
“Get me in the room where decisions are being made because that’s where CX actually begins.”
Operations and customer experience teams rarely get into the strategy room. John forced his way in the only way that works:
With data.
Meaningful data. Business-model-shifting data. Data that showed:
- How operational failures were really hurting revenue
- How marketing campaigns were breaking fulfillment
- How logistics “savings” were creating refund losses
- How customer sentiment was bypassing the call center and hitting the CEO directly
He learned early that the CFO is the CX leader’s best friend because CFOs understand one universal truth:
Cents turn into dollars. Minutes turn into margin.
Once finance saw the real cost of poor customer experience (labor, refunds, cancellations, churn), CX stopped being “soft.” It became a revenue engine.
Cross-Training: The Move Every Company Should Steal (Yesterday)
This was one of the most important insights of the entire conversation. In military, cross training is survival at the platoon level. There is a second & third cover for each skill, & everyone knows the plan.
John made the engineering team sit in the contact center during peak chaos.
Not because he wanted to punish them but because he wanted them to feel the product they built.
And suddenly these engineers, who had never seen the downstream effect of a bad workflow, were asking questions like:
“Why do I have to click through five screens to solve this?”
“Why isn’t this button visible?”
“Why isn’t this automated?”
And the best part? They went back and rebuilt their own systems enthusiastically.
He did the same with marketing. They sat inside social media queues during peak complaint storms. It wasn’t fun. It was transformational.
Customer centricity isn’t a slogan. It’s empathy earned through proximity.
The Military Lesson That Built His Leadership Philosophy
Then John saidt:
“In the Army, the only bad decision is no decision.”
He shared the story of Ranger instructors yelling: “What’s your decision, Ranger?”
Because indecision kills. In business too.
This became his leadership model:
- Make decisions.
- Make them with data.
- Make them transparent.
- Course-correct quickly.
- Communicate relentlessly.
- Move forward always.
In the field, and field ops; this is how you survive, and thrive.
The Data Foundation Comes Before the AI Fantasy
Companies today want AI to magically fix their operations. John laughed.
AI only works when:
- Your data is clean
- Your systems consolidate truth
- Your workflows make sense
- Your teams trust the output
When he arrived, FTD had seven different systems storing versions of the same information. One lipstick had seven different descriptions. One flower order had eleven different case numbers.
AI cannot fix that. Only discipline can.
So he pushed for:
✔️ one source of truth
✔️ one order management system
✔️ clean workflows
✔️ accurate timestamps
✔️ normalized naming
✔️ unified communication channels
Then and only then did they add AI and that’s when the magic happened.
The 30-Minute AI Go-Live Story (Yes, Really)
This is the moment that is always worth thinking through.
FTD’s self-service suddenly disappeared, increasing contact volume by an expected 20%. Disaster was coming.
John called an AI partner he’d been quietly evaluating. They had once bragged they could deploy in 30 minutes. He didn’t believe them until that day.
He asked, “Can you really launch by Monday?” They did!
AI immediately:
- Sorted calls
- Routed customers to the right specialists
- Answered simple questions
- Reduced unnecessary transfers
Within five days, the contact rate dropped 15% and the execs panicked because the numbers looked too good. That’s when you know transformation is working.
Pain Reduction > Customer Delight
John said something that completely reframed the CX conversation for me: “Delight is expensive. Pain prevention is scalable.”
Customers don’t need magic moments. They need:
- No waiting
- No confusion
- No friction
- No repeat calls
- No surprises
- No anxiety
Delight comes after consistency. It’s not the cookie at the Holiday Inn, it’s the fact that everything works the way you expect.
Lessons From John:
🔹 Leadership Begins With Proximity
If you won’t sit in the pain with your teams, you can’t fix it.
🔹 Every System Should Be Designed For How Customers Consume, Not How You Deliver
That subtle shift changes everything.
🔹 Transformation Is a Multi-Year Journey With Multi-Minute Decisions
Three years to change culture.
Thirty seconds to change direction.
🔹 Variability Is the Real Enemy
Not the average, not the peak unpredictability.
🔹 The Right People Already Work For You
They’re just waiting for permission, clarity, and accountability.
🔹 You Cannot Scale Chaos
You scale what you standardize. You standardize what you understand.
