Who runs it
Beyond Helpful is led by Tyson, who has spent twenty years learning what makes businesses grow and last, and the same twenty years testing it in his own.
In 2007 he founded Instrument Choice, an Australian retailer of scientific and measurement instruments, on one promise: just be helpful. Scientists answer the phone instead of salespeople. Prices are published openly. Hard questions get a straight answer, including when the answer is that you do not need to buy anything. It is now an eight figure business holding an average net promoter score of 85, in an industry nobody would call exciting. People who buy a data logger do not usually tell their colleagues about it. These ones do, and that word of mouth is the growth engine.
Not much of the thinking is original to him, and he will tell you so. It comes from two decades of books, podcasts, seminars and conferences, and from years running events for the Entrepreneurs' Organisation, which put him in rooms with operators from around the world who had already solved the problem he was working on. What is his is the filtering. Twenty years of running the ideas in a real business is how you find out which ones survive contact with customers and which ones only ever worked in the book.
The same thinking gets tested somewhere completely different. Tyson co-hosts The Gladys, an 1860s cottage in the Adelaide Hills, where the experience is the entire product and the distance between one star and five is a handful of small decisions nobody notices until they are missing. The frameworks hold up in both places, which is what makes them worth teaching.
