“Accept challenges that scare you”

Being a loyalty executive for a big retailer, starting with 11 years as an executive at British Airways internationally, Amanda Cromhout, the company's CEO and founder of Truth, saw that the African industry needed loyalty expertise. About 14 years ago, Truth was founded as a global loyalty and customer strategy consultancy. For businesses, they create and run customer relationship management and loyalty programs. They also teach professionals in these fields how to excel in the field of loyalty. The South African Loyalty Awards are owned and hosted by Truth, and the company also provides loyalty content in the form of podcasts, webinars, white papers, and leading-edge conferences.

Amanda is uniquely qualified for her current position. She graduated from Loughborough University with a first-class honors degree in business studies and French. She has a degree in business and certification from the UK Marketing Society. Her leadership and mentoring abilities were bolstered by her education and certification as a life and executive coach. "If it doesn't scare you, it's not worth doing!" is her favorite quote by David Noyes, "a senior leader at British Airways." She truly thinks everyone has a greater self to release each day, and this is something She lives by and motivates her team with too. Amanda meets frequently to discuss personal leadership and its significance to the team. She believes her own growth cycle will motivate the team to realize their professional and personal potential.

Small business Truth has a simple hierarchy. Amanda considers her title as "founder and CEO" to be meaningless. Her staff and any freelancers, with whom they collaborate, report to her or the Truth team. Regardless of designation, they are all loyalty consultants to the outside world. They meet weekly to assess progress towards "business as usual" and make plans collectively. They outline goals, growth challenges, and company issues as needed prior to the fiscal year. Fortunately, they have a diverse set of strengths as a group. Truth has exceptional follow-through. She appreciates ideation and new initiatives but recognizes the importance of delivering and prioritizing an infinite flood of ideas.

Prioritizing clients, they also stay ahead by obsessing over clients, innovation, and research. Amanda prefers that the team spend more time on local customer delivery research than corporate tasks. Since they are obsessed with innovation, everything they do has to have an edge of innovation; otherwise, Truth doesn’t exist, according to Amanda. Their training courses have to offer new insight; their consulting approach has to offer new insight; and their content sharing has to be interesting and innovative. All of these lead to the brand "Truth," she adds.

"Truth, we advise leading global and South African brands on their loyalty and customer strategies. We build loyalty programmes, from concept to design, to commercials and customer research. Truth provides you with the one-stop solution for everything in your world of loyalty from strategy, to platforms, to CRM, to member engagement. We are here to serve your every loyalty need."

They target organizations looking to build client loyalty. Their world-class online training platform serves all loyalty professionals, including industry vendors, including technical, data, and marketing. It's a world-class training resource and her secret passion. She enjoys "teaching" and sharing their loyalty, creativity, and research with others and seeing them improve. Amanda recommends creating more content and she wishes they had a five-person marketing section. They co-create content but they have to balance this with client delivery, which gives Truth its gravitas and reputation.

Amanda also observes that their niche and bespoke consulting firm may present challenges. They are not a marketing agency or a worldwide corporate consulting organization with 400-person operations in every major city. They are experts in loyalty programs. As a deeply experienced, niche firm, They believe they provide superior service and output in loyalty consultancy compared to global executive consultants and marketing companies. Both alternatives may have a greater brand presence for their larger products and reach clients more easily. Nonetheless, in order to provide the best customer solution, they frequently collaborate with corporate solutions and agencies.

Besides, client feedback and word-of-mouth let them know how they're doing. They spend little money on marketing. Referrals drive their business; they work hard to reinforce Truth's values and will gladly leave work if it doesn't bring value to their clients. They strive to balance short-term and long-term issues. They've improved over time, and starting with their annual planning cycle, they are long-term focused, which meets the client's short-term needs.

Their market size is USD 0.5 – 1 million. Amanda believes they can develop by aggressively promoting the Truth training packages to worldwide loyalty firms, including . Thousands of industrial service providers serving loyalty clients. Any service provider could better serve clients with extensive and well-researched training. They develop new, impactful material for their training programs, podcasts, webinars, and conferences by becoming the greatest consultants in their market.

Truth, like other small enterprises, struggles to predict future dangers. They did not anticipate COVID-19 and this drastically affected their income, staffing, and spending. Nonetheless, they acted quickly and confidently to save the situation and continue serving their clients well. That made them more agile and succinct, which Amanda appreciates in the "post-COVID-19 Truth."

Amanda sees the next five years as a time for Truth to no longer "play" in the global loyalty market but to become a renowned industry leader. Demand may necessitate more resources, but they will never compromise their brand's client obsession and creativity. Above and beyond that, Truth will continue to do its part to assist those in need. "We focus on a number of trusts with deep personal connections," explicates Amanda. Faced with blindness, Amanda founded The Blind Loyalty Trust & she is the co-founder of Kika Trust. IE