REACH OR MISS

  Toccara Karizma is a digital marketing consultant and business growth strategist. She is the CEO of Karizma Marketing, a full-service digital marketing agency dedicated to growing elite eCommerce brands online through email marketing, social media marketing, PPC, SEO, website conversion optimization, and more. Having built her own successful eCommerce business back in 2007, Toccara is now considered one of the world's top eCommerce marketing experts. Her out-of-the-box approach to digital marketing and expertise in the online business growth space is why I've asked her to join me today. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I have a two-fold failure. The biggest failures are taking on clients without the bandwidth, without the support system that I need. We are in demand and are blessed to be in demand. At some points, we want to take on clients when we just don't have the right support team in place. And that's not a fair thing for us to do because when we do that, we don't give them the best results or the best client experience with us. We want to be the Four Seasons of ad agencies. The second failure would be taking any client, especially when you're newer. That was when we failed because we weren't working with a partner that had everything in place. It was kind of like putting a Ferrari engine in a VW Bug. Biggest success with customers I stand for full reporting. When we talk to our customers, it's almost like we're flipping all the ways in which they were mishandled and mismanaged by other agencies and saying, “You deserve this.” We do full transparency. We'll tell you when we're wrong and when we've done something wrong. We want to meet with you regularly and build a long-term relationship. We're always on camera with them. So, it's doing business with people. My son was working on a project at school. (He's in high school now.) He was using a video editing software. I looked up that video editing software's ads because I ran ads, and I realized that they were struggling. They just did not have great customer feedback. I went directly to this company, it's a SAS company, and said, “Can I get connected with your director of digital marketing?” I got the client, and I think it's funny because I had just interviewed someone for my own YouTube.   Michael Cannavo started his career on social media. He was able to infuse his own understanding of viral content, social platforms, and demographic interests into Super73, causing it to accelerate the growth and visibility of the company. As the company grew, so did his social media presence. With 500,000 followers online, Michael has been able to pull back the curtain on what life is like within Super73, how the company has succeeded, and where it is going next. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I think it's a matter of really understanding what they want. Early on, we had this idea of what we wanted to do, and we kept trying to insist to our customers, “Hey, this is what you want. This is the product for you.” We were missing a few key features. We heard that directly from the customers and I think it has really changed the way that we view our products, from designing to prototyping to testing it. We really engage with the customers now. Biggest success with customers We recently released a bike called the ZX. It's not necessarily too remarkable of a product, but it is a perfect product for a demographic that was asking for it for a long time. We really took into account what customers were saying in the comment sections, what they were saying on reviews. That really created something so magical because it was exactly what our customer was looking for. When we released that bike, it was positivity across the board. Everybody was so happy. The customers were happy. Our design team was happy.

Rick Elmore is an entrepreneur, sales and marketing expert, and former college and professional football athlete. As the Founder and CEO of Simply Noted, Rick developed a proprietary technology that puts real pen and ink to paper to scale handwritten communication, helping businesses of all industries scale this unique marketing platform to stand out from their competition and build meaningful relationships with clients, customers, and employees. Founded in 2018 and based in Tempe, Arizona, Simply Noted has grown into a thriving company with clients of various sizes across the country including in hospitality, real estate, insurance, nonprofit, franchise, B2B, and others. Rick has served as the company's CEO since its founding, for more than three years, and has over a decade of sales and marketing industry experience.   most passionate about My background is in athletics. I played college and professional American football. When I got done, I made the transition into sales and marketing. I started with medical companies in the United States, Stryker and Straumann, and in orthopedics and dental. I had a pretty good career. I'm currently doing Simply Noted. We help companies send and automate real, genuine handwritten notes with technology and have been doing that for the last three and a half years. We have developed technology – a handwriting robot that puts real pen to paper and helps businesses connect on a more personal level, building relationships with their clients. Rick's career and story During my MBA, we had to start a project. When I was recruited in college, the coaches who always stood out the most to me were the coaches who sent handwritten notes. One year, in 2016, my wife and I had 400 clients. We tried sending out 400 printed holiday cards. All we did was hand-write the envelope and it took us over two weeks. I was like, “There has to be a better way.” So, I started researching. I looked up some technologies that were available. It wasn't until 2017 that I dove into it for a school project, but, really, I'd researched the technology for about a year. Best advice for entrepreneurs A lot of people want to become entrepreneurs or start a business, but they have analysis paralysis, overthink They think, 'I can't do it.' They think they have to have all the answers, but really, it's just taking that first step and getting started. Absolutely build the best relationships you can with those first clients. Those are your lighthouse customers. Those are the risk-takers. Those are the ones who are going to give you an opportunity. You have to make sure everything goes through. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I would say scaling a company is really hard. I'm struggling with figuring out how to scale a service like this when you're selling a $2 and $3 item. We want to help every client out, and we need to figure out an effective, efficient, really personal way of doing that. Biggest success with customers Something that I'm really good at is perseverance, relentless competition. That's just baked into who I am. Being patient is important. When you're an entrepreneur and starting a business, it's really hard to be patient because you have bills to pay. Rick's recommendation of a tool Zapier it's a platform that allows you to automate tasks between software. Rick's one key success factor The first thing you need is a really good support system. I have a wife and two kids and my parents live in Arizona. I absolutely couldn't do this if it wasn't for them. It takes time to get a business off the ground. One other thing that's important is to remember that you fail only when you give up or quit.   Rick's Mountain Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market...

Rhonda Petit is a Sales and Business Peak Performance Coach with 35 years of Sales and Sales Management experience in Corporate America in the life sciences and diagnostic markets. She has experience working with Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies. Today she works enthusiastically with Corporations and Individuals with champion mindsets, who know school is never out, who want to continually grow to unleash and activate more of their true potential and power. She helps people discover their deepest desires, leverage the untapped potential in their hearts, activate their potential and achieve their personal and professional goals so they can create the life they want and realize true fulfillment. Rhonda is a seasoned Sales Professional, a certified coach, leader, in-demand speaker, and author of “The Spirit of Selling.”   Most passionate about I am most passionate today about helping people realize the potential that lies within them, especially given the fast-paced changes that are occurring in the world today. I'm passionate about selling. I wrote a book about selling and how you can tap into the subconscious mind and your potential by understanding it and understanding more about the divinity within you. Rhonda's career and story I intended to be a chemist, but I got a double major in business because I was always fascinated, especially living in the United States, with free enterprise, being an entrepreneur, and building my own business. I was working as a chemist for chemical company and called the representative for J.T.Baker. The chemical company had been promoted and, there, the sales position was open. My lab manager knew I liked the business end of things. My position was eliminated in 2019 and I had been going to coaching school because I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I had my own business when they informed me of the news. I looked up at the sky and said, “Okay, I guess it's time for me to do this now, as opposed to later.” That's when I started my coaching business. Best advice for entrepreneurs Recognize that your business is serving people and what the value of your business is. Know your worth and the impact you can make on other people with your services. Don't be timid or scared to step out and do what you love. The biggest, most critical failure with customers In the beginning, I was caught up in a lot of the mechanics and the details. Because I was not aware of, and really conscious of, the value of my service, I would let people off the hook. If they came up with an objection, I would be timid, stand back, and listen to what they were saying. Biggest success with customers The greatest success is when you deliver a service and feel the energy from the people who got something from it. You see they've had an alteration and a shift that has put more life into them. They're excited that they've had a breakthrough. They recognize something that was holding them back and now they see why it was holding them back and how they're going to proceed. They're lifted, like virtual chains are coming off. Rhonda's recommendation of a tool Zoom Having a Zoom meeting is much more impactful than when you had meetings on the phone. Rhonda's one key success factor I find that my biggest strength is when I really get present and honest with myself. I lean back into myself and say, “You can do anything you set your mind to.” I think about my successes as opposed to the failures. That allows me to keep going and make the results happen, to go with the punches. It's always served me.   Rhonda's Mountain Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of mountaineering, I want to ask you: Is there a mountain you dream of climbing

Jake Jorgovan is a Serial Entrepreneur, Podcast Producer and Business Advisor. He is the Founder of Content Allies and Lead Cookiehttps://areteincubator.com/ (.) Through these companies he has generated $40M+ in sales for his clients. Jake is the host of the https://workingwithoutpants.com/ (Working Without Pants Podcast), and Leaders of B2B Podcast. He also shares the raw lessons of his entrepreneurial journey at Jake-Jorgovan.com. Jake is the producer behind podcasts for brands such as Facebook, Siemens Energy, Stampli, and more. Jake's professional focus is to build companies that enable freedom of time and financial profitability. He does that by being an active entrepreneur in the trenches and through training others on entrepreneurship, leadership, sales & marketing. Jake has degree in entrepreneurship from Belmont University and has been awarded Nashville's Youth Entrepreneur of the Year. He has spoken at conferences such as SXSW and has been featured in publications such as Inc & Forbes. Jake lives a nomadic life and has traveled the world while running multiple companies. Current location: Barcelona, Spain   Most passionate about I currently run Content Allies, which is a podcast agency. I'm really passionate about building this business up. Then, personally, on the side, I'm really passionate about playing with synthesizers. We produce revenue-generating B2B podcasts. That means we work primarily with businesses. These would be companies that are looking to launch a podcast. They tend to be of a decent size. Jake's career and story I have been in entrepreneurship for about 12 or 13 years now and have been in a video agency for a while. I got really into the event, industry, and music industry early in my career. Then I went off and did freelance digital marketing—various iterations of digital marketing agencies. Eventually, I decided: Okay, I want to focus at the agency on content. My previous agency wasn't lead generation and got heavily disrupted; it kept changing the game. I started Content Allies. We did a bunch of different iterations of content offerings and eventually landed on podcasting as our core service, with a full suite of content marketing. We found that podcasts are growing. There are tons of stats out there, saying that every year podcasts are growing and that more people are listening to them. What is really interesting for B2B companies is that podcasts can become the epicenter of their content strategy. Out of a podcast, we'll create videos, we'll create articles, we'll create social posts, we'll create quote blocks, we'll create short, social videos, and YouTube videos. We'll also often lead that into collaborations with the guests to post content on their site. Best advice for entrepreneurs It helps to launch a business in a rising tide, like in a rising wave. We're doing the same thing with podcasting right now. It's like podcasting is a wave and we're riding that. At some point, that will plateau or stabilize and commoditize as any industry does. The biggest, most critical failure with customers One of the things that's hard about being an entrepreneur is that you have to learn every facet of the business. People deny this early on. I'm not a finance guy; that's how I started. So, I tried to hire out the job of keeping my books to the cheapest person I could, but that meant I didn't have visibility into finances. Not knowing at least the basics led to really bad failures for me in the past. Biggest success with customers It came down to being intentional about the niche we were going to pick with Content Allies. The biggest success comes from testing different offers and then trying to really think through things like, ‘This is going to become my core business.' Jake's recommendation of a tool Process Street It replaced very expensive project...

Dan Zavorotny is the co-founder of NutriSense – a metabolic health company that utilizes Continuous Glucose Monitoring (GCM) technology to provide real-time data to clients. He launched 3 months before Covid, and he has grown the company from an idea to over $150 million valuation in just 26 months and 120 employees. Previously, he worked as a management consultant for KPMG where he consulted for 3 out of top 5 hospitals in the world. When Dan's not working, he loves to travel, and he has been to over 100 countries before the age of 30.   Most passionate about I was working in healthcare consulting and saw a trend over and over. We saw people, hospitals, and insurance companies spend more money every single year on healthcare. I ran into one of my friends who was wearing a device called a continuous glucose monitor. It tracks your glucose in real-time, 24/7. I put on a device and it completely changed the way I looked at health. We said, “Let's start a company around it.” We basically launched in two weeks. I quit my job and then we just started going, going, going. Since then, we've gotten to an over $150 million value. Dan's career and story We immigrated from Ukraine. My parents didn't have much money. So, I picked jobs in corporate finance that let me live in France for a year. Then I focused on my career. I said, “How do I become the best employee possible?” I was doing healthcare consulting. I quickly realized that there are fundamental shifts in the industry of healthcare that need to happen, and there's not enough drive or change inside. So, that has to happen from external forces. I started looking at, like, “What can I start? How can I help this industry?” This was when I ran into my friend, Alex, whom I started a company with and who was an acknowledged expert. We brought in a third person, Kara, who's our head of nutrition. We can focus on the business, the software, and the human capital in this area to change behavior. That's been guiding us. It's been very effective by focusing on hiring the best people. Best advice for entrepreneurs The first one is, in every business, there are always two things that are most important. It's either build the product or service and offering or sell that product or service and offering. You must always say who's doing the first and who's doing the second. Remember, no matter what you're doing, always focus on those two functions at the beginning. Number two is, you just gotta go and try to sell this to someone to see who wants it. The goal here is to get them to put their credit card in. Always focus on credit. Until someone's putting a credit card down, they're not actually your customer. To me, the signifier is, did you collect their cash? If you did, your product has value. The biggest, most critical failure with customers It's that we listened to the customers who are the loudest customers, but they might not be our main customers. It's important to remember that just because someone is very loud as a customer, that does not mean this is the person you should be billing for it. I think that's a mistake we made. It doesn't sound that bad, but if you actually think about it, we're a software company. We're telling our engineers to build something and retain all that money on salaries, product development, and a user experience for this one individual, while the other 99% of people might be less vocal. Oftentimes, they're the silent majority. We're basically neglecting them because every time we're building for this one individual, we're not building for those other ones. Biggest success with customers When we first started, we had about 12 customers sign up. One of the packages got lost by the United States post office. We emailed the customer and said, “Hey, it looks like your package got lost in Arizona. Do you want us to ship you another one?” The person said, “No,...

Five years ago, I started my podcast REACH OR MISS for entrepreneurs. Two hundred sixty episodes to date and counting. I took something from any episode, and, of course, many taught me something new. However, three past episodes are the core of entrepreneurial marketing. In today's episode, I invite you to listen to these three thought-leaders and find the difference between what you do and what they talk about. Choose one thing that you will do differently from today. I think that will help you become a better entrepreneurial marketer. And every entrepreneur should also become their own marketer.   John Lee Dumas John Lee Dumas: John is the host of EOFire, an award winning podcast where he interviews today's most successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders. JLD has grown EOFire into a multi-million dollar a year business. with over 2000 interviews. He's the author of The Freedom Journal and The Mastery Journal, two of the most funded publishing campaigns of all time on Kickstarter. All the magic happens at EOFire.com! https://www.eofire.com (Fire Nation (EOFire)) John's best advice about approaching the customer Number one, you need to know who your perfect customer is, the ideal customer, your avatar. Once you know who that person is, you can start creating free valuable, and consisting content for that person. Then you want to make sure you are getting it in front of them, so you have to find them and put that content in front of them. And, of course, they will be attracted to that content because you are creating it for them specifically. Then, once you have the opportunity to get in front of them, ask them a question, send them an email, newsletter, or a social media message, you have to ask: What are you struggling with? Then you can start to understand your ideal customers, what their pain points, obstacles, challenges, and struggles are, so then you – the person that, by the way, has been delivering them free value and assisting content, can provide the solution in the form of a product, a service or a community. You are not just somebody pitching them something; you are somebody that already provided them value, who they are growing to know, like, and trust, who asked them what they are struggling with, who listened to them when they were telling their pain point, and who now says: ‘Hi, you told me you are struggling with this, here is the solution, and I'd love to offer it.' That's the way to approach your customer. Biggest failure with customers This is a big mistake that I made, and it was a big waste of time, energy, effort, and money. It goes back to 2013. Many people said they love my podcast and love to create their podcasts. I wanted to create an entire platform where I would create other people's podcasts for them. I'll host their shows; I'll edit their podcast. I'll make their show notes; I'll do it all. I called it PodPlatform. Everybody that heard the idea said it's a great product. I made all the arrangements and invested so luckily it was the perfect number…which quickly let me realize I don't want to be in this business; I don't want to edit other people's shows, upload their outro and intro, and host that for them. And I went back to this one person, here is your money back, but this isn't the kind of business I want. But I wasted so much time, so much energy, and money. And actually, I could say if anybody telling me they want this before I'll go and creates this and invest so much time and money, let's have people put money where their mouth is and invest in this product before it exists. And I did that a few months later with Podcaster Paradise, and I had 50 people signed up before we launched, which made me realize that this is something that can actually work. Fast-forward to today, Podcaster's Paradise has over 3000 members and over 4 Million Dollars in revenue. Biggest success due to the...

For over 17 years, Lucas Root led numerous teams on Wall Street. After establishing a consistent track record of success, Lucas started his own consulting business. Lucas works with strong brands with a well-funded great idea, who doesn't quite know how to execute. Since early 2019, Lucas has had the wonderful opportunity to speak to numerous audiences in North America, Australia, and Europe, as well as partner with both businesses and VCs for mentoring.   Most passionate about I launched my consulting company and was really focused on the thing that I got paid for on Wall Street. On Wall Street I was hired to execute the strategies they would come up with and to give them constructive feedback. I've partnered with the NCN university, which has one of the largest MBA programs in the world. They strongly encourage their MBA students to start a business while they're going through the MBA program so that they can test out the things they're learning in the program real-time, live, in their own business. They support them with this program called The Launchpad. Three years ago, I decided, for better or worse, “I'm doing good things here.” So, I started focusing on women entrepreneurs. I found that there are significant barriers to success for women. I wasn't happy with that. Lucas's career and story I was on Wall Street for 17 years doing mergers and acquisitions. I always had a side project. My first two side hustles were real estate businesses and they were great. My third side hustle was a food blog where I wrote about recipes and food. I shared my passion with the world and it was wildly successful. Once I was satisfied that I knew how to create a marketplace and have people get excited to show up and have that conversation with me, I decided it was time for the next thing, not a side hustle. So, I left Wall Street. Best advice for entrepreneurs To be a successful business owner, you must be able to create a conversation with a marketplace and have people excited to show up and have that conversation with you at its very core. That's what it is to be a business. Get started. Go out, start your idea, bring it to the market. Find a team that believes in you and supports you, and just start doing something. Don't get stuck trying to create some version of perfection just to get started. The biggest reason that businesses fail is not the thing you see in the newspapers. The newspapers are lying to you. The magazines are lying to you. The entrepreneurship books that you're buying from Barnes & Noble are lying to you. The biggest reason that businesses fail is that the founder didn't have enough money to pay their own bills, their rent, their food, their cell phone. The founder didn't have enough money to pay their own bills for at least two years when they started. What can be done about that? Make sure, number one, that you have a plan in place to have your bills paid. Let's be honest: Your business is probably not going to be ready to pay your bills for you in the first two years. The biggest, most critical failure with customers One of my first businesses was a real estate business, as I mentioned. It was amazing. I had a really cool idea. I was a really smart analyst. I found a market where I could invest a certain amount of money and that money would turn into a profitable opportunity very quickly. This doesn't always exist. However, I made two big mistakes with that business. Number one, I went in from an analyst perspective and didn't learn my lesson from this business. I went in because of the profit potential, not because of my passion for the business, not because it was something I loved. Number two, since it was a business that I didn't love, I didn't want to be in it. I didn't want to be in the details. I didn't want to be elbow deep in everything going on in that business. So, I hired a manager early...

One of the most popular questions on my REACH OR MISS podcast for entrepreneurs is the question about the biggest, most critical failure with customers. I often think about my biggest failure with customers. It was when I promoted my online course. Five years ago, a short while after I started my podcast for entrepreneurs, I decided to create an online course for entrepreneurs and teach them the secrets of entrepreneurial marketing. I invested in a rather expensive online course to study how to create my successful course. I learned every aspect of creating the course, and I studied four different ways to promote my course. The expert I learned from about creating an online course had a very clear recommendation about promoting the online course: he warmly recommended not using webinars to promote and sell my course. Webinars are too complicated, he said, and you should use a better, easier way to sell your course. But I didn't listen. I listened to another mentor who was a great believer in webinars. On my first webinar, I had 25 participants and not one sale. I had 12 participants and not one deal on the second webinar, and on the third and last webinar, I had 4 participants and not even one sale. You got it right; my webinars were a total failure, and although I tried again two years later, I didn't manage to use webinars to sell my course. The reason for my failure: I didn't focus on the one most important challenge of selling my course. Instead, I wasted a lot of energy and time learning how to make webinars. It took me a while, and I found a different successful way to sell my courses. But this was a fundamental lesson for me. In today's episode, I chose to focus on the stories of six successful entrepreneurs who shared with me the stories of their biggest failures and what they learned from them. Failures are an excellent opportunity to learn. Don't be afraid to fail; dare to win!!     Khaled Maziad is a marketing consultant who specializes in the Psychology of persuasion and high-ticket sales. He helps coaches transform their uncharged-non-monetary offer into a high-ticket one without having Tony Robbins like Brand. He shares his story on struggling to give away his stuff for free to charging high-ticket offers and helping his clients from all around the world do the same. He is known as the Copy & Messaging Alchemist. He has been featured in FOX as one of 21 Entrepreneurs You Need to Know About in 2021. He has also been featured in ANLP, Fox, CBS & NBC. Khaled is a professional member of ANLP International CIC, a certified Master of NLP, and holds a degree in Civil Engineering. Before becoming marketing, Khaled worked with traders and professional fund managers, helping them master their mental edge in trading and life. He also had over 15 years of experience as a Project manager, where he managed multi-million dollar projects on 3 continents. Khaled lives with his wife and two kids in Sydney, Australia.   Khaled's biggest, most critical failure with customers One of them was not testing offers before validating them. I worked on a product once that I was perfecting and I didn't show it to anyone. I didn't get any feedback. I didn't ask anyone if they wanted it or not. I worked for about a month on it. When I put it out there, no one even cared about it. The tool was a really big failure.     Toccara Karizma is a digital marketing consultant and business growth strategist. She is the CEO of Karizma Marketing, a full-service digital marketing agency dedicated to growing elite eCommerce brands online through email marketing, social media marketing, PPC, SEO, website conversion optimization, and more. Having built her own successful eCommerce business back in 2007, Toccara is now considered one of the world's top eCommerce marketing experts. Her out-of-the-box approach

Robbie Samuels is an author, speaker, and business growth strategy coach recognized as a networking expert by Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Lifehacker, and Inc. He is also a virtual event design consultant and executive Zoom producer recognized as an industry expert in the field of digital event design by JDC Events. Robbie is the author of "Croissants vs. Bagels: Strategic, Effective, and Inclusive Networking at Conferences" and "Small List, Big Results: Launch a Successful Offer No Matter the Size of Your Email List." He is a Harvard Business Review contributor. His clients include thought leaders, entrepreneurial women, associations, national, and statewide advocacy organizations, women's leadership summits, including Feeding America, California WIC Association, and AmeriCorps. Robbie is the host of the On the Schmooze podcast and #NoMoreBadZoom Virtual Happy Hours.   Most passionate about I have multiple tracks in my business. I do one-on-one coaching, group programs, all about helping people build an audience before they try to launch an offer. I also work with my virtual event clients on bringing their events online with less stress and greater participant engagement. What had been somewhat dormant, but is just starting to come back, is working with organizations around their in-person events to help them become more engaging and to really support their participants through what, for many, is their first experience at an in-person event. Robbie's career and story I spent 15 years organizing fundraising events and doing major gift work. On the side, I started speaking and showing people how to network. I was working with boards of directors and foundations. I did both of those things for about five years. Eventually, I realized that there was a possible career in doing this full-time. In 2015, I left my comfortable and safe career to really see if this thing I'd been doing for five years was going to turn into something. That's when I decided to launch a podcast, which came out a year later. I launched my first book, which today has 191 reviews on Amazon. I then got a chance to do a TEDx. Every year, I had different opportunities. I was well on my way to being an overnight success, 10 years in the making, when everything got upended in March 2020. Best advice for entrepreneurs My second book is called Small List, Big Results: Launch a Successful Offer No Matter the Size of Your Email List. That subtitle belies the fact that, a lot of times, as entrepreneurs, as experts, we get really excited about some kind of solution, some kind of offer. We get some kind of program offer—an online course app, whatever the modality is. And we rush out to market to tell people about it. The marketplace basically responds with “Who are you? What is this? Nope, I don't need this.” And we're just shocked. I think the better approach would be to not create solutions in a vacuum, but to invite input from your most likely prospects. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I mentioned this in my latest book. When my first book came out, I didn't have a very clear plan for what kind of offer would come from it. But I had a pilot in mind, and I did run a successful pilot. I got great feedback. When I went to sell the next iteration, I created a landing page and took video testimonials and written testimonials from the few people who'd gone through the initial pilot. I had 250 people view the landing page. But they did not contact me to learn more about the program. So, the problem wasn't my ability to get the word out. But in that same span of time, several people reached out to me, asking for other types of services and other types of support. That was when I really started to understand that the packaging wasn't matching. People were seeing me as a resource, but they didn't see the program as a solution. Biggest success with customers

For 30 years Chris Beall has led software start-ups as a founder or early-stage developer. He believes the most powerful part of a software system is the human being, and that the value key is to let the computer do what it does well — go fast without getting bored — in order to free up human potential. Chris is currently CEO of ConnectAndSell, Inc., based in Silicon Valley, and hosts a podcast at MarketDominanceGuys.   Most passionate about What I'm doing now, and I've been doing for quite a while, is running a company called It helps companies dominate their markets by leading with the human voice. I've been passionate for a long time about having computers and humans work together in a way that unleashes the strengths of each. Chris's career and story I was raised out in the desert in Arizona, pretty far away from most people. I was raised by animals—by horses and dogs and cats and goats and all manner of creatures like that. I think that's how I learned how to sell. My first sale ever, where I was successful, was getting a bridle on a horse when I was seven years old. I was very interested in mathematics and the physical sciences. Kerry Wilcox took me aside and said, “I want to let you know something that might change your mind about teaching.” Here I was with this dream of being a teacher. She said to me, “You are an entrepreneur by nature.” “I invest in my former students' companies.” This was all a revelation to me, that she was an angel investor. She said, “You can teach if you want to, but I don't want you to go off into industry, get a job in some field where there's a lot of opportunity.” I reluctantly followed her instructions when I got a job at an NCR computer company in 1979. Sure enough, I was dissatisfied. That led me down a path where, within four years, I was starting my first company. Best advice for entrepreneurs One thing I find that's the number one mistake that entrepreneurs make is that they build the product before they sell the product. I think you should do it the other way around. I highly recommend that any entrepreneur who wants to be a product entrepreneur, especially in B2B, start by having conversations—sales conversations, not survey conversations. If you're not doing it under pressure, you're probably not really doing it. So, try to sell your product before you build it and be serious about it. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I can go back to 1984. The company was called Unison software. Unison was an ERP system before there were ERP systems. So, it was called an MRP II system. It was intended to help primarily manufacturers with their processes around Bilson material and so forth, but it had a complete accounting system in it. The biggest failure was that we could go after two kinds of markets. We had discrete manufacturing folks who put parts together in order to make up a product. And then there was what's called continuous or flow manufacturing. So, there are no parts; there are inputs and outputs and then control conditions and all that kind of stuff. What we failed to do, rather dramatically, was focus on one or the other. We could have done very well. We had impatient investors who drove us down a path that was impossible. It ended up shrinking the software. Biggest success with customers It was in 1998 and I was at a company called Requisite Technology. Requisite had the world's most advanced (at that time) electronic cataloging technology for business to build. First, we had to invent a whole new cataloging technology from scratch, which we managed to do in six weeks. We did it by simplifying and accepting something that everybody said was true, which was that it was impossible to build this kind of technology on top of a convention. The big triumph, the big success, was in focusing on only four customers for the entire year and having only...

Lisa Staff is a master photographer, former fashion model, and expert interior & exterior designer. She has had success at every turn in her entrepreneurial career due to her ability to connect and understand people on all levels. She embodies the metaphor of meeting people where they are and turning their lemons into lemonade. Deevo is a thought leader, photographer, videographer, blogger, serial entrepreneur, ex-college athlete, former corporate executive, a single father of two promising young ladies, and now an emerging strategy consultant and paid speaker, who is fast making his way as an expert in creating digital architecture to help small businesses and entrepreneurs' brand and market. In 2018, Lisa & Deevo founded Sprout Connectors, a full service creative agency with a focus on social media management and content storytelling. They mix an efficient blend of content savvy with a relentless creative lavishness and depth of imagination to serve up an inspiring brand community.   Most passionate about Business-wise, I am running my photography agency, which I've been doing since 2003. About a year and a half ago, Lisa and I partnered and formed a new business called Sprout Connectors. It's a branding and marketing acceleration agency for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We are also launching some training workshops, working on a TED Talk proposal, and traveling the planet as much as we can, given the closures all over the place. We're just trying to live our life. Best advice for entrepreneurs First and foremost, as it pertains to your customer perspective, you must develop, if you haven't already, the ability to listen. There's a fine line between adding your own unique twist and approach to things and melding that metaphorically with what your client wants out of the situation, being able to look at that intuitively and intraoperatively and clearly understanding what their vision is, what their business objective is. At the core of that, you need to be able to read the room and understand that everyone you engage with is uniquely qualified and uniquely different in their own sense. The biggest, most critical failure with customers For me, it's the ego piece. As a business owner. If you can't tell, I'm very firm on my approach to everything. I have very specific ideas about how things should function. And because I've had a decent amount of success in my businesses, I come to the table sometimes thinking that I know the way to do things. That's really just my ego talking. Biggest success with customers The accomplishment is the fact that we've been in business collectively for over 20 years and we've launched a new brand together. In our first year of business, we were already profitable. Being able to pivot into a new business model, adjust that, and have an impact right away with our clients was a big success for me. Still having the understanding and humility that we have a lot of room to grow and being able to do that has been monumental in my business. Lisa & Deevo's recommendation of a tool I use HoneyBook for my photography business. We use it for onboarding as well. It's CRM and workflow software that you integrate with your back-of-the-house procedures. Contact information, databases, email systems—any way that you communicate with your clients, not only does it enable you to track it and keep an inventory log of your conversations, history, contracts, all that sort of stuff, but it can also integrate with your email system. Lisa & Deevo's one key success factor My one success factor has been connecting with people everywhere I go. I connect with people whether it's someone delivering food to my door or somebody I've met in a grocery store—just the most random occasions. For me, it's being curious about people, understanding what makes people think, connecting with...

Patrick B. Parker is an accomplished Tech Executive turned Founder with domestic and international experience in operations, custom software development, multichannel product distribution, and marketing involving both start-up and growth operations. He has bootstrapped companies he founded to millions ($MM) in ARR and has raised venture capital to build out teams, to refine product features and user experiences, and to execute go-to-market (GTM) strategies. Today, his company works with amazing entrepreneurs that are looking to make a major impact within their industry. Thoroughbred Solutions helps clients with everything from business ideation to product/service development to building scalable marketing strategies and everything in between.   Most passionate about I'm extremely, deeply involved in Software As A Service. I love technology and Those are definitely my passions, but my purpose is really helping young entrepreneurs and brain builders with building out their businesses—helping to make them successful and to de-risk the process. Patrick's career and story I was a software architect before launching my own business. Then I started building out entreprise software, web apps, mobile apps, things of that nature. From there, I got into branding business building as well, being involved on the software side. We've gone above and beyond to bring in experts and all of the various functional domains so that we have that expertise in-house. Best advice for entrepreneurs The biggest thing is to just start now. Start having those conversations with people in your target audience. Start understanding what challenges they're facing and then what possible solutions might look like. The biggest, most critical failure with customers We've had one customer, out of several hundred, that has opted to leave and go work somewhere else. The struggles I've had have not been with customers as much as with market conditions. As a serial entrepreneur, starting businesses from a young age, I've failed a lot. It's been more about being able to bring on capital or manage cashflow—things of that nature. Biggest success with customers I've launched a ton of different ventures. The first one, I launched as a side hustle was a staffing company. I grew it to a million in revenue within the first year. That allowed me to have the seed capital to start my next venture, which was a software development company. That has probably been my greatest success story. My greatest personal success, or the greatest reward, that I see is being able to help my clients and customers realize their dreams. Patrick's recommendation of a tool CRM HubSpot It helps you track that customer. It helps you create touchpoints around that customer's experience and journey. Patrick's one key success factor The biggest thing, especially when we're working with clients, is that there's so much noise going on in the world about what works and what doesn't work. We stress to clients that they need to understand that no two entrepreneurial journeys are the same. It's the same for your backstory as it is for your roadmap of where you're going. At SAS Partners, we use proven frameworks to help entrepreneurs focus on the activities that are actually going to add value to their business, especially in the early stages, so they don't waste time on activities or tasks that aren't going to move.   Patrick's Mountain Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of mountaineering, I want to ask you: Is there a mountain you dream of climbing or a mountain you have already climbed? We make a habit of going once or twice a year, hiking and climbing and reaching the summits. It's a...

Mark Colgan is an entrepreneur and revenue leader responsible for increasing revenue across a small portfolio of companies where he leverages his 13 years experience of B2B Sales, Marketing and Recruitment. Mark currently splits his time as Co-founder of Speak On Podcasts, mentoring B2B Startups via GrowthMentor and ScaleWise, The Product Onboarders and coaching 100's of SDR's through his Outbound Prospecting and Cold Email Bootcamp course via The Sales Impact Academy. He's a Techstars 18′ Alumni and a regular speaker within the B2B SaaS industry, his work has been published by SaaStock, Mailshake, Pipedrive, LeadSift, Lemlist, SugarCRM and Baremetrics to name a few. Mark currently lives and works from Lisbon, is addicted to travelling and exploring new cultures and places. You'll often hear him saying “por que no?” (why not?) to anything that sounds fun or gets the heart racing like wingwalking, skydiving and paramotoring.   Most passionate about We are building an agency, which is completely remote. And we're in the podcasting world. We help people secure interviews on relevant podcasts so they can get their brand message out there and build awareness about that. Mark's career and story I studied marketing at university, but as part of my degree, we had to work for one year in a company. I actually got a job in recruitment and I did so well in that year that I was invited back to the company once I graduated. I spent the first two to three years of my career in recruitment, working for some of the largest recruitment companies. I started to teach myself digital marketing because it was all very new back then. I managed to get a role in a separate company as the first digital marketing person. So, I got very good at implementing CRMs and marketing automation, as well as a lot of the technology and putting that all together. I realized, once I was traveling, that I didn't really want to go back to a nine-to-five job. I enjoyed the freedom. And I enjoyed the ability to be able to travel and work from wherever I wanted. So, I set up my own consultancy, focusing on HubSpot CRM and marketing automation, all of the things I love building together – building things and putting them together. I managed to be invited to work for a company as their chief revenue officer, which meant essentially that I was looking after marketing sales, customer success, and product. In this case, the product was the service. I did that for just over a year which brings us up to June 2020, when I left that company to start speaking on podcasts. This is the agency that I currently focus and spend most of my time on now. Best advice for entrepreneurs I'll split my answer into two parts, but it's pretty much the same answer: Focus on the customer. What I mean by that is to really understand who it is that you are going to be working with. What are their problems and their challenges, and can you build a solution to help them overcome some of those challenges and problems? The second part is to then think about distribution. What I mean by distribution is how you can get in front of as many of those ideal customers, whom you've defined, as possible. The biggest, most critical failure with customers My most critical failure would be not focusing on the client delivery part of the business. It's one thing to market and sell to people. It's another thing to actually deliver on the promise that was sold. I've been in situations where I wasn't focusing on that because it wasn't really supposed to be part of my job, but then I noticed that a lot of customers were becoming unhappy after they started working with the company I was working for. Biggest success with customers At the company that I was working for at the time, we provided data for customers to use in their own sales process, so their outbound sales process, but they had very poor messaging or...

From homeless to hero, Michael Unbroken, is the Founder of Think Unbroken, best-selling author, award-winning speaker, podcast host, coach, and advocate for adult survivors of childhood. Since 2016, Michael has empowered over 100,000 trauma survivors to get out of The Vortex, learn to love themselves, and become the hero of their own story. Michael has written multiple books including the best seller Think Unbroken: Understanding and Overcoming Childhood Trauma, spoken in over 80 countries, won investments from Undercover Billionaire Grant Cardone, and is on a mission to end Generational Trauma in his lifetime. About Think Unbroken: Our mission is to empower trauma survivors with the tools and curriculum of Think Unbroken to get unstuck, learn to love themselves, get "Out of The Vortex" and reclaim their power. We believe that by creating palatable and practical tools that Trauma Warriors around the world can overcome their past, heal from trauma, and BECOME THE HERO OF THEIR OWN STORY!   Most passionate about One of the two biggest things that I'm moving toward right now is having the number one mental health and personal development podcast on the planet. The other biggest goal is to be in the best physical, mental, and emotional shape of my life this year. Michael's career and story I spent the majority of my childhood being homeless and deeply in poverty. I started doing drugs when I was 12 years old. I was expelled from school when I was 15 years old and I spent a lot. As I headed into my later teen years, I thought about life from the perspective of “What is the solution for poverty? What is the solution for abuse?” “How does somebody really get out of this?” I decided it must be money. So, I made a decision that I would chase money, but do it legally. I started learning skills. I started learning leadership. I started learning how to be productive with my time. I started learning how to manage cash flow and P&Ls and inventories. And I worked for a fast-food restaurant. At 18 and a half, almost 19 years old, I had 52 employees underneath me. So, I started learning about legit business. In a couple of years, I was working for a Fortune 10 company here in America. No high school diploma, no college education. I started making six figures. That just destroyed my life because money is not the solution to your problems. And, in that, one of the most beautiful things happened. I remember I was lying in bed the next day, eating chocolate cake and watching the CrossFit games. And I'm like, “Hold on, something here is not right. There's something really wrong with everything in my life.” I went into the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, and asked myself, “What are you willing to do to have the life that you want to have?” And the answer was “no excuses, just results.” It started me on this beautiful journey where now, 11 years later, I am talking to you. That has been a process of healing, of discovery, of therapy and coaching, and education and investing in myself, investing in my community and my businesses. Best advice for entrepreneurs If I were an entrepreneur at the beginning of this, if I rewound my life 15 years, the first thing that I would tell myself is, “You need to learn to be okay asking for money. You need to put yourself in a position where you move through the discomfort of not valuing yourself for what you are. Charge what you are worth.” In that, because it is a trade-off, you have to bring massive value to your customer. You have to take care of them. You have to be their best friend. You have to follow through. You have to do what you say that you're going to do. The biggest, most critical failure with customers When you are dealing with other people, in the beginning, until you understand how to not make business personal, you take everything personally. That's one of the hard parts about the dichotomy of

Robyn Johnson has been heralded as one of the country's foremost leaders on the topic of selling and marketing products on Amazon.com. Robyn has been a guest on shows like Entrepreneur on Fire, Confessions of A Marketer, and is a SEMrush Academy professor. Robyn is the co-founder of Marketplace Blueprint, a digital agency that specializes in listing optimization and advertising on Amazon. She has over a decade of experience of selling online on Amazon, eBay, and other eCommerce venues.   Most passionate about I get to help people who have physical products market those products on Amazon. We have an agency that helps run the ads and does the listings for people. I'm also really passionate about Disney, Star Wars, and my kids. We try to squeeze in as much travel and adventures and board games as we can. Robyn's career and story I had no intention of doing this. I had no marketing experience about 11-plus years ago. I was working in a church but you don't get paid a lot and my son got sick. There was a moment when they were testing him and I knew that the test was going to cost a certain amount. I took a hundred dollars out of our emergency fund. I can still remember the five twenties in my hand. It felt like a million dollars. We started buying things at garage sales and then reselling them on Craigslist. From that hundred dollars, we built a million-dollar business selling physical products on Amazon. We moved from buying used items to buying things in retail stores to wholesale. I started coaching other high-volume Amazon sellers and we realized what a big problem Amazon was for brands. About five years ago, we started our agency. Now we get to work with brands that are “Shark Tank”-size companies and some publicly traded companies. Best advice for entrepreneurs When you're looking at customer approach, make sure that you're offering what your customers really want. Make sure you're really keyed in to what's going on in your buyer's mind. Don't try to skip steps. Enjoy each moment. The biggest, most critical failure with customers The thing that set us back the most was related to cash flow. I hired somebody who was supposed to manage our cash flow but I wasn't monitoring it well enough and it got us in some trouble. Then it took us quite a long time to get out of it. And it added a lot of stress. It made the business very much not fun for a long period of time. Biggest success with customers The biggest success is when we've gone out of our way to provide off-Amazon connections or use the resources in our network to help other sellers. There was a publicly-traded company that had worked with an agency previously. They're a large company, so they had significant sales on Amazon. By communicating what changes we needed to make and reassessing and changing their approach to their ads on Amazon, we were able to grow their year-over-year sales by 118%. That extra revenue helped them get another round of investment that netted $40 million for the company. Robyn's recommendation of a tool If you have a physical product, go to your product on Amazon and your competitors' products on Amazon. Look at your website, then review their website and reviews. Copy and paste all of them in Google Word Cloud. Robyn's one key success factor My key success factor is that I want to always learn more. We set a goal as a company and then we break things down backward, assuming we hit that goal in the future. We work backward to identify what needs to happen today, tomorrow, and next week in order to make that goal predictable and not just a hope or a wish. That has made a big difference in our being able to consistently generate miracles.   Robyn's Mountain Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire...

Among all the challenges entrepreneurs are facing getting more clients is the challenge that is mentioned most. Customers are the oxygen of any business. And yet, we often think about getting customers and sales as a given. Surprisingly, in most cases, focus on getting more customers to grow your business is much easier than most entrepreneurs think. But often, they prefer to focus on finding a cheaper manufacturer or making changes in the product, or replacing the team rather than increase their leads and customer base. Why? Probably because customers' marketing and sales are something most business owners are not certain of. They are not aware of the speed and volume of growth they can get through focus on the right customers to generate more leads, and sales In today's episode, I chose to focus on the stories of three successful entrepreneurs who realized that focusing on the customer is the easiest and fastest way to win.   Karl Maier: “The customer is critical. One of my mentors said, many years ago, that nothing happens until you sell something. So, obviously, that starts with the customer.” Karl Maier has been part of the leadership team in six established companies which have at least doubled sales in two years. Leveraging his successes, Karl developed the Abunden Framework© and led the development of the practical management tools in the Abunden Tools App. These online SaaS (Software as a Service) tools build the management structure for companies to grow and succeed.   Karl's best advice for entrepreneurs The customer is critical. One of my mentors said, many years ago, that nothing happens until you sell something. So, obviously, that starts with the customer. I think the principal is to talk to a number of different potential customers and really understand what their problem is. Can you solve it in a way that they're willing to pay for? That's the most fundamental part of starting a business, in my mind. Then you have the option to be Hands-on all the pieces of the company, but that limits your growth, or are you willing to transform and delegate it to other people to grow the company? I think that's a very fundamental choice, one that I would encourage people to reflect on and decide which way they really want to go. The biggest, most critical failure with customers My first software startup was during the dot-com boom. Everybody said, “Technology is going to solve all the problems.” I think I got sucked into that and I really didn't understand my customers. I was ignoring how the products were actually bought and sold. In the end, the company failed because of that. So that's a lesson. We remember failures better than our wins, I think. Biggest success with customers We had a service company in the health safety industry. I was part of the C-suite management team. And we really did build a team. There was great communication and connection. People respected each other. They worked hard and were able to really understand what our customer's problem was. High-value people were getting malaria and getting sick. We were able to come in and cut their malaria rate in half the first year and then half again the second year. So we clearly were solving their problem. We were able to come in and solve a problem, do it effectively. We were able to grow the company. We grew it in four years by a factor of seven.   Dan McGaw Best Advice: “Focus on generating revenue. Sometimes it's much easier to sell and get your customers, not only to raise money.” Dan McGaw is an award-winning entrepreneur, speaker and the CEO of McGaw-dot-io, an analytics and marketing technology consultancy and SaaS platform, UTM.io. In addition, Dan also finds time to be a 500 Startups Mentor, and has previously started the first business accelerator in Orlando. He's also a thought leader in the MarTech world

There are a few reasons why so many entrepreneurs fail, and around 90% of the entrepreneurships fail. However, many of the most successful entrepreneurs I interviewed for my podcast told me the same thing; Keep going. Only those who quit fail. In today's episode, I chose to focus on the stories of three successful entrepreneurs. The main reason for their success was their state of mind; no matter what happened and how big the failures they experienced were, they never ever gave up until they succeeded. I think you will find those stories very inspiring. Brian Roland: “A lot of failures look like trial and error. It's an iterative process. It kind of hits the failure category but we learned so much through the process that it's hard to see it as a failure.” Brian Roland is a Social Entrepreneur and Founder of Abenity, the 6x Inc. 5000 Company that's powering corporate perks for top brands including U.S. Bank and MasterCard. And while Abenity provides millions of subscribers with private discounts, the company's social mission is fighting extreme poverty with every program they deliver. Abenity recently exceeded a million dollars of total giving and hired a CEO to accelerate growth with their fully remote team. Brian lives in Scottsdale with his wife and 3 daughters and is investing his time in efforts that help like-minded entrepreneurs establish a social mission of their own.   Most passionate about In 2006, my brother and I built a SAS company (software as a service) that helps large corporations offer employee perks and benefits to their people. We've negotiated discounts on everything from pizza and the zoo to movie tickets, oil changes, car rentals, and hotels. We put it all in one spot for our clients and brand it to look like the company and the employees saved coupons all over the United States and travel offers across the world where they can enjoy special corporate perks. When we founded our business, we really wanted to stand for something outside of our industry. So, we built our business with a social mission. There was an output to our cause for every input into the business. That is what gives me the most passion and mission at this point in my career. Brian's career and story As a third-grader, I was making laminated folders because my folders would tear apart. I started playing the trumpet when I was young. It teaches you to be the entrepreneurial solo artist, where you're running the show and everybody's looking at you. It teaches you to be a team player, where you're sitting in the symphony and blending in so that nobody notices your contribution, but they hear it, they see everything. That led to teaching trumpet lessons, which led to making a CD and moving to Nashville to go to school, which led me to sell cell phones—having the a-ha moment that the music industry is actually not that entrepreneurial. In that role, I discovered this gap: Companies would love to offer perks and benefits to their people but they had a hard time finding the perks to offer and vetting the purchase to make sure they were good. That's how we built Abenity. We've probably built five or six businesses inside of it. This is what led me, two years ago, to realize that the business had grown to a certain level of maturity where the number of businesses that I could launch within Abenity reached its peak in terms of what the team could have accomplished in a healthy way. There was this moment when it was like our business didn't need an entrepreneur anymore. It needed people to help execute and set standards and focus on growth. Those are areas that fell outside of my passion areas. So, there was time to put the right people in place to take the business to the next level. And that's what we did. Today I'm kind of the chief evangelist for the brand, which allows me to be available here talking to you. The biggest, most critical failure...

Miriam Schulman is an artist, author and founder of The Inspiration Place and The Artists Incubator Coaching Program where she helps artists (from amateurs to professionals) develop their skills, tap into their creativity, and grow thriving art businesses. Her podcast, The Inspiration Place, is on the top 1% of all podcasts globally and is listened to in over 40 countries. Miriam has been featured in Forbes and has been a guest on numerous podcasts. Her art has been featured in The New York Times, Art of Man, and Art Journaling magazine by Stampington, as well as seen on NBC's “Parenthood” and the Amazon series “Hunters'' with Al Pacino. Her forthcoming book on how to “make it” as an artist is scheduled to be published with HarperCollins Leadership in February 2023.   Most passionate about I have been working on a book for Harper Collins. It's a traditionally published book. I've been writing a book called Artprenuer to help artists learn how to earn a sustainable living from their creativity. Miriam's career and story I wanted to be an artist when I was young. When I left college, I figured, “Well, if I have to make money from what I'm doing, where can I make the most money?” So, I went to work on Wall Street instead. It took me a while, even after I had that awakening, to realize that, yes, I could turn my art, my painting, into a sustainable living. It was about 20 years ago that I started down this path, truly learning how to apply those marketing skills. It was about not just becoming good at my craft and becoming good at art, but also becoming good at being an entrepreneur. I got involved online. First, I was selling my artwork online. Then, in 2012, I started teaching online art classes. Best advice for entrepreneurs What I've taken from that time when I was on Wall Street and that I still use now, which I feel is critical in everything I do and for every business, is focusing on customer experience. I think of every touchpoint that happens along the customer experience and pay attention to that. You need to make sure you're building customers rather than just focusing on sales. The biggest, most critical failure with customers There are two that I'm going to offer. The first one is not building an email list from the very beginning. I had so many sales and I couldn't imagine a time when I wouldn't have that stream of customers coming to me, so I didn't build an email list. Another thing is something that a lot of us have to work on overtime, and that is understanding how to price your offerings with an abundance mindset, not a scarcity mindset. It's about understanding that customers are not always looking for the cheapest price. There are many times when not only will customers be suspicious if the price is too low, but they also prefer to pay more money. Biggest success with customers I would love to tell you a story about one of my clients. I took her through this process. When my client Fay came to me in 2020, in the last year she had lost her job during the pandemic and was going through a divorce. She was a painter and had two children. She could turn her creativity into a full-time job. But the problem was that she was pricing her art at $50 per painting—and, in fact, sometimes less. We had to work together to build her mindset and teach her that it was okay. I took her from charging $50 for her artwork to $1,400 for her artwork. She found that when she stepped into this confidence, she was able to make $5,300 in a month. Then, a few months later, it was $8,400 in a month. Not only was she able to claim this power, but now she's on her way to a sustainable living. Miriam's recommendation of a tool I think the best tool that we have is using physical mail. Sending physical pieces to prospects and customers. Miriam's one key success factor I don't...

Khaled Maziad is a marketing consultant who specializes in the Psychology of persuasion and high-ticket sales. He helps coaches transform their uncharged-non-monetary offer into a high-ticket one without having Tony Robbins like Brand. He shares his story on struggling to give away his stuff for free to charging high-ticket offers and helping his clients from all around the world do the same. He is known as the Copy & Messaging Alchemist. He has been featured in FOX as one of 21 Entrepreneurs You Need to Know About in 2021. He has also been featured in ANLP, Fox, CBS & NBC. Khaled is a professional member of ANLP International CIC, a certified Master of NLP, and holds a degree in Civil Engineering. Before becoming marketing, Khaled worked with traders and professional fund managers, helping them master their mental edge in trading and life. He also had over 15 years of experience as a Project manager, where he managed multi-million dollar projects on 3 continents. Khaled lives with his wife and two kids in Sydney, Australia.   Most passionate about We focus on what we call transformation – transformational entrepreneurs or transformational cultures. We specialize in helping people make their email entertaining and persuasive, in a way that helps them feel their products. Khaled's career and story I started as a civil engineer many years ago. It had nothing to do with marketing or anything like that. I was working as a site engineer and had a project manager who was very influential and charismatic. He knew how to manage people. When they chose someone to manage the project, they didn't go with someone who was just an expert. They chose someone who was a leader, someone who could manage. This is something that helped me when I started. When I became an entrepreneur, I was doing something called trading psychology. I was helping people trade in the stock market. Best advice for entrepreneurs The biggest advices I have for entrepreneurs is about one of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs often make. You can't go against the market. You can't fight against it. You need to clearly know what they want and then give it to them. The biggest, most critical failure with customers One of them was not testing offers before validating them. I worked on a product once that I was perfecting and I didn't show it to anyone. I didn't get any feedback. I didn't ask anyone if they wanted it or not. I worked for about a month on it. When I put it out there, no one even cared about it. The tool was a really big failure. Biggest success with customers We had a product that helped people by working on their messaging. We did a beta test first at a lower price, just to test how it worked. When we took a small group for the beta test, we were surprised that the people got value from the test. When we published the course and pushed the program, some of the beta testers asked to pay full price. Khaled's recommendation of a tool The best tool is more about how to do market research. There are many forums out there. Khaled's one key success factor You need to believe in what you're doing. You need to believe that you will succeed.   Khaled's Mountain Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of mountaineering, I want to ask you: Is there a mountain you dream of climbing or a mountain you have already climbed? Our entrepreneurial journey is going to close a sale. You're going to find yourself sometimes climbing this mountain, thinking, ‘We're going to make a lot of money. Are we going to do this? Are you going to do that?' Eventually, you will get there, but in the middle, your whole body will be full of pains and scars. But this is what makes success...

Mark Lachance is a serial entrepreneur, strategic thinker, and investor. He possesses a deep understanding of blitzscaling companies. Having owned and operated several businesses that have experienced hypergrowth through creative business development and lead generation, he is a master of sales and marketing and continues to apply and grow his expertise through current projects. Mark is currently the CEO and lead investor of Maxy Media Inc., one of the largest TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, and Google Display Network performance marketing agencies in the world. Currently, Maxy Media is the number one advertiser in terms of monthly spend on the TikTok platform in Canada and top ten in North America. In 2016, Mark successfully sold EVO Payments International Canada, an end-to-end payment solutions provider and merchant acquirer which he founded in 2009. He guided the company from its inception with one employee to over 200 employees across Canada.  Prior to founding EVO, Mark was one of the founding members and president of VersaPay Inc, a payments solutions provider, which was taken public in 2010. Before joining VersaPay, Mark was a founding member of Pivotal Payments, which is now a multi-billion-dollar public company. He helped set the foundation and drive the company's sales and revenues before his successful exit from the company in 2006.  Mark has made several other highly successful investments in various industries such as payments, cryptocurrencies, marketing, nutrition, fitness, and sports. Over the past twenty-five years, he has invested in and consulted for dozens of other ventures, which have resulted in highly positive returns. Mark speaks and travels the world with his wife, Sonya, and their two boys.   Most passionate about I've just launched a book called The Lucky Formula. I also run a digital media agency. Mark's career and story I went to a university in Boston. Right after school, there weren't a lot of great opportunities. So, I had to go to work with my father in construction. I absolutely hated that. I got into sports and was a sports agent for about seven or eight years. It was a lot of fun. I represented professional ice hockey players. I started a company in Boston. Then, I was able to get clientele all across Canada. I had four successful exits in the payment space. Sandwiched in between there was an unsuccessful venture in real estate, a colossal failure. From there, I got into the digital media space. We've grown from two employees – myself and my business partner – to over 350. We're going to hit this year. We're targeting 50 million in revenue. We want to grow this to a billion-dollar valuation in the next two to three years. Best advice for entrepreneurs If you want to scale your business, my biggest advice is, and I learned this myself the hard way, is “don't fall into the trap.” You don't need to be the smartest person in every department and everywhere. You should hire the smartest people to do what you're not the best at. Stay in your lane. The biggest, most critical failure with customers Back in 2006, I was fresh off an exit from one of the companies that I was a founder of and that I was able to sell. I was able to sit on millions of dollars. I mistakenly took those millions and plowed them into real estate. I remember exactly where I was in 2008, with the financial collapse. You remember the real estate marketplace. I intelligently, at that time, rolled all of my money. I basically put all my chips on red. It went into a real estate venture in 2007, at the height of the market. The great financial crisis was upon us in 2008. Everything I had was basically out the door. I was on the verge of bankruptcy. I had a colossal failure and depression, anxiety, all that. Biggest success with customers We had a mega issue with Facebook. In the summer of 2019, Facebook literally shut our...

My name is Parham Albadvi. I'm a copywriter and brand strategist serving conscious businesses. I spent my formative years in Iran and moved to Canada eager to work for purpose-driven tech and B2B companies, but soon became disillusioned… I love working with conscious entrepreneurs - people who share my values and vision for the world. Clients that I feel energetically aligned with, and who believe in making profit and impact. That's why together with my partner, I founded Mocho and Co, the first full-service digital agency exclusively for conscious businesses and disruptors. I'm committed to helping businesses of all sizes realize Fred Kofman's vision of businesses “conscious of inner and outer worlds… taking into account body, mind and spirit in self, culture, and nature.” But we can't do it alone. We need a vibrant community of conscious, aligned entrepreneurs - people like you, who know their skills are better served somewhere else... somewhere they haven't found yet.   Most passionate about I'm leading Mocho and Co, which is an integrative digital agency serving conscious businesses—businesses that truly see business as a force for good. At this point in our journey, we are taking a reflective break for December to think about how we've served our customers so far and how we'd like to serve them moving forward. We're at the stage of reflecting and taking more conscious action forward rather than taking many steps forward in December. Parham's career and story I was a lost 20-year-old boy who had just graduated university and had a lot of passion. I wanted to work for technology companies, and in my university years, I had been in the sales and marketing world. Initially, I wanted to be more independent in my own business. I wanted to determine my own schedule. I wanted to visit my family that I had back home and in Europe. From there, I noticed that working in corporate was not a long-term solution for me. So, I initially had that itch of going completely freelance and starting my own business and building from scratch. I started with freelancing, taking on clients that were in the conscious space and that were using business as a force for good. After seeing them coming back to us with stories about how they'd been able to grow their business from 10K to 40K per month, and above and beyond, we were really motivated to serve as an extension of their marketing team to be growth partners. That's what shifted into me starting Mocho and Co. Best advice for entrepreneurs I think it comes down to taking conscious steps forward as an entrepreneur and realizing that you can't do everything—rather, really putting out the most minimum viable product that can make the maximum impact. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I don't personally view it as a failure, but I do think at the time it was easy to label it as a failure. One that comes to my mind was when I was working at Vidyard. I was doing business development at the time and I noticed that, for a lot of our prospects whom I was reaching out to, I was not getting a high conversion on the outreach. What I noticed was the power of personalization and your approaches—not approaching customers to sell anything, but just approaching them to add value. Value itself will play a big role in your relationship with a potential customer. You need to develop that relationship and build that trust rather than always looking at it as a transactional relationship. Biggest success with customers I started working with a client back in the summer. This was the first time that I was approached by a client who really, from the get-go, trusted the process and wanted us to tell her exactly what had to be done in her business. She was a yoga teacher for 20 years and had led many different experiences before. She was really well known in her space, in her community. However, with the pandemic...

Tim Cakir is a growth consultant who helps companies, entrepreneurs and students achieve fast and consistent growth. Working with 17 startups to date, some of his best achievements include helping two startups receiving 1.7 million euros in Horizon 2020 funding, increasing MRR of one startup from $80k to $300k in less than 18 months and completing projects such as implementation of OKRs, building company dashboards, rebranding and product launches. In addition to that, Tim's passion for helping people realize their potential to bring their ideas to life means that he also teaches Bachelor and Masters programs at two universities in Barcelona, ESEI International Business School Barcelona and Geneva Business School.   Most passionate about I'm very passionate about education at the moment. About 30% of my professional time, I dedicate to teaching. I teach in two master's programs in two different universities. I usually teach around digital marketing, online growth, and some business intelligence. I really love any kind of high-tech, deep-tech startup, trying to solve some of the problems that must be solved by technology. That's where my passion lies. Tim's career and story When I was about 17 or 18, in California, I sold Turkish and Persian-made carpets. It was a bit of telesales, a bit of door-to-door sales, trying to book appointments with people who visited Turkey before. In California, I would visit them and try to sell them carpets. This was, I think, my first business venture. When I moved to London, I really got into creative marketing, media marketing. I helped a few publishing companies digitalize their magazine offerings from the offline world to the digital world. That's where I switched myself, big time, to digital marketing. I was lucky enough, about five or six years ago, to move to Barcelona, Spain, where I'm residing right now. I became a sound engineer. I studied media production, concentrating on audio technologies, and found myself in the music world, which was always a passion. Best advice for entrepreneurs My biggest tip would be to focus on the problem. Why does that customer have a problem? What is the problem? Don't be obsessed about the problem, because if you obsess about the problem, the solution will change over time. The solution will get better and better, what you're building. But if you focus a lot on the solution, that's where you're not innovating anymore. You get stuck on the solution that you've already come up with. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I'm going to look at the perspective of when we targeted the wrong customers. In one of the businesses, which was the B2B SAS, we had a technology for e-commerce businesses and targeted the wrong segment. We targeted big e-commerce shops. We were closing deals, but it was very slow. I think the biggest mistake that I've made was not thinking about different customer segments or testing or experimenting with the messaging to different people. Biggest success with customers One of the greatest successes that I was involved with in a company was when some drama happened in the world – actually a major problem around the world. We had an e-commerce and we were setting products in America. There was a bigger movement of Black Lives Matter, as you're aware. We donated some money to certain charities or projects that we believed in. A percentage of our client base suddenly turned a bit racist and we started getting hate messages, hate reviews. That really scared us. We blocked these customers, these racist comments, and we said no to certain revenue. That helped us grow even better. We didn't just focus on the money. We focused on the good people whom we had. We got rid of the bad people, and this helped us grow. People started talking about it and protecting us on Reddit. We got amazing loyalty on Reddit. Tim's recommendation of a

Brian Fritton is the founder of Havoc Shield, which is a cybersecurity program as a service where he brings the founder's perspective to cybersecurity in an increasingly complicated and risk-filled environment. Brian has built products and led engineering, design, and IT teams at companies with credentials such as Fortune's 500 Fastest Growing Companies, the Inc. 5000 List, and Entrepreneur's 100 Most Brilliant Companies.   Most passionate about I built Havoc Shield, which is a cybersecurity program as a service. It helps you holistically protect your business from attacks as well as win new business with security-conscious customers like government organizations or larger enterprise businesses. At the beginning of 2020, we went through an accelerator called Techstars and, about this time last year, raised a $1.5 million round. Right now, we are selling primarily into financial services but really our goal is to protect other founders and small business owners. Brian's career and story I've always been a little bit of a nerd, I guess. I taught myself how to program. I was very fortunate to have a computer pretty early as a child and taught myself how to design websites and to program. I was always very interested in the security side of things. I had a website design and development firm that was doing other websites for small businesses. Through that, I learned how to manage clients, price my products, manage my time, and all of that sort of stuff. Most recently, I started a startup with my brother called Patch of Land, which was a real estate crowdfunding investment business. We took the Kickstarter model of investing fractions, little small amounts and larger projects, and applied that to giving normal people the ability to invest in real estate. We recently sold that business and I moved back to Chicago from Los Angeles, where I was at the time. I took a job with a data science software maker in Chicago. They work very heavily in the political space. When I came on as the VP of engineering, I quickly inherited it and got put in charge of cybersecurity in front of the midterm elections in the States in 2018. Trying to put together a professional cybersecurity program that would protect us and help us win new customers was a really difficult thing to do. I left that job and started Havoc Shield. Best advice for entrepreneurs For a while, we were trying to sell to what I would call Main Street businesses—less technical companies. We explored very technical startups, but more broadly than any one industry and a couple of other things. Don't be afraid to narrow. You want your business to grow and do more. I think the fastest and highest-quality way is by focusing first on a smaller group of people who will love your product and represent your product, whom you can speak very clearly to. The biggest, most critical failure with customers In businesses in the past, I've certainly spent less time than I should have on listening to people whom I want to solve a problem for—understanding how painful the problem that I think I'm solving is for them and what problems they have that are related to it and that may actually be more top of mind for them. Without listening carefully, without interviewing people whom you're trying to serve, it's very difficult to build the right thing. And that is how companies die. Biggest success with customers The managed plan is driven by our internal client success team, which uses a very well-oiled, well-designed playbook for how to use our tools inside other people's businesses to reduce their risk of an attack or, if one happens, the impacts of it, and help those customers who don't have time to do a lot of those activities. We built a plan through which, in a couple of meetings, every few months, we can take those actions for them using our existing tool and take security as a responsibility, more or less,...

Scott Turman is an IT expert and entrepreneur that has been writing code and cryptographic systems for the last 25 years for the likes of NASA, the Department of Defense, Disney, and other Fortune 500s. He is the founder and CEO of BrightRay Publishing, an all-in-one writing and publishing service for busy entrepreneurs like himself. He lives in Florida with his wife and son.   Most passionate about About a year ago, we started a company called BrightRay Publishing. We're the writing partners for CEOs, founders, and anybody trying to build their brand. Typically, the book can be a vector onto podcasts, interviews, and the news. We've been doing this for about a year now. We've hired our ninth employee and things are going swimmingly. Scott's career and story Twenty-five years ago, I started my career at NASA, as a software engineer. I have a history at NASA. My father was an engineer during Project Mercury, which was America's first foray into space. I started my consulting company. We grew to 25 consultants and that was great. Then, about a year ago, I realized I was sick to death of technology. I was absolutely done with it. I wanted to start something more interesting. I was writing a book on negotiating for nerds – “A Nerd's Guide to Negotiating.” I'd been trying to write it for 10 years but I just could not get it done. My daughter's friend was a writer, so we started working together during the pandemic, via Zoom. We got the book done pretty quickly. When I published it, friends asked, “How the heck did you get a book published with how busy you are?” Then someone said, “Hey, would you write my book?” We took the same process. And then we did another one, and another one. And here we are, a year later. Best advice for entrepreneurs At every point in your journey, make sure the customer is first. Entrepreneurially speaking, my advice would be to start now, fail quick. The quicker you get to it, the quicker you understand the challenge. Start all those things that it takes to run a business as quick as possible. Having great ideas and not executing is like not having ideas at all. You have to just start. The biggest, most critical failure with customers In the last 10 years, I started a consulting company called BrightRay Consulting. We would have these projects involving two or three engineers. If you're not trying to please the C-level executives at a company, you're going to fail no matter how happy the senior management is. It's just a matter of time. In the past, I really can't tell you who, but there was a fortune 500 top company, where everybody was just thrilled with us, except the C-level managers. The problem was not reporting correctly. We were not sharing our successes correctly with them. And as a result, we shuttled out of there. Biggest success with customers It was the birth of BrightRay Publishing. We started with one client and then two and then five and then 10. I handled new customers correctly. As a result, we've exploded in growth. Scott's recommendation of a tool HubSpot It allows you to send emails and have the right people in your house. It's definitely changed my life. I'm able to sleep at night because I know that we're following up. Everybody is notified, and everybody knows where we are at a given moment. Scott's one key success factor Tenacity Failure was never an option! Never give up. I know that's such a cliché, but maybe you're a day away from success, or a month away from success. Giving up is a great way to never find out.   The best ways to connect with Scott https://brightraypublishing.com/ (Website) Social Media Profiles: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottturman/ (LinkedIn)   https://www.reachormiss.com/how-to-start/ () Want to learn how to start your Entrepreneurship? Download for Free...

Brian Roland is a Social Entrepreneur and Founder of Abenity, the 6x Inc. 5000 Company that's powering corporate perks for top brands including U.S. Bank and MasterCard. And while Abenity provides millions of subscribers with private discounts, the company's social mission is fighting extreme poverty with every program they deliver. Abenity recently exceeded a million dollars of total giving and hired a CEO to accelerate growth with their fully remote team. Brian lives in Scottsdale with his wife and 3 daughters and is investing his time in efforts that help like-minded entrepreneurs establish a social mission of their own.   Most passionate about In 2006, my brother and I built a SAS company (software as a service) that helps large corporations offer employee perks and benefits to their people. We've negotiated discounts on everything from pizza and the zoo to movie tickets, oil changes, car rentals, and hotels. We put it all in one spot for our clients and brand it to look like the company and the employees saved coupons all over the United States and travel offers across the world where they can enjoy special corporate perks. When we founded our business, we really wanted to stand for something outside of our industry. So, we built our business with a social mission. There was an output to our cause for every input into the business. That is what gives me the most passion and mission at this point in my career. Brian's career and story As a third-grader, I was making laminated folders because my folders would tear apart. I started playing the trumpet when I was young. It teaches you to be the entrepreneurial solo artist, where you're running the show and everybody's looking at you. It teaches you to be a team player, where you're sitting in the symphony and blending in so that nobody notices your contribution, but they hear it, they see everything. That led to teaching trumpet lessons, which led to making a CD and moving to Nashville to go to school, which led me to sell cell phones—having the a-ha moment that the music industry is actually not that entrepreneurial. In that role, I discovered this gap: Companies would love to offer perks and benefits to their people but they had a hard time finding the perks to offer and vetting the purchase to make sure they were good. That's how we built Abenity. We've probably built five or six businesses inside of it. This is what led me, two years ago, to realize that the business had grown to a certain level of maturity where the number of businesses that I could launch within Abenity reached its peak in terms of what the team could have accomplished in a healthy way. There was this moment when it was like our business didn't need an entrepreneur anymore. It needed people to help execute and set standards and focus on growth. Those are areas that fell outside of my passion areas. So, there was time to put the right people in place to take the business to the next level. And that's what we did. Today I'm kind of the chief evangelist for the brand, which allows me to be available here talking to you. Best advice for entrepreneurs As an entrepreneur, you're really in a testing experimental process all the time. This means you have to be really sensitive to what is, and isn't, working. You have to be really present to what people's needs are. Part of the discovery process of becoming an entrepreneur is looking for gaps and thinking, ‘How can I fill that gap? How can I bridge that gap?' Wherever you are, you're looking for gaps. That's the makings of entrepreneurship. When you see a gap, how do you fill it? Think about how to fill it and if you're equipped to fill it. That's really step one for entrepreneurship. From there, it's being willing to take the risk, to take that first step and go for it. The biggest, most critical failure with customers A lot of failures looks like trial and error. It's an...

There are a few reasons why so many entrepreneurs fail. I believe that lack of marketing is the biggest one. And that's also what entrepreneurs think. According to CBInsight Post-Mortem research, 42% of the entrepreneurs who failed said the number one reason for their failure was ‘No market need.' Finding the market need is, as I see it, the first and most important role of marketing. It always starts there. It's all about where is the biggest market opportunity at the current stage of the company. Any company. Otherwise, you might try to go in the wrong direction. OK. Let's admit it. What would you say if I asked you what is marketing? You would probably tell me it's lead generation, social media, building a brand, or the like. And you are right.   Marketing is everything you need to do to get customers and build your brand. In order to succeed in doing so, you need two things. First, you need to understand who your target audience - your potential customers are... Second, comes the most important law of marketing; The law of Focus. There is an old legend about a farmer that went to the market and bought a golden hoe. This hoe has the power of digging 100 holes in the ground. So the farmer took the hoe and drilled one hundred small holes all over his farm. Instead, he could use the golden hoe to dig in one place, and then he would have a deep excavation where he could build a swimming pool or another room to his house. The same is with marketing activities; you can try and do hundred different activities to different audiences with different messages, and you will get zero effect. But you can do a few larger activities for your most potential customers with the correct message and create a most successful company and brand. In our episode today, I chose to focus on three entrepreneurs that chose to focus on one direction and won the game. Michael Nemeroff saved the financial future of the family and says: “We do one thing—quickly. That's our success.” It called focus! Michael Nemeroff is the CEO and co-founder of RushOrderTees, a fast growing eCommerce custom t-shirt printing and apparel company. Founded in 2002 when Michael was only 17 with his brother and sister, RushOrderTees specializes in screen printing and embroidering services for everyone from teams to small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Over the past 18 years, the company has focused on the customer experience by streamlining the entire process with its innovative design studio, incredible service, and the quickest deliveries in the industry.   Michael's career and story This is probably the third business that I started. It was like a combination of being on the computer, being a fast typer, and getting lucky that my brother took the first design course, didn't want to do his homework, and gave it to me. I turned it into affiliate marketing. I had a need to make money because that's what we needed to survive. My dad was kind of done, shutting down his business with my mom and Ben, his friend said to him, “You're a great sales guy. Come on the road with me door to door. We'll sell shirts to pizza shops and restaurants. I'll show you exactly how it works, where to get the shirts, where to get them printed, and you can be making money this week.” Initially, my dad didn't have the mindset to do it but then my brother pushed him to do it. And he actually got in the car with them. In the first two days, they sold three different places. I think it was like making about $1,500. I launched a website and a marketing campaign on yellowpages.com. The website just said, “Russia disease needs t-shirts, click” and there was a blinking phone number. That was the entry into taking custom t-shirts online. It was usually a localized business where you would go to a t-shirt shop and meet with the guy. He would tell you when you get them and you'd work out the design with...

Michael Cannavo started his career on social media. He was able to infuse his own understanding of viral content, social platforms, and demographic interests into Super73, causing it to accelerate the growth and visibility of the company. As the company grew, so did his social media presence. With 500,000 followers online, Michael has been able to pull back the curtain on what life is like within Super73, how the company has succeeded, and where it is going next.   Most passionate about My passion comes from creating things that haven't been created. Whether that's through marketing or products, it's all about bringing something new to the table and looking at it with a fresh set of eyes. Michael's career and story We founded Super73 back in 2016. It was built on the ashes of a couple of failed businesses. It was about finding the right product for the right time. Here we are five years later. We just crossed over a hundred employees. Over the last year, we've been working to release new products that fit more parents and grandparents—kind of expand that range. Right now we're seeing anyone from 14 years old up to 94 years old. It's been a blast. Best advice for entrepreneurs I think our connection to the customer has helped us. We sell directly to the consumer. We don't go through dealerships or retail stores too much. One of the biggest things that have benefited our company is that we actually hire from the community. So, we hire customers all the time. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I think it's a matter of really understanding what they want. Early on, we had this idea of what we wanted to do, and we kept trying to insist to our customers, “Hey, this is what you want. This is the product for you.” We were missing a few key features. We heard that directly from the customers and I think it has really changed the way that we view our products, from designing to prototyping to testing it. We really engage with the customers now. Biggest success with customers We recently released a bike called the ZX. It's not necessarily too remarkable of a product, but it is a perfect product for a demographic that was asking for it for a long time. We really took into account what customers were saying in the comment sections, what they were saying on reviews. That really created something so magical because it was exactly what our customer was looking for. When we released that bike, it was positivity across the board. Everybody was so happy. The customers were happy. Our design team was happy. Michael's recommendation of a tool One of the biggest tools that have worked for us has been our engagement on social media, downloading all of the apps. I wanted to grow our TikTok presence. TikTok is an app that is primarily for Gen Z. It's about 94-95% Gen Z. Michael's one key success factor I would say it is our ability to understand where we've misstepped. It's our ability to go back to the drawing board and say, “Hey, we could have done this better.” What I love about this company is that there are no egos here. It's this constant evolution of growth. And I think that has been a massive success factor in our company. Anybody can come in with any idea. And it's a valid idea that we're willing to listen to.   Michael's Mountain Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of mountaineering, I want to ask you: Is there a mountain you dream of climbing or a mountain you have already climbed? When I do anything, whether it's going on a hike or climbing or walking or doing a project, all I want to do is finish it. I want to do everything in one day. I want to hike to the top in one day. Super73 has taught me that this is the quickest way to...

Yaro Starak is the co-founder of InboxDone dot com, an email management company with a team of 25+ serving clients including restaurant owners, venture capitalists, accountants, doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, car retailers, online coaches and more. Yaro has made 30+ angel investments in tech startups including Steezy, LeadIQ, Fluent Forever, FitBod and Nutrisense, has property investments in Canada and Ukraine, and in partnership built a 3.6MW solar farm. During the mid-2000s Yaro sold his first company, BetterEdit.com, then built an online education business, Blog Mastermind, selling over $2 Million of his books and online courses, as he traveled the world, living in 26 different cities. Yaro has been featured in SkyNews, Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Huffington Post, Business Insider, Foundr and hundreds of media outlets and events.   Most passionate about I'm passionate about my own company right now, InboxDone. I'm also passionate about angel investing, which is something I've done more of recently. It's exposure to great ideas and great people. I have a podcast as well. I love doing podcast interviews with exciting and interesting people. Yaro's career and story When I was 18 years old, I entered university. It was the dot-com boom. I already knew I don't want to have a job, a boss, an alarm clock that would force me to wake up at a certain time, a cap on my income potential. I just wasn't sure how to make enough money to survive given that I didn't want those things. So, I knew that entrepreneurship was the likely path. With the dot-com boom happening and me entering university, I was given access to the internet. I was constantly exposed to ideas on digital space. So, I started a website. It was more of a hobby about a card game I played called Magic: The Gathering. I made some money from advertising. Eventually, I had a little e-commerce store selling the cards and learned a lot. After graduation, I started what I call my first real business. It was called Better Edit and it was an academic editing service that grew into a full-time income for me. Most importantly, it was a digital business that I could travel with. Basically, I could do what I had always dreamed about—not have a boss, live where I wanted, and be independent. Best advice for entrepreneurs Even today, with our current business, it's about the customer and figuring out not just what they want, but the psychology behind how they're dealing with that problem. You have to actually meet your customers where they are, then present information that gets their attention. Secondarily, you have to present an alternative pattern or way of doing something to solve their problems. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I had a company that I didn't mention in the story because it was a failure. It was an advertising management company that I started as a proper startup. I got two co-founders and we were attempting to essentially build a platform that would help us. We started building a software platform but I didn't really realize and understand what the customer base needed. They were just so far away from being capable of doing that. Ultimately, we couldn't help them solve the problems and we didn't have a workable business. Biggest success with customers To me, meeting the need of helping the customer break free and delegating is the biggest customer success. Talking about the business too. It's not always the nuts and bolts. It's the idea that, by delegating, you get to focus on your creative genius or your family, or you get to focus on exercise and health where these things may have been neglected because you were too busy doing all the everyday routine tasks, including email and your calendar. Yaro's recommendation of a tool It's more about my team managing our customers than me because I'm on the marketing side and my team...

Serioja Glorie is an enthusiastic Serial entrepreneur. He has a wealth of knowledge on e-commerce that can be quite beneficial to every business owner. His automation service journey started because of his personal success & demands by others to tread similar paths that yield positive results. He broke a lot of barriers and utilized an ever-evolving landscape that has helped to grow and establish a new formula. Serioja has launched the first Multi-Market Automation Service and thereby proffering solutions to problems that are encountered by entrepreneurs.   Most passionate about I'm basically trying to provide the freedom of financial independence. It's financial freedom, which we try to provide through e-commerce. E-commerce automation means you can own your own e-commerce store on Amazon or Walmart without having to manage it or handle it. Sergei's career and story I've been a salesperson my whole life. Really, I was a door-to-door salesman. I was an insurance salesman. I was a car salesman. I had tens of companies, if not a hundred companies, little startups that I was always trying. I sold LED screens. I was in construction, myself, working in construction. I tried real estate. I didn't want to think about money or success anymore. I wanted to think about filling my emptiness inside. So, I packed my stuff and moved to Thailand. I started a kebab business. I started wine distribution. I mean, I had my own club. There were so many things I tried. And so many things still didn't work for me. I tried the MLM thing too, which obviously didn't work. It brought me to Forex trading. Finally, I started to take a break from Forex trading and opened my very first personal Amazon store. That was basically when my e-commerce journey started. I had a team of five running my store, doing $50,000 a month, making $10,000 in profit—which I paid them a share from, of course. I started posting that on Facebook. Before I knew it, someone was asking me, “Hey, can you manage my store too?” I told them, “Why not? Let's just do 50/50 and give me a thousand bucks.” Best advice for entrepreneurs There's just one simple rule and it's never, ever give up. You just have to keep going. If you have that kind of mentality, that kind of mindset, that no matter how many times you fail, you will learn from it, you will not get discouraged. You will just keep moving or try something else. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I had already approved 50 clients and was making money for them. But for me, personally, it took 10 months. So, people complained to me: “I'm not getting approved in two weeks or one month.” Well, like I said, they basically gave up before they even started. These are some of the challenges that I face for customers. Biggest success with customers There's a client I had, I just posted something. This client made $29,000 in a single month. Obviously, that is a very big achievement for us. We did over $250,000 in sales in one month. But what people don't realize is that this client needed more than $150,000 to be able to process all these sales—basically, to make that money. So, there's a challenge to that, but I would say that this kind of success is incredible. Sergei's recommendation of a tool I don't micromanage because I have a pretty big organization already. I just use FaceTime, Skype, WhatsApp, or Messenger. Sergei's one key success factor It really comes down to the fact that I didn't ever give up on anything. If I have a passion for something, I just go for it. That's the same thing I did with the e-commerce and it's the same thing for which I will always have that flame burning in my heart. It's having the courage—or having the balls, as they say—to do something and do whatever it takes until you get there.   Sergei's Mountain Since we believe that the best way for...

Toccara Karizma is a digital marketing consultant and business growth strategist. She is the CEO of Karizma Marketing, a full-service digital marketing agency dedicated to growing elite eCommerce brands online through email marketing, social media marketing, PPC, SEO, website conversion optimization, and more. Having built her own successful eCommerce business back in 2007, Toccara is now considered one of the world's top eCommerce marketing experts. Her out-of-the-box approach to digital marketing and expertise in the online business growth space is why I've asked her to join me today.   Most passionate about I own a seven-figure digital marketing agency with a heavy focus on e-commerce clients. I had grown that business to be an international company and it was quite successful. I have a background in business economics, so I knew that my place was in scaling brands and that I could do it very well. That is where I got my start. What I'm most passionate about is building e-commerce brands. I love figuring out how to scale them. Toccara's career and story I'm the daughter of two entrepreneur doctors who worked very hard and taught me that I could do anything I wanted. I realized that I didn't want to work for anyone else. I just don't like fluorescent lights and being in a cubicle. And I knew there was more for me out there. I got pregnant with my son and decided, like many other entrepreneurs listening today, that I wanted to solve a problem: I couldn't find cute clothing for my son. So, I had to create it myself. There was so much when it came to the inventory, the output of money in advance of sales, and those types of difficult decisions that every entrepreneur has to make. I realized that there was a different business model here that I knew really well, which was a very low fixed-cost business model: I spend money only after I've received it versus prepaying for things. Four years later, officially being an ad agency, as a single mom and with an excellent team behind me, here we are at seven figures. So, that was the journey. Best advice for entrepreneurs My best advice about what has worked really well for me is getting on those one-on-one calls with your potential clients, especially if you're selling a high-ticket service, because they need to hear from you. Really listen to them and their problems. Be fully transparent and honest. Tell them whether or not you think it would be a good fit. They so appreciate it when you give them free advice and tell them, “I think this would be a better option for you.” The biggest, most critical failure with customers I have a two-fold failure. The biggest failures are taking on clients without the bandwidth, without the support system that I need. We are in demand and are blessed to be in demand. At some points, we want to take on clients when we just don't have the right support team in place. And that's not a fair thing for us to do because when we do that, we don't give them the best results or the best client experience with us. We want to be the Four Seasons of ad agencies. The second failure would be taking any client, especially when you're newer. That was when we failed because we weren't working with a partner that had everything in place. It was kind of like putting a Ferrari engine in a VW Bug. Biggest success with customers I stand for full reporting. When we talk to our customers, it's almost like we're flipping all the ways in which they were mishandled and mismanaged by other agencies and saying, “You deserve this.” We do full transparency. We'll tell you when we're wrong and when we've done something wrong. We want to meet with you regularly and build a long-term relationship. We're always on camera with them. So, it's doing business with people. My son was working on a project at school. (He's in high school now.) He was using a video editing...

John Thalheimer is an award-winning management consultant, speaker, and author who has helped hundreds of businesses and thousands of entrepreneurs and small business owners transform their potential into extraordinary performance. The secret is in learning the ability to make the right behavioral decision in the moment to reach the desired outcomes. It's simple. It just ain't easy. John teaches small business owners and entrepreneurs how to make the right decisions about their company to take it to the next level. In his new book, The Truth About Selling, John teaches us how to influences others to invest in our ideas, products, or services.   Most passionate about My real passion is focusing on the human side of work My main focus has been on the employee. How does that employee achieve what they want to achieve at work? How do they perform well and all that kind of stuff? But it's also about that customer and client and how we get them to make that decision. John's career and story My first career was in theater. I was a production manager, lighting designer, set designer. At the time, I was in my early 30s. I'd been doing it for 12, 15 years, and it was time for me to do something different. I went into what I call my lost years. I did manufacturing for a while. I did hospitality. I did retail. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I had an opportunity to work in corporate America at a company called QVC, which is a television network. One of the things QVC did well for us, when we were working there, was expose us to the whole business, and not only the production side. I was in operations at first, but then I got into the human resources side and the talent side. I got laid off. I wanted to be an executive coach, to help executives get better. So, I started that journey, but I realized that my main focus was on the small business owner, the middle-tier management team. Best advice for entrepreneurs I believed everyone in the world needed my products, and it wasn't true. There are three levels that I look at. At the first level, people out there see value in your product or service. Then there are people who have the resources to embed. The third category is people who have the problem you solve. When we think of three circles, our market is in that overlapping section. I think that's the biggest thing I see when I'm talking to entrepreneurs. They're like, “Oh, my product is great, everybody wants it.” And they don't narrow that market down to a set of people who are actually going to buy and invest in it. The biggest, most critical failure with customers One of the things I did was go out and get warm leads. I would do a free workshop or a presentation. The failure was that I would give great information and people would like it, but I was never able to get them to take that next step and invest in me. So, I struggled with that for a long time. I would just keep going. Biggest success with customers I got my wife a biscuit-making class. She could go to this class to learn how to make Southern biscuits. I go to this class thinking, ‘Here I am, I'm going to be learning about biscuits.' However, as I sat in this class, I started realizing the effectiveness of the facilitator. I said, “Here's the thing that we all have to do as sales professionals. When we're working with our customers, we have to create a repeatable experience that gets us to where we want to go.” It's selling products, selling information, selling whatever we're trying to do—we have to create something that's repeatable. And so my wife and I created a recipe that we use. John's recommendation of a tool My biggest turning point was when I hired a virtual assistant. John's one key success factor For me, it's constantly innovating and seeing things from different perspectives. And, I guess, really, it's...

Steve Hoffman (Captain Hoff) has had more careers than cats have lives, from Hollywood TV exec and game designer to manga rewriter, voice actor, animator, electrical engineer, studio head, and video game designer. Today, he's the Captain & CEO of Founders Space, one of the world's leading startup accelerators. Founders Space was ranked the #1 incubator for overseas startups by Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazines. Hoffman is also a venture investor, founder of three venture-backed and two bootstrapped startups, and author of several award-winning books. These include “Make Elephants Fly” (published by Hachette), “Surviving a Startup” (published by HarperCollins), and “The Five Forces” (published by BenBella).   Most passionate about I am most passionate about helping entrepreneurs, not just financially but also in reaching their personal goals, helping them do something meaningful with their lives and actually make an impact on the world. I see myself less as a business person and more as a creator. Steve's career and story When I was a child, I began making movies. By the time I graduated high school, I had made over 50 movies. I made lots of games—board games, role-playing games. I even programmed computer games. So, I was always creating and I wanted to be a creator. I went to college in electrical, computer engineering, but after I graduated, I felt like my creative side was lacking. So I applied to graduate school at the two top films: NYU in New York and USC in Los Angeles. I got my graduate degree in film and television, then went off to work in Hollywood. I quickly rose to the position of television development executive at a major TV production company. I jumped from Hollywood to the largest game company in the world at the time, which was Sega in Japan. A I began working with them, creating interactive entertainment. I launched my career as an entrepreneur. I came back to Silicon Valley, my home, and launched my first gaming startup. Best advice for entrepreneurs A lot of entrepreneurs think they have to have an epiphany, a big idea, or they shouldn't jump in and be an entrepreneur. But my experience has shown me that the idea you begin with doesn't really matter because being an entrepreneur is a journey. And usually, the idea you begin with is wrong. Many entrepreneurs fail because they stick to their original idea. Those who succeed tend to change ideas all the time. I tell entrepreneurs: Don't go out there with one idea; pick a direction and go out there with many ideas. Then, engage with the customers until you figure out who your customers are and what they need. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I have had a profound failure and that was when I came up with an idea to create character avatars on the internet that people could control and that could walk and talk on any website. This idea was so compelling that we had, yes, Disney, and all these entertainment companies, all these singers and entertainment people, flocking to us saying, “This is an amazing idea. We want to work with you.” We raised a lot of capital and put this idea out there into the world. Then, all of a sudden, we discovered that people would use our application for a while and then leave. We had to find that magic key that got people to come back and stay and engage long-term because unless we had them long-term, we couldn't make enough money to acquire more customers. We were battling against this new social network: Facebook. Biggest success with customers One of my biggest successes came very early in my career. It was my first product. The game was called Gazillionaire. The role was, ironically, what I do today: teaching people to become entrepreneurs. So, teaching them how to become gazillionaires. I put all my personal savings into this. Steve's recommendation of a tool Startup incubators and accelerators. WeChat It allows you to communicate with friends, do business deals, engage...

Vikrant Shaurya is the CEO and Founder of BestsellingBook.com. He's also the author of two #1 bestsellers: P.O.W.E.R: The Success Mantra, and How to Write a Bestseller: Become a Bestselling Author, Attract High-Value Clients, and Skyrocket Your Authority. Vikrant is the most-viewed author for “eBook Publishing” on Quora and is recognized by the National Academy of Bestselling Authors.   Most passionate about I'm in the book publishing industry, where I help entrepreneurs publish their books. We help them turn their ideas into best-selling books through “done for you” book writing, publishing, and marketing services. Vikrant's career and story Eleven to 12 years ago, I had just graduated from high school and my dad asked me, “What do you want to become in your life?” At that point, I had no idea, no clue. I was 16 or 17 and I had no vision at all for myself. I was just trying to enjoy my life. I told him that I wanted to be an engineer. I come from India and there is a kind of mentality that if you're not a doctor or engineer, people think that you are a failure. My dad thought that I was serious about my career and in my life. He sold his land so that I could be admitted to an engineering college. One day, I found this book by Robert Kiyosaki called “Rich Dad Poor Dad.” I decided to do something of my own. The very same day, I dropped out of college. I started looking for a business idea and within a few months, I got one. I got some loans from my relatives, my seniors, my friends, and started a business that hired a bunch of employees. I made so many mistakes and within six months I had completely run out of money. I was 18 at the time. Then I discovered self-publishing. This was my introduction to self-publishing or book writing or publishing. I discovered that I could write books, publish books, and make some money out of it. I started writing books. The first book took just 21 days to write. I published that book and in the first month I made $27 in royalties. I wrote another book in just three days and published it. I also did some marketing and that month I made around $440. I started offering a coaching program through Facebook. I also added coaching fees, so I started making some money from that as well. Within one year, I had launched dozens of courses and eBooks and also helped thousands of students with my courses and coaching programs. Best advice for entrepreneurs My simple advice would be, “start small, think big.” One of the mistakes I made when I started with my first business was doing the complete opposite. I was starting big and thinking small. With my current business, I started very, very small. It was a one-person company, and only when I began to see the opportunity, I hire employees one by one. Now we have more than 40 people in the company and more than a thousand freelance partners. The biggest, most critical failure with customers We help our clients become bestsellers but one client had this expectation that he would be selling billions of copies of his book. We take care of the launch for one or two months—like, we start, we do the marketing, we do the promotion, and we do the sales. There was a communication gap as well, which I had, where we mentioned something and he interpreted it as something else. I had to make a tough decision. We had helped him write the book, publish the book, but because we had some negative reviews, I had to refund him the money. But the thing is, I learned with the process. That's why, whenever a new client comes, we send them a proposal. Biggest success with customers A client came to us three or four years ago. He offered a physical product. By this point, [we had been] helping people who were in the information industries, like people who were speakers or coaches, experts, people who had some kind of a messaging story to share. But this entrepreneur came to us with a physical product, like a physical store where he offered a natural...

Anthony Blatner is a tech founder, ex-IBMer, and the founder of Speedwork Social: a top LinkedIn advertising agency. After watching a lot of companies with great products or services fail because of ineffective marketing, Anthony started Speedwork Social to help those businesses unlock their B2B marketing potential and achieve explosive growth. By blending his experience in marketing and software, Anthony helps businesses reach high-level decision makers at scale using LinkedIn Ads and technology. Having managed millions in ad spend and generated over 100,000 new sales opportunities, it is safe to say Anthony is one of the top leading LinkedIn ads experts in the industry and in a way, is only getting started.   Most passionate about I'm one of those people who spends more time on LinkedIn than any other platform. My specialty is helping people with LinkedIn ads. That's what I do day in and day out. We specialize in helping create and manage LinkedIn ads and campaigns for different types of B2B organizations. Best advice for entrepreneurs The thing that I end up talking about the most is, if you're an entrepreneur and you're starting a business, talking about the sales and marketing funnel or how you're going to market your business. If you're a new business and you're starting your marketing, and if you're not seeing a direct “contact us” or “free consultation” working out, you'll probably need to lower the barrier to entry and think about focusing your content more on your customer. The biggest, most critical failure with customers Before I started Speedwork, which is a marketing agency and my current businesses, I had a mobile app development agency. Here in Austin, Texas, we built a whole lot of different mobile apps for a variety of companies. We would build software for them. What we noticed was, after you build an app, you have to put it on the App Store. Then you worry about getting downloads. We saw, in the early days of the iPhone, it was possible to put an app on the App Store, go viral, get a lot of downloads, and be successful in that way. I'd say the biggest challenge was seeing startups spend so much time and money and effort on a new app, but then not think about the distribution and the go-to-market strategy. They'd put it on the App Store and just see it flop. Biggest success with customers I'd say, for my own journey, it is focusing on LinkedIn ads. When I first started my marketing career, I tried out a lot of different areas. At the time, I never would have guessed that I would be focusing on LinkedIn. Anthony's recommendation of a tool Google Data Studio It's going to tell you something about the stats that can help you optimize campaigns. Google Data Studio itself is free. We're able to blend data from various sources. I can compare, LinkedIn numbers versus CRM numbers and sales numbers. Anthony's one key success factor It is my technical background as I approached the marketing world. I appreciate the technical skills that I have. I'd say my differentiator is being able to be comfortable with the tech side.   Anthony's Mountain Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of mountaineering, I want to ask you: Is there a mountain you dream of climbing or a mountain you have already climbed? I do have a relationship with a mountain. I've gotten really into running over the last few years. I've done a bunch of random marathons and I'm part of a run club. I like to do a lot of running. Maybe entrepreneurship or startups, you know—you can go at something by yourself and it's going to take a lot of work and training by yourself to hone your skills and learn things. But there are also the times when you're going to need to rely on other people. You'll need to surround yourself with other people who are going to push you and whom...

Dan McGaw is an award-winning entrepreneur, speaker and the CEO of McGawdotio, an analytics and marketing technology consultancy and SaaS platform, UTM.io. In addition, Dan also finds time to be a 500 Startups Mentor, and has previously started the first business accelerator in Orlando. He's also a thought leader in the MarTech world and CXL instructor on the topic. Having spoken at the leading Marketing conferences and online events, including Traction Conf and Forget The Funnel, his expertise lies in helping businesses extract and interpret the right data to grow their revenue exponentially. Dan previously served as the Head of Marketing at Kissmetrics and in the past he's worked as a CMO consultant for a number of high-growth companies, implementing tools, offering support, and analyzing data. In 2015, Dan was selected to be a United States Ambassador of Entrepreneurship by the United States Department of State, where he had the privilege to advise the government, universities, and private corporations on how to build entrepreneur ecosystems. He even flew out to Mexico to be an entrepreneur ambassador for Tijuana and Mexicali! Dan lives in Orlando, Florida with his wife, 3 sons and two French Bulldogs. He's a keen runner and a self made millionaire who grew up in the ghetto, fought his way out, and is very grateful for the hardships he had in life as it taught him the persistence and grit required to succeed today.   Most passionate about What I'm most passionate about today, of course, is marketing technology and marketing analytics. This is a big area where I spend a lot of my time. I love building marketing technology and sales technology stacks with our clients and with a lot of different people. Best advice for entrepreneurs Focus on generating revenue. To do sales, you have to talk to customers, you have to talk to prospects, you have to get out there and sell your product better to generate revenue. That's the fastest way to grow. I'm a big believer in bootstrapping. Sometimes it's much easier to sell and get your customers, and not only to raise money. The biggest, most critical failure with customers In consulting, I have experienced some fascinating ways that we can fail companies. We just had a client that we worked with and, unfortunately, my team member who was leading the project was not capable of doing the work. So, failure happens. Seven years ago, a team member here stole company intellectual property. Basically, we came up with a business idea. I'm in a meeting. We could build this, but we're not going to build it right now because we have a client that it's conflicting with. Two months later, all of a sudden, in a meeting, the guy's doing a demo and accidentally shares his screen. On his screen, he shows a Trello board, which has this product on it. We decided to terminate that employee. Unfortunately, the employee also had access to all of our customers and databases. This team member thought it was appropriate to steal one of our customer's email lists and then promote their product, which is competitive to that customer, to their email list. That was a huge data breach for us. Obviously, we and our client attacked this person with lawyers and all that stuff. But it really changed my perspective on, like, “Hey, listen. People are going to do really, really shitty things and you've got to cover your ass.” Biggest success with customers One thing that I would say was a super big success for us—I don't know if it was luck or if I'm just smart—but for the first year and a half or two years, we didn't really have a niche. We were just taking clients for digital marketing and marketing and technology. We were flailing about to whoever would give us money. There were agencies that did analytics, there were agencies that did marketing automation, there were agencies that did CRM, all these specialty shops. We said, “Nobody is focusing on building you a tech stack. Nobody is...

Mark Firth spent a large portion of his life working a corporate job in London, but he was left feeling unfulfilled and in need of creating an impact. He decided to take an extended break and visit Colombia, not knowing it would be one of the best decisions of his life. Mark met, fell in love and quickly started a family in Columbia, but he didn't have a job. To support his new family, he wanted to start an online business and remembered that when he worked for corporate companies, like IBM and Siemens, he used LinkedIn to prospect and book qualified sales calls through a personalized approach based on human-to-human connection. In 2017, he founded Linkedpreneurs where he combined traditional B2B sales and online marketing to generate leads. He has helped thousands of business owners and solopreneurs to consistently book qualified calls that become clients through LinkedIn using their personal connection system called Emotional Brand Intelligence. In return, his clients have more time, money and freedom to make an impact and change their life.   Most passionate about We help people grow their businesses. We help them see situations and environmental stimuli and friends and conversations differently from how they did in the past. Ultimately, growing a business is not about just implementing a load of tactics and strategy. It's also about being in alignment, doing things that you want to do, and starting to see things in different ways. Mark's career and story I started in corporate life. I was at IBM, Siemens, and then at a series of startups. I was trained by Tony Robbins coaches and I've been on a big personal development journey myself. It's my fundamental belief that you cannot lead where you have not been and, as I said, you cannot teach what you do not know. So, I've also been through the frameworks. I can't force people to change, but I can create an environment. Best advice for entrepreneurs The best advice I can give to any entrepreneur is to just keep on testing. I believe in helping people create the desire to test stuff and try new stuff, as that is when success really comes. When people start being themselves and start doing things their own way, they find this groove and flow that really suit them. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I deleted an entire email list of 10,000 people in error and the backup failed. You need to be in control of your audience. You should have your own target audience. Many people will get a benefit from having a podcast, even though they're not necessarily paying customers. And my email list was that version of it. And I deleted it by mistake. That was a complete failure for me. It was awful. Biggest success with customers This comes down to innovation. It really does. It's about finding new ways of doing things, discovering new things, improving our products, improving our service. That's something we've always done. We started with automated messaging, and as soon as that became effective, we had already innovated a new process. Mark's recommendation of a tool I recommend anything that gives you multichannel and allows you to own your audience. I always concentrate on having emails, SMS, phone numbers. Don't trust something you don't control. That's a recipe for disaster anywhere in life. Mark's one key success factor Just getting up, even when I get knocked down, has helped me become successful.   Mark's Mountain Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of mountaineering, I want to ask you: Is there a mountain you dream of climbing or a mountain you have already climbed? I think people forget to look in the rearview mirror of life at how many skills they've learned, how many experiences they've had, how many people they've helped. Mothers who brought up kids, fathers who've done the...

Karl Maier founded Abunden to help internal and external business advisors be even more effective in helping their clients to grow and succeed. Abunden is the third software company Karl has co-founded. In his various roles over the past three decades, he has been part of the leadership team in six established companies which have at least doubled sales in two years. Leveraging his successes, Karl developed the Abunden Framework© and led the development of the practical management tools in the Abunden Tools App. These online SaaS (Software as a Service) tools build the management structure for companies to grow and succeed. Karl received both his MBA and BA from Rice University in Houston. has been the chairperson for the Rice University Business Network and the Houston District Export Council as well as a board member for TiE Houston.   Most passionate about I'm working to help make coaching better and using technology tools to do that. I'm working on tools to help coaches and business advisors be even better. I see the path forward as adding even more tools and technology to improve coaching and make it more of a 24/7 type of experience for people. Karl's career and story I started reading The Wall Street Journal and The Economics. I went to university and studied economics, got my MBA, and went into consulting. Over the years, I've been involved with information systems, computer systems. I've done finance, accounting, processes, many different things. Over the decades, I've put together what I've seen, the keys to growing companies. To me, it's the most fundamental. Early in my career, I was part of a large consulting organization. I was part of a team doing projects. We grew from 23 people to over 350 people in about 30 months. Best advice for entrepreneurs The customer is critical. One of my mentors said, many years ago, that nothing happens until you sell something. So, obviously, that starts with the customer. I think the principal is to talk to a number of different potential customers and really understand what their problem is. Can you solve it in a way that they're willing to pay for? That's the most fundamental part of starting a business, in my mind. Then you have the option to be Hands-on all the pieces of the company, but that limits your growth, or are you willing to transform and delegate it to other people to grow the company? I think that's a very fundamental choice, one that I would encourage people to reflect on and decide which way they really want to go. The biggest, most critical failure with customers My first software startup was during the dot-com boom. Everybody said, “Technology is going to solve all the problems.” I think I got sucked into that and I really didn't understand my customers. I was ignoring how the products were actually bought and sold. In the end, the company failed because of that. So that's a lesson. We remember failures better than our wins, I think. Biggest success with customers We had a service company in the health safety industry. I was part of the C-suite management team. And we really did build a team. There was great communication and connection. People respected each other. They worked hard and were able to really understand what our customer's problem was. High-value people were getting malaria and getting sick. We were able to come in and cut their malaria rate in half the first year and then half again the second year. So we clearly were solving their problem. We were able to come in and solve a problem, do it effectively. We were able to grow the company. We grew it in four years by a factor of seven. Karl's recommendation of a tool LinkedIn This has been a great tool for identifying people whom we can begin to build relationships with and get to know. LinkedIn is a fantastic tool and a bit underestimated place where people are free to buy things. It's okay to sell them through LinkedIn. People are coming together to do business. The

Jess Chan is the Founder & CEO at Longplay, a full-service email marketing agency for DTC e-commerce brands. Within 6 months of launching Longplay, Jess helped brands increase email revenue by 639% within 90 days and increase average order value by over 67%. Prior to Longplay, Jess was the Chief Marketing Officer at DTC brand Best Self Co where she saw the unique opportunities and challenges e-commerce brands faced in nurturing, converting & retaining customers that fueled her to launch Longplay. Jess has spoken at events such as DX3 and Digital Growth Summit, and has been featured in Entrepreneur, Influencer Hustle & Thought Catalog.   Most passionate about Most of my time is spent building up Longplay, which is our full-service email marketing agency for e-commerce brands. Now that our business is more established and we have our foundations down, we are doing a little bit more exploring of new business initiatives, whether it's launching courses or having exploring partnerships to bring the business to the next level. Also, we are exploring starting an e-commerce business as well. Jess's career and story I work in marketing now, and obviously in entrepreneurship, but my background is in actuarial science and economics. That's pretty much as far away from marketing as possible. With actuarial science obviously, the focus was on statistics and working in insurance companies and risk modeling. In my last year of college, I found a job posting for a marketing assistant and e-commerce company. At that point, I had zero experience in marketing. So, I started off as a marketing assistant and learned a lot in the first few months. I dove right in. When I graduated, I think it was nine or 10 months later, they promoted me to chief marketing officer. That was how I got my start in marketing and digital marketing. Best advice for entrepreneurs My best advice would be to just get started and figure it out along the way. I think the biggest reason entrepreneurs fail is that they try to have that perfect plan, they try to have it all figured out. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I'd say the biggest failure with customers has been not setting expectations and not having boundaries for my team or myself. We got off to a strong start, but we had to slow down and build those foundations. I think that was a good reminder: If you grow fast, then you slow down and fix the foundations. Biggest success with customers My biggest success is the fact that like Longplay, as a business, exists and is somehow working and profitable and growing. I really had so little experience and it all moved very quickly. The big success was about building an amazing product, an amazing service that had a market fit and really solved a pain point for customers. Jess's recommendation of a tool Shopify and Klaviyo if you're on e-commerce. Sauna and Slack Google Drive Jess's one key success factor My one key success factor is figuring it out as you go and trusting in that. When you trust in your ability to figure things out, it removes all of those barriers to getting started or kicking things off.   Jess's Mountain Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of mountaineering, I want to ask you: Is there a mountain you dream of climbing or a mountain you have already climbed? I haven't climbed any actual mountains but the bounce that I'm wishing to climb next is starting to build a portfolio of different businesses. I've gotten the first one off the ground and it's still growing. We have a really great vision and trajectory for it. Building out that empire, I guess, of e-commerce brands, agencies, services, even physical locations. Seeing where the journey of entrepreneurship takes me and what the next business will be.   The best ways to connect...

Roger Hardy is a serial entrepreneur with over 15 years' experience building several technology businesses to successful exits. Hardy founded Coastal Contacts Inc. in 2000, instantly re-writing the business model for contact lens sales and delivery. Drawing from his previous logistics expertise and industry knowledge, Roger seized the newly emerging e-commerce revolution. Roger led Coastal to become the largest online retailer of eyewear and vision related products until it was acquired by Essilor International in what was the largest e-commerce transaction in Canadian history at the time. In 2018 Roger co-founded KITS Eyewear Ltd. alongside Joseph Thompson and Sabrina Liak. As CEO, Hardy has led KITS through unprecedented growth with a 47% year over year revenue increase.   Most passionate about We built Coastal Contacts, my sister and I, from startup to a NASDAQ-listed public company and then sold it in 2014, for almost half a billion dollars. Since then, we've been doing investments in real estate and technology. We kept coming back to the optical category. We were excited about the opportunity in optical. It has always gotten us interested in trying to serve customers in a way that exceeded their expectations. We've been working on KITS Eyecare here out of Vancouver, Canada, mostly focused on the eye care business for North America. Roger's career and story I worked in the vision category, and while I was working there, I was struck by the fact that I felt that customers were underserved. I think part of it was the timing. The internet was just getting going. And so, like I said, my sister and I built a website and started selling contact lenses. The first day, we had 16 orders. In the first month we had 70,000 in sales, and in the first year we had two and a half million in sales. In the second year, we had 10 million in sales. So, we really knew there was an unmet need in terms of savings and convenience for customers. At that time, the technology innovation was just a website—just putting it online. Today, I think the real technology innovation, like I said, that eye exam just makes it easier for customers to do it online from home or the office, anytime, 24/7, day or night. They can really step into that. The first thing we worked on was growing our subscription business for contact lenses. Today, that's about 25% of our company. The second thing we worked on is vertical integration. We made sure that we had the most technologically advanced optical lab in North America. Best advice for entrepreneurs Build businesses that serve customers. I think NPS is a great measure to use. What we find is that the more we can focus on and listen to customers and remove any challenges in our business, it takes the experience up for customers. That ultimately is a driver of financial results. It's our opinion that the company with the highest NPS in every category ultimately has the highest value in that category. I would put it as: You want to be getting direct feedback from your customers. You want to be removing all the choke points, anything that's friction, anything that they tell you is even a slight displeasure. You want every customer to be wowed by the experience of being served by you. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I don't want to name names, but we used a payments company that we thought of as being very innovative. We did the due diligence on the company. We thought, ‘These guys are really cutting edge and customers are gonna love this.' It was a different way of making payments and it was on the front. But that company kind of overstated what they could do. Ultimately, it was a significant cost for us. They had problems processing transactions and their technology didn't keep up with their promises or commitments. We want to be innovative, but with innovation comes some bumps. So, I think you're going to see some challenges when you test things. Biggest success with...

Andrea Owen is an author, global speaker, and professional certified life coach who helps high-achieving women maximize unshakeable confidence, and master resilience. She has taught hundreds of thousands of women tools and strategies to be able to empower themselves to live their most kick-ass life through speaking, her books, coaching, and her wildly popular podcast with over 3 million downloads. Andrea is creating a global impact in women's empowerment with her books being translated into 18 languages and available in 22 countries. When she's not juggling her full coaching practice or writing books, Andrea is busy riding her Peloton bike, chasing her two school-aged children or making out with her husband, Jason. She is also a retired roller derby player having skated under the name “Veronica Vain”.   Most passionate about After about 10 years as an entrepreneur, I am focused mostly on speaking on stages and writing books. Andrea's career and story I Have an interesting story that's that involves my personal life ae well. I was previously in the fitness industry. I was in my late 20s and was in my first marriage, to someone different from whom I'm married to now. I had heard about life coaching. This was back in about 2002, 2003—very early in the infancy of life coaching as an industry. I was telling my then husband about it, and he was saying, “I think you would be great at this. ,However you need more life experience”. A couple of years later, my husband had a love affair with our neighbor and got her pregnant. So I got my life experience. My life experience got worse before it got better. I got into another terrible, abusive relationship. By the time I was 31, I'd had my rock bottom experience and decided to change my life. I took responsibility for my life. That's how the life coaching portion started. A couple of years into that, I decided to write a book. The university opened the doors for me. I got a traditional book deal with a small publisher, which got my foot in the door. Now I'm on my third book. It has all just fallen into place from there. Best advice for entrepreneurs You have to ask for help, whether that is with a therapist, your best friend, or your partner. Success doesn't happen in a vacuum. There have to be people who come to support you. That's what I would tell people to work on: Start there if they're having problems with something. This is probably something you've talked about on your show: You have to get very clear on who it is whom you serve and what it is that you do in your work. Don't be afraid to tweak and change this over time. The biggest, most critical failure with customers There have been several of them and they're all connected in my industry, in online life coaching. It's very scalable to offer group coaching. It's the one-to-many model versus one-to-one and it's the best way to scale your business. So, I started doing that and had some success, but for the most part, it wasn't that lucrative. I would say that facilitating group programs was probably my zone of competence. People would say that I was pretty great at it, but I really didn't like it all that much. I didn't look forward to it. It wasn't where I could really shine. For years I tried, and again, it was profitable enough, but not worth the energy I was putting out there. A few years ago, I decided, “I don't want to do this anymore.” It didn't make any sense because, from a marketing standpoint, it's kind of the only way to scale. I just decided, “You know what? I'm not going to do it anymore.” Biggest success with customers My last book, which came out in 2018, was sold to Hachette Books, a division there. It's a major publisher and the book ended up selling extremely well. It has been translated into 18 languages now and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Here's why I think it was successful. First, because I wrote that book and insisted on the title, because that is how I talk to my...

Chris “Mercer” Mercer, co-founder of MeasurementMarketing, is a sought after measurement marketing expert. Mercer (as he's known) and his team have been helping marketers, marketing teams, and agencies measure their marketing so they know what's working and what's not. First by planning out what's important to measure in their marketing, then how to actually measure it (using tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics), creating dashboards that are actually useful, and pulling actionable insights from what's being measured to begin forecasting and optimizing future results. Mercer spends countless hours reading, practicing, adjusting and innovating to improve his skill set. He has a knack for teaching, and is known for his ability to simplify even the most complex ideas for his audience. He can be found speaking at conferences and events, such as Traffic & Conversion, Social Media Marketing World, Content Jam, TravelCon, Digital Elite Camp, Baby Bathwater Institute, and others.   Most passionate about I'm very passionate about the art of systems as it relates to measurement, but also as it relates to entrepreneurship and building brands that are very customer-centric and listening to customer journeys. I think that is absolutely what I am obsessed with right now—figuring out how to perfect those things. Mercer's career and story My main background is sales management. I come from everything managing sort of a pipeline by nature. When we moved online, I created a WordPress site to show people how to do WordPress sites, essentially. It was like a membership site. That led very quickly to people saying, “This is a lot of work. Can you build our sites for us?” We created an agency and that's where we sort of grew, digital marketing-wise. We said, “Okay, we're going to build the site and we will also help you optimize the site”—something called “conversion rate optimization.” In order to optimize, and in order to improve, like, an opt-in rate or a conversion rate for a purchase, you have to know what that rate is. We set up Google Analytics for our clients. We would deliver the site with their Google Analytics and say, “Here's how you can tell any leads you got from Facebook.” Almost overnight, when we made that shift, we started getting a lot of referrals from clients, but they weren't referrals for sites. They were people coming to us saying, “We already have a way but we need help with our Google Analytics.” We wanted to eventually diversify the business because that was a great business. It's still a great channel of revenue for us, but we wanted to be able to diversify. Best advice for entrepreneurs I think the keyword is going to be deceptively simple, but it's listening to your customer. If you take a second to listen, they will tell you, “Yeah, you're kind of on the right track, but maybe do this instead, or do it in this particular way.” All of a sudden, it becomes a lot easier to grow a business when we listen to our market. The biggest, most critical failure with customers It was when I did the exact opposite of what we just talked about—when I wasn't listening. I was telling the customer, “Here's how this thing works.” The thing that comes to mind for us is that we have a certification program where we will work with agencies. I think sometimes, too, ‘If it's our idea, it's a good idea,' but it doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea. It's just our idea. Biggest success with customers We were making some changes to one of our offers. Our do-it-yourself training program is called the Measurement Marketing Academy and it's a just-in-time learning platform to learn all this stuff. We noticed way too many people going to the cart, but we weren't creating more sales. We saw this immediately in our dashboard, and it was weird. It was an odd behavior. So, we went back to our page. We had forgotten to put the price. So, they were going to the cart but not to purchase. They were going...

Aidan Sowa is an entrepreneur who got into the digital marketing space in 2016 due to working with the MIT Enterprise Forum Cambridge. Aidan is now the founder and CEO of Sowa Marketing Agency. Sowa Marketing Agency specializes in helping luxury realtor get featured in the media, guaranteed. Aidan believes all entrepreneurs have the choice to differentiate themselves from their competition or die as a commodity.   Most passionate about I'm the CEO and founder of Sowa Marketing Agency. Essentially, we specialize in helping luxury realtors become the authority in the industry by getting featured on major media sites, like Yahoo, Forbes, and the like worked. Within the next nine years, we'll try to reach nine figures. Aidan's career and story I originally worked with the MIT Enterprise Forum Cambridge. Learned a bit about digital marketing. Eventually, I decided to start my own company around digital marketing, to help entrepreneurs. I wanted to see how that would work. And it did work. I would just have to experiment a lot. Best advice for entrepreneurs My best advice for any entrepreneur who's starting out is to set their goals; to focus on monthly, yearly, 10-year goals and be able to play it down. So many people start at the beginning of the year and have all these big goals in mind and then they eventually give up. I highly recommend that people really nail down their goals so they know exactly what needs to be done. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I would probably say that my biggest failure as a business owner was taking on every single customer. That was a big mistake because when people came in with really high expectations, I would take them on anyway. And then we've them frustrated with me. When I first started my company, that led to chargeback and almost ruined my business. It was a painful experience. I was fortunate enough that this didn't happen, but it was definitely a pretty devastating blow. Biggest success with customers One of the biggest things we did is start utilizing our own marketing methods for ourselves. So, being able to not just be seen like any other business, but being able to generate positive media presence and being able to build out our social media services. I feel like that has really impacted the way our customers have seen us, especially all these luxury realtors. They can see for themselves that we truly believe in what we're selling. We're not just trying to sell them on something. It's something of real value. Aidan's recommendation of a tool For us, social media is the easiest way to reach customers. We still get a huge number of clients just by sending out messages on Instagram. We're also doing the traditional kinds of social media stories. LinkedIn We have the entire profile built out, and things of that nature, and we've actually automated our invitations. That way, we're reaching out to clients every single day. Aidan's one key success factor One of my key success factors is believing in myself and being able to follow through on what I want to do. It's one thing to write something down, and it's another thing to take action and really make your goals all day. So, being able to take action is probably the key thing.   Aidan's Mountain Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of mountaineering, I want to ask you: Is there a mountain you dream of climbing or a mountain you have already climbed? I've definitely climbed a couple of mountains. I mean, entrepreneurship is sort of like that—just trying to reach new peaks. Once you get to the top, you realize you're not that high at all. There's so much more out there. I feel like that's one of the really cool things about entrepreneurship, as it really opens up your worldview. [caption id="attachment_5825" align="aligncenter"...

The 3 shared traits behind successful entrepreneurshipsIt took me fourteen years of research that included following 120 entrepreneurs from their first stages, Interviewing more than 200 successful entrepreneurs, and listening to thousands of them. Here are the three factors of the Formula for Entrepreneurial Business Success.   1. New / Non- existing thing - that's needed Jon Lee Dumas invented a daily podcast, Jeff bullas started to write about social media when the first innovators seeked for information, Mike Stelzner started to share content for free, Douglas Burdett started to interview authors of new marketing books, John Nemo cracked the code for selling through LinkedIn, Pam Wasley established the interim executive model, Mike Allton built websites for clients and shared content about social media to find more customers when he realized that what his customers really wanted was to learn about how they can use social media. So, he became a blogger and social media educator. and the list goes on. You don't need to be the first, and you don't need to be the only one in the world that offers that product or service, you do need to be the first or unique among your target audience. The story I heard in my interview with Mike Allton is a great example not only for choosing a new needed service (or in that case, information) but what it takes to find it. Mike Allton Mike Allton is a Content Marketing Practitioner, award-winning Blogger, and Author in St. Louis, and the Chief Marketing Officer at SiteSell. He has been working with websites and the Internet since the early '90s and is active on all of the major social networks. Mike teaches a holistic approach to content marketing that leverages blog content, social media and SEO to drive traffic, generate leads, and convert those leads into sales. Mike's entrepreneurship I started the Social Media Hat back in 2012. At that time, I had been building websites, and as part of that website business, I was blogging about social media marketing in order to give my prospects and customers helpful information. It didn't attract people who needed websites, it attracted people that already had a website and wanted to learn about their social media opportunity. So, as a result, I wasn't growing my online business, but I discovered that I like to write and I like to teach people how to use social media blogging. I realized that the content doesn't help to sell websites, however, I decided to create a site about social media blogging and that what I did. I've used my site as a testing ground for anything related to online marketing. I execute the test and write about it and I found out my audience really appreciates those kinds of insights. And in the meantime, I was experiencing making money through the website and I tested that as well. Affiliate relationships, Google AdWords, Display ads, and many other monetization techniques. The most successful way to make money is to have a product that can you sell a lot of, so it can scale.   2. Technology is a success factor Andres Pira started to use VR systems that allow his real estate clients to walk through and see what they are buying, without actually being there, and sold an extensive amount of units just with this technology. Dorothéa Bozicolona-Volpe uses technological listening tools to focus on understanding customers' needs to help her clients make their digital transformation. Paul Bratby got some geeks that turned his trading strategy that hasn't lost a quote for 15 years, into a software. Mellissah Smith worked with a development team that developed the technology for developing automatic marketing strategies without a human. You don't necessarily need to develop a new technological tool (although sometimes that's what leaded entrepreneurs towards a billion-dollar company market cap). However, you must find the technology that will allow you to boost your entrepreneurship to a meaningful...

Kevin Urrutia is the co-founder of New York based Voy Media who specialise in creating for clients Facebook and Instagram ads that are sophisticated and super creative. Kevin's team are usually half on site and half around the world. During lockdown they have all. been working remotely. Kevin also has his own podcast - Digital Marketing Fastlane which helps you to build. launch, grow and scale a successful online business. Kevin is a travel and nature enthusiast. In his spare time, you can find him hiking through Mount Fuji or booking his next adventure.   Most passionate about For me, the most passionate route is marketing. We do a lot of online marketing here at my current company, which is Voy Media, but it's not just online marketing for other brands. I still do my online marketing for my own companies. I have my own e-commerce brands that I'm working on. What I'm most passionate about is doing marketing for other brands, but using those skills to make my own businesses in my own companies. Kevin's career and story We started marketing. A marketing agency wasn't something I wanted to start. When I was running my other companies, I wanted to connect with other founders and entrepreneurs to help them with their stuff. Initially, I thought that Voy Media was going to be a great way to invest in startups. It was a way for me to meet entrepreneurs, but then that turned into, “Hey! We need help with advertising. We need help with marketing.” That led us to turn into a traditional business model. That's how we came up. Best advice for entrepreneurs My best advice is, for approaching the customer, consider: If you were that customer, how would you want to market your product? How would you want to sell the product? How would you want to handle complaints or returns? I always think about it like that. The biggest, most critical failure with customers At one point, like any business, you over-promise stuff that you can do. As a new entrepreneur, you always want to over-promise. You want to promise and over-deliver, but sometimes you make the mistake of saying, “Yep, I could do that.” And then you get overwhelmed because you don't know how to solve the problem. You know how to solve their issue. Then the customer does get upset. That's something I think about. It really affects your journey. When you're working with your new company, you want to minimize those moments. A lot of times, they're just not fun to deal with. And they stick with you for a few days or months. Biggest success with customers It was when I was doing the cleaning company. We really focused on making it super easy for customers to book and tell us what they wanted for their cleaning. I liked that because it made them trust us to book a service. Cleaning is a very personal thing. You're literally letting a stranger into your home. By having a great, simple price, by answering phone calls, by answering customers' text messages to us about their apartments, we made customers feel comfortable booking with us. It's being very customer-focused and customer-centric and trying to figure out what they want. Kevin's recommendation of a tool Ebook/Book The book that's really helping me think about marketing, think about sales and business, is DotCom Secrets by Russell Brunson. It talks about how to run a business and how to make money running a business. It teaches you the core fundamentals of marketing and sales. Kevin's one key success factor I think my key success factor is that I believe in myself. Anything is really about just believing in yourself. We tell people, “Just buckle down, turn off the TV, and start learning.” Then you can literally do whatever you want and change your life. Problem-solving techniques Try to be a great problem-solver and see an issue.   Kevin's Mountain Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the...

Imran, the founder & CEO of BIZBoost and BTweeps. Creating Meaningful and Personalized Digital Media Experiences, Globally, Human to Human, Since 2009.   Most passionate about I run a company called BIZBoost. I started in 2010 as a brand. Initially, I focused on building a diverse and global network, both leaders and influencers, on the 9th of March, 2014. I passionately believe in doing what you love and loving what you do. So, here I am, creating meaningful and personalized digital media experiences globally. Imran's career and story I started everything on Twitter. In 2009, I came onto the digital media space. I started analyzing and observing what people were doing. I created my network of influencers and leaders. The first thing I did was analyze and connect. During that journey, I gained a lot of knowledge and exposure. I hustled to different and diverse networks of people. It has been almost 11 years, and it's a really creative and intentional journey. I'm living my dream. So, it's a life of my own choices, a life of my own decisions. Being a creator is kind of a responsibility, so it's not about me. Best advice for entrepreneurs Businesses must believe in knowing their customer first, even before pitching their services and approaches, because without knowing who you are dealing with, the possibilities of building a healthy connection become in vain. You have to connect with your customers and consumers, human to human. This is a really important approach. It takes a lot of patience, but it goes a long way and has benefits. The biggest, most critical failure with customers It was trying to look into the wrong places and connecting with the wrong people. It took a few years for me to figure out the right direction and the right kind of people who are our ideal consumers and customers, so we weren't hitting the wrong places and connecting with the wrong people. Biggest success with customers Referrals are one of the biggest successes that we have gotten so far. We get forward into a business relationship. We connect deeper, we sell better, we share values. They tend to refer their network to BIZBoost. They tell them that BIZBoost is reliable and is one of the best companies around. Imran's recommendation of a tool Instagram and Twitter They are the best tools for connecting with people and serving them and communicating with them and/or marketing and selling our service. Businesses that aim to go global, that aim to connect with diverse people with diverse perceptions, should check out Twitter to build their presence. It's a completely different platform of perceptions within a limited character of creative writing; you can connect with great people. Imran's one key success factor The one key success factor is consistency and patience. It's a dilemma for creators and entrepreneurs that they have a huge list of things to do. They have to connect with their teams, their partners, their clients. So, it's all about how to consistently and efficiently optimize your flow, be an executive, and execute the flow in the most disciplined manner.   Imran's Mountain Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of mountaineering, I want to ask you: Is there a mountain you dream of climbing or a mountain you have already climbed? When you talk about mountains, I think about the vision, the comfort zone. For me, climbing a mountain equals working for the vision, being a visionary, and coming out of your own comfort zone because it's at each level. When you try to climb a mountain, there's another barrier. There is another limitation. One of them is coming out of your comfort zone. So, if an entrepreneur or businessman takes on that limitation and comes out of the comfort zone, that person learns a lot through climbing another mountain or climbing

My first executive marketing role wasn't about marketing! At the age of 27, I was chosen to become the first Customer Service Manager and a board member. No one in that water systems company understood what I was going to do—and who needed a customer service manager when professional technicians went to fix whatever was needed when a customer complained? To tell you the truth, I didn't know exactly what this job meant, either. All I knew was that it was a strategic decision; the sales department said that the reason for not meeting their sales goals was a lack of good customer service. I started by following one rule: to never leave a customer unsatisfied. I talked with each customer who needed a service. Mainly, I listened to them very carefully. The next step was to build a team of service providers who listened to customers and found the solution that would make them happy. The next step was to build a new team of technicians that love to give good service. I did something else, too. I decided that I didn't want to earn money from customer service itself, so all the payments went directly to the technicians. Within 6 months, customer service went from being the biggest obstacle for closing a sale to the biggest driver for selling. Our customers' satisfaction skyrocketed…and so did the sales. It was probably the most effective marketing campaign that I ran in my more than 30 years as a marketing director.   When I asked Warren Coughlin, one of my recent guests on the REACH OR MISS Podcast, for his best advice for entrepreneurs, he said, “I always think it's ‘to serve'! My definition of sales is professionally helping people solve problems, making it a kind of an honorable activity. “If you have a service focus for your customers, like always wanting to help them, you're going to have long client and customer relationships.”   This wasn't the first time we heard successful entrepreneurs talking about 'serving your customers.' Josh Elledge from Up My Influence and SavingAngel told his story about it: “When I started as an owner of a small-town newspaper, I was so uncomfortable to sell; I was so scared, so I ended up failing miserably. And after that, for the next five years, I did sales and marketing for a network of law firms and had to sell every day for a commission-based salary. I was very miserable, and then, I suddenly realized that it's not about convincing people to buy; it's about listening to people's needs and finding how I can help them. The minute I understood that, I started to enjoy my connection with my clients and started to succeed dramatically. I found the win-win formula.”   Bob Burg, author of the “Go-Giver,” said that “shifting your business context from getting – to give, is the most financially profitable.” In today's podcast episode, I share some of the most inspiring and educational stories of successful entrepreneurs who won their success by serving their customers best.   The first story is about Jeremy Parker from Swag.com, who told me, “I'm never satisfied in terms of customer success. We should go above and beyond to make our customers' experience great.” Jeremy Parker is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and serial entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Swag.com, the best place for companies to buy quality promotional products that they'll actually want to keep. They work with 5,000+ companies including Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and TikTok. They are #218 on the 2020 Inc 500 (fastest-growing companies in the US). Also, CrainsNY named Jeremy one of the 40 Under 40. Jeremy's career and story I'm actually a filmmaker. I even won the Audience Award at the 2006 Vail Film Festival for a documentary I made with my brother. After we won this award, I realized my passion wasn't to become a filmmaker. After college, I started my first business. I had no experience in businesses and...

Ronny Leber has been able to contribute to countless award winning events for over a decade. He has been on stage in front of more than 5 million people all over the world while working with some of the biggest brands in the world. Ronny loves to transform others by making them shine on stage and helping them to shape their own legacy. Besides working as a legacy coach Ronny is a multilingual tv & event-host and a keynote speaker.   Most passionate about I have the opportunity and the privilege, to be a host, commentator, and moderator on TV, and I love it. I'm absolutely enjoying it and I'm very passionate about it. Ronny's career and story I want to work at events that bring the whole world together. It was back in 2008 when I had those thoughts. At the same time—as a coincidence, in a way—a professional soccer team from Vienna was looking for somebody to host the youth teams' games, like, once a month on a Saturday afternoon. Through some friends who were working there, they asked me. I said, “Well, okay. Yeah, sure.” For me, that was not a job; it was like a hobby. I remember I got 70 euros—I got paid seven euros per game. Back in the day, I thought, ‘Wow I really got a good deal out of that.' One year later—on the 25th of June, 2009, which was the day Michael Jackson died—I was at a party for my former sports university. I was working there and was a DJ. At 5:15 in the morning, I left. It was a long party. At the same time, a colleague of mine who worked for a professional ice hockey team in Vienna left as well. Funny enough, the first-ever hockey game for that team that I saw live was in the stadium where I was the announcer. Then, suddenly, it was not just 100 or 150 people. I got the kids' soccer games. It was like 1000 people there. That was the first time ever, back in 2009, when I thought, ‘Hey, this could be a career.' I started taking classes in that direction. For over a year, I took classes in voice education, speakers' education. I started to take singing lessons and acting lessons. I danced competitively. I did all kinds of things that I could do in terms of expanding my field and getting better at what I do. I did the ice hockey for nine years. I quit because it was just so much time for me. Best advice for entrepreneurs I believe that every entrepreneur has something unique about them. Many entrepreneurs started because they love what they do and wanted to create a business out of it. In the beginning, I was focused just on my craft. I was focused on loving what I do and doing it, and not on building the business. You need to be able to measure the important things because what you cannot measure, you cannot manage. The biggest, most critical failure with customers The biggest failure that you can have with customers is not being prepared. At the end of the day, you need to know their needs, wants, and desires. Biggest success with customers The biggest success for me was when I was able to host 120,000 people, which was, for me, one of the most incredible events that I've ever been a part of. That event was in 2019, and it was “INEOS 1:59 CHALLENGE.” I feel really blessed that I work in a field where I feel that I have had many successes. I believe it's also a mindset. You need to set yourself up for success. Basically, I think it's believing in yourself and following the journey, always having a next step, knowing where you want to go and then just being hungry. Ronny's recommendation of a tool Slack - which is a fantastic way to communicate with your team Trello - A planning app where you can go from Idea to action in seconds Ronny's one key success factor As I mentioned before, I think there is one single factor that is going to determine your success, and that is hunger. It is also your responsibility to have all the fuel you need to have the hunger, to have the why. If you don't have it, dig deeper.   Ronny's Mountain Since we believe that the best way for...

Jason Zilberbrand is the President of VREF Aircraft Value Reference & Appraisal Services. He is an Accredited Senior Aircraft Appraiser with the American Society of Appraisers (ASA), and an Accredited Member of the Appraisers National Association (ANA), and he is also an Accredited Member of the International Society of Appraisers (ISA), Expert Witness, broker, inventorying dealer, acquisition agent, aircraft owner, aircraft operator, contract negotiator, consultant, teacher, conference speaker, and author. Jason spent over 15 years as an inventory aircraft dealer with a $300-million-dollar credit facility, and over $4.5 billion in completed aircraft transactions.   Most passionate about I help buyers and sellers of airplanes, ranging from small little piston aircraft like Cessnas to commercial aircraft, like you would fly on an airline. Most of my clients are either financial institutions that provide loans for this type of equipment or individual buyers of these aircraft who are looking to deal with some sort of estate planning or refinancing. My firm is the largest aircraft appraisal firm in the world. We do a couple thousand desktop appraisals a year. If you're familiar with Kelley Blue Book for cars, we manage a similar software platform for aircraft values. Jason's career and story I started off in a family business: an aviation insurance company. So, right out of college, I worked for the family business. I did that for a decade. It was all business jets. I cut my teeth in the industry, working with what are today considered the classic business jets. These were airplanes that were used by Fortune 500 companies and high-net-worth individuals. They were flying them globally. My father's company provided coverage for maintenance. I started getting requests from clients to assist them in buying airplanes. That was really when the light bulb started to go off that there were things that I could do in aviation that weren't necessarily tied to the family's business. I left the insurance company and started an inventory dealership—like a car dealership, except we had planes and cars. I did that full-time through 2013. When the recession hit in 2008, I started to appraise more airplanes. I think it just was a natural progression of my career. Best advice for entrepreneurs Some of the tricks that I use are to try and create obtainable goals and set those goals every day so that eventually I hit the big goal, but I'm not taking on such a massive project. One of the ways to do that is to look inward and see what your strengths are, then try and bring in other people who can bridge the gap of your weaknesses. You have to trust those whom you delegate work to, which is another big challenge for entrepreneurs. So, you have to trust the people whom you hire; otherwise, don't hire them. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I think that one of the biggest failures that anybody can have is assuming that the other person or the customer sees things from your perspective. When you're young, or at least when I was young, I tended to explode on people who were looking for help and who might not have done it in such a respectful way. So, my biggest failure, unfortunately, was burning bridges with some potentially really important customers because I didn't care to engage with them the way that they wanted to engage with me. Biggest success with customers My base success, I think, comes with the new business, and that is trusting the fact that the customer base would be able to adapt to change. My biggest success today is asking permission before I go down a path, including when it's personal, with my wife. I talk about things instead of making decisions in my own little world. I think that is really demonstrated not only to the industry but to our client base, that we're dedicated to them and that we're here to assist them with complex problems and be somebody they can trust to solve those...

Jenn T. Grace, M.S., Founder & CEO of Publish Your Purpose. Jenn T. Grace is a nationally recognized business strategist, speaker, and award-winning author. She has been featured in Forbes, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. Jenn passionately believes the more raw and real we can be—the deeper the connections we can experience. This drives her fierce commitment to bring voice to the invisible stories that free people from their isolation. She is committed to giving underrepresented voices power and a stage to share their stories, speak their truth, and impact their communities. She is the Founder of Publish Your Purpose and In addition to publishing 70+ books that share the stories of others, Jenn has written six, including her memoir, House on Fire. A marathon runner, animal lover, and novice birder. She lives in Connecticut with her family.   Most passionate about I feel like my passion always lies in helping people tell their stories. And how I do that is by helping people publish their books—primarily nonfiction books and memories. What I'm really passionate about, as of late, is making a difference within the larger publishing space and context surrounding the predatory practices of many publishers out there, who are essentially taking advantage of first-time authors. Jenn's career and story I was a consultant. My background is in marketing, so that's certainly a unique angle that we bring to the publishing process. We really have a strong focus on the marketing side. I wrote my first book in 2013. I started it probably at the end of 2011, beginning of 2012. I self-published it, and I made every possible mistake. It was not a good-quality product. I wrote a second book, and I learned from all of my mistakes on the first one. And then I wrote a third book. By the time I was in between my second and third books, everyone I knew kept asking me, “How did you know how to hire an editor? How did you know how to lay out the book?” I kept getting all of these questions: “How did you do this? How did you do that?” The process of having one-on-one conversations with people and then teaching people in smaller groups how to get their books published eventually led me to found a full-blown publishing company in 2015. Best advice for entrepreneurs The best thing that I would recommend is to track your data. The only way that we can really scale and increase that impact is if we really truly know the very core of whom we're serving. The more clear you can be on whom you're serving, and the more you track that, the more robust it becomes, and the easier it makes your marketing for purposes of finding more of that same person. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I think, in a lot of ways, it's ego. I had this kind of ego that was telling me, “You can't switch focuses, you can't switch your business, you're known for doing this consulting work, and you've worked for a decade to build your reputation in that specific consulting area.” I think if I had listened to my intuition, listened to my gut and my instincts, I would have started the publishing business even faster, or perhaps more confidently, rather than fighting it like an internal battle with myself that no one actually saw on the surface. Biggest success with customers One of the things that I was completely hell-bent on achieving was to get national recognition for our chamber of commerce. I had such laser focus. This is a really good example of how I do this in my business. I had laser focus on winning the Chamber of the Year award on a national level in the U.S. Jenn's recommendation of a tool Google Suite. Boomerang. It helps you remember who you were supposed to be following up with. Jenn's one key success factor I would say, if I had to define it for myself (and probably everybody around me would say), it's my level of organization. A default function for me is just being exceptionally organized....

Dan Morris is an investor, advisor, and B2B growth expert with a mission to leverage his experience to impact 1000 businesses positively by 2025. Helping companies to succeed in volatile markets, increasing profitability from existing strategies, and helping CEOs take positive steps forward to grow their business is where Dan’s expertise is focused. Before turning 30, Dan left a finance career to join a digital agency that showed him what a fast-growing services business could be – it went on to sell for £100m. He then launched a digital signage network publishing content to thousands of screens, and helped a content marketing agency reach #61 on the INC. list.   Most passionate about We are working with businesses that need some help with growth. We help B2B, SaaS, and services businesses that are stuck in that six- to seven-figure revenue range and that need to break through to the next level. We help them identify and break down that barrier. Dan’s career and story I started my career at a very large bank. They taught me to negotiate to understand numbers very quickly, but I realized that my calling was really with smaller businesses that were moving much faster—a lot less red tape and a lot more entrepreneurial energy. I found myself working with a group of entrepreneurs who had several different businesses. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, we were working on a very exciting project, selling to a group of banks, but all of a sudden, they ran out of money. The opportunity arose for me to go with that group of investors from the UK out to the United States and help them build a business that became 61 on the Inc. list in the next four years. When I left working with those businesses, I trained as a product manager, then worked with technology businesses and SAS companies. My training as a product manager helped me to focus even more on what the customer really wants, how to really get the customer to understand the value of the technology, how to build technology that really works for the customer, how to communicate that in sales and marketing, and how to talk with the technology teams. I really wanted to give away some time and understand technology businesses that were out there and that I could potentially be a part of. As I worked with lots of those early-stage customers, I recognized that there was a big opportunity in helping them build those initial building blocks. Best advice for entrepreneurs Aligned with exactly what we do today I advice entrepreneurs to take the time to review. Have a look at who you're actually working with. Talk to them and understand what they're actually using your product or service for. If you review, you can build that information into a refinement. You can focus more on delivering more for what people are already getting from you. Then, once you've developed that refinement, you can roll it out. The biggest, most critical failure with customers I think the biggest fail for me was not realizing earlier how many people we could help if we just kept it simple and delivered on this four-Rs framework, rather than being tempted to get in and try to fix everything within a business. Biggest success with customers We were onboarding in January 2020. This is a company that had been around for nine years and they'd grown to hundreds of thousands of revenue, even around a million dollars in revenue. They'd been in a heavy services business they've been a heavy into the software side of their business. And they'd struggled a little bit with who that core customer was. Over the years, they’d had a lot of successes. Then they'd come back down to a point where they just said, “You know what? We really need some help focusing.” So, we got involved with that team. Great people. We went in and reviewed who their ideal customer was, where their leads were coming from, what was happening as a result of that marketing. We worked with their existing team to refine who...