IAM2385 – Unveiling the Secret of Franchise Success

Gresham Harkless reflects on his entrepreneurial journey and emphasizes the importance of experimentation in business.

Gresham shares his experience, experimenting with different strategies and approaches is key to discovering what works, what you enjoy, and what aligns with your goals.

He emphasizes the value of data in understanding what's working—such as tracking impressions, clicks, conversions, or other key performance indicators (KPIs).

Gresham highlights the need for consistent experimentation, referencing how successful companies like Google encourage innovation through dedicated “experimental time.”

In addition, he advocates entrepreneurs to create space for experimentation in their routines, analyze the results, and adjust accordingly.

• Blue Star Franchise: http://bluestarfranchise.com
• Browse the Franchise Inventory: https://bluestarfranchise.com/franchise
• Is franchising right for you? Check this out to see: http://bluestarfranchise.com/assessment
• Franchise CEO (A CBNation Site – coming soon) – http://franchiseceo.co

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Transcription:

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Intro 00:01

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:28

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. And this is a special episode of our I AM CEO Podcast.

And this is actually going to be a snippet of a snippet, so to speak. I'm just doing an intro because I've been starting to document my journey into starting what is now called Blue Star Franchise.

We're also going to do a kind of sub site within CB Nation called Franchise CEO. So you'll see some links in the show notes related to that.

But just wanted to give you a little bit more insight, give you a little bit more color in some of the aspects of why I'm actually doing this.

Because one of the things I was doing as I was going through training to start up this new business was realizing and hearing from the founder of FBA, the Franchise Brokers Association, that it'd be really cool to document your journey going through and building this out.

I think it's something that would be super helpful, obviously for people that are looking for and thinking about starting franchises.

But frankly, if you're starting anything, any type of business, I think it's really cool to kind of just even see the journey and how it's been going from there.

So I'm going to share a few of those snippets from the, from the first couple of videos that have been created.

But definitely, of course, subscribe to our YouTube, check out a lot more where I figure out exactly where we're going to post this.

So I'll have that information that's available to you. But regardless, if you're a builder, continue to keep building, continue to do your thing.

The world definitely needs exactly what you're trying to build and needs you to be your unique self.

So make sure to run your own race, because nobody can run your race like you. This is Gresh signing out. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh and I think it's day 25 of the franchise broker journey. I didn't really know what I want to talk about today.

But actually yesterday I went through and I started to look at all the experiments I was doing, all the things and Seeing like what results there were.

So I think that's, probably a two part thing that I really wanted to like hammer home today was of course having that spirit of experimenting and doing things, trying things out is going to be insanely huge because you don't even know what will work all the time.

You don't know what you're gonna even love doing. You don't know what's gonna necessarily feel in alignment.

So one of the big things that kind of came up for me is that I want to have that spirit of just trying things, of testing things out, of figuring out what works and what doesn't work.

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But one thing I don't always do a great job of is keeping track of what these experiments are, of closing the experiments when they don't kind of bear those fruits and bringing those things out.

So the idea is kind of like to do like an AB test, a rapid AB test. You have kind of two things you're testing out essentially and then you continually kind of tweak those things until you get to ultimately where you want to be.

Mine ends up a lot of times being an A, B, C, D, E, F. You can get the idea of like exactly how those tests are.

So it becomes a lot harder to be able to kind of iterate between two or three, four, five, six different things.

So you want to try to keep it to maybe two different things, maybe three different things that you're kind of testing out simultaneously.

But I am notorious for trying out lots of different things, doing things against the wall. But that's not necessarily always bad.

Especially if those two things or three things or four things are not kind of competing or there sometimes things that you just kind of sit in and see what's happening, but you want to kind of look at that data.

I think that's the biggest thing that I wanted to kind of hammer home today is that that data, especially if you're doing stuff from a digital standpoint, is going to be huge.

So whether we're talking about impressions, clicks, actually setting up time to speak or offers or whatever, the KPI that you're measuring is going to be huge to kind of track.

But one of the reasons I bring it up so much is that because if you're getting a lot of impressions but people aren't clicking, maybe it's something around the copy or the offer or something along those lines that is not resonating if you have an ad that you're putting out.

But on the flip side, if you are getting a lot of clicks, but people aren't converting. Maybe it's something along the lines of a landing page, or maybe it's too slow, or maybe it's not the right offer, or maybe people just don't have a good journey to that landing page.

So whatever that might be, it gives you a little bit more of a awareness around what's working and what's not.

When you have that data that you can lean on, but you never know if it's even worthwhile. So sometimes when you do it and you set it out, it doesn't end up happening.

And you end up saying that, hey, this isn't necessarily for me. So maybe that's how it goes. And, it's so important to make sure that you are doing that.

This is for anybody that's getting started and testing out ideas, but frankly, it's for anybody that is doing anything.

I think in business or especially in marketing, you're gonna constantly be testing out things, seeing what works and what doesn't work.

And you want to create space and time to be able to do that. Some of the biggest brands, you hear, they have their experimental time. Google's one of those where I think products like Gmail came out largely because people were experimenting, experimenting.

And they had that 20%, 15, 20% time. I think it was that they're experimenting becomes part of their ethos, their culture, and the thing that they're doing.

It keeps them a big company, but also kind of taps into that, that innovation and, moving fast and breaking things because you have space and time to do that.

So I think that that's, all pretty cool to be able to do and to leverage. And I think it's so important as CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners that we are creating space and time to experiment.

But also creating space and time to make sure that we're review those experimentations to see what's working and what's not.

But that's the big thing that's kind of coming up for me. Don't be afraid to experiment. Don't even, don't be afraid to even track those experiments even more, because you do want to be like the kid that's trying out new things.

You want to be like the scientist that's in the lab and with the test tubes and the beakers and all those things and testing out those different concoctions, or even the person that might be a chef and just putting together a really phenomenal recipe.

So that's it for today. Just don't be afraid to experiment. Don't be afraid to track those experimentations so that you can eat eventually get your way to the success that you want to have.

Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help. And of course, looking forward to giving you more and more updates.

Outro 06:17

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast, powered by CB Nation and Blue16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Check out the latest and greatest apps, books and habits to level up your business at CEOhacks.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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