IAM1805 – CEO Helps Online Experts Grow Their Businesses with Funnels, Paid Ads and Email Marketing

Brice Gump Teaser 00:00

You know, I think the more you can understand your customer and the more that you can understand the real problems that they face, the more you can create better solutions for them and the more you can actually help them, which just helps accelerate everything you're doing in your own business.

Intro 00:12

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:39

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we hit over 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, the business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, business owners, and what I like to call a CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month we are focused on the visibility game, a.k.a. Marketing, Advertising, PR, and Sales. I would just say the name of the game is being found and these tools will help you to do that. We have heard the philosophical question, if the tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? If there's a really, really great product or service and no one knows about it, how great is it really? What impact does it ultimately make? This is where we will go into this month. Looking at visibility, branding, marketing, public relations, sales, being the lifeblood of businesses, building media companies, and so much more.

This is probably one of the most exciting and probably the most excruciating topics, but we hope this month to demystify and maybe even vanquish the fear and help and arm you with the tools to be able to increase your visibility. So buckle up and sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Bryce Gump of Major Impact Media. Bryce, it's great to have you on the show.

Brice Gump 02:09

Yeah, man. Thanks for having me.

Gresham Harkless 02:10

Super excited to have you on and hear about all the awesome things that you're doing. Before we do that, I wanted to read a little bit more about Bryce, so you can hear about some of those awesome things.

Bryce is a marketer and CEO from Texas. Although you can find him living abroad in Barcelona, Spain, these days. He's fascinated by the way messages spread, technology moves, and teams of everyday people can create life-changing businesses using a laptop and an internet connection.

His company, Major Impact Media helps online experts grow their business with high ticket Funnels, paid Ads, and backend Email Marketing.

Bryce, super excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Brice Gump 02:45

Yeah, man, let's do it.

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Gresham Harkless 02:46

Let's make it happen then. So they kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit, hear a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

Brice Gump 02:53

Yeah. So I got started in this whole online world back in like 2012. So I finished college, I was always pretty tech-savvy with computers, so I started helping people with websites. What we would often find is we would build people these websites, and then no one would ever find them. They wouldn't get any traffic. They weren't getting any leads. Nothing was happening.

So we started digging around. We were doing some SEO, some content, trying to figure out what to do, and eventually tapped into Google AdWords. Here we were able to set up campaigns, set up some landing pages, and then immediately start driving traffic to these landing pages. Within a couple of days, we were starting to get actual leads come into their site. So that was super exciting. After that, really just transitioned straight into focusing mostly on paid ads.

So I started my own agency back in 2015. When I first started, we were really just focused on being an ad agency. And as I'm sure you might know, being an ad agency is still a very general thing, so over the years, we've really started to focus more on who we can help most, and how we can best serve them. Now today, what that really looks like is we're running an ad agency, but we have a very niche market and we have a pretty niche service that we run for people. So we really focus on helping people generate calls for high-ticket offers and so that's how we got into this whole business.

Gresham Harkless 04:00

Nice. Yeah, I definitely appreciate that. And hearing like the progression of everything you're doing and just as you alluded to like digital marketing used to be, you can do all things by doing one thing and then you start to realize how broad each of these different, I like to call them lanes get. Like you said, you start to find your niche and find how you could create that value.

But I love, that you're making, it sounds like that connection because I think there are a lot of people that have really great services and offerings that they have, but they can't actually connect with the people where they struggle in terms of doing that. So it sounds like you and your team kind of bridge that gap.

Brice Gump 04:38

Yep. That's pretty much what we're here for.

Gresham Harkless 04:40

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I know you touched a little bit upon that niche that you went into, could you take us through a little bit more on that? What that looks like in terms of how you serve your clients and how you're making that impact.

Brice Gump 04:49

Yeah. So after many years of running advertising, some of the biggest things that we have found was a lot of what people struggle with is having the right foundation in place to be able to run advertising. Because depending on what type of offer you have, what type of services you're running, what type of funnel you have  will create a lot of the success that you have later on down the road.

So for us, what we started doing was where we were first only running advertising, we were really just focusing on running Facebook ads and Google ads. What we really started doing was focusing more on, okay what is the funnel that they need to have in place in order to be successful in this? What is like the email backend follow-up that they need to have in order to be successful as this? And so a lot of our clients come to us because they have had some success with their business. They've either got some outbound marketing going, they've got some referrals going, and so that's working for them.

They've usually tried paid ads before, they've had some success with that, maybe kind of hit or miss, but they're really looking for okay, how do I take what's already working and start to be able to effectively run advertising in order to acquire customers? I think if you are in a what I would consider a high ticket services kind of business, where it's like you're selling something for more than 3000 bucks, right? You're not selling little widgets online. You're not selling like Dogface socks or something like that, but you're really trying to attract professional clients.

What are the systems and processes you need for that in order to be successful with advertising? And so that's how we have evolved. What we're doing at my company is again, we really started first with the advertising, but then it was like, okay what do our clients need next in order to be most successful with the services that we have now? And how can we add that for them and just building it out that way?

Gresham Harkless 06:28

Nice. I love that. I think so many times when you see like the commercials or you hear, Oh, just do Google ad or Facebook ad, you don't think about, okay, they clicked on it. Now what happens from there? And how do you nurture that? How do you take them through that funnel and have those conversations?

So I love that you saw that, when you were working with your clients, you decided that you wanted to create true entrepreneurial form, that opportunity, that option for them to have that really great experience. So at the end of the day, they can serve the clients that they ultimately hope to serve.

Brice Gump 06:53

Yeah. I think one of the biggest challenges for a lot of small businesses is like Facebook and Google have made it so easy for anyone to set up ads. One of the things they want everyone to think is Oh, hey, all you have to do is jump online. We've got some blueprint certifications. You can take them in a couple of hours, or you can get AdWords certified this week and you start launching ads next week.

I really have just seen over and over again, and if you follow advertising at all, you will see this happen over and over again, where these platforms are designed to just eat your money if you really don't know what you're doing. So if you don't know the right settings, if you don't have the right funnel, if you're not doing all the right things, you will just spend money on ads every month and not get the results that you're looking for.

So again, that can come back to great. If you are specialized in trying to sell services or trying to sell coaching or trying to sell consulting or something like this, what is it that you need in place so that you can go run ads and be successful?

Gresham Harkless 07:42

Yeah. That's absolutely huge. And I think so many times we'll hear when people have that less than ideal experience, they'll say Facebook ads don't work or Google ads ads don't work. Advertising doesn't work. I'm just going to do X, Y, and Z.

But I think in reality, I appreciate you talking about like the holistic nature of what that journey looks like, because I think so many times you don't hear that a lot with the Facebook ads of saying, hey, this is how it works. You hear okay, all you have to do is put in this amount of money and you have this amount of success because this person had it. But you don't hear about that behind-the-scenes thing. That happens in advertising and I think it happens in entrepreneurship as well, too.

Brice Gump 08:14

Yeah, I think it happens with everything. Everything always looks a lot easier from outside.

Gresham Harkless 08:18

Yes. The grass is always green on the other side, I say. So, you might've already touched on this, but I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce, and this could be for yourself personally, the business or a combination of both, but what do you feel sets you apart and makes you unique?

Brice Gump 08:30

I think for us, we really have just a very methodical way of approaching things. It's how I think about doing things. So it's how our services have evolved, which is just being extremely detail oriented. And again, always trying to figure out what that next step is. So for us, the way I've approached my agency is rather than us run Facebook ads for a bunch of different markets, how do we just find Transcribed One type of client that we really enjoy working with, we work really well with, and how do we just keep solving the problems that they need to solve?

I keep us focused on paid advertising because I think that's still even niche enough. There's plenty of depth to go inside of that. But we don't run ads for e-comm. We're not doing a bunch of local ads as well. We're just really focused on how can we get our clients the best results possible and then just keep going deeper and deeper.

I think that's one of the things that's helped our business be successful. Then for my end, that's how I approach what we do. So I'm always trying to figure out what is the next bottleneck we have in our business? How do we just methodically attack that until we get that fixed and then figure out what comes next after that?

Gresham Harkless 09:29

I love that. And I think so many times, it speaks to like that abundant mentality, I think. Because we can get stuck in oh, we have to do all things so that we get opportunities. But when you start to realize that you can provide a very specific solution to a problem, and there are so many more people, so many more businesses or, whatever it is that you're trying to attract and to serve that you can serve.

So when you start to drill down, you start to really become an expert and you're able to talk the same language, have those conversations and of course serve on an even better level because it's not going wide, it's going deep and you understand them tremendously.

Brice Gump 10:03

Definitely. And I think it just helps everything. I think the more you can understand your customer and the more that you can understand the real problems that they face, the more you can create better solutions for them and the more you can actually help them, which just helps accelerate everything we're doing in your own business.

Gresham Harkless 10:16

Absolutely. I think so many times we forget about, like you said, within the business also self-solving those bottlenecks that we have within our own organizations and seeing how we can, of course, do the same thing to ourselves.

I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Brice Gump 10:36

I think one of the like smallest little hacks that I have done for the last probably two years that I find extremely valuable, I got out of a book from a guy named Keith Cunningham and he said before you start your day, just remember to sit down and write down what are the major things you're trying to accomplish right now. I think just doing that every day, just redialing in your focus on what's important, it makes it really easy for what's that list of things that comes up that you need to accomplish does, how do you just look at that major list of things you're trying to accomplish and just keep it focused on what's going to move the needle on those activities.

Because I think if you run a business, if you're online, if you're doing anything there's an endless list of things to do. There's never an end to the to-do list. Stuff piles on faster than it gets off. But if you can always keep it focused around, okay what are those major things I'm trying to accomplish? You can prioritize what you're trying to do in your business. Because I think that's one of the biggest skills that honestly I feel everyone can work on. When I feel like whenever I hire somebody new, this is one of the first things we're always talking about, it's like, how do we prioritize?

Because again, there's always so much to do and how do you know what's important thing to focus on next? I think if you just take those five minutes of daily practice and write down, hey, here are the major things I'm trying to accomplish. Then you can help set the tone for, okay, when that next thing comes up, go, okay, where does it fall on this list? Okay how do I prioritize it? And then you can attack it.

Gresham Harkless 11:56

Nice. I love that. I think Tony Robbins said in order to win the day you have to win the morning, and I love that hack in the very beginning of the day, because like you said, there's always something to do. There's always a fire to put out.

There's always another thing. But I think it's so important, as you said, one of the best skills you can learn is prioritization. It allows you to not get overwhelmed by all of the things because you've done the work in the very beginning. You created that list and it allows you to say, okay, is this really that fire or that much of a fire that, you know, so and so might say it is. So you start to realize this is what's going to help me get to where we and our team multiply needs to be.

Brice Gump 12:30

Definitely.

Gresham Harkless 12:31

Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. This could be more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. It might be something you would tell your favorite client, or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

Brice Gump 12:43

I think if I hopped into a time machine and was talking to my younger business self, I think I would focus a lot of my advice on team. Because I think that's one of the things that has created the most leverage in business, that coming from the background of being like someone who was a freelancer and just work by himself, and then had to like a transition into having a team and trying to grow a business, not being the only one, it's a skill that I'm continuing to try to evolve and continue to try to get better at.

But I think one of the best things that I have figured out how to do as far as checking in with a team is just having like an account of it, like a time where you check-in and step away from work and just talk about how business is going. So, for us, what we do is we have a biweekly check-in, we run an agency, right? So all day, every day, we're all just talking about client stuff, this client, that client, what's going on with this project, that thing every two weeks we sit down and it's just okay, how's work going? Like how is your flow with work?  Are you able to get done all the things you need to do? Do you have everything you need to be successful? Is there anything we could do to improve what you're doing?

Having that kind of check-in time, I feel like has really helped bring me the insight that I need to be able to help to work with the team. And then also to be able to make that connection with the team when it's not just about the agency, the clients, the projects we're working on, all that stuff. So I think that's something that I wish I had implemented sooner. Now that I am doing it, I'm excited that I'm doing it and continuing to like work more on just how to build a team because I think at the end of the day if you're running a business, it's about the people that you have in it.

Gresham Harkless 14:01

Yeah, absolutely. And I say we often forget about that human aspect of business and definitely even the human aspect of life at that. Because we forget about when we're able to take care of those people that are a lot of times, on the, I don't want to say front lines, but just having those interactions with the clients and allows you to really make that impact by helping them help to serve your clients.

I think so many times we forget that by stepping back and a lot of times having those conversations, not always in the business and rolling up our sleeves, but stepping back and just having a conversation at that, it provides so much more opportunity. I think it provides a sense of connection it sounds and people love the business. They want to go to bat for the business and really phenomenal things sound like they come from that.

Brice Gump 14:41

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think having that check-in is just so important.

Gresham Harkless 14:44

Awesome. Awesome. Now I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping out different quote and quote CEOs on the show.

So Brice, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Brice Gump 14:53

Man, that's a really good question. I think for me, again, it's really come down to transitioning from being an individual who's like trying to provide a service to now being someone who's trying to lead a team to accomplish more of a mission.

I think that if you can like embody that and really help put something together around a mission that you're all trying to accomplish and getting the right people in place to do what they need to do and give them the resources they need, I think that's a lot of what being a CEO is.

Gresham Harkless 15:19

Yeah. And I think you touched on so many phenomenal things. Then when we've talked about obviously the human aspect and being able to take care of the people, but I think you also mentioned things like processes and even things that you do for clients.

And sometimes we forget about those aspects as you try to build an agency or build a business and all the different moving parts that you have, but you create those strong foundations and being able to kind of transition from, more of maybe a freelance mentality, or even as a freelancer, you can still have that mentality.

Brice Gump 15:43

Definitely.

Gresham Harkless 15:44

Awesome. Truly appreciate that definition. Obviously, I appreciate your time even more. What I want to do now was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get ahold of you and find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

Brice Gump 15:58

We're trying to teach people what they need to be successful and then help Implement those things. So again, YouTube is a really great place to check us out. Also online, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, we're on all of them. So find us on, your favorite social platform and and we'll be putting out a lot of content there.

Gresham Harkless 16:11

Awesome. And to make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes as well too, so that everybody can click through and find out about all the awesome things that you're doing.

So thank you so much for doing that, of course, reminding us of that today and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Brice Gump 16:22

Thanks, man. Have a good one.

Outro 16:24

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast, powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation at blue16media.com. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless, Jr. Thank you for listening.

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