IAM2204 – The Journey of Pushing Boundaries for Success

Gresham Harkless shares his journey from working on websites as a tech enthusiast to becoming involved in SEO and digital marketing.

He explains how his SEO and digital marketing work evolved, leading to a deeper focus on connecting with entrepreneurs and business owners.

Gresham highlights his unique blend of digital marketing services and media content creation helps build relationships and visibility.

Gresham affirms that CB Nation’s content aims to be educational and supportive for business leaders, emphasizing the importance of visibility, resources, and connections.

Furthermore, he highlights the “success equation” and the goal to provide valuable information and connections for entrepreneurs.

Business Pillar: Journey | Strategy

Episode Link: Sara Sheehan Consulting

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Transcription:

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Gresham Harkless Teaser 00:00

I think there's so many times that we think that something's not possible and that stops us in our tracks from ever trying.

So I would just encourage anybody to there was once a time where we weren't going to reach the moon.

There was once a time that we weren't going to be able to fly and the Wright brothers were able to make  there's all these instances in history where people say that's not possible, that's not gonna happen.

But I just would encourage everybody to make sure that you do take it upon yourself to say, I'm going to try and I'm gonna try to make that happen. I'm gonna try to do whatever it is I'm achieving.

Intro 00:34

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast, and I wanted to share with you one of the episodes that I was a guest on for someone else's podcast.

I always talk about how important it is to build a media company. One of the next best things you could do is be on somebody else's media company.

So I had the pleasure of being a guest on this podcast, and I want to share a little snippet with you because it would help support the 8 business pillars we've really been trying to focus on with a lot more of our content and a lot more of the solo episodes that I'm doing.

So make sure, of course, that you subscribe to our podcast. But, of course, you take some time out. Check out the show notes.

And subscribe to the podcast that I've been featured on as well too, and get to learn about some of those 8 business pillars and how you can continue to leverage and build that up so you can go from builder to architect to, of course, rock star and luminary.

So this is Gresh signing out. I hope you enjoy this I AM CEO special episode.

Gresham Harkless 01:27

What really changed things was I tore my Achilles tendon, while I was playing basketball. And when I tore my Achilles tendon, I went through like a dark period because I was like not really happy because I did I feel like I made bold moves and they didn't work out.

And I was literally without an Achilles well, partially without all my colleagues. So it was a partial tear, but that's what kind of planted the seeds for CEO Blog Nation, which became CBNation and all those.

So I was already working on that learning about entrepreneurship and business saying I wanna start something.

And on the other side, I started to I've always been like a techie. I've always been interested in technology and computers and things like that.

So I would work on websites not thinking that was of any value. It was only years later after having a job while freelancing and doing all these other things that I met somebody from a networking group.

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And my way to get through to him was actually just say, hey, your website's not up it up to par and I was working an outside sales job at the time.

And I was like, okay, well, I want to try to sell you advertising. So I'm going to talk about your website to hopefully sell you advertising.

And when that happened, I got into the door, spoke with him. He didn't want to talk about advertising.

He wanted to talk about the SEO work. So that's where I started to do more SEO work. So all while I'm still doing a lot of the freelance writing and all these things and I started doing digital marketing.

The digital marketing starts to kind of take off a lot more than other things. So fast forward a lot of years, I'm like, okay, I'm overextended. I'm doing too many things. I have a lot of I'm way overextended, way more overextended than I that I want to be. Kind of two things that I'm chasing.

And I kind of came back to like, okay, if I was going to blow up my digital marketing company, how would I do that?

And a lot of that was like, okay, I would probably try to invest into something that can connect me with more entrepreneurs and business owners.

I'd probably try to get a entrepreneur magazine or something along those lines. And then when I started to think about it, I was like, okay, I'm building something that is probably very close to what I would want to invest in.

And that's where those two things kind of meld together. It's like, okay, you have the services that you provide, but you really want to showcase people that you might end up working with.

At the very least, you get the opportunity to provide support for the community. So that's where those two things came together where it wasn't either or. It was actually both and better.

And it allowed me and everybody else to be a lot more, strategic with what we're doing.

Sara Sheehan 04:02

That's fascinating to learn more about. And so can you tell me if Blue16 and CBNation, are they passion projects for you? Or how, how do they fit in with your secret sauce? Or maybe they are your secret sauce in a sense. Tell me more about that.

Gresham Harkless 04:26

Yeah. So I actually absolutely believe it is part of my secret sauce. I think it's the differentiator. It's the secret sauce. The thing that sets us apart and makes us unique.

Because I think so many times with digital marketers, which has become a lot more prevalent, than it was when I started ten years ago, it becomes less of like, oh, I can just help you build a website.

It becomes more of like, oh, you're doing some really awesome things. Would love by the way, we do help support with x y and z and a b and z, but I would love to have you on my podcast.

I think you have a phenomenal story. I think you're doing phenomenal things. So would love to showcase you.

And I think it's a way to also help to build those connections and those relationships, but also to get our name out there.

So everything's powered by Blue16 and that's by design as well too. So that again, investments into like other streams of marketing and other ways of market may not be able be in alignment with what we're trying to build.

So it's definitely in alignment with our secret sauce and I see it as basically like a marketing opportunity.

But I think one of the beautiful things is we're hoping to launch more and more type of products and services to help support CB Nation as well too, so that we have the services, but we also have other opportunities and things that we can build from there.

Sara Sheehan 05:40

Excellent. Is it fair to say that you are providing content through CB Nation that is educational for anyone that really wants to learn and grow.

They want to grow as a business leader. They want to be a better leader. They want people to want to work with them. That you have a much higher standard for what you're doing. You're trying to share content that would help people learn and grow.

Gresham Harkless 06:20

Absolutely, Sara. It's so funny. I say like at the heart of like every interview or every piece of content, I'm always that annoying kid that's in class that continues to raise their hand and ask, but why, how do you do this and all those things.

So I feel like I'm tapping into that with everything that we create. And like, our I call it our success equation. I say visibility plus resources times connections equals success.

And the whole idea of that is that every piece of content we wanna hit one of those three pieces, if not more than one.

So we're even telling a story about a CEO, entrepreneur, and business owner. And I think even in that, it could be very lonely starting a business.

It could be very lonely if you're innovating or doing anything. I think it you have a lot of peace and this is why I kind of touched on that networking group because I only believe I was more able to achieve more success because I was in the room with people that were already doing it.

And like things have changed obviously with some of the ways that we connect, but I think I wanted to tap into that. Oh, if I'm having a bad day or a bad month or even a bad year in my business, I'm not necessarily doing it wrong. It's kind of part of the process, part of the step.

So I wanted to get a lot of that information out there. Of course, the resources, we don't know about all the organizations or the software or the tools, tips, tidbits, whatever it is. I call them CEO hacks that we can lean on.

So let's start to get a lot of that information out there and then connections is everything that's at the humanistic part of what we're doing.

I think I love the opportunity we get to do this now, but how can I bring all those things together so that I can help these business owners who I think are the true superheroes be able to succeed even more?

Sara Sheehan 08:05

That's very powerful. Can you talk with me about what some of your big aspirational goals are right now and what you're working on.

Gresham Harkless 08:18

Yeah. I think the most immediate thing that we're really trying to work on is after hitting 1600 episodes, I took a step back and I paused new recordings for a year and really started to work on like mining the information of all the podcast and information.

And we came out with sixteen kind of foundational elements and some of them, or most of them are covered in the I AM CEO handbook volume three.

And some of those things are valuable. But one of the things, I think that is really impactful is what I call the CEO hacks.

And those are the apps, books, habits, software, things that can make you more effective and efficient.

So we're doing some really cool things around them. Starting to compile a lot of the CEO hacks that are available, but also drilling down.

I think it's really cool to know about these software, but I think one of the things that a lot of SaaS companies struggle with is starting to bridge the gap of like how you can actually execute that within your organization.

So we're hoping to kind of bridge the gap as far as like making it more of a directory, potentially tapping in certain like AI chats to be a for people to be able to find the specific hack that can help them with their business.

But different things like that to be able to make it easier at the end of the day for people to find the things that they need in order to succeed.

And I think that's really, exciting because I think all these hacks, there's so many things out there that people don't even know about.

And we want to try to bridge that gap and make it a little bit easier for people to be able to not just know about them, but also be able to use and execute them to be able to, have a higher level degree of success.

But I think everything goes back to ten year old Gresh for me overall. It's like, how can I start to really approach that in terms of creating media to help to create a solution?

As a kid, my idea was like, how can I reach out to my dad? How can I generate a little revenue and money?

That was my problem, that was the solution. So the same way that I look at that, I look at a lot of things that are happening in the world.

So I definitely see us launching more media properties around specific niche communities. That's definitely aspirational, but a lot of what we're trying to do is in the line with that media company mindset.

Sara Sheehan 10:30

Outstanding. And so one thing I wanna make sure that I do with you is give you an opportunity to share about a couple of client success stories, the solution that you helped them with, and what their results were in the end?

Gresham Harkless 10:48

Yeah. Absolutely. I think one of my my favorite clients, usually, especially from a digital marketing standpoint, some of our best clients are, I see people that know enough to be dangerous.

Those people that know enough to be dangerous and those organizations are often people that have had a less than ideal experience with digital marketers in the past.

If you can't tell, I do like to talk a little bit and I do like to make sure that I over explain a lot of the things that are happening.

I think to the detriment of a lot of clients is people don't have as much communication about what's happening.

And even not just communicating just to say like certain, they say legalese in business and law. So I don't know if it's market ease or whatever words that people don't understand.

So what I really try to do is try to communicate and we try to communicate to people to let them know what's happening.

So one of my absolute favorite clients is a plumbing company out of Ohio and she did not have a great experience with SEO.

Really honestly, her SEO rankings were tanking and a lot of them were tanking because in SEO, there's something that's called duplicate content.

What people sometimes try to do is they will take a page on their site and if they're trying to show up locally and in certain cities and states and zip codes and things like that, they'll literally just take that content, copy it over to another page.

They'll change the city and the state, and that's it. So all the content is pretty much the same across the site.

So this person, actually employed a SEO that was not really doing what's in their best interest. And it's really detrimental because not only does it rank, does it, tank their pages, it can take all their entire site.

So that was something that we were able to kind of step in and do really to just change those things around to create unique content across the site.

But I think also to just optimize it to increase the page speed on the site, to do all those things to help the site to rank higher.

And I think that I really get saddened because a lot of business owners and CEOs and entrepreneurs don't really realize that when they're not aware of what's happening on their site or they're not aware of what's happening in their business, even asking those questions or they don't understand sometimes what's happening.

It goes a long way towards like continuing to ask questions, continue to say, I don't understand this. Can you explain this to me? Like I'm a five year old.

That's okay because there's unfortunately a lot of people that do take advantage of of CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners.

And right in line with what I talk about with CBNation, it's all about, like, helping these business owners to succeed.

And we try to do that in the best way possible, but that's just one example that I had, we had a sports, a nationwide, they were global.

They did stuff into other countries, but they were a soccer company and they also had a bad experience.

Another one of those, I know enough to be dangerous. I know something's not right, but I don't know exactly what it is.

But this was in relation to like building the website. They didn't have access to updating websites. They didn't have access to any of the aspects of the site.

So what we really try to do is transition them over to something that to WordPress, which is more of a content management system that we could not only support them, but they can also do the updates themselves.

We can be on call if they need something. We don't necessarily have to do everything. And just those things are huge because you own your business, why not be able to own certain updates to your website and if you need help, just be able to call people.

So those are some of my favorite clients just because you it's like a bad relationship or sometimes a bad ex where you're like, I don't wanna date anymore. I don't wanna deal with any other marketers. I don't wanna talk to anybody. I don't wanna do anything.

And those end up coming from like referrals because they're really strong relationships and connections that we've been able to build.

But those really are people that can and still our clients for years and years and years largely because we take a step forward.

We really try to have those communication and we try to make sure that we are helping to support them to succeed in the way that they wanna succeed.

Sara Sheehan 14:52

Fantastic. Is there anything else, Gresh, that's on your mind that you would like to share about you, your business, what's coming up for the year?

Gresham Harkless 15:06

I think one of my favorite quotes that I always come back to, and this was right in line with running your own race, is don't tell me that the sky is the limit when there's footprints on the moon.

And the reason that I bring that up is because, especially depending on where you are in the journey of business, entrepreneurship, life at that, there can be a lot of people that aren't necessarily cheering you on and I had to experience that to some degree, especially when I started my business and said, this is what I wanted to do.

This is my race. This is the essence of who I am. I did get push back from that. I think there's so many times that we think that something is not possible and that stops us in our tracks from ever trying.

So I would just encourage anybody to there was once a time where we weren't gonna reach the moon.

There was once a time that we weren't gonna be able to fly and the Wright brothers were able to make the there's all these instances in history where people say that that's not possible, that's not gonna happen.

But I just would encourage everybody to make sure that you do take it upon yourself to say, I'm going to try and I'm gonna try to make that happen. I'm gonna try to do whatever it is I'm achieving.

Some of those naysayers become cheerleaders and that's when it becomes really awesome.

Outro 16:19

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh again, and I hope you enjoyed that special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

Just like I mentioned in the beginning, we're really trying to laser focus on these 8 pillars to show you as a builder how you can leverage these 8 pillars and really level up there, so it helps to level up your business and organization.

So hope you enjoy this episode, and definitely please check out the show notes so you can learn more about the pillar, learn more about the person that I guested on their episode and of course, learn more a little bit more about us as well too.

This is Gresh signing out. Hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

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