In this special episode, Gresham Harkless discusses the importance of understanding your identity and goals when building a media company.
He emphasizes the value of niche targeting while remaining open to evolving client needs.
Gresham discusses the significance of understanding psychological factors in client relationships.
Furthermore, the conversation highlights the importance of finding the right client fit and the mutual search for compatibility.
Business Pillar: Visibility
Episode Link: unlocking-media-potential-in-your-business-reaching-business-goals-with-gresham-harkless
Check out our CEO Hack Buzz Newsletter–our premium newsletter with hacks and nuggets to level up your organization. Sign up HERE.
I AM CEO Handbook Volume 3 is HERE and it's FREE. Get your copy here: http://cbnation.co/iamceo3. Get the 100+ things that you can learn from 1600 business podcasts we recorded. Hear Gresh's story, learn the 16 business pillars from the podcast, find out about CBNation Architects and why you might be one and so much more. Did we mention it was FREE? Download it today!
Transcription:
The full transcription is only available to CBNation Library Members. Sign up today!
Gresham Harkless Teaser 00:00
What we do is we have those conversations around that and we help support buyers to do that.
But it's really rooted in that foundational element of who you're targeting, what your goals are, and what are your resources that try to do that.
Those same 3 questions in the play and rendering part once you're going through the process.
Intro 00:16
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 wanted 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, 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 kind of leverage and build that up so you can go from builder to architect to of course a rock star and luminary. So this is Gresh signing out. I hope you enjoy this I AM CEO special episode.
Stephanie Polcyn 01:08
I love how you say everyone is a media company. Like we are media. So how did you or how do you help people stand and understand first off like who they are and then putting it into media form? How do you how do you help somebody do that?
Gresham Harkless 01:28
Yeah and I think it definitely takes a lot of time for that to happen. Of course, I ended up going the route, that I ended up going.
[restrict paid=”true”]
But, I very much so was a lot like you. It sounds like I felt a lot of tension around trying to be me.
And I think that's one of the things I want to make sure to say, because it wasn't easy to sometimes be who you are.
And you know do that all and do that thing to stand into what I call your secret sauce or your super power that thing that when he sets you apart it really is difficult.
Because it's so much easier to copy everybody else and and I always say if you run your own race you can't lose.
And so many times when we are running our race, we look over to the next lane and we say, okay, this person is doing this, this person is doing that.
So let me copy that because I wanna achieve their success or whatever they've been able to do.
And that becomes really, really difficult. And it takes time to really understand who you are.
So I think as you start to really think about that, there's 3 foundational questions that I really say are extremely important to kind of understand what you're thinking about building a media company.
I compare building a media company to figuring out what your favorite dish is that you want to make.
And mine is my mom's sweet potato pie. Even though I can't make it as well, I love to eat it.
So I say you want to approach that the very much so same way that you're trying to build your media company.
When you go to the grocery store, think about the ingredients that you need to go into that dish.
Most of the time, people go to the grocery store and they're like, I'm not sure what I want.
They go to the grocery store hungry, which is not one of the things you wanna do because you throw everything into the cart, everything looks amazing, everything's going to be awesome, but it's not always the case when you're trying to create something very specific.
So with that being said, the first question that you really want to answer is what is your goal?
Know exactly what success looks like. Success isn't what somebody else's lane is and isn't what somebody else wants to do, it's what you want to do and what you want to accomplish.
Are you building a business because it's going to be your quote-unquote side hustle or thing that you do, you know, when the kids are at school or something along those lines or potentially do you want to grow this into a behemoth company and be immobile and neither is right or wrong.
It's ultimately what you want to do. So be very clear on what that is and continue to check in on that because that will also evolve and change as you start to have a side hustle maybe like hey, let's push it a little bit farther, a little bit farther.
So make sure you're clear on what that is and you're always checking in on that. The second thing is knowing who exactly you are serving, what impact are you making?
A lot of times you hear the phrases and marketing avatar, ideal client, painting the picture of exactly who and what you are trying to serve is gonna be one of those big things.
And a lot of times we use the psychographics where we say, okay, it's 10 years old or 10 and a half kids or 3 and a half dog that is located in the DCA or whatever it might be that kind of encompasses who you're trying to target.
Make sure you paint that picture, but also go a little bit deeper. Think about the true reason for entrepreneurship, which I believe is to solve problems.
How are you solving those problems? What things are keeping them up at night? What things are they worried about? What does it mean to be transformed for them?
Like how can you make that impact? And once you start to give a really good understanding of what that is, that's going to help you pay a picture of who you're targeting.
And then the last question, which is probably one of the most important questions is the resource question. Resources is time and money.
Once you start to get an idea of what your time and your money is, you're going to know, are you going to hire a firm or are you going to DIY it and potentially roll up your sleeves because you're bootstrapping everything.
And once you start to kind of get an answer for that, know that as you evolve in your business, maybe you start to bootstrap it.
But later on you decide that you want to hire a firm or you want to hire a marketing person or whatever that looks like.
But just really make sure that you're dialed into those 3 questions and you have an idea of what that is, what your secret sauce is so that you can kind of answer that better than anybody else.
Stephanie Polcyn 05:29
Yes. I'm a person who takes notes. I'm not even gonna lie, even while interviewing people.
So I got notes here. I hope everybody was taking notes, because I've got notes. So what are your thoughts when it comes to that, especially in the media realm of like, can I get too specific in my media? Can I be too niche or too 1 way or the other and it ruined my business?
Gresham Harkless 05:57
Yeah, I agree with you a hundred thousand percent that you can't really get too specific.
And I think so many times, one of the things that, a lot of times, people don't talk a lot around is kind of the abundant mentality.
And I say so often, of course, there's important parts of business, marketing, finance, all those things, but we often forget about that human part, which in that human part starts with you.
So the reality is that a lot of times we're bringing in, I don't know, I want to say junk that isn't necessarily serving where you want to go.
You have this goal of where you want to go, but there might be junk that's kind of climbing that up.
And one of the biggest things I deal with myself is, is understanding that there are lots and lots of people, just like your ideal client that wants you to serve them.
And the more that you lean into who you are and you communicate that, the more you're going to attract them to be able to serve them on a bigger level.
So, so many times when we think that we are focusing too much or we're drilling down too much on who we're serving, we're saying no to the rest of the world, the rest of the opportunities.
You're not doing that. You get to make the decision. But a lot of times if you're so dialed in and you're so excellent at what it is that you're doing and no one can do what you can do like you can, you start to realize that you are going to attract those clients.
And then you start to be able to develop other avatars or personas, customer personas as well too that might be other people you also want to work with.
And that's one of the reasons I really feel like that whole psychological part is really, really important of knowing how you are providing value, knowing what their worries are, their fears are.
Because you can easily say, I want to find between 30 and 40 years old, and you might meet somebody that's 41 years old, and they have the exact same thing that they're struggling with, that you can serve them.
So that's why I think that psychological work and really understanding that those parts are going to be just as important, if not more important than those ages.
But also, one thing that I talked about too, one of those major questions is your budget, is those resources.
The more that you try to focus on everybody, the more expensive it is, the more costly it is, the less you're going to be able to break through the noise.
So understand that even though you're focusing on this avatar right now, it's going to be less expensive if you decide to do Facebook ads or you decide to actually just go and talk to people within that specific age and that specific gender or whatever you know might be parts of your avatar.
So it's so important that you focus and laser focus initially and you can always add on more avatars.
And do that as your business grows, as you start to say, oh, I also want to work with them, or frankly, you might say, that's exactly who I didn't want to work with.
Let me try to find who I ultimately do want to work with. And that just is part of the journey and the evolution.
Stephanie Polcyn 08:42
Yes, a hundred, oh yes, just yes. Because I've had some clients where I'm like, I think this is it.
And then you're like, nope, not at all. Like, look at that for you. You and I, we are not meant to work together.
And it's not any fault of mine or not a fault of theirs. It's just that Our personalities don't match, right? And that's fine.
So when it comes to clients coming over to you and they're like, right, I need your help. What are some of the things that they're like, I need you most to take care of when they come to you.
Gresham Harkless 09:18
Yeah, and I think that the beautiful thing of, like you said, finding the one, I love that you said that, because as much as we are looking for the one, they're also looking for the one too.
And when you have that connection is a really, really beautiful thing, and you're able to come from your secret sauce and your superpower, you'll be able to kind of serve them with a podcast.
I love everything that you're doing, but for us, like my phrase that I go to is I say people that know enough to be dangerous.
So those are the people that we're looking for. And often they haven't had a really great experience with digital marketing in the past.
They may have had their son, daughter, nephew or so, or maybe even the neighbor, like build their website, try to get their marketing up and going and haven't necessarily gotten them to where they want to be.
So when we try to work with clients, I have a lot of those conversations in the BA because we're really trying to understand how exactly they are trying to reach their clients, understand exactly who their clients are, understand exactly what success means.
Because one of the beautiful things or sometimes people may not see it as beautiful but I definitely do is that you can have the exact same business as somebody else.
You can provide the exact same products and services, but you can execute it in a different way.
You can have a different goal aspiration. So it's so important to kind of drill down into those things before you start delving down deeper into what exactly are, I call them the ingredients that you're pulling from the grocery store to go into that media company recipe.
And a lot of what we do is we help build the website. So sometimes people have websites that want to be refreshed or rebuilt to go to a next level to connect more with their audio clients.
Sometimes they are having technical issues where something breaks on the website, where it's not operating as functionally or how they envisioned and we ultimately can kind of step in for that.
But sometimes, especially with the SEO piece, it's really getting into the hearts and the minds of your ideal client and knowing exactly what they are searching for, where exactly they're having those problems, those issues, and trying to create content and information that's right there where they're searching.
So it's sometimes just even a good exercise to even think about that. Do you even think about like, sometimes if you've been in business for a little while, you might be an expert at the thing that you do.
And you get those quote unquote crazy questions over and over and over and over again. You're like, why don't people know that?
They don't know that because you're there when in there are looking for you to answer that.
So a lot of those questions that you get over and over again, our opportunities for you to write blog posts, this opportunity for you to do a podcast.
This opportunity for you to create a blog, whatever it might be that your cup of tea, that really, is part of your superpower, you can do that to be where people are.
So a lot of what we do is we have those conversations around that and we help support buyers to do that.
But it's really rooted in that foundational element of who you're targeting, what your goals are, and what are your resources that try to do that?
Those same 3 questions in the play are really important once you're going through the process.
Stephanie Polcyn 12:10
Amazing. So when somebody comes to you and is like, yep, I had my child put it together for me.
What are your like initial I know that they've got to be? Because I've been that person that is your client.
And How do you put it all together for them? How do you take that vision that's in their head and make it a reality for them?
Gresham Harkless 12:37
Yeah, a lot of what we try to do is just have those conversations. And it's so funny, I feel like we've all been that person in some form, shape, or fashion within our, even if we look at our business, we're like, the first podcast I listened to that I did, I said, ooh, that's, that's, that's not it.
That's not it. So you start to continue to kind of improve. So I always encourage people like really that resource question is so important.
Because if you know that you have to DIY, you have to bootstrap it by all means have your son, daughter, nephew, neighbor, dog, whatever it is that you decide to employ to build that website.
That's completely fine because it's going to be that first step. So know that your website is something that's going to constantly evolve, constantly improve.
That's one of the biggest things I always try to say. The goal is to get closer to the perfection knowing that you will always be at that perfection.
Because you're always going to improve, you're going to learn more about your target market, your goals might evolve and change.
You might test out a different product or service, but know that that is actually, part of that journey and part of that step.
So what we usually try to do is really continue to kind of drill down on what success looks like, what exactly are kind of those aspects of success and kind of ultimately see like, is this website that your son may maybe did contribute to that?
Is it in alignment with what you're trying to do? And that's from a visual standpoint, which is a big thing.
But we also look at it from a SEO standpoint, which I consider SEO to be more of a methodology or even a philosophy around marketing because all of the, all it is in the sense for search engine optimization is being where people are searching.
So do the pages on your website, do the images, the videos, the content, does that communicate to your target market and know that it doesn't necessarily happen overnight, but just being aware of like one of the biggest things I see, Stephanie, is especially for local businesses.
And so many times we know where our business is located. A lot of times our referral partners, our family knows where our business is located.
But often if we want to get local businesses, we don't put that information on the website.
And it's a big thing that's missed, but it makes sense, but it doesn't make sense because what Google and search engines do is they send up these things called spiders, they crawl the internet and they try to understand your website, they understand what you do, they understand how you do it.
And they try to really show that you're of value to the person that's searching, but you have to help them to do that.
So that's one thing that I see, especially with local businesses, that they don't do nearly as much where they don't put their, have to put your actual address.
You can just put your city and state and that goes a long way towards helping people to understand.
But there's so many things I could definitely obviously geek out and delve into. But just know at the end of the day, you're trying to create a great user experience.
And all that means is that the people that come to your website, your ideal clients, want to know who you are.
They want to know how you can help to see themselves on the as you can do that, the B to be able to serve the C with.
Stephanie Polcyn 15:44
Amazing. Yes. And I the person who was very s well, why don't they know they, how do they not know that?
Like I know that doesn't, I think everybody knows that. And we forget that like newcomers have no idea.
We need to bring it down. There's a reason why you're at level 10 and you're attracting everybody up to that level 10.
Outro 16:09
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 enjoyed 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. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
00:00 - 00:15
Gresham Harkless: What we do is we have those conversations around that and we help support buyers to do that. But it's really rooted in that foundational element of who you're targeting, what your goals are, and what are your resources that try to do that. Those same 3 questions in the play and rendering part once you're going through the process.
00:16 - 00:39
Intro: Hello, hello, hello. This is Gretch from the I Am CEO podcast and I wanted to share with you 1 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. 1 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 wanted 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
00:39 - 01:04
Intro: a lot more of our content, 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 kind of leverage and build that up so you can go from builder to architect to of course a rock star and Luminary. So this is Gret signing out. I hope
01:04 - 01:07
Intro: you enjoy this I Am CEO special episode.
01:08 - 01:27
Stephanie Polcyn: I love how you say everyone is a media company. Like we are media. So how did you or how do you help people stand and understand first off like who they are and then putting it into media form? How do you how do you help somebody do that?
01:28 - 01:53
Gresham Harkless: Yeah and I think it definitely takes a lot of time for that to happen. Of course, I ended up going the route, you know, that I ended up going. But you know, I very much so was a lot like you. It sounds like I felt a lot of tension around trying to be me. And I think that's 1 of the things I want to make sure to say, because it wasn't easy to sometimes be who you are and you know do that all and do that thing to stand into what I call your secret sauce or
01:53 - 02:17
Gresham Harkless: your super power that thing that when he sets you apart it really is difficult because it's so much easier to copy everybody else and and I always say if you run your own race you can't lose and And so many times when we are running our race, we look over to the next lane and we say, okay, this person is doing this, this person is doing that. So let me copy that because I wanna achieve their success or whatever they've been able to do. And that becomes really, really difficult. And it takes time to really understand
02:17 - 02:45
Gresham Harkless: who you are. So I think as you start to really think about that, there's 3 foundational questions that I really say are extremely important to kind of understand what you're thinking about building a media company. I compare building a media company to figuring out what your favorite dish is that you want to make. And mine is my mom's sweet potato pie. Even though I can't make it as well, I love to eat it. So I say you want to approach that the very much so same way that you're trying to build your media company. When you
02:45 - 03:12
Gresham Harkless: go to the grocery store, think about the ingredients that you need to go into that dish. Most of the time, people go to the grocery store and they're like, I'm not sure what I want. They go to the grocery store hungry, which is not 1 of the things you wanna do because you throw everything into the cart, everything looks amazing, everything's going to be awesome, but it's not always the case when you're trying to create something very specific. So with that being said, the first question that you really want to answer is what is your goal?
03:13 - 03:24
Gresham Harkless: Know exactly what success looks like. Success isn't what somebody else's lane is and isn't what somebody else wants to do, it's what you want to do and what you want to accomplish. Are you building a business because it's going to be
03:24 - 03:25
Intro: your quote-unquote side hustle or
03:25 - 03:50
Gresham Harkless: thing that you do, you know, when the kids are at school or something along those lines or potentially do you want to grow this into a behemoth company and be immobile and neither is right or wrong. It's ultimately what you want to do. So be very clear on what that is and continue to check in on that because that will also evolve and change as you start to have a side hustle maybe like hey, let's push it a little bit farther, a little bit farther. So make sure you're clear on what that is and you're always
03:50 - 04:25
Gresham Harkless: checking in on that. The second thing is knowing who exactly you are serving, what impact are you making? A lot of times you hear the phrases and marketing avatar, ideal client, painting the picture of exactly who and what you are trying to serve is gonna be 1 of those big things. And a lot of times we use the psychographics where we say, okay, it's 10 years old or 10 and a half kids or 3 and a half dog that is located in the DCA or whatever it might be that kind of encompasses who you're trying to
04:25 - 04:53
Gresham Harkless: target. Make sure you paint that picture, but also go a little bit deeper. Think about the true reason for entrepreneurship, which I believe is to solve problems. How are you solving those problems? What things are keeping them up at night? What things are they worried about? What does it mean to be transformed for them? Like how can you make that impact? And once you start to give a really good understanding of what that is, that's going to help you pay a picture of who you're targeting. And then the last question, which is probably 1 of the
04:53 - 05:18
Gresham Harkless: most important questions is the resource question. Resources is time and money. Once you start to get an idea of what your time and your money is, You're going to know, are you going to hire a firm or are you going to DIY it and potentially roll up your sleeves because you're bootstrapping everything. And once you start to kind of get an answer for that, know that as you evolve in your business, maybe you start to bootstrap it, but later on you decide that you want to hire a firm or you want to hire a marketing person
05:18 - 05:28
Gresham Harkless: or whatever that looks like. But just really make sure that you're dialed into those 3 questions and you have an idea of what that is, what your secret sauce is so that you can kind of answer that better than anybody else.
05:29 - 05:56
Stephanie Polcyn: Yes. I'm a person who takes notes. I'm not even gonna lie, even while interviewing people. So I got notes here. I hope everybody was taking notes, because I've got notes. So what are your thoughts when it comes to that, especially in the media realm of like, can I get too specific in my media? Can I be too niche or too 1 way or the other and it ruined my business?
05:57 - 06:30
Gresham Harkless: Yeah, I agree with you a hundred thousand percent that you can't really get too specific. And I think so many times, 1 of the things that, a lot of times, people don't talk a lot around is kind of the abundant mentality. And I say so often, of course, there's important parts of business, marketing, finance, all those things, but we often forget about that human part, which in that human part starts with you. So the reality is that a lot of times we're bringing in, I don't know, I want to say junk that isn't necessarily serving where
06:30 - 06:57
Gresham Harkless: you want to go. You have this goal of where you want to go, but there might be junk that's kind of climbing that up. And 1 of the biggest things I deal with myself is, is understanding that there are lots and lots of people, just like your ideal client that wants you to serve them. And the more that you lean into who you are and you communicate that, the more you're going to attract them to be able to serve them on a bigger level. So, so many times when we think that we are focusing too much
06:57 - 07:22
Gresham Harkless: or we're drilling down too much on who we're serving, We're saying no to the rest of the world, the rest of the opportunities. You're not doing that. You get to make the decision. But a lot of times if you're so dialed in and you're so excellent at what it is that you're doing and no 1 can do what you can do like you can, you start to realize that you are going to attract those clients. And then you start to be able to develop other avatars or personas, customer personas as well too that might be other
07:22 - 07:52
Gresham Harkless: people you also want to work with. And that's 1 of the reasons I really feel like that whole psychological part is really, really important of knowing how you are providing value, knowing what their worries are, their fears are, because you can easily say, I want to find between 30 and 40 years old, and you might meet somebody that's 41 years old, and they have the exact same thing that they're struggling with, that you can serve them. So that's why I think that psychological work and really understanding that those parts are going to be just as important,
07:52 - 08:21
Gresham Harkless: if not more important than those ages. But also, 1 thing that I talked about too, 1 of those major questions is your budget, is those resources. The more that you try to focus on everybody, the more expensive it is, the more costly it is, the less you're going to be able to break through the noise. So understand that even though you're focusing on this avatar right now, it's going to be less expensive if you decide to do Facebook ads or you decide to actually just go and talk to people within that specific age and that specific
08:21 - 08:42
Gresham Harkless: gender or whatever you know might be parts of your avatar. So it's so important that you focus and laser focus initially and you can always add on more avatars and do that as your business grows, as you start to say, oh, I also want to work with them, or frankly, you might say, that's exactly who I didn't want to work with, let me try to find who I ultimately do want to work with. And that just is part of the journey and the evolution.
08:42 - 08:50
Stephanie Polcyn: Yes, a hundred, oh yes, just yes. Because I've had some clients where I'm like, I think this is it. And then you're like, nope, not at
08:50 - 08:51
Gresham Harkless: all. Like,
08:51 - 09:17
Stephanie Polcyn: look at that for you. You and I, we are not meant to work together. And it's not any fault of mine or not a fault of theirs. It's just that Our personalities don't match, right? And that's fine. So when it comes to clients coming over to you and they're like, right, I need your help. What are some of the things that they're like, I need you most to take care of when they come to you.
09:18 - 09:42
Gresham Harkless: Yeah, and I think that the beautiful thing of, like you said, finding the 1, I love that you said that, because as much as we are looking for the 1, they're also looking for the 1 too. And when you have that connection is a really, really beautiful thing, and you're able to come from your secret sauce and your superpower, you'll be able to kind of serve them with a podcast. I love everything that you're doing, but for us, like my phrase that I go to is I say people that know enough to be dangerous. So those
09:42 - 10:10
Gresham Harkless: are the people that we're looking for. And often they haven't had a really great experience with digital marketing in the past. They may have had their son, daughter, nephew or so, or maybe even the neighbor, like build their website, try to get their marketing up and going and haven't necessarily gotten them to where they want to be. So when we try to work with clients, I have a lot of those conversations in the BA because we're really trying to understand how exactly they are trying to reach their clients, understand exactly who their clients are, understand exactly
10:10 - 10:38
Gresham Harkless: what success means because 1 of the beautiful things or sometimes people may not see it as beautiful but I definitely do is that you can have the exact same business as somebody else. You can provide the exact same products and services, but you can execute it in a different way. You can have a different goal aspiration. So it's so important to kind of drill down into those things before you start delving down deeper into what exactly are, I call them the ingredients that you're pulling from the grocery store to go into that media company recipe. And
10:38 - 11:10
Gresham Harkless: a lot of what we do is we help build the website. So sometimes people have websites that want to be refreshed or rebuilt to go to a next level to connect more with their audio clients. Sometimes they are having technical issues where something breaks on the website, where it's not operating as functionally or how they envisioned and we ultimately can kind of step in for that. But sometimes, especially with the SEO piece, it's really getting into the hearts and the minds of your ideal client and knowing exactly what they are searching for, where exactly they're having
11:10 - 11:39
Gresham Harkless: those problems, those issues, and trying to create content and information that's right there where they're searching. So it's sometimes just even a good exercise to even think about that. Do you even think about like, you know, sometimes if you've been in business for a little while, you might be an expert at the thing that you do. And you get those quote unquote crazy questions over and over and over and over again. You're like, why don't people know that? They don't know that because you're there when in there are looking for you to answer that. So a
11:39 - 12:04
Gresham Harkless: lot of those questions that you get over and over again, our opportunities for you to write blog posts, this opportunity for you to do a podcast, this opportunity for you to create a blog, whatever it might be that your cup of tea, that really, you know, is part of your superpower, you can do that to be where people are. So a lot of what we do is we have those conversations around that and we help support buyers to do that. But it's really rooted in that foundational element of who you're targeting, what your goals are, and
12:04 - 12:09
Gresham Harkless: what are your resources that try to do that? Those same 3 questions in the play are really important once you're going through the process.
12:10 - 12:36
Stephanie Polcyn: Amazing. So when somebody comes to you and is like, yep, I had my child put it together for me. What are your like initial I know that they've got to be? Because I've been that person that is your client. And How do you put it all together for them? How do you take that vision that's in their head and make it a reality for them?
12:37 - 13:02
Gresham Harkless: Yeah, a lot of what we try to do is just have those conversations. And it's so funny, I feel like we've all been that person in some form, shape, or fashion within our, even if we look at our business, we're like, the first podcast I listened to that I did, I said, ooh, that's, that's, that's not it. That's not it. So you start to continue to kind of improve. So I always encourage people like really that resource question is so important. Because if you know that you have to DIY, you know, you have to bootstrap it
13:02 - 13:30
Gresham Harkless: By all means have your son, daughter, nephew, neighbor, dog, whatever it is that you decide to employ to build that website. That's completely fine because it's going to be that first step. So know that your website is something that's going to constantly evolve, constantly improve. That's 1 of the biggest things I always try to say. The goal is to get closer to the perfection knowing that you will always be at that perfection because you're always going to improve, you're going to learn more about your target market, your goals might evolve and change, you might test out
13:30 - 14:00
Gresham Harkless: a different product or service, but know that that is actually, you know, part of that journey and part of that step. So what we usually try to do is really continue to kind of drill down on what success looks like, what exactly are kind of those aspects of success and kind of ultimately see like, is this website that your son may maybe did contribute to that? Is it in alignment with what you're trying to do? And that's from a visual standpoint, which is a big thing. But we also look at it from a SEO standpoint, which
14:00 - 14:35
Gresham Harkless: I consider SEO to be more of a methodology or even a philosophy around marketing because all of the, all it is in the sense for search engine optimization is being where people are searching. So do the pages on your website, do the images, the videos, the content, does that communicate to your target market and know that it doesn't necessarily happen overnight, but just being aware of like 1 of the biggest things I see, Stephanie, is especially for local businesses. And So many times we know where our business is located. A lot of times our referral partners,
14:35 - 15:05
Gresham Harkless: our family knows where our business is located. But often if we want to get local businesses, we don't put that information on the website. And it's a big thing that's missed, but it makes sense, but it doesn't make sense because what Google and search engines do is they send up these things called spiders, they crawl the internet and they try to understand your website, they understand what you do, they understand how you do it and they try to really show that you're of value to the person that's searching, but you have to help them to do
15:05 - 15:31
Gresham Harkless: that. So that's 1 thing that I see, especially with local businesses, that they don't do nearly as much where they don't put their, you know, have to put your actual address. You can just put your city and state And that goes a long way towards helping people to understand. But there's so many things I could definitely obviously geek out and delve into. But just know at the end of the day, you're trying to create a great user experience. And all that means is that the people that come to your website, your ideal clients, want to know
15:31 - 15:43
Gresham Harkless: who you are. They want to know how you can help to see themselves on the as you can do that, the b to be able to serve the c with.
15:44 - 16:09
Stephanie Polcyn: Amazing. Yes. And I the person who was very s well, why don't they know they, how do they not know that? Like I know that doesn't, I think everybody knows that. And we forget that like newcomers have no idea. We need to bring it down. There's a reason why you're at level 10 and you're attracting everybody up to that level 10.
16:09 - 16:09
Gresham Harkless: Hello, hello, hello,
16:09 - 16:38
Intro: 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 enjoyed 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,
16:38 - 16:40
Intro: a little bit more about us as well too. This is
16:40 - 16:41
Gresham Harkless: Grash signing out. I hope
16:41 - 16:43
Intro: you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
Sign up to receive email updates
Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast.
[/restrict]