IAM2359 – Embracing the Franchise Broker Experience

In this special episode, Gresham Harkless reflects on a particularly overwhelming period, both personally and professionally.

Gresham describes a hectic pace where he met with around 80 different franchise brands in a short time, likening it to “speed dating” due to the brief 5-minute interactions.

Gresham shares an epiphany regarding his approach to the broker business. He plans to lean heavily into content creation as a key part of his strategy, recognizing it as a potential strength for him.

He points out the challenge of having critical business functions reliant on others, reinforcing the idea that businesses should aim for a certain level of independence, even when people are valuable assets.

Gresham discusses the importance of maintaining strong ethics, conducting thorough due diligence, knowing your inventory, and understanding potential franchise candidates.

He highlights the challenge for less experienced brokers in converting leads into clients and the need for continuous practice to improve his sales and communication skills.

• 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 00:00

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 here and it's day 17 of the franchise Broker journey. To be very honest, I am completely overwhelmed. I'm overwhelmed just because we just met.

I want to say maybe about 80 different brands in such a short period of time, like we were doing basically kind of like speed dating, where we were meeting a brand for five minutes.

You go on to the next brand, the next brand, the next brand. So that in itself is overload of information.

Then you're networking and connecting with a lot of different people. Then, of course, I just got off of training. I'm still running the digital marketing business, so it was just like an overload of a lot of information.

And then, you just try to do the workouts and stuff like that in the morning. This is my rest day actually on Wednesday, so I was gonna go play pickleball.

Also learned how to play pickleball this weekend. So it was a lot of new things this weekend. But obviously, with the little one on the way in January saying goodbye to Star, Grandma, it was, it has been definitely a season of change for these last like four months.

And it'll be for the last probably two months and then it will be for the next couple of months. One of the things that I kind of had a little bit of an epiphany about is like how I want to approach this broker business.

I was still kind of up in the air on exactly how I wanted to do it. I think I want to lean heavily into this content creation. I think that that's going to be a big thing for me. It's going to be in my superpowers.

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But I think one of the things that can kind of get you overwhelmed is because having to refresh so many things.

And I think that's going to be kind of top of mind that I'm gonna have to focus on is just getting those things in place and just re-calibrating that and seeing what that looks like.

But still working on the digital marketing business. The ops manager is out, which has also been a big thing.

Like as you go on this conference, then the ops manager is out. And it just, it just honestly shows me that there's a lot of kind of dependency that we have on people, which is important.

You want to have quality people, but at the same time the people are quality, but the people are people.

So you have to figure out, especially in this day and age, like, how can you build something? I think that is very much so amplified by the people that you have on your team, but it's not as dependent and that includes me, honestly.

I think the more that you have things that are completely dependent upon you, the more you don't have as much of a business.

So that's really one of the really cool things about franchising in general is that you get to kind of set that up.

But the big things that I've taken away is that you definitely want to make sure that you have your ethics overall as a broker.

It's just going to be so important to make sure that you are doing your due diligence. The next thing is knowing your inventory.

And then probably these is going to be the biggest part of that. And maybe the fourth thing is going to be make sure you understand as much as you can about your potential candidates.

So I think those things end up taking you into the place where you can end up being like a really stellar broker.

I believe, like, just from what I've seen, the biggest gap is potentially related to the, the leads generation.

And that's where I'm really kind of laser-focused, honed in on. Because just from the talks that I've heard this week is just along the lines of the cost of leads are continuing to go up.

And when you're spending as much as you're spending on leads, which I think leads range anywhere from like 50 to 150, I've heard, I haven't actually purchased leads, but that's some of the numbers that I've seen.

And you're not guaranteed anything if you have these leads. So especially as a, as a younger rep, less seasoned rep, I'm trying to get those reps in to make sure that I continue to kind of get better with my conversation.

But the good thing is I definitely a lot of business having built a business, but also like having the podcast in and of itself so I can speak directly to that.

Franchising is just kind of like a new language. There's a lot of different concepts, but at the heart of it, they are businesses.

They were started by entrepreneurs, they were started with a vision and they just were replicated in a way.

So often they should be stronger, I should say, in their operations and their systems and things like that.

But you learn more, you continue to kind of get smarter. But I think the leads part, the marketing part and probably the sales part is that I think what is the biggest gap, and I think that's what people are going to be looking for.

So that's kind of the journey. As of today, I took a rest day. I don't know when we get started. I believe it might be like 8:30 or so.

So I'm going to go ahead and continue with my morning routine. Just ease into today and get ready to kind of go home, because I'm happy to go home and see the fam for sure.

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 06:51

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast, powered by CBNation 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. Want to level up your business even more?

Read blogs, listen to podcasts, and watch videos at CBNation.co. Also, check out our I AM CEO Facebook group. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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