IAM2436 – Unleashing Your Brand’s Power

Gresham Harkless is conducting a brand presentation for a candidate but isn’t certain they will move forward. He views this as part of his learning process, gaining valuable experience through repeated practice.

Gresham recognizes that some candidates may seem like a perfect fit but don’t work out, while others may unexpectedly succeed.

He underscores the importance of customized presentations tailored to territories, business relationships, and cultural fit.

Gresham acknowledges that growth takes time—about 40 days post-training, he’s seeing movement but not at full speed yet.

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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.

And today is brand presentation day. So I have a candidate and we're going to go through a brand presentation.

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Not 100% confident necessarily that the candidate will continue on. But I know at the very least, one of the reasons I really wanted to get started as quickly as possible is so that I can get my reps in.

So I think that it could very well turn out that it's a great candidate. One of the things that I do remember that one of the people, one of the trainers said, was that a lot of times when you go through this process, there's going to be people you're going to be root for.

And those people are going to really connect with and say, hey, it'd be really awesome that you own this franchise and you find a really perfect fit.

And there's going to be others. You're going to be like, I don't think this is going to work out.

And it works out. And so I kind of feel like this is it. So that's why you kind of just continue to take the steps of the process.

And you don't try to say, oh, I think it's going to work or not going to work out. One of the things that you do a lot of times in sales is you try to gauge your time and energy.

You try to maximize the time and energy as much as you can, because you can't go 100% for every single candidate.

You can't go 100% for every single client and customer. So you have to kind of gauge and due to the best of your abilities and your spidey senses, I guess you can say, on what and how things are going to go.

But one of the things that I'm really excited about for this candidate is this candidate is in real estate as well, too.

So that's one of those verticals that you have a lot of really strong sales skills. And with those sales skills and the ability to build relationships and connections, it ends up being like a really great fit for something like a franchise.

And I found some that are a little bit more in that same kind of vertical. The thing and the reason I'm not a hundred percent sure on like how well this is going to work is because I hasn't taken a lot of the actions.

Hasn't done this Oracle, hasn't done the financial connection, I don't think he made that or followed through with that.

And it's the connection just to pre-qualify to see exactly how much he could be pre-qualified for.

I think one of the give and takes, and I had a call yesterday, an intro call, very first call with somebody, and a lot of it was like, hey, I only have 12 minutes to speak.

So we went through, bam, bam, bam, got the numbers, understand exactly what he's looking for.

But the reality is that he wants to, he said, you should have everything you need. And it's like, no, you don't have everything.

I don't have everything I need. And I think it's just somebody not understanding the process and not understanding like ultimately what you're trying to do.

And it's hard to do that in like a 10 minute, 12 minute session, because you also want to build that rapport and relationship.

So you have to kind of gauge those things. Even trying to set up a next appointment, it was pretty much like, no, I'm just talking on the phone with you for this.

You send me everything that you think might be a good fit. And for me, having heard from other brokers that have a lot more seasoned and have talked with a lot more people.

And even having been in sales positions, I understand that that's not necessarily the best way to do that.

And it's especially because a lot of these presentations are very customized. So you're figuring out exactly what, as far as territories, is available.

You're also figuring out exactly what's in their desire. You're figuring out the culture. You're figuring out what type of relationship they're going to have with the business.

So that's the first call. that I had with this client that I'm doing, brand presentation for kind of went like that.

But I think it went a lot better in the fact that, he's been available each time that I've reached out for our meeting.

So we're going to do it on Zoom. So hopefully that goes well. But outside of that just continuing to kind of find leads and opportunities.

I'm looking very much so into vending and seeing like how that turns about and just seeing what happens from there.

Like I think things are starting to move and it's been about a month or so. So you could kind of say like it's about 40 days or so.

And I would say probably two weeks after that we were in, we were in at the conference.

So it was another overload of information. So I just consider that to be an extension of training.

So I would say probably about a month, 40 days or so outside of training. Yeah, I mean, I think things are moving along okay.

You always want to go from zero to 60, but just continue to kind of take the process, build the steps and build that foundation.

Also with the digital marketing and all the businesses, really just like restructuring a lot of those.

So lots of change, lots of things happening, but I'm excited about, you know, some of the things that are happening and seeing how I can continue to kind of take the steps to where I want to be and where to go from there.

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 06:23

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.

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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