IAM159- Entrepreneur and Marketing Consultant Helps Individuals Launch Their Business with More Confidence

Mr. Masudi Stolard (M. Stolard) is an Entrepreneurial & Marketing Consultant. As a result of working with him, the books he has written, and his public speaking individuals have been able to launch their business with more confidence. He holds a Business & Management degree from St. Edward’s University. He holds an MBA w/a Marketing Concentration, and a Specialization in Brand & Customer Management from Georgia State University. His mission is to educate, challenge, and equip individuals to go after their entrepreneurial dreams and position themselves for greatness. For further details and contact information please visit his website. 

• CEO Hack: One Note, My FitnessPal
• CEO Nugget: Read (including something outside of the norm) and make family your priority
• CEO Defined: The ability to multitask

Website: http://mstolard.com

Facebook: http://facebook.com/Mstolard

Twitter: http://twitter.com/Mstolard 

Instagram: http://instagram.com/Mstolard

An Introduction to Entrepreneurship: https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0692582444

The Entrepreneur's Preparation Checklist: https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0692848045 

Check out one of our favorite CEO Hack’s Audible. Get your free audiobook and check out more of our favorite CEO Hacks HERE.

Transcription:

The full transcription is only available to CBNation Library Members. Sign up today!

Intro 0:02

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 0:27

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Masudi Stolard of mstolard.com. Masudi it's awesome to have you on the show.

Masudi Stolard 0:37

Hello. Thank you for having me. Speak with you again. Gresham.

Gresham Harkless 0:40

Yeah, it was great to connect with you and I'm glad to hear a little bit more about you. So what I wanted to do is just read a little bit more about Masudi, so you hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And Mr. Masudi Stolard is an Entrepreneurial & Marketing Consultant. As a result of working with him, the books he has written and his public speaking individuals have been able to launch their businesses with more confidence.

He holds a Business & Management degree from St. Edward’s University. He holds an MBA with a Marketing Concentration and a Specialization in Brand & Customer Management from Georgia State University. His mission is to educate, challenge and equip individuals to go after their entrepreneurial dreams and position themselves for greatness. Masudi are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

[restrict paid=”true”] 

Masudi Stolard 1:21

Yes, yes, I am. I'm ready.

Gresham Harkless 1:24

So the first question I had was just to peel back the onion a little bit and hear a little bit more about your CEO story and what led you to start your business.

Masudi Stolard 1:30

Okay. We'll just say hello to everybody out there in the I AM CEO community. Again, thank you for having me. So I've been an entrepreneur and have had an itch and entrepreneurship from the time I was a kid, even before I knew the word as a child, I used to play the lemonade stand game on my Apple to see computer probably tells you how old I am.

So even before I understood the word entrepreneurship, I was always interested in that kind of genre. I was probably watching the news for business and leaving the business section, not really understanding the word as a child, but just what I was trying to find out more. Fast forward years later, I am as a love for computers. I got into graphic design. And then that led me to kind of web page development as well.

And throughout that time when you're building, you're talking to people about what their projects are, what they're trying to accomplish, whether you're as a graphic designer, or as a web designer, yet, you're talking about their business, you're kind of consulting them along the way. So that's kind of what kind of led me to kind of where it wasn't I kind of officially kind of formulated a specific organization and solid LLC. And that's kind of where I've been at since

Gresham Harkless 2:28

Yeah, well, I'd love to hear those stories. It's always great to hear, how entrepreneurial people's true entrepreneurial people, when they look back at when they were younger, they can always pinpoint to say, hey, I did this entrepreneurial thing when I was younger, and that and then it kind of propels you, never goes away. But it propels you into what you're doing now it sounds like.

Masudi Stolard 2:44

Yeah, yeah. Cuz people, you building websites for people and part, we've talked about this a little bit more, and then they kind of want to know, so what do you think I should do? What's the next step for launching the website so yeah.

Gresham Harkless 2:52

Yeah, it makes sense. And like the website always kind of seems like the digital storefront, so to speak, is one of the first things that people kind of looked at to do whenever they're starting their business. Yeah. And so now I wanted to drill down a little bit in here a little bit more on how you're helping out these clients that you work with. I know you touched on it a little bit. So could you tell me a little bit more?

Masudi Stolard 3:08

Yeah, yeah, so a couple of things that I'm doing about my products or services, I think it's important to kind of have an accountability partner. So I have a couple of services where people will meet up to decide if we're going to work together. And if we decide to work together, we'll probably have an initial conversation not longer than 30 minutes, 45 minutes to an hour, kind of figure out what the goals are going to be. And the main two services I had with this particular part is whether you want to check in twice a week, twice a month, or checking four times a month.

And so what that is, sometimes people need a little more time in between sessions, to kind of work on their plan and kind of move forward with it. Some people need a little bit more accountability. And so they say, Hey, let's check in every Friday at XYZ, let's kind of go over. And then those meetings, were kind of also determining, you know, did we achieve what was ever gonna accomplish, that we need to make some changes and so forth?

And if you're not achieving not, what is going on with that? Is it outside entities? Is it that we just kind of have to make adjustments if needed from there? Another one of my services, I do a lot of copyright editing and proofreading.

So people have books, manuscripts, papers, resumes, and so forth. It's one of my skill sets. And so a lot of people reach out to me to kind of say, hey, can you take a look at these 20 pages, whether it's the whole document or just unfortunately, sometimes we just want read the beginning to kind of make sure they're kind of on the right track and clarity and so forth.

So um, then, of course, I have a marketing plan creation, and then I have also my business plan creation. And well, both of those, usually, I either create the plan for you and let you execute it yourself. Or if you actually want me to help you kind of walk you through the whole process, we can definitely do that. The main thing, just want to kind of differentiate a little bit between the marketing plan and the business plan for those out there is that the marketing plan is going to help you kind of bring awareness to your company and how you're going to execute and let people know that you around and so forth. The business plan is the overall structure of the entire business itself.

And of course, we mentioned the web design and so forth earlier and sometimes it's usually included with the marketing package or some people just want the web designed by themselves marketing pages to find themselves. But I found in most cases, people who just you just get a web page, and you don't have a marketing plan to go along with it, tend to be a little bit more unsuccessful because you have a page and as I said before, your website, it's not just a glorified business card, it's kind of an extension of your office or storefront, want people to kind of interact with it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

And then as an author, I've written a couple of books as well, one called An Introduction to Entrepreneurship. The second one is The Entrepreneurs Preparation Checklist. And then as a public speaker, as well, that will kind of help people kind of, as I said earlier, as you said earlier, in my bio, can help people get more competence as they kind of go along these paths that kind of launched your business to kind of move forward.

Gresham Harkless 5:39

That makes perfect sense.

Masudi Stolard 5:40

Yeah. So some of the services are sort of the main services that I do in the nutshell.

Gresham Harkless 5:44

Yeah, no, that's awesome. And I think that anytime that anybody is thinking about starting a business, especially like, I know, you mentioned, if you're really good at baking cakes, you know how to bake cakes, but you don't really understand all this business stuff. And sometimes when you start to work on your business and start to build the business, all of a sudden, you realize it's not just baking cakes, which is always interesting to see. So it's great that you sound like from soup to nuts, you're able to help people with their strategy from the overall business strategy, but also the execution of the marketing plan, building the website, and all those things that are integral to kind of having a successful business.

Masudi Stolard 6:15

Absolutely, absolutely.

Gresham Harkless 6:16

Awesome.

Masudi Stolard 6:16

And that's kind of the thing. So just to mention, like two books that I wrote An Introduction to Entrepreneurship that kind of goes through the basic steps. If you're a reader, you just need to read the book and kind of figure out that's kind of the best one for you. Then what I also found is that people, they are ready, they kind of understand the basics, but to like what is actually step one, how to do I kind of prioritize everything.

And so The Entrepreneurs Preparations Checklists, kind of gives you literally do this on day 1, do this on day 15, do this on 20. And it's about 60 certain steps in there that kind of help you walk through the whole process.

Gresham Harkless 6:44

Yeah. And that's huge. I know, especially in this day, and Coachella a lot of times this day and age, I should say, a lot of times entrepreneurs and business owners are sometimes like kind of DIY, do it yourself. So they want to know exactly how they do it. So it's great that you can work with somebody, but at the same time, if somebody wants to go and be a DIY or and do it themselves, they're able to go and read your book and get a copy of exactly how to execute on that.

Masudi Stolard 7:04

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.

Gresham Harkless 7:06

And now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. And this could be what you feel kind of distinguishes you or your organization. So do you have an example of a secret sauce you can share with us?

Masudi Stolard 7:14

Yeah, so a couple of things, I think it's important. I think this is something that I think businesses tend to forget when you launch your business, it's now about you. So you have to kind of change your mindset and realize that you are no longer working for someone else. So you are responsible for every aspect of the business, whether you're contracting somebody out, and so forth.

So one of those key things I like to tell people to also do myself is to return all calls and emails, within the first 12 hours to 24 hours. You don't really want to go long, in a couple of days, especially when you're first starting out, that's kind of that's gonna set you up to create a niche for you that the bigger businesses that may be in your same genre are not doing because they're big business, they don't feel they say, hey, I can meet you expect you within a week or three days, and so forth.

And for them, it may work. But if you're trying to get that business and trying to just establish a core relationship or report, you want to return all calls, all he knows, within 12-24 hours, you just want to make sure you're addressing their needs. People don't want to feel cheated, people don't want to feel we've all had calls where you kind of feel like somebody's pushing you may be to subscribe to a newspaper that you don't necessarily read that particular brand and newspaper, or maybe you're more of a digital person, but they're trying to push you to say, hey, take this physical piece of the copy of newspaper once a week, but that's not necessarily your genre.

So you want to make sure you're listening and hearing what the customers or potential customers and clients are saying and addressing those specific needs. So those are the thing's secret sauce.

Gresham Harkless 8:26

Yeah, I think that was a great example, and especially the last one, you know, so many people here, but few people actually listen. So to be able to listen to what people were saying and actually understand and provide them the best solution not just a solution in that you have a solution that actually helps them to reach their goals. And it is in alignment with what they're trying to do is super important. And a lot of people don't do it. So it's great that you kind of reminded us of that. Yeah, absolutely.

Now, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you what I call a CEO hack. And this might be an app or book or a habit that you have, but it's something that you feel makes you more effective and efficient as an entrepreneur or business owner,

Masudi Stolard 9:01

One piece of software, this is my big shout-out to Microsoft. Microsoft has done a lot of great things, the one piece of software that I think they really just started pushing a little bit more maybe two or three years ago, but it's a software called OneNote. OneNote is just delivering an app to kind of take notes. And people think well, I can take notes of anything and you can't, you really can't. But OneNote is actually set up so you have separate tabs, you can actually link inside of the note. And it's mobile. It's mobile-friendly, which is obviously the key here in 2018. Right.

So that's one of the main things I'd like people if you don't have one note on your phone to be accessible to me want to get it it's also transferable, so you can actually email those notes from your phone to anybody to your desktop. And so when you actually print them out as well, another app, I would probably try to I think it's important, really just about taking care of your health. I think a lot of times when you start getting into business entrepreneurs don't make health a priority.

And that's something I actually had to learn myself. So even for myself, I can even be a full disclosure, I probably lost about 35 pounds in the last couple of months. And I just always kind of go up and down and so forth. But one of the things I think Is tracking your health, make that a priority. So tracking the things that you eat. So I use a particular app called My FitnessPal app.

And this is the thing I actually signed up for the premium service. And the key with that is, and let me just give us I'm not a doctor, this is just my own self was kind of working on me. But it helps you to track your sugar helps you to track your sodium, more so than some of the other sites. But it's two things, you got to make work, and you got to be honest with yourself about what you're eating.

So you can put it in there. And you have to be diligent and disciplined about tracking what you're eating. Because if you eat a chocolate bar, put it in there, and then they'll tell you, Okay, are you close to getting your sugar to meet making your sugar for the day are you not and then that'll also help you too, because that also creates even more energy overall, if you're taking care of your health, to give you more time to work long hours that we tend to do with entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial environment, if you're traveling a lot as well, that's another way to kind of make sure that you're checking out so My FitnessPal app, and then the OneNote app as well, both of them.

Gresham Harkless 10:49

Yeah, I love those, both of those hacks, largely because obviously OneNote when you have everything, and you can't be mobile, and on the go and able to put all your information in one place and be able to go and find it. That's definitely awesome. And then I love that idea about My FitnessPal as well, too. Because I think a lot of times, as an entrepreneur or business owner, you automatically think I'm gonna work 25 hours in a day, even though it's not gonna be 5 hours in a day. You just gonna go go go, but you forget to take care of yourself, you forget to pay attention to what you're eating. And I always remind myself, we had a previous episode where someone said your food is your fuel for your body.

So understanding that if you want to be able to work, the long hours that sometimes we work, you want to make sure that you're putting in the right thing so that you are able to be that effective and efficient.

Masudi Stolard 11:32

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's been a great help for my being more diligent and learning more about health stuff. And again, tracking you just kind of sees the overall picture. So absolutely.

Gresham Harkless 11:40

Awesome, awesome, awesome. And now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice. Or if you can happen to be a time machine, what would you tell your younger business?

Masudi Stolard 11:50

Okay, well, I guess two things, I would say one, I think it's important to read, you got to be willing to read everything. But I also want to say that it's important at least once a week, really once a day, at least once a week to read something, even if it's an article in a book or music that you wouldn't normally read. So we entrepreneurs tend to focus on the Wall Street Journal, and Barron's.

And those are great, great sources, go read a magazine article on heavy metal or something, or plants or flowers, or whatever the case may be, may not be a normal interest, but you'll never find where they may become useful just to be able to create a conversation about somebody you may meet later on, say, hey, you know what, I just read something on plants and stuff in Europe, you happen to be a botanist, I got some questions for you.

So if you make it make that a priority, it just kind of helps you to kind of expand your mind. And again, as entrepreneurs, we kind of think out of the box anyway, right?

So kind of making diligent planning to kind of read things that you would normally do to kind of help that as well. The second piece, I would say, is making time for your family. So I'm currently not married but have a mother have a brother. And so we entrepreneurs, we tend to work as you said, 25 hours in the day, you know, 40 plus 60 hours a week, and so forth.

But make family a priority, because those are your backbone, you know, when you have a long day, and so forth, you happen to have kids set that even you have to schedule it in advance, and then keep that appointment, make sure you keep that appointment, I mean, even if it's just two hours a day where say, hey, let's go grab dinner, and so forth, then that's going to be key.

And that's going to be a long run, because then what you're happening is as your success increases your family's willingness to then be like, okay, it was way more supportive, more involved, and so forth. You know, whether you choose to talk about what you're doing to them or not, it's a different conversation. But um, definitely make time for them.

Gresham Harkless 13:25

It all goes back to kind of filling up your cup, because like, like we said, even about the health and what you're eating and what you're doing as far as activity, making sure that you fill up your cup, and sometimes filling up your cup as being around family, friends loved ones right here that you make time to do that. Because like we said that 25 hours, you can really go run, run, run around, and do 1,000,001 things.

And then I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is about being a CEO, and we're hoping to have different, quote-unquote, CEOs on the show. So I wanted to ask you, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Masudi Stolard 13:53

I think the most important thing about being a seal is what it means to me is the ability to multitask right? In the beginning, you are responsible for every aspect of your business and so forth. But if you are able to multitask now, it doesn't always mean that you have to physically do to do every single responsibility, but you should have some knowledge about every aspect of your business from the business side to the marketing side. And again, it comes with also talks about reading as well.

It's all these kinds of things kind of go together, you know, so if you can actually multitask, you kind of know what's going on most of the C Major CEOs that you know about Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and so forth. They're very strong at their core stuff. But if when you talk to him, you listen to interviews, they know a lot about all kinds of stuff. Bill Gates is very strong on philanthropy right now and so forth. And so when you look at his background, he's always kind of touched on that and so that's one of the main things I would say. Multitasking is key.

Gresham Harkless 14:43

Yeah, yeah, it's definitely huge. And like you said being well rounded I know that you know, the Bill Gates, the Warren Buffett's of the world, they read it tremendous amount. I know you touched on it earlier. It's like that's why they know so much stuff, not because they've done all those things, but just because there's so well read and they know just about all types of industries and all types. to businesses, so it's very hard to give them or tell them something that they haven't heard at some point.

Masudi Stolard 15:06

Exactly.

Gresham Harkless 15:07

Masudi, I truly appreciate you for taking some time out. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional, you want to let our readers and our listeners know how best we can get a hold of you. And of course, get a copy of your books.

Masudi Stolard 15:18

Thank you all out there, I AM CEO do have some online course content coming out in early 2019. So there's only a couple of courses where you can 24 hours a day, seven days a week, kind of get some of the training, um, if you're one of the people who just prefer to just go online and kind of learn so forth, that's gonna allow you to do that as well. I have a couple of books that I'm working on. I'm also a doctoral student.

So I have a dissertation that I'm working on as well. So those are the things as far as the books we mentioned earlier, both of them are available on Amazon if you search M. Stolard amazon.com, you should be able to find them as well. And so my website is mstolard.com. All my information is out there, all my contact information is out there. And so thank you very much for having me.

Gresham Harkless 15:59

No problem. Thank you. I truly appreciate you for all the awesome things that you're doing. We'll make sure to have those links in the show notes. And yeah, I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day. Congratulations on working on your doctorate at the tail end of that and again, I appreciate you have a great rest of the day.

Masudi Stolard 16:15

Appreciate it.

Outro 16:16

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by 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. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

[/restrict]