IAM2657 – Start Your Journey as a Broker

In this special episode, Gresh begins with a thought experiment: if he were starting his business journey today, knowing what he knows now, how would he approach it, specifically focusing on lead generation.

He recalls the constant desire during his own path to be ahead of where he started. He notes that the perennial challenge in this type of business remains how to effectively generate leads, acknowledging that there is no single, solid, established “new formula” for this crucial process, prompting a need for continuous experimentation.

Drawing inspiration from listening to an entrepreneur's long-form content, the speaker realizes that the key focus should not be merely on the quantity of leads, but their quality.

Ultimately, Gresham concludes that if he were to start over, he would pivot his entire focus to becoming a specialist lead generation company. Instead of handling the entire broker process (calling, qualifying, and guiding), he would generate quality leads and then partner with established brokers, splitting the commission.

• Blue Star Franchise: bluestarfranchise.com
• Browse the Franchise Inventory: bluestarfranchise.com/franchise
• Is franchising right for you? Check this out to see: bluestarfranchise.com/assessment
• Franchise CEO (A CBNation Site – coming soon) – franchiseceo.co

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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 Jr. 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 subcite within CB nation called franchise CEO. So you'll see some links in the show notes related to that.

But I just want 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 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. It 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.

I was a starter game knowing what I know now, how would I start? And I think it's always fun to kind of do this, have this exercise because as many times we go through this journey, I always said this many times when I was going through this broker journey is that I want to be ahead of where I was if I would have started and I would have started it probably would have been around this time.

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You know, maybe, you know, around June or so, June or July, I probably would have said, Hey, okay, baby's here, you know, businesses, digital marketing businesses where it is.

So this is what I want to do. I mean, if I'm looking at about a year or so, so I try to start early so that I can get further ahead, but. Needless to say, you know, maybe it would have been the same type of, you know, start. But with that being said, what would I tell myself if I was starting now?

What advice would I say? And I think I would go back to probably the advice that I received, which is I experiment a lot. I think, you know, you're going to have ebbs and flows, but don't get discouraged if you need to kind of try to find ways to generate leads. I think one of the reasons I got into this was really to look at how I would approach generating leads.

And I think that that is something that I think is still kind of unknown. What does that look like? What's that going to be? What's the new formula?

And I think you hear people say certain things around, this is what we're going to do to generate leads, but I don't think there's a solid kind of process or flow. I think when I've been, you know, doing these recordings and I actually just gave a talk, I mean, I didn't record yesterday, completely forgot, but I did talk yesterday around podcasting to a community travel agent.

So I flew to Miami, flew back and, you know, completely forgot and blanked on, you know, doing my recording, but I was actually waiting for something to finish. And I was like, let me go ahead and do my recording.

I didn't do it yesterday, so let me do it today. this lead generation is really the thing, and it's really the big challenge, and I almost feel like I really want to put a lot of energy into it.

But I was listening to Alex Ramosi, his seven-hour-long live, and I was listening to a lot of questions that he was asking and answering, and I think hearing a little bit more about what he said made me realize that It's really the quality of the leads that I'm looking at.

I think if we look at the lifetime value of a franchise candidate, it's around maybe around $25,000. So if we're looking at that, or that's the average, If we were able to get five of those per month, what are you looking at? If you're able to get 20,000, what would it be? Or whatever that number is, the important part is just like how you extrapolate that and what that looks like.

And it's like you start to work backwards from where that space is that you want to be. And I think that the more that I think about that is like, okay, if I, looking at this a year from now, it would make me look at things completely different than how I looked at it before.

I would probably definitely look at it from a perspective of maybe I just will want to be the lead generation company and basically pass the lead to a broker that I built a relationship with. So if I was to throw in that time machine, maybe that's what I would tell myself.

Maybe I would say that, hey, I would want to split the commission, I split a portion of the commission or whatever that is, and actually go through that process with somebody. So I think that's what I would tell myself is definitely, you know, take the people that you feel like are good candidates or quality candidates.

Do that initial call maybe just to qualify. After you qualify, have, you know, brokers that you would partner with and, you know, Or they say half of a grape is better than none of a watermelon.

That's kind of like where you're at. And I don't think this is a great, you know, but if you're able to generate leads, that opens up an opportunity. So I think that, you know, when I looked at, you know, the investment and all those things, you start to look at what it costs to get into this business, what that looks like.

And what it looks like maintaining that over a large period of time, I would think that over a large period of time I could see myself going towards more of the lead generation route rather than the calling, the qualifying, guiding people through the process.

So that's something that I've learned and developed and feel like I'm a lot better off than I was before, but It's just very interesting to kind of take a look at and see what this process looks like, what makes people successful, and where you want to go to try to develop those opportunities. So as I go, 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 06:45
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CB Nation and 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. 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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