IAM1000- Special Podcast Episode with Gresh: 1000 Episodes Milestone

Gresham “Gresh” W. Harkless Jr. is the founder of CBNation and Blue 16 Media. CBNation is a business-to-business (B2B) Brand focused on increasing the business success rate through content including blogs, podcasts, and videos. CBNation consists of blogs (CEOBlogNation.com), podcasts (CEOPodcasts.com), and videos (CBNation.tv). The brand focuses on increasing the visibility of and providing resources for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners. Blue 16 Media is a digital marketing agency providing digital marketing services including web design & SEO to small to medium-sized businesses and organizations. Central to his marketing philosophy is that You Are a Media Company: Developing a Marketing Strategy to Connect with Your Target and Reach Your Goals. Gresham is a proud graduate of Howard University & Georgetown University.

Check out these CEO Hacks: ceohacks.co

• CEO Hack: Using talent to impact the world
• CEO Nugget: (i) Having a marathon mentality (ii) Test out different things
• CEO Defined: Understanding that at the heart of entrepreneurship is not about the numbers

Website: http://iamgresh.com

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

00:01 – Intro

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.

00:29 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. And I'm actually recording what is episode number 1000 of the I AM CEO podcast. And it's hard to believe how far it kind of takes to get to episode 1000. So I just wanted to kind of take some time just to talk a little bit more about the process of me, you know, my story, as I usually do in each episode, you get to hear about visibility, resources, and connections for success, or a combination of some of those things more than others. But right before I'm about to record the episodes today, I wanted to do this 1000th episode just to kind of ring in the opportunity for us to kind of reach this far. We've definitely had more than less, more than none, I should say, of guests on the show.

Most of them have not been duplicate guests, but we're definitely hoping to kind of have more people who are repeat people who have been on the show and will be on the show again. But with that being said, this I Am CEO podcast came about largely because I wanted a way to kind of create a daily podcast. I had the CEO chat podcast, which has kind of been sunset but will come back. It's funny enough, I was listening to and looking at the last episode that I did, and was some time ago, it was right before I got what I think ended up being COVID. So it was before, you know, a lot of people, at least in the United States knew about COVID and the severity of it and the impact they'd end up having everywhere across the world.

But it was also a time when I literally was talking about how I was sick and how I didn't get to do these interviews. And I actually titled the episode, Sick Host, because I was feeling definitely under the weather for about 2 weeks towards the end of 2019 going into 2020. And that's before, obviously, everything happened across the world and just a complete transformation, just for transformation and change and everything that and how I think the world is and even how people are doing business. But that podcast came out of the CEO chat podcast, which is more of a weekly podcast that started out as more of a sporadic podcast and became a weekly podcast. And by the time I started the I am CEO podcast was starting to be again, and another sporadic podcast, but that podcast will be coming back out, have more long-form type interviews.

But with this as an episode, I wanted to talk a little bit about the formulation of the I AM CEO podcast, which basically came about a culmination of different projects and different things I'd worked on everything from the digital marketing and the website, SEO audits that we did, whichever guest gets on the show to get an opportunity to ask the most highly valuable questions that are aligned with that equation that I talked about in the very beginning. So that's really the goal of the IMCO podcast. The CO chat podcast wasn't really structured or built to be a daily podcast. This definitely was. I was very cognizant of how I wanted to build and grow it. And the structures that I wanted to put in place and structures that I'm still putting in place for the podcast and just team members.

Mercy and Mahad and all the great people on the team that are doing things on the back end, like Raju and myself, and just so many things that are happening and moving and Miriam as well too, just so many things in moving parts that it does take to have a daily podcast. And you're gonna see a post from me very soon that talks a little bit more about the things that I've learned from doing these thousand podcasts as well too. But I started out basically as that didn't start out as a daily podcast, eventually became that pretty quickly because I was already comfortable with podcasting and already had a structure and an idea of how I wanted to mold the podcast, and it just kind of evolved from there.

But one of the big things that you'll see through each of these episodes is we want to, you know, learn from the guests, We want to hear their story, what led them to get started. We also want to hear what it is that they do and what makes them unique. One of the big changes that have been happening that we've always been kind of edging towards is making Blue 16 Media more of a hub for media content and different types of media content. Of course, including CB Nation and the, I'm CEO podcast, CEO chat podcast, and CEO blog nation, all the different kinds of ways by which we're creating content are under the umbrella of Blue 16 media.

So what you have probably seen if you've been to the site or if you go to the site now, is you'll see more of a holistic approach to content and the different brands within Blue 16 Media that basically helps to achieve that idea of success, which is kind of my own personal mission, which is to help people to be successful in so many different ways. And that's really what you'll see when you go to the site. The digital marketing aspect is spun off into blu16marketing.com now, which of course is a brand under blu16 Media. But my overall mission is I create, connect, and collect to help people in our organizations win.

And that's kind of the spirit of what we are doing at Blue 16 Media now as we become a lot more broad, really more content focused on creating content that helps certain groups and people to be successful and to succeed however they might define that. And of course that depends on each of the different sites. So that's what you'll see when you go to Blue 16 Media. Now, again, we're still doing the web design and SEO. That's still a big part of what it is that we do, but you're going to see more of a holistic umbrella type of feel when you go to blue16media.com and see each of the different brands and how those brands relate to what it is that we're doing to help people to succeed ultimately.

And that's really the heart of what I like to call the secret sauce for myself and even the business as a whole is really to use content and information as a way to solve problems, to help people to succeed. Whether it's our still work-to-do site, our I AM CEO podcast or CEO blog nation, we try to focus on how can we leverage content to help success become something that is a reality for different groups and for different topics on an even deeper level. And that's what you'll see when you go to the site is that hopefully, that success equation manifests itself in different ways, but still is focused across the different sites. So that's what you'll see kind of at the forefront. That's what I feel makes my secret sauce a foundational element to my secret sauce. But it's also a foundation element to hopefully every single aspect of what it is that we're doing.

If you haven't heard or you didn't, you know, listen to any of the podcasts that I've been on or even some of the special podcasts that I've done. I started a family newspaper when I was about 10 years old. My dad went to CDY, so he went to an entirely different country. I was of course missing him. And this was like all the technology that we have at our fingertips today, Skype and Zoom and all these different tools. So I did a family, I started a family newspaper largely to be able to let him know the things that were going on in our family and in true entrepreneurial form. I sold the subscriptions, but the reason that I bring that up is because content, the creation of content At that time, it was a family newspaper was very foundational to me being able to solve a problem at the time where I couldn't, you know, at that time get at least a legal job.

But I also wanted to connect with my dad. So I've always had this approach to being able to kind of take multiple problems and hopefully being able to solve those problems with a blended and aligned approach, I guess you can say. But a lot of that has revolved around content. When I didn't know what my major was in college, I eventually became an English major just because I've always liked writing and creating content. So that's always been at the forefront of me and who I am. And of course, as a lot of founding CEOs, or founding entrepreneurs or whatever, you know, a title we might use, we'll often say that those foundational elements, those morals, that kind of approaches to creating solutions always create the foundation for these organizations.

And that's really what's at the heart of what we're trying to do. And one of the ways that we try to solve problems as I switch gears is the CEO hack of CEO hacks, which is our site, CEO hacks.co. There are loads of resources there. What I always say is A lot of people think CEO hacks are things that we do and are huge and grandiose to be able to kind of solve the problems. But I think the beauty of CEO hacks is really that they're often small apps, books, or habits that people have that really end up being huge things because they allow us to be present, and get in our zone of genius. So I have personal ones. You can even go to the site and you'll see some of my favorites, like morning routines, of course, scheduling links and So many other different things that I use on a regular basis and that we use as a team like Basecamp.

But what I think people often forget about CEO hacks is that they're things that help you to save time so that more of your time could be put into your zone of genius and the things that you do better than anybody else. What are your gifts? Like I like to talk about, you know, especially from a biblical standpoint is the parables of the talents. What are the talents that you were given that you should be using to impact the world? And once you start to realize that you start to look at these hacks as things that allow you to clear off your plate so that you can be more present at the things that you're supposed to be doing, I think, the things that you're gifted in order to give to the world and make a huge impact.

And that's definitely something that I've become more clear about is that the CEO hacks aren't necessarily grandiose things. They're often in little small things that often clear off enough so that you can be more present. You can make a bigger impact. So it's not so much the thing that always pushes the dominoes forward. It's the things that clear the space so that you're able to flick over the domino and start to see that impact. So that's really what I want people to think about with the CEO hacks. Definitely go to the site, might even see an app coming soon that has a collection of a lot of those hacks that you can use free audio-visual for podcasting, for hiring and bringing on human capital, from leadership standpoint courses, just loads and loads of information that is all in one place for you to be able to kind of leverage and use that we have collected from podcasts, but also from just different things that I've used as well too.

And the next thing I wanted to talk about was the CEO nugget. CEO nuggets are more of that word of wisdom or piece of advice. Often say if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self? And I often go back and forth about this. It's really like a combination of 2 things, I think. It's really having that marathon mentality. But along the same lines of understanding, that business and life are not an overnight thing. The secret to the overnight success is it takes 10 years. It's also understanding that it's not a straight path. I think, you know if anybody, and I haven't run a marathon, but I've run, you know, 10-miler. When you're running a 10-miler, especially in a large group, usually some markers tell you to go this way, don't go this way.

There are people that give you the drinks and all the things that kind of hydrate yourself and keep yourself fueled, which I think are essential to being able to kind of understand how to continue on throughout the process. But one thing that I think kind of shakes up that analogy is that there's often, especially if you're a trailblazer, not a straight path toward where you're trying to go. So I think it's so important to understand that it's a marathon, but understand that a marathon is kind of a path that you're running yourself. Like I like to say, if you run your own race, you can never lose. So when you're running your race, when you're running your marathon, when you understand that it's long term, understand that there is going to be dips, there's going to be valleys, really high highs, and not so high lows.

Understand that you're probably going to incur some injuries, maybe you'll twist your ankle, or maybe you'll get frustrated and realize that you're going the wrong way. But that's all, you know, part of the process. So I often say if I could hop into that time machine and tell my younger business self that is to really embrace that marathon mentality, understand that the people that you see as successful, the people that you want to be quote unquote like or model even some of the actions that you take under and in alignment with, didn't do it in a straight path. It doesn't matter what the stories that you hear the media stories often will tell you. It was probably something that they did put in a lot of time and energy towards.

And if I can do a small plug that also is a hack, there's a book called Range that I'm going through now, I'm listening to, you know, through Audible, which is another hack. It talks about how a lot of times we get so obsessed about putting our 10, 000 hours into one specific path, but understanding that it's a marathon and understanding it's not a straight path allows you that opportunity to be able to kind of be creative to try different things. And those things don't take away from your success, they actually add to your success. And that's one of the beauties that I love, you know, from that book, as I'm still working my way through it, is to remind yourself that trying things and testing out different things is part of the process.

So something definitely you want to try to keep in mind. And like I like to close everything out, the definition of what it means to be a CEO is really from my perspective, one of my favorite books is the book, The Alchemist talks so much about the process that it takes to get to that destination. And often we think that we're at the final point of our destination or this is the path that we're going to take. And often we go through those really lows and we experience that those low lows often put us on the path to where we ultimately want to be as far as success. So really understanding that, understanding that at the heart of entrepreneurship being a quote-unquote CEO, to me it's not about the numbers, It's not about your top line revenue.

Obviously, when you're a publicly traded company, that plays a huge path. But I think the people that are really making the biggest dent in the universe, those people that are mission-driven if they're able to also create that top line revenue, that revenue that helps out shareholders. It's huge, but know that being shareholders does not necessarily mean being traded on a New York stock exchange. It might be you as a shareholder who has invested in and bootstrapped your business. It might be your grandmother who had a business that they wanted to put, the money that she wanted, he or she that she wanted to put into the business, or a grandparent or something along those lines.

But just be very cognizant of that, of the shareholders, the people that you want to basically make an impact for, and know that there's more than just the people that are buying your products and services, there are the people that are on your team, there's the people that are the quote-unquote shareholders who have invested into your dream, there's you know if you're a person of faith as well too, God I think also gives us those talents that we're actually able to put into the work that we do. So understand all of those holistic shareholders, for lack of a better term, that want to see the impact of what it is that you're doing, whether it be a nonprofit organization, or it is a consulting business, or potentially a New York Stock Exchange size business, understand this is what you're going to do to make that happen.

You have to create, just like through Alchemy, those opportunities to see something come to fruition that maybe the world has not ever seen. Maybe it's not unique, but maybe you're using it and pulling it into a different industry that nobody's ever done before. So keep that in mind, you know, when you're really thinking about what it means to be a CEO, that's something I wanted to drill down on. But with that being said, you can always find me at imgresh.com. You can find the podcast at iamceo.co And please, of course, definitely let me know if I could do anything to help out. Thank you so much for the 1000 episodes and listening here and hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:28 – Outro

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.

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