IAM2653 – Unlocking Success Through Warm Referrals

In this episode, Gresham candidly shares the hurdles he’s faced in his first year: no closed deals yet, restructuring his marketing company, personal setbacks and juggling family responsibilities.

Despite generating a sizable pool of leads, his outreach—via Google Ads, LinkedIn DMs, Facebook groups, and newsletters—has produced little traction.

He notes that franchise sales cycles can stretch up to a year, and he’s still searching for low‑hanging‑fruit opportunities that haven’t materialized through his existing channels.

Recognizing that big‑budget spending has been ineffective, Gresham plans to reboot his marketing approach by leaning into his strengths: personal networks (BNI), organic content creation, and modest test ads to identify what works.

He likens the process to warfare—play to your advantage, avoid overextending, then regroup.

• 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 a 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.

In this day, I think 298 of this broker journey could be even less than that. But basically winding down on the time that's within this first year, I'm still kind of shell-shocked that I haven't made a deal, to be very honest with you. It makes sense why I didn't.

I have a lot going through restructure. We were bringing on people for the marketing company. Now we're restructuring it to be a lot more systematized, a lot stronger with our processes and things like that.

While having now an eight-month-year-old and losing a dog and a grandma, you know, just all the other things with life that happens, you know, the 10 year old and then, you know, life, you know, juggling all those things.

So it makes sense sometimes why things don't go as smoothly as you want them to go, but it doesn't, you know, I'm not a real big excuse person. So I really believe it might provide context, but it doesn't necessarily excuse away, like, you know, what had happened.

And I think, you know, we had people that went through the process. I mean, I think I had maybe three, two or three people that went through or introduced to Zors.

I think I had a hundred leads, I had 200 leads or so, if not more. But it's sometimes, I think it's like, approaching this from an entirely different way and i think a lot of times when you want to do that you have to kind of do a massive reboot so we're doing it from a marketing standpoint.

So it'll be easier to do it from the blue star standpoint just because I haven't really gotten much traction you know it's a year and not seeing the results that I want to so experiment with things like LinkedIn now, you know, in a networking group as well, too, to see like what could come about from there.

But I think it's just looking at these things. I think the other big thing that I want to start looking at is to look into organic creating content, but also being able to kind of leverage some paid advertising as well too that goes to these specific sites.

So I want to build that out, see what happens from there. But yeah, it's just continue to kind of take it a step at a time. Continue to kind of gauge like where things are you know things that i've tried have been you know google ads i tried a little bit of the linkedin before.

So I'm trying more now doing like LinkedIn DMs and and messages you know Facebook groups activity and Facebook groups and you know, dm and people are there but it's just wild to me that there's been no traction but I also got to look at the sales cycle.

I think the reality of the sales cycle is that it could take, you know, sometimes a year to kind of see those things come to fruition. So you talk with somebody, you know, one day, think about it.

It might take a year before they actually come through that process, which is vital to think about. But that's, you know, that's part of, you know, what this is. And I think you're looking, I was looking for more of the low hanging fruit scene. And if I could find that, I thought I'd be able to find that through the newsletter or something like that.

Have not found that. So but I don't not believe it's not fair. You know, I use this, uh, the CEO hack, called Dex. And you know, I have about 13,000 people that I'm somehow connected with and that's not including like people on a newsletter and things like that.

So that's LinkedIn, you know, Facebook, and I think emails to some degree, you know, just a lot of these different places. And it's like, you got to know that something's there. And the question is just how do you get to that? How do you sift through all that?

And that's where I don't know the answer to. So, you know, I continue to kind of, you know, chop at the tree, be a lot more refined. I think it'd be a lot more intelligent with how I'm spending resources. It's going to be important.

You know, doing a $20, you know, ad, you know, to test out what works. It's not going to be spending $7,000 or spending $1,000. And I think that's where, you know, there's a big mistake made. I thought I would get, you know, the one and the one pays for the next one.

And then it builds that momentum from there. But it just has not, you know, gone that way. So now you're going back to your strength, which is like your BNI, your network, the content, things like that. And then you're going to start driving pretty straight.

I think that's one of the things you realize about marketing. And I think, you know, they even draw the parallels of war is that a lot of times you have to operate from your, what's your advantage and what your strength is. And then once you get away from that, that's when you get in a bad, not a great place. So that's what I'm going to do.

I'll reboot, you know, the blue star as well as who, and then we'll just see where everything kind of takes us from here. But yeah, Just take it a day at a time, just try to get better and go from there. Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help. And of course, I look forward to giving you more and more updates.

Outro 06:40
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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