IAM2650 – What A Simple Nibble Can Teach You
Special Episode by Gresham Harkless Jr.
In this special episode, Gresh details the personal and professional hurdles he’s confronting: a newborn son disrupting sleep, a demanding late‑night schedule, and a digital‑marketing strategy that fell short of expectations.
Faced with the need to rebuild his marketing funnel while simultaneously overhauling the brokerage operation, he acknowledges feeling overwhelmed but sees the situation as an opportunity to refocus.
He’s scaling back to a part‑time model for now, leaning on his strengths in networking (through BNI) and content creation—especially his existing podcast, which already boasts over 1,600 interviews—to generate leads without spreading himself too thin reflects on his target market: individuals who are new to entrepreneurship and often unaware of franchising as a viable path.
He recognizes a significant educational gap and believes his extensive experience and conversation archive position him well to fill that void. As he continues to “take it step by step,
- 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 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.
It's day maybe 294. I don't know what day it is, but at the end of the day, We're just trying to take it a step at a time, day by day. Overall, it has been, you know, my, our new son's kicking my butt.
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I'm doing a late night shift now. So he's been kicking my butt for the last like three, four months or something like that. Like you're just not sleeping all the way through the night. He got close to doing that.
I think that one day he woke up at like 6 a.m. Slept all the way through the night, but yeah, it's been brutal. And I feel like he's been working, he's been going backwards now. So now he's, I think he woke up maybe two or three times last night.
Imagine sleeping six, seven hours and literally getting up every two to three hours. That's kind of like what, you know, you're kind of working through. So that's a challenge. I think the digital marketing, that didn't go the way I needed it to go.
So I have to completely rebuild a lot of the aspects of that. So that's another challenge that you have. amongst, you know, make sure you're serving clients and getting to them and things like that. So it's just been a process, you know, continuing to do the podcast, rebuilding all this thing.
So what do you do when you're literally rebuilding everything all at the same time? You feel a little bit overwhelmed. One of the beauties of the franchise brokerage business is it's fairly new, so you're just kind of getting started, but at the same time, invested heavily into that. And then you're trying to see and get some ROI, get some opportunities from this, and get to see people get over the finish line.
So I think that's something that I definitely want to see happen. I have some nibbles, looking a little bit more towards people that are getting laid off. And you just know that you may have to literally scale back some of these things. I've been talking around this being a little bit more of a part-time thing.
It looks like it might end up being that for the foreseeable future, especially as I rebuild like the marketing and things like that. That's going to take priority. But I think where I'm at is honestly just kind of starting over and just saying, OK, I'm redoing everything from the brokerage standpoint, and I have some nibbles. I saw some things that were working, and you just have to continue to cultivate that.
Joining and being a part of the networking group, the BNI, I think that should definitely help as far as hopefully getting some referrals and some opportunities. But we're going to see. Other things I think that's really cool that I have for from my perspective is I have this podcast. This podcast is not just like a podcast that I'm starting.
It's a podcast that literally has, I've interviewed over 1600 people. So I'm not starting from scratch. I think I can improve that. But I think what I haven't, what I haven't and didn't do is lean into these things and really start to cultivate those things because you're always chasing and trying to get more and more and more.
But I think if you kind of take a step back and operate from your strengths, which is networking and content creation. I think that's going to put me in a great place, but you just have to create the space and time to be able to do that and make sure that you aren't kind of wasting time in other places.
So that's the challenge that I have right now, you know, including the digital marketing and just like, including the franchise brokerage. And you know, it's, it's interesting though, because really What I'm looking at as far as like entrepreneurship with this niche is not actually this niche, which is wild.
So, you know, when you're going through the process and taking the steps, you have to realize that the people that I'm targeting, I probably looked into entrepreneurship on a very surface level. They probably haven't gone very far with it. So these conversations that I'm having, it's not just around, you know, what's possible. It's like, I didn't even know that that was a thing.
So there's a lot of education that probably needs to be done. And I'm equipped to definitely do that just because of the amount of time that I've been in business, the amount of conversations that I've had. But the reality is that these people are not necessarily where I'm searching. So that's going to be interesting just to see how that develops and see where it takes me.
But I'm going to try to take it step at a time, continue to work hard on this. I have to balance a lot of things and just get my ducks and steps in front of each other. 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 06:06
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. Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation at bluesixtymedia.com.
This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.
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