IAM2443 – Embracing Change: Your 12-Week Transformation

In this special episode, Gresham Harkless is wrapping up the last week of a 12-week period, transitioning into a rest week (week 13). While he anticipates the next phase to be busy, he plans to take things slowly and not rush.

His main focus is staying intentional with his actions and prioritizing what’s most important as he moves forward.

This year has been challenging for Gresham, notably with personal losses, including the passing of his grandmother and the struggles his pet, Star, faced with cancer.

Despite these difficulties, he acknowledges the emotional toll and recognizes that it impacted his focus and productivity throughout the year.

Gresham has a promising opportunity to dive into franchise brokerage in the coming year. He feels more streamlined in terms of knowing how to approach this venture and the necessary steps for success.

Gresham believes in the importance of thoroughly understanding the brands, products, and ideal candidates involved before diving in. It’s about building expertise gradually.

He plans to focus significant energy on content creation and digital marketing, particularly around landing pages.

Moreover, Gresham discusses the importance of tracking lead measures (inputs or actions that drive outcomes) versus lag measures (outcomes or results).

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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 00:26

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 sub site within CB Nation called Franchise CEO. So you'll see some links in the show notes related to that.

But just wanted 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'll 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 and 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.

With that being said, I'm just in this place of like closing out this last week of the 12 week year.

So 13 week is usually a week of rest. So starting to like prepare for it's going to be busy times for sure.

Of course, getting back to it, I think the next week, of course, I'm not going to overdo it. I expect that things gonna go, you know gradually slowly.

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But that's gonna be even more important why it is going to be Focusing on being very intentional with everything that we're doing I think taking the steps towards making those things better.

And just continuing to kind of process everything that we need to have done so that we can get to where we need to be I think in the grand scheme of things.

It's a little bit of a It's been a little bit of a challenging year, like I mentioned, and just trying to make sure that you're focusing on the things that are most important.

But this was a year of losing my grandma, losing Star, Star going through cancer. And to be honest, I really consumed most of the year of shocking understanding.

When you evaluate this year, it's kind of hard to evaluate this year because you also know that you weren't always 100% focused on the things that you need to be focused on.

Also, just from the emotional standpoint, you had a lot of loss. Not all the loss in the world, but it still was a really challenging year.

Getting an opportunity to do the franchise brokerage, that's going to be awesome to really step into next year.

I think I'm a lot more streamlined on exactly how I want to do it and what processes and steps to take to make that happen.

So I'm looking forward to that, definitely. But I also think that I talk about leads, and the leads are going to be one of the most important things.

But I think that we really want to focus on different opportunities. I had an agent who basically said that he'll focus on one opportunity every year.

And while I also heard not to do that, I think that there is some validity to not learning the whole entire inventory.

And it doesn't mean that you don't necessarily get, you know, you don't continue to do due diligence.

Cause I think that you want to get in this process of steps of really doing that and learning the brand, learning more about the inventory, learning a little bit more about, what's an ideal candidate or who to look for, things like that.

Have kind of like those set questions that you kind of go through. I think the biggest thing is understanding that it is a process and it does take steps to kind of get there.

So while you're getting there, you know, after you have mastery of a specific brand, you just continue to kind of learn about that brand.

And I think especially me from like a content standpoint, and I think also like a landing page standpoint, looking at it from a digital marketing standpoint, it's where I'm going to focus a lot of like my energy into that.

So that's something I definitely want to do, to continue to do that, continue to kind of build that.

And I think by doing that, it's going to allow like a tremendous opportunity to grow, to expand, to really start to see, to break through the noise in a way that I think most people are not from what I can tell from a brokerage standpoint.

And maybe even some of the businesses standpoint, to be very honest. So definitely looking forward to that, seeing where things will go and just kind of take some steps from there.

But again, leads, leads, leads, leads, leads, really across Blue Star. I think even CEO hacks is going to be a huge thing is developing these leads.

And I think us kind of focusing on that a lot more would generate some results. One of the things that I wanted to talk about is I talk a lot about lag lead measures.

The lead measures, I feel like we're doing, the lag measures are not measuring up. So I think a lot of it is how we're measuring them.

But I think the also big thing is just making sure that we're pushing towards the lead, not the lag.

And we're measuring the success on the lag that sometimes don't always line up. So we need to adjust what we're doing.

So that's something I'm continuing to kind of look at and seeing what can I do with these lead measures to get them to be lag.

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 06:07

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by CBNation and Blue16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AMCEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and everywhere you listen to podcasts. Subscribe and leave us a five-star rating. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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