IAM2470 – Mastering Decision-Making: From Fear to Action

In this special episode, Gresham Harkless shares a transparent and introspective update on his franchise broker journey, now over 150 days in, noting the emotional weight of not yet closing a deal.

He expresses a mix of hope and frustration, acknowledging his strengths in lead generation but recognizing a gap in nurturing leads through the lengthy sales cycle.

Gresham identifies a key mistake in not qualifying candidates financially early enough, realizing that without proper funding, even motivated prospects can’t move forward.

In addition, Gresham is confronting the emotional fatigue of ghosted candidates and unclear financing paths, and he’s beginning to see that focusing on mindset, money, and motivation, especially securing the financial piece, is crucial before advancing candidates too far.

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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.

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And just like this, I think it's day three of the 12 week year, but it's day like 153, I believe, of the franchise broker journey.

It's crazy to think that it's been this long and you haven't got anything over the finish line, it's so funny because I almost wonder like.

When I do get to something on the finish line, I truly believe that I will. What's that gonna be like?

Like, what's gonna be next in the hopper? And I think that's something that I need to really like lean in on.

It's like, you have to really start generating these deals and these leads and things have started to slow down.

Like honestly, I think it's just by my effort, some of the things that have been put in and you have to make a decision.

Like, are you gonna lean back into the things that you've been doing? Do you start to slow?

Crawl towards this and do you start to say that okay the money that I was gonna put into the marketing and the sales of this do I now?

You put more into the digital marketing business get that further up and going now that I have and I'm getting a stronger team.

I do I lean more into that so definitely lots of decisions to make I think these decisions would definitely be made by the end of this quarter.

Like if you if If that's just to say I didn't close a deal this quarter, that would be crazy to me.

They just haven't gotten over but I think one of the things that I have made as a not great.

I think I've been able to generate leads I think the problem has been like getting nurturing those leads getting them over the finish line I think that's where I'm at.

Overall so I think when I'm going through this process just truly understanding that I'm when I'm going through this process.

It's truly understanding that where I need to be is in a place that, I don't know, I really maybe need to be in this lead generation place.

And I think that that's where the sweet spot is for me. And when I think about like, sometimes being able to leverage the digital marketing experience to be able to generate leads and generate opportunities.

It's a lot of like maybe spending and getting people through the process is not actually the most exciting thing.

Maybe it's a little bit more of the the lead generation, the marketing, the sales, creating content, things like that.

It's kind of actually been a little bit more discouraging to try to work people through the process of meeting every week and sometimes people falling off.

It's definitely a sales process, but I think it's just the length of this process that's been kind of crazy.

So, I mean, I don't know where these things will stand or what they're going to be, but I'm hoping that one of these people will get over the finish line.

I, one of my best candidates that I had come through actually ghosted me. And the candidate that's the furthest along, I'm not sure if he has the financial backing to do what he wants to do.

And I'm starting to wonder whether or not he wants to do that since he's starting to do other opportunity.

So where he started to look into something else because he needed to generate revenue.

So I'm not sure exactly where he's at. I'm not getting clear cut direction from anybody else either that are the financing people.

I got one person that told me directly like, hey he doesn't qualify, and I'm not sure if there's some alternative ways because he didn't have enough in his 401k.

So, these are just things that you're really kind of wondering about and seeing what you can do to kind of help people up.

I have one other person talking to the Zores, but he's talking to so many Zores that, that could be somewhat of a challenge.

But I kind of coached him up and just said, hey, as soon as you can to prioritize, you don't want to shut the door on any brands.

But you do want to prioritize them because you are working 60 hours. I have another candidate that hopefully he'll be able to kind of do the financing piece.

And then we'll be able to kind of go through that process and see ultimately what he qualifies for.

So feel like I'm starting to learn that hey you know that next step has to be that finance part you can't be in a rush to get people over the line.

Because if they don't have the finances you're just gonna make them you're just gonna be making a mistake.

And i made that mistake early so try to get the the mindset, money and the motivation in place, the money part is going to be huge.

So connecting them with a partner that I have that I learned through FBA is going to be huge.

So before I kind of take those next steps, you just want to make sure you have those things in place. So we'll see what happens 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 06:37

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.

Check out the latest and greatest apps, books, and habits to level up your business at Ceohacks.co. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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