IAM2489 – The Secret Life of a Traveling Broker

Gresham Harkless takes a moment to reflect on recent progress in his personal life and franchise broker journey while spending time in Austin with his wife’s family. He shares that travel went smoothly with their baby and expressed hopes of reconnecting with a local franchisee candidate who had previously gone silent.

From a business standpoint, he's testing various outreach methods, such as cold DMs and Meta ads—efforts that generated strong engagement but ultimately didn’t lead to any conversions.

Gresham recognizes that content creation is his core strength and sees an opportunity to shift away from ad-heavy strategies toward more meaningful, relationship-based growth through storytelling and podcasting.

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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 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.

Just like that is day 163 of the franchise broker journey. And I am in my new area that I'll be for a week.

We're in Austin. I'm actually with family, my wife's family. And the baby did really well in terms of traveling.

Didn't really cry that much at all. I had him in the little strap that you have on. So that went really as smoothly as possible.

I actually have a candidate, at least one candidate that I know that might be here. He kind of ghosted me.

So I'm hoping to see if I can maybe send him a message, maybe meet him for a coffee or something like that, just to strengthen the relationship.

So I'll see if I can take advantage of that being here of course he goes to me so we'll see.

But can't hurt to send out a message um just to see he's an existing franchisee which I think would be pretty awesome to see that come to fruition at least strengthen up that relationship not just somebody randomly outside of the us off the inter-webs.

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But outside of that just kind of thinking through things seeing what i can do I'm running some experimentations this week so i just sent out some some cold or lukewarm DMs, through a list that I have.

So I'll see if I can continue to kind of build the newsletter. I did get some things back.

Like I got a lot of clicks, it looks like from a meta AD, but didn't get any conversions, it looks like.

So that was kind of disappointing. But, you continue to kind of test out things, continue to try things and see what happens.

I think overall, you just do more frequent tests or frequent trials. I have some more long-term things going, like cold emails, things like that.

But the more I really think about it, like I had two people on the show, really in my first, on the first episodes I had talked around sales and sales kind of operating from your superpower.

And I really thought about what my superpower is. And I really believe that content creation to some degree is.

And it's kind of crazy that I'm not leveraging that or operating from that, especially related to the podcast their portfolio and improving their portfolio.

It's really a niche that might end up being really valuable for me, especially for somebody like me that has an existing business and added on another business.

I mean, it's trying to build out another business with that. So I definitely see the power of having multiple streams and what that can look like.

But I think maybe the most valuable thing, I had a candidate that she has Subway's Del Tacos.

Spoke with her, got to do a brand presentation, do out the territory checks and things like that.

But I think one of the things that really popped up for me is she asked me, like, as a part of this, is she going to get to meet other people that are doing what she's doing, but just further along?

And I was like, that's a great question. That's not something that I know exists, but it's something I could definitely build just through the podcast.

It really made me think that maybe the way that I'm doing this is completely wrong.

The investment we're having in Google Ads and all those things, maybe we should just be, I don't know, shifting things in a different way.

Maybe we should be trying to get people to be guests on podcasts and things like that.

So I'm excited around seeing what exactly that's going to look like and what that's going to be.

But getting a change of scenery is sometimes a great way to just reevaluate things, approach things differently.

And so I'm looking forward to doing that and we'll see what happens from there.

But yeah, we'll see if I can get in touch with that candidate who's also one of these existing franchisees that can, continue to kind of teach others.

So I'm thinking like maybe even a niche around the architects, the architects being those people that have an existing business or beginning to kind of scale up.

So looking more legacy driven. So something interesting that I think is valuable and we'll see what ultimately kind of goes from there.

But yeah, we'll enjoy this travel and time with family and then take it from there.

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 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.

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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