IAM2568 – Achieving Your Goals with a 12-Week Year

In this special episode, Gresham Harkless opens up with a sense of grounded clarity and renewed focus as he begins a new 12-week cycle—his fourth so far.

He emphasizes a strong commitment to sales and digital marketing as key priorities, particularly exploring ad campaigns to drive traffic to his newsletter.

At the same time, he’s leaving space for creative opportunities, like expanding his CEO Hacks project, which he hopes could become a meaningful income stream.

Gresham shares a personal motivation—maintaining ownership of his condo—which symbolizes the broader financial freedom he’s aiming to achieve through consistent, focused execution.

• Blue Star Franchise: http://bluestarfranchise.com
• Browse the Franchise Inventory: https://bluestarfranchise.com/franchise
• Is franchising right for you? Check this out to see: http://bluestarfranchise.com/assessment
• Franchise CEO (A CBNation Site – coming soon) – http://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 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 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.

And it's day 240 of the Franchise Broker Journey. I have my little partner here. He's wide awake.

He's ready to play. And today is 240 of the Franchise Broker Journey. Day one of the new 12-week, which is hard to believe.

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I think this is the third 12-week year that I've gone through, which is basically meaning that I probably have gone through about 180 days.

I guess that's how the math lines up. It's about 90 days per quarter. So, I don't know how the math works out, but needless to say, beyond my 12-week goal, actually, I probably did it.

This is probably the fourth 12-week goal I've been somewhat involved in. But with that being said, I'm just working through, I'm setting up my goals.

My goals are definitely focused a lot more on sales, a lot more skewed towards the digital marketing.

After that, I'm leaving room for opportunities like the CEO Hacks and things like that too, just to see what comes up from that.

But I'm really more locked in, less off the, jumping off the bridge and saying, I'm going to throw away this business and things like that.

But I am very much so approaching it from a marathon mindset. saying that I'm not gonna try to crush it, but I still am very confident in my ability to kind of get things done.

I'm just gonna do it a lot differently, do it in a lot more of a long-term focus, but still with some experimentation around developing ads, probably more to drive people for the newsletter more than anything else.

So, I'm excited about that because it's something that I think that I had tried to set up for my last 12-week year.

I didn't really do it well. I don't think the goal was like ambitious enough. I don't think it was more tangible enough. to kind of get that done, or it was like too much.

So yeah, I'm kind of there. I was able to consolidate a lot of my contacts. I have around 13,000 or so that I use for this piece of software.

So, there's some things I probably want to do to kind of make that happen a little bit more to make it a little bit easier to be able to consolidate that.

Hopefully I have a little project for my older son so that he can take some of the business cards and things like that and put those things together.

That's ultimately what I want to do. And we'll just kind of ultimately take it from there. But this will be like my opportunity to really, I think, break through this quarter.

I think this is going to be a breakthrough quarter from a sales standpoint. And then we'll just kind of take things from there.

Hopefully be able to do some very ambitious things within the quarter. And then, just continue to kind of support that.

Funny enough, I was thinking a lot along the lines of, like, I'm thinking about selling my condo, which is the whole reason I got into this franchise. business anyways.

But the reality as he dropped something, the reality is that you don't have to sell your condo if I take care of business related to this franchise business.

If I could take care of business related to this franchise business, it's going to open up opportunities for everything.

If I could build out the CEO Hacks to something that gets five to $10,000 each month.

Again, that's something along with the digital marketing business and along with the opportunity to be able to make some big deals, changes everything.

So, it's me, having the opportunity to lock in this quarter, and that's what I got to do.

So, looking forward to that, taking it from there one step at a time, and we'll see what happens.

Please let me know if there's anything I could do to help. And of course, looking forward to giving you more and more updates.

Outro 05:05

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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