Realizing the substantial opportunity in the franchise brokerage business, he is now prioritizing the crucial task of rebuilding and refining his digital marketing efforts to ensure long-term success.
Currently, he is working on a strategy that balances actively generating leads and converting customers with the necessary rebuild of his core systems, which include developing the websites for his different business segments.
Gresh emphasizes the importance of implementing some key systems, even if not all, to avoid taxing workdays and ultimately achieve the foundational stability needed to grow.
- 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 Jr. 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 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.
Yesterday was like a week. You know, I think you sometimes have those days. It's like very taxing.
It ends up being a lot. I think yesterday was one of those days. Like I'm in the midst of like literally building And I think one of the things I realized is that while I was trying to build something, I was trying to bring on people in order to build it so that I could leave or transition into doing other things. What did happen is I wasn't able to truly leave because the foundation wasn't built.
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So now I'm at the point where I have to do test out this idea and see if it worked or if it didn't. What I find is that what I found is that it didn't really work as quickly as I thought it would. I'm also not sure if the timing played a part with that with the broker business, but needless to say like I didn't invest into being a referrals and opportunities there. And I just want to continue to kind of refine that.
I mean, I don't know the best way to kind of, you know, adjust all these things. But, you know, when I look and go through the process and take the steps that I take, it's important for me to understand that there still is an opportunity, that it doesn't matter whether or not I executed on it. There's a huge opportunity with this franchise brokerage business. I truly believe that it relates to marketing.
I don't feel like there's a lot of marketing talent. like, you know, from, you know, a year ago, like, I feel like it's an exact same space. And I wanted to step more into that. And I think if I was to go back, I would basically say to myself that, well, first of all, I thought and you should be in for the long haul, you should be in for a marathon.
And don't get me wrong, I did get the opportunity to have my reps. I got an opportunity to speak to people. I think buying leads or getting leads included in my package, I think that that was good because it helped me to basically start to refine and have those conversations, understand what I wanted to say, how I wanted to say it, what that was gonna look like. But I think in the grand scheme of things, When you get those leads, you want to maintain that.
You know, you're getting a lead or two per day. Like, hey, let's continue on with this. I think that that becomes to some degree kind of like an addiction. So I've shifted a lot.
I'm looking at more organic opportunities. I'm looking at seeing if I can refine and cultivate my the digital marketing part. And I've had to do that to reboot that because it wasn't done well. And I think there wasn't that alignment.
There wasn't, you know, the directive and there wasn't the accountability there. So I have to kind of rebuild this and it's, you know, it's not allowed me to step more as much as I wanted to into the broker business. And I think that's just the reality of where I am. So I'm in this weird holding pattern where you still have to work on this.
I don't want to spend a ridiculous amount of time rebuilding this, but I do think that I'm not sure if it's going to take six weeks, but I wanted to give myself the priority of continuing to do what I'm doing, which is continuing to kind of get leads and opportunities and try to convert customers while also building this kind of like a little bit more on the back burner. So give myself more time and space, you know, for those things, because yesterday was like, like I said, a week. And I think that's where I did need to kind of refine and continue, I think, just to be honest.
You have that impatience that kind of comes up to say, hey, we just need to get somebody in place and then do it from there. But I think having the systems in place, some systems in place, not necessarily all the systems, but some systems in place is going to definitely help.
So continue to kind of work through that, you know, see where things go. And, you know, I think one of the best things that I can ultimately kind of do is to say, OK, at this price point, I can bring on a person that could do the SEO.
How I do that, I need to work on building out the different work, the web. So that's getting website design projects and then the franchise, then the CLX and the franchise brokerage business. I think that's the breakdown of like how it needs to go. Those things can happen really quickly because they're not built from scratch, but they need to be rebuilt.
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 06:46
Thank you for listening to the IMCEO 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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