IAM2567 – Navigating the Pressure to Buy Leads

In this special episode, Gresham Harkless shares an update about the internal push and pull of staying committed to his path. He recently spoke with a coach who encouraged him to invest in software and buy leads—something he’s been intentionally avoiding since day one.

While he understands why many others go that route, he questions its effectiveness, especially since widespread adoption hasn’t necessarily led to widespread success.

Gresham explains that he’d rather build something more sustainable and aligned with his strengths, even if it’s harder and takes longer.

Gresham emphasizes his desire to build his business organically, leveraging his digital marketing expertise and exploring platforms like Google Ads and Facebook, though with mixed results so far.

Juggling multiple ventures — including digital marketing, affiliate revenue from CEO Hacks, and the franchise business, Gresham reflects on where to focus his energy without losing the original vision.

Moreover, he’s taking a step back to remember why he started, fine-tuning his direction, and choosing to stay true to himself instead of giving in to outside pressure.

• 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.

Just like that, it's day 224 of this Franchise Broker Journey. And, I had a call with one of the coaches, the people that help out with the process.

And he was really kind of pushing towards, using this software or buying leads.

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I've been really hesitant to do that from day one, and I've kind of stayed true to that.

But I think one of the things that you start to realize that it is really hard to try to do things differently.

And you may or may not have it work, but I think it's even harder not to go with what everybody else is doing.

And I think my hesitation has always been, like, if everybody's doing it, or if there are a lot of people that are doing it, and everybody's not reaching a tremendous amount of success, like, why are you gonna do that? Get caught in the middle.

So, to be honest with you, I'm always been a person that I'd rather don't get me wrong, I have my digital marketing business, so that definitely helps out a ton, because it doesn't require me to do things in it in a different way.

But I think when you kind of look at it and you say, okay, I'm either going to do it. You don't have as many options.

When you decide or you start to invest, you have that opportunity cost that you have to pay back.

And I think the hesitation for me with this is that one of the reasons I joined this is because I wanted to see if I could get leverage this from a digital marketing perspective and Google ads, which hasn't worked out as much as I wanted it to.

Had maybe two good leads, but organically, I have gotten some stuff through Facebook.

So, I'm looking at those two things, and I'm like, hey, there might be some opportunity there.

But then I'm also very much so aware that once you turn on and getting leads, it creates this dependency.

That's something that I brought up during the conversation. It doesn't necessarily do that, but I know it does because when I was getting a week or two per day, you start to feel like, hey, I want more of that.

And you start to get on this path where you're constantly doing that. And I think it becomes really hard when you're trying to do things differently to do things differently because there's always a push to do what everybody else is doing.

But I think in the grand scheme of things, everybody else is not having that success. And you can see from the amount of deals, you can see from what people are doing.

I think sometimes you see things that the top workers are doing, and you try to emulate that.

But you also understand that there's a lot of moving parts with those things. So, I think I'm trying to stay very strong and very true to the things that I'm doing.

And I think that I'm very aware, you know, I'm not getting the success that I want. My production has dropped down this last month or so, maybe two months or so, probably a month and a half, I would say.

But I think part of that is because I've been wanting to switch gears, and I haven't all the way to switch gears, but I leaned more into my digital marketing business.

One of the things that I realized too this morning was that I'm asking myself, what lever do I want to pull?

Because I have the digital marketing business, I have the CEO hacks with it, which is the affiliate revenue, and I have this franchise broker business.

So, it's not necessarily like success has to be one of these things. You want to have all the things to be successful because you want to be able to drive revenue and opportunity there.

But what I don't want to do is rob Peter to pay Paul, where you're not really getting ahead because you're using one business to support another one.

And I think that's sometimes where you want to take a step back and say, okay. What was my goal? What was I trying to do? How was I trying to leverage this?

And I think the vision of what I wanted to leverage on one aspect didn't work as well as I would have liked with Google Ads. I think that's something a little bit more of a refinement issue.

So, I'm taking a step back there to figure out how best to refine, like who I'm targeting. I think once I can have more clarity around that, then you can start to add Google ads or do other things there.

But I think overall, you know, you get into this space where you're paying attention to the noise too much and you lose sight of, like, why you're doing the thing that you're doing.

So, this is the journey that I'm on. This is what I'm deciding. I'm not going to let anybody else make these decisions for me.

I really believe that I don't want to be caught in the middle. I don't want to be the person that's getting to the person that's getting maybe five or six deals.

I either want to be crushing it or I want to take it as like a part time realtor. That's the approach that I have.

I think it's easier to do the latter rather than the former. But I think even in terms of doing the latter, you start to get a little bit more insight into what might be some gaps and opportunities for the former.

So, I think that's the approach that I've been leaning into. But it doesn't happen if you allow people to run and control that race.

So that's what I'm staying true to. I'm putting my foot down, and I'm going to lean into that a lot more.

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 06:37

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.

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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