IAM2371 – Essential for Success in Franchise Journey: Lead Generation

Gresham Harkless shares his journey from working in youth sports to founding a digital marketing business.

Gresham highlights that marketing, particularly lead generation, is essential to growing any business.

He discusses how he realized the potential of digital marketing and how it provided a foundational skill set that could lead to numerous other opportunities.

Gresham mentions the high cost of leads in his industry, indicating a gap in the market that presents an opportunity for innovation.

He encourages entrepreneurs to explore marketing and advertising to identify and exploit industry gaps.

He emphasizes that consistent content creation and strategic use of different platforms can help businesses better serve their clients and candidates.

Moreover, Gresham underscores the importance of understanding marketing fundamentals, especially in lead generation, to drive business success.

• 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 00:30

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.

All right, so I did a video already where I drilled down a little bit more around the eight things. I had to do it really fast. I'm using this tool. I only have five minutes, really, to try to get everything in.

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So I was boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, saying all the things. But really the thing that I wanted to kind of focus on the most that I'm excited about as far as, like an opportunity, is just around this idea of marketing and advertising, which every business has to do.

I'll wind the clock and tell you a little bit more about why I chose to go into digital marketing. So I had basically a youth sports kind of camp where we went on site to help basically preschoolers do sports and activities, just stay active.

We did even things like karate. So I worked in that franchise. I started out as just a instructor. I ended up becoming an area manager.

And then from an area manager, I actually left that position because I didn't think it was stable. And I came back because I didn't. The other position I took wasn't stable.

So I talked with the leadership there and they said, hey, everything's great. You come back, you can still crush it and do all the things.

And I was laid off about three months later. So needless to say, that sparked a lot of the entrepreneurial spirit within me. There's nothing like that accidental entrepreneur that you hear a lot about.

And I talk with a lot on podcast. But anyways, the reason I bring all that up is to give you a little bit more context because I had relationships with some of the preschoolers.

I was laid off and I said, okay, let me just go in on the things that I want to do. So I started to do a lot of freelance writing.

I started, decided to do everything from being an adjunct professor to teaching at some of these schools.

I had probably about 45 or so kids that were in the program. And I also started the digital marketing company. So I did all these things all at the same time.

But I would constantly be exhausted just from doing too much and really being stretched in so many different ways. So I was kind of faced with the opportunity to.

Well, I faced with the hard decision of choosing a lane. And the lane that I chose was a digital marketing business.

The reason I chose it is because I felt like it was so foundational it will be able to open up doors to many other opportunities. Ten years, 11 years later, this is where I'm at.

And this is where I see the franchise brokering as such a big opportunity because one of the things that came up so many times is basically generation and also a content creation, which is more of the organic creation, the organic opportunity to be able to inform the clients you want to work with.

And even the phrase of within the conference of the leadership saying, we are a media company and that's something that I've been preaching for years and years and years is that every business is a media, business is a media company.

And if you approach that, you step into that, it's going to set you up. So the reason I bring that up and I want you to drill down a little bit more about on that and about that is because as you are starting a business you have to really, I think learn those basic foundational things.

And you can learn all the things. But I'm really biased where I feel like marketing is something that is one of the most core and important things.

Marketing and Sales probably right there. Marketing is basically the opportunity for you to get leads that you can sell.

Sales is of course an important part because you have to not just market things, you have to actually have them convert to paying clients or paying candidates or whatever phrase you might use.

But I think that, and one of the things I've been doing is, you know, listening to Alex Hormozi's book on leads and $100M Leads and it really talks around what I've even seen throughout this process.

Like we have like basically like an eight or nine step process of someone that is going to going through the process to become a franchisee.

But that first part is all around leads. You can't take the next steps unless you have leads and opportunities.

So when I hear this over and over again and I see what's happening where people are paying for leads, 50 to $150 per lead, it tells you a where the industry is and that's where I see the biggest gap in opportunity.

And one of the things that I encourage you to do is define what those gaps and opportunities might be within your organization.

I think a lot of it sometimes is marketing and advertising related, whether it be using a different platform that somebody else isn't using in the way that you're going to use it, or just going about things in a different way.

But look for marketing advertising as one of those big gaps for you to be able to execute. And that's as I go through this process, I'm looking, I'm mining the content, I'm seeing what people are doing and I'm finding gaps that we can create content or something more to be able to leverage and serve our clients and candidates that we want to work with.

So just think about it, find the gap, look at that marketing advertising because you will need it for your business. Leads are going to help to build a foundation towards where you want to be.

So see how you can leverage that as much as possible to be successful. So that's it. Made it in the five minutes. And hopefully I have a little bit more to say about that.

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 06:45

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast, powered by CBNation and Blue16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation at Blue16Media.com. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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