IMPORTANT NOTES FOR THE ROAD
You need to find a niche.
Build a brand, and, as much as you can, authority in your domain and niche. This will help you convert prospects to clients.
Start prospecting first with your network, then direct prospecting, and build slowly before scaling with ads.
You can easily manage 10-15 clients making a few hundred thousand dollars a year with direct prospecting before needing to scale into paid media.
When selling, ask the right questions to build a solid plan of action for your prospect.
Lead with value, be earnest and tenacious, and you will build a solid business.
One of my favorite books is Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s a must. It is painted as an adventure book, but it’s actually a self-growth book and a very intense religious book, where Robinson talks to God time and again. Through tribulations and miraculous luck and fortune, he feels undeserved.
I can’t stress enough how much I recommend this book to any entrepreneur or indeed anyone taking a long journey, be it internal or external.
Journeys are not easy. At first, we may be overwhelmed and pushed back by what feels like an uphill battle. Then, we gain some success. A shimmer of hope rises but is extinguished by more hard times.
Finally, we pull through into success, just to feel undeserving.
It is the mere fact we think we’re alone which makes us take on the weight of everything in our lives. And though I encourage you to own your failures and success, it is without a speck of doubt that I tell you, we are not alone, and our path is in many ways, guided.
Take solace in that when times are hard, and take care when times are good.
Most of all, take in order to give, and you will shine.
Many people are unhappy with their current lives, especially entrepreneurs and even successful ones, as they measure their success by comparing their existing life or business situation with an amorphic idea of what success is supposed be.
When you’re doing $50K a year, and someone asks you how you would feel if you made $200K a year, you might say “I would feel like a winner”, but then you reach that point, and you feel bad because you’re not making $1M a year. That means you do not know how to evaluate success (which is common).
In their book The Gap and The Gain, Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy, analyze this common problem and teach you how to overcome it, which is critical not only for evaluating business success, but being happy in life.
Let me give you the cliff notes gist – Always measure success backwards, meaning looking back (for example, six months) and reviewing your progress. If progress was made as expected, such as hitting your sales milestones, that is success and you will feel happy about it. But if you measure your current situation by comparing it to an ideal, far-away, amorphic goal like “working much less”, you will feel like an underachiever.
This works, and moreover, the book explains how to break apart your end goal to more achievable smaller goals and subsequent tasks you can actually achieve and measure.
*Big Thanks to Lisa Larter for recommending this book.
When setting on this journey, one needs to look at all paths to success.
As an example, a person opening a quick food restaurant, can decide to build their own brand, craft their own menu and plan their own operation cycle, or they can buy into a McDonald’s franchise and get all that and more out of the box.
If someone is looking to become a real estate agent, they can go at it alone, build reputation on their limited budget, source leads and learn systems, or they can join a broker like REMAX and be part of a brand that has credibility already.
The same situation lies before you as you start your path as a marketer.
As an Umbrella Member you enjoy several advantages:
Having built an agency from the ground up with zero help, I can promise you that working with Umbrella is easier than going solo.
As an Umbrella member you enjoy the benefit of being part of a marketers’ community and success-supporting eco-system, with the flexibility of being your own boss and charting your personal course.
To learn more about Umbrella or book a complimentary consultation, go to: