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Building a Comprehensive Financial Solutions Business with Nicole Landau – AEP #12

June 3rd, 2019 by

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Guest: ​​​​​​​​​​​Nicole Landau

​Company / Business name: ​​​​​​ ​​​Landau Consulting Solutions

Nicole Landau, owner of Landau Consulting Solutions, specializes in helping construction business owners gain control over their finances by increasing profit margins and streamlining their accounting function. She also provides financial coaching to small businesses who want to gain clarity on their financial situation.

Show Notes:

2:09 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Rely on your network to find your first paying customersNicole talks about starting her business as a side hustle while working a full-time job and as the mother of a newborn to have a flexible life. She talks about relying on her network (a colleague) to find her first client and specializing in construction industry (which she has personal experience of having built couple of houses) to differentiate herself.

 

5:38 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Rely on your network to find your first paying customersNicole takes us on a step-by-step journey of her registering her company, getting her license etc. which took a very short time. She talks about defining her offering, figuring out marketing, marketing messages took little bit of extra time.

7:59 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Extend your traditional offering to grow your business into new areas.Nicole details about the specialization of services in her business like complete payroll/accounting outsourcing for construction businesses and consulting / coaching for new businesses in financing & accounting to help them grow.

10:59 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Find ways to connect to your customers on a personal level to earn their trust.Nicole has an interesting angle about establishing herself as a trusted advisor in what is typically a male-owned businesses. She says many of the wives handle the finances & accounting in these businesses and Nicole could relate to them and become a trusted adviser.

14:03 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Tap into your local chamber of commerce network and/or create your own network to grow your business.Nicole talks about her motivation (which is her daughter and her family), her support network (coach identified by local chamber of commerce), and a specialist coach in her own accounting industry that helped her scale her business. She also talks about the network she built with other business-woman-moms.

18:01 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Don’t procrastinate and start investing in networking.Nicole gives 3 tips to would be entrepreneurs (1) Just start doing it (2) Networking is huge (3) Take time to invest in sales and building a customer pipeline

21:17 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Keep learning to grow your business and be an empathetic leader.Nicole talks about some key personality characteristics of successful business owners she works with. (1) They invest in themselves to learn from experts (2) Takes care of his employees (3) Repeat customers because they love working with him

22:41 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Specialize in profitable areas and select good customers to work with.Nicole talks about some challenges such as specializing in profitable services and focusing on ideal customers as opposed to any customers. She mentions that it is key to let go off bad customers as they will be a drain on the business.

24:42 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Focus on cash flow.Nicole gives advice to entrepreneurs to focus on cash flow to survice in business.

27:30 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Find a coach. Network. Start doing it.Nicole gives parting thoughts on finding the right coach in your own industry to grow the business, be hungry about networking, and not to be afraid to jump in.

00:00

Ramesh: Hello everyone welcomes to the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is about starting and building your own business with purpose, passion, perseverance and possibilities. Today we have Nichole Landau as our guest. Nichole is the owner of Landau consulting solutions, specializing in helping construction business owners gain control over their finances by increasing profit margins and streamlining their accounting function. She also provides financial coaching to small businesses who want to gain clarity on their financial situations. Hi Nichole welcome.

00:52

Nicole: Good morning thanks for having me.

00:54

Ramesh: Excellent. So, you specialize in financing and accounting and construction area. So, a very interesting business here.

01:02

Nicole: Yes, that is my focus and I also focus on small business as well.

01:08

Ramesh: Excellent excellent. So, let's get started with how did you actually end up starting a business and if you could tell your story please.

01:19

Nicole: Yeah absolutely. So really getting started in my business was a big leap of faith. It was always this dream that I had that I wanted to be on my own someday and really just said yep here's my timeline, let's do it and jumped into it. When I first got started I was still working full time and I had a newborn at that time as well. So, I was balancing a full-time job, being a mother, a new mother and then having this dream of entrepreneurship and really getting started. So, I was taking on a lot at the time. But it has been the most rewarding thing that I’ve ever done in my life and I absolutely love it.

02:03

Ramesh: Yeah so you said you had a full-time job, so was your job related to financing, finance and accounting?

02:09

Nicole: It was. I started my career in accounting and then went to, if you're an accountant you'd call it going to the dark side of internal audit. For clients they would outsource to us and I also worked in industry for large companies, retailers, bankers as an internal auditor for those companies. So, I was an auditor for a bank when I started my own business and at that time we were going through a merger and so a lot of our audits had stopped for a while and that's when it really hit me, what am I doing, what do I want to do with my career and how am I going to get there. So that's where I took a deeper dive and said, I'm ready to go out on my own. I want to be a trusted advisor and work with multiple clients and really help them get their accounting and their finances in order and really take it to the next level and help them grow their business.

03:07

Ramesh: Excellent. So, I understand your finance and accounting background how you parlayed into your business. But in addition to small businesses, you're also specializing in construction. Why construction?

03:18

Nicole: So, at one point in my career I thought I might be an architect. I thought I would go to school to be an architect and I took classes, I was really good at the CAD drawings and woodworking and really enjoyed it and my husband and I, we've actually built two houses from start to finish on our own and have really been involved and enjoyed the trades. So, when I started my business, I wanted to focus on one industry and really become an expert in that area. So, I came back to construction and just because I really enjoyed it, I’ve grown up with it, I’ve always been around it and that's kind of how I got started when I started my business is just getting back to working with other construction professionals.

04:05

Ramesh: Okay excellent, excellent. So, one of the challenges that any new entrepreneur, any business owner will have been getting their first set of customers, even the first customer. So how did you overcome that obstacle?

04:17

Nicole: So, I had a colleague who was in Dallas and had a client, I'm located just south of Denver. He had a client that was in Denver and said hey you should take this over. I know you're starting your business, I'd love to help you get started as well. Because he had to start somewhere as well. So, we worked out a deal to where I took over one of his clients in Denver and from there just doing a really good job of setting up their accounting and helping them grow their business, they referred me to somebody else and, so it became a referral network to get my first few clients and then it's just expanded from there.

05:01

Ramesh: I see. So how long have you been in business?

05:05

Nicole: I started early in 2017. So, a little over two years now, almost two and a half years.

05:12

Ramesh: I see, okay excellent. So, then you decided that you wanted to start your business. So, what are the steps that you took actually? So, I mean if you could walk us through, did you go on first thing is finding the name for the business and so what are the initial steps that you had to take and then any help that you got, the mechanics of actually starting a business.

05:38

Nicole: So first getting started I did a lot of research in my state of Colorado to how to form a business. What paperwork did I need to even file with the state and there's a lot of information on the internet? But go into like the Secretary of State and filing and also figuring out my business name and making sure nobody else had that name. And so, registering that with the state, applying for all of the insurances that go with it and all the business license is as well. So, making it a formal entity and then doing the tax work as well. So really getting everything formalized first with the state and then just like with any other business owner, getting it set up with the accountant, getting to account the bank account set up from day one and really just take care of the foundation of the business.

06:36

Ramesh: So, I mean how long did that process, overall process take place? In the sense like let's say you said, hey I want to go into my business and then you started researching and let's consider that as a day one and then how long did it actually you know really and start doing the business.

06:55

Nicole: I think it was pretty quick. Once you got everything formalized, you know setting up all the paperwork and everything is really fast. But then it's like taking the next steps and figuring out your product offering, where you're going to market it, your marketing message, that next step, that next layer took the most amount of time. But doing the formalization was pretty quick.

07:19

Ramesh: Okay so excellent. So probably in two three months say you're in business with your first customer then?

07:24

Nicole: Yes absolutely.

07:26

Ramesh: Okay excellent. So just so I'm clear you're not an accountant?

07:31

Nicole: I am yes.

07:32

Ramesh: You are okay, okay. So then in that case, so can you give us a profile of the set of customers you have. Like both with respect to a demographics, age kind of stuff and also the kind of industries and then the third one is in terms of small or a medium. If you could give us a profile of the customers that you have.

07:59

Nicole: Absolutely. So, we have a couple of different service offerings. We have monthly construction accounting clients and they're across the United States from Virginia to San Diego. Most of them are general contractors in construction and they do not have an accounting function. So, they will outsource it to us and we handle all of their accounting for them. Their accounts receivable, accounts payable, payroll month in closed and really supporting them from an accounting function and helping them grow their business and that's like the monthly accounting and then we do consulting engagements to where they might have a software that they want to use that they need to talk to the accounting system. So, getting those systems to integrate and all of them talking together, we'll set those up for them and then we also have clients that are just getting started. They might be in their infancy to where there are just getting started or they might have been doing it for two to three years, but they didn't really set it up correctly or they did it themselves. So, we will go in and do cleanup projects for them and we'll clean up their books and really establish a system for them. That way they can start tracking their numbers and their projects and really start to see increased profit margins based on just better reporting for them.

09:30

Ramesh: Actually, very interesting. So, you didn't open just an accounting business, you open a consulting business in the area of Finance and Accounting.

09:39

Nicole: Yeah, a little bit of both.

09:41

Ramesh: Yeah so and then I think the problems that you're trying to solve is just hey just not the accounting and payroll. But anything that touches the accounting payroll if you have other software that touches it that has issues, I will solve you for that. So, I think it's a very interesting way that you're expanding your business here.

09:59

Nicole: Yeah absolutely. Because you know we really want to support businesses and help them grow. Most go into business and they're really good at their trade no matter what that is. Even if it's not in construction they're really good at what they do. But it's really taking it to the next level and tracking the financial data, without knowing your numbers, it's hard to grow and see what's working and what's not and how to analyze different scenarios. So, we really want to give them that data to make better financial decisions and really grow their business.

10:33

Ramesh: Excellent. So, Nicole let me ask you this a little bit of a personal question, so yours is a women-owned business and then you are working with what is considered in the construction and which is a little bit probably a male-dominated kind of industry and I don't know what the accounting profession itself how it is. But how has your experience been as a women-owned business working in the financial accounting and the construction kind of an area?

10:59

Nicole: You know I really haven't had any pushback and like you said most of my owners are male. It is a male-dominated industry. I do, so what you'll normally see in the construction industry is the mom or the wife who will be working in the business doing the accounting function and so that's, I think they kind of see me as like their business partner that helps them and helps them understand that data to where their mom or their wife might not know all the financial ins and out, so I work with them as well. But they really see me as a trusted advisor and I haven't had any push back like I said, that has made it go the wrong way.

11:46

Ramesh: That's very very interesting. Very insightful, thank you about moms, there's somebody else you know helping them with the finances and then, so you could relate, I think that you could connect with them.

11:56

Nicole: Yes absolutely.

11:58

Ramesh: That's very nice. All right so then for most of the business owners from what I have seen in my conversations, in addition to their own self Drive there are also other motivations, other inspirations or inspirators in their life. So, in your case what is it? So, who inspired you? Who motivated you? Who helped you apart from yourself?

12:22

Nicole: So, I think number one, I have a young daughter and so the reason I wanted to start my business, my why does I really want to be there for her as she's growing up. I want to balance the mom life and being an entrepreneur and always being there for her. So, she's my number one inspiration and family's really important to me and so that's really keeps me going and trying to find that work-life balance. I know there's a lot of moms out there that do both. Even being an entrepreneur mom is a whole new level as well. But it's been very rewarding and also who's been inspirations to me is other business owners that are especially moms too that are going through the day-to-day what I'm going through too, and I can with them. So, I built a really strong network of other entrepreneurs who are doing the same thing and see the same struggles. Because when you start your own business, nobody tells you how hard it's going to be and but it's the most rewarding thing ever. You wear so many different hats right and you just learned so much and I’ve learned a lot about myself as well going through this process and I love to share that information with others. So, I’ve had a lot of mentors that have helped me through this process and people that I never knew would be a mentor have become mentors.

13:53

Ramesh: Excellent, actually that is very very important I think for the listeners to know, but how did you find, how did you create this network? How did you find this network?

14:03

Nicole: So, I got very fortunate. When I first started my business, I went to the local Chamber of Commerce to get started. Because I didn't know what I was doing and, so I thought maybe that might be a good starting point for me and within our local chamber, they had a mentorship program where they would pair you up with a coach.

14:22

Ramesh: Excellent.

14:23

Nicole: And I got paired with a coach that was great, he was very business savvy. He worked for IBM at one point in his career. So, he was very knowledgeable about business, but he didn't understand accounting specifically and I felt like that was one piece that was missing. I need a specialized coach and he just wasn't quite there. That's when I started to do a lot of research. I wanted to find somebody who was in my industry, but had also ran their own business and I came across an accounting coach that helps other accounting practices, accountants tax people really build their firm. So, I got involved with their program and have met so many other people that have been very influential to my business and helped me grow my business. But they have really laid out a program, their program was very specialized to help with marketing, sales, product delivery, pricing. It was really the whole gamut. But what was really important for me was the specialty. I wanted somebody who understood accounting and how to grow an accounting practice. So that's how I found my coach.

15:40

Ramesh: Excellent, that is very very good. So, I know as a business owner myself, finance and account are extremely crucial. But from your experience running a business, I want to understand your perspective as to how accounting plays a role in especially the new business owners and starting companies.

16:02

Nicole: Yeah absolutely. So, it's really important to track your numbers from day one. You might have a product that you think is great and ready to go to the market. But you really need to understand your profit margins, what price you're going to take it to the market or if you're a service delivery, if you have clients how much are you going to charge that client for your service and really understanding those numbers. But it's important to track it. Like I said because if you're not tracking it, you don't really know what your profit margins are. How much you're making per client and then also taking it a step further, if you are offering like a service or a coaching program, how many sales calls do you need to have, how many closes do you need to have on each sales call. What's your close percentage and really just tracking everything when you're first getting started, so you know what's working, what's not working. If you're on social media, how many posts are you doing, your ad spend. You can't just do things blindly, you can, but you won't survive. So even if it's not just from the accounting perspective, tracking everything is so important from start to finish in everything you do. Especially when you're first getting started. Because you might not have the financial backing when you first get started. So, it's important to know okay how much do I need to make per month to survive and keep my business and my doors open and then working backwards to know how much you need to sell, how many calls you need to have, what’s your spend is and so really tracking everything to the penny.

17:44

Ramesh: Okay excellent. Then I'm a person, I want to start a business right, so let me first take that one. So what tips can you provide me as to how I can go about it?

18:01

Nicole: So, I really say just do it. Just jump in. It's never at the right time. It feels like it's never the right time, you prepare, and you prepare. I say just do it. Get out there, go for it, find others that you can collaborate with and really build your market. Networking is huge. It's amazing. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn and the networks that I’ve built on LinkedIn has been huge for me. There's so many people out there and even if you're not targeting your ideal clients, look for the people who are servicing your clients too. So, within construction, I also network with loan officers that service construction companies. I've networked with contractor coaches, the coaches that help construction businesses with maybe the operations. So, there's a really a whole networking aspect to it. You think you don't have time, but you have to make time when you're first getting started and really get your name out there and your product out there and what you do for other people to help refer you and then like we talked about earlier, know your numbers. What are your goals, how are you going to reach that goal and what's it going to take to get there? Each month how many new clients do you need to bring in, how many sales calls do you need to make a month, each week. But really keeping it that in mind.

19:34

Ramesh: Excellent. So that's really good. So, Nicole you talked about few, three services I think you're providing to your clients and then I want to ask you, you've been dealing with a lot of customers and clients. What kind of characteristics that do you see in people who running successful businesses versus people who are struggling with the business?

20:02

Nicole: So, I think being very open and honest about your situation. I have had some failures that have come my way, if somebody who has had a great idea they think they're going to do it, but they're hiding something or they're making excuses and they're just not realistic with their financial situation or really digging deep into what's not working. You have to be open-minded, take feedback from others if they're trying to help you, so that you can grow and make adjustments. So, it's really being honest with yourself, but being open to take criticism and feedback to grow your business.

20:45

Ramesh: I mean for example I’ll give you in leading up to this podcast through our email communication and this and I could figure out that you're a very organized person. So as a characteristic I said okay fine, so she must be really running a good business. Because she seems to be very disciplined and organized. I mean just through the communications and all that stuff I could figure it out. So likewise, you know like what are the personality, attributes that you are seeing in the clients who are you know really killing it.

21:17

Nicole: I will give you an example. One of my clients that is on a track to, he's doing great as he is, but he is just killing it. Because he's getting coaches from multiple facets of his business. So, he's not just looking at one coach, but he's getting several different coaches to come into the business to really help him grow. He's a good leader too. People love working with him. He has a lot of repeat clients and even his workers just talking with his workers they stay, and you can see that they've stayed with him since day one. He's been in business for six years and I would say probably 80% of his staff are still there. So, he's just a really down-to-earth, open, family-oriented man that really takes care of his employees and values the leadership. But he works to improve himself. He's not just, I’ll do whatever it takes to get by to make it day-to-day. He really invests in himself to become better and his employees.

22:27

Ramesh: Excellent that's really good and then let's talk a little bit about the challenges. What challenges did you face prior to starting the business and then after you started the business?

22:41

Nicole: So, I would think, first getting out I didn't know really what I want, I wasn't clear on my service delivery. What was I really going to provide. Accounting is a very big broad spectrum. But we needed to hone it in and decide what service I would be delivering, who I would be going after. Like who would be my ideal client. But also coming up with a list of who that ideal client is and what does that look like. Not everybody is a good client, not everybody is a good fit. Sometimes you learn that the hard way. You go through bad experiences and say this just isn't working, we need to cut ties and this is how I'm going to improve for next time.

23:30

Ramesh: Actually, that's a very good point. Because one of the guests that I interviewed, and she said she fired her clients, bad clients.

23:35

Nicole: Yes, yes definitely. Don't be afraid to do it. It is hard and it's emotional the first few times. But I think it really makes you a stronger person and it really helps you define what your service delivery is and how you want to grow your business.

23:50

Ramesh: Right okay. So, towards end and the last couple of questions. So, in addition to the challenges that you faced, what challenges are you seeing the customers are facing? What are the typical things that they're struggling with?

24:04

Nicole: Cash flow is always an issue, it doesn't have to be specific to construction. I talked to other business owners as well and I read their posts and their struggles and hear from other practitioners. But cash flow seems to be a big issue if you're not tracking it and especially at the early stages when you're first getting started.

24:24

Ramesh: So, Nicole let me, sorry ask you a little bit clarifying question; the cash flow. Is the cash flow related to that money is not coming in that means no customer pipeline or that money is coming, but these owners don't have a handle on what money is coming and what money is going?

24:42

Nicole: All the above. Because I see you too where clients don't build when they should be, they do the work and then they get busy and they don't build when they should be and then they also are paying out money to subs or their overhead their employees and they just don't know, they're spending more than what's coming in.

25:07

Ramesh: I see, okay so that's one and then keep going sorry.

25:13

Nicole: So, a lot of first getting started cash flow really need to understand the cash flows and help grow the business.

25:23

Ramesh: I see, okay excellent. So that's good and then in terms of the timeline, like I’ve started a business and what have you noticed both with your own business and with your client’s business. Like many times people say that the first year is the toughest one and if you have survived two years, then you're in business kind of stuff. So, what have you noticed the evolution of the business with respect to time?

25:52

Nicole: I would say that's very true. Sometimes it's trial and error to figure it out. But if you do have a coach or somebody that's helping you an expert in some of these areas, they can speed up that process. Because they've seen what works and what doesn't work and help you implement processes early on. But then when you're also first starting out your business, it's about can you afford it, or do you have to figure it out yourself. So, it depends on where you are in your business. But really to speed up that timeline and that's part of why I found a specialized coach. I could cut down that timeline and really propel my business very quickly, instead of working with somebody who was just a generalist and new business but didn't understand my industry. It could have taken me years working with that coach where I found a specialist who had worked with thousands of other accounting practitioners to grow their business and I could cut down that timeline. So that's something else to keep in mind. When something isn't working in your business, find somebody that has worked with lots of clients, hundreds, thousands of clients that can help you reduce that timeline. So, you don't go in the hole and have to close your doors sooner than you want to.

27:08

Ramesh: That's very very good actually. Because many times people go after different kinds of coaches, gurus or whatever, I think they're struggling with finding the right person. So, the last question Nicole. In general, anything that I have not asked, we have not talked, things that you want to share.

27:30

Nicole: There's a lot when getting started. Don't be afraid just do it, it's like I said earlier. It's the most rewarding thing and hardest thing at the same time. But I wouldn't take it back for anything in the world. Find a coach that specializes in your area no matter what industry you are in. There's experts out there, go find them and really go after it. If you want it and you're hungry enough, do it and find the right people to build your network and who will support you.

28:02

Ramesh: Excellent, Nicole so you're in your third year. So, it looks like things are really going well for you. I wish you the very best and then thank you very much for your time.

28:10

Nicole: Thank you, I appreciate it.

28:12

Ramesh: Excellent, thank you.

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Building A Profitable Content Writing Business with Kenzi Wood – AEP #11

June 3rd, 2019 by

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Guest: ​​​​​​​​​​​Kenzi Wood

​Company / Business name: ​​​​​​ ​​​Kenzi Writes

Kenzi Wood is a former marketer turned blogger and she writes content for marketing agencies, SEO agencies, Fortune 200 enterprises, as well as small mom-and pop shops. Her focus is on vanquishing the demons of content marketing—one blog at a time. Her mission is to stamp out flimsy copy and increase your reader engagement, boost website conversions, audience retention, and, best of all, the business bottom line, with content designed to win.

Tools / Books / Resources mentioned:Tools: Asana (task management), Google-Suite, Timeular (time management), Slack, Doodle, zoomBooks: ‘BadAssYourBrand’ by Pia Silva

Show Notes:

1:08 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Start doing what you enjoy and keep exploring possibilities to start a business.Kenzi starts off by talking about how she started to blog for fun in the personal finance space, realized that she can make money by writing as a side gig, and finally took the plunge to quit her corporate job and never looked back.

2:52 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Support network is key to continued successKenzi talks about how her husband saw the potential with her blog to start her own business and encouraged her start on her own. She also found moral support in her parents. Finally, she attended a personal finance bloggers conference and found her first customer.

5:33 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Build customer pipeline by soliciting testimonials and building a portfolio.Kenzi gives tips on building a customer pipeline by (1) always requesting customer testimonials after each project (2) keeping a portfolio of your projects on your website. She also talks about weathering lean times by keeping personal finances in order and being financially secure.

9:10 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Be proactive about managing different aspects of business by outsourcing where necessary.Kenzi talks about dealing with the waves of solopreneur work by outsourcing work that someone else can do better (in her case it is customer outreach) and negotiating with customers on deadlines and as a last resort to refer other trustworthy freelancers.

11:05 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Identifying key customer segments and their specific needs is essential to grow your business.Kenzi identified her sweet spot of customers as small and medium businesses where she can translate her large company experience and provide a white glove service for her clients. This focus helped her to get lot of customer referrals.

15:25 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Enhance your productivity by selecting proven tools.Kenzi talks about the tools that enhance her productivity. Asana for task management, G-suite for email & docs, Timeular for time management, slack/google chat for customer communication, doodle for schedules, and zoom for video communication.

18:48 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Pricing right is key as well as tracking time and expenses.Kenzi talks about few things that she could have done better. (1) Pricing right for her services. She thinks she underpriced her services initially. (2) having an accounting software to automate tracking and expenses.

22:14 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: It’s equally important to find the right customers and not just any customers.Kenzi talks about the need to find the right customers to work with as she thinks it is very important to find the right chemistry. She has a check list that she goes through in selecting her customers.

24:59 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Find a way to turn service business into product business that sells itself while you sleep.Kenzi is focusing on gradually turning her service business into a product business and she mentions a book by Pia Silva called Badass your brand that inspired her.

24:59 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Confidence, Quality, and perseverance are key to success.Kenzi says confidence and dedication to quality are two important attributes that an entrepreneur needs. She also advises would be entrepreneurs to find ways to keep moving forward.

00:00

Ramesh: Hello everyone, welcome to the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is about starting and building your own business with purpose, passion, perseverance and possibilities. Today's guest name is Kenziwood. Kenzi runs a Content writing business, she's a former marketer and she used her marketing background and experience to turn her passion into a content writing business. She has helped over 60 entrepreneurs and agencies and she and her business provides content for fortune 200 companies. Hi Kenzi.

00:52

Kenzi: Hey there Ramesh how's it going? Thanks for having me here.

00:55

Ramesh: Pretty good, pretty good. Thank you for your time today actually.

00:58

Kenzi: Yeah thank you, I’m excited to be here and talk about all things entrepreneurship.

01:03

Ramesh: Excellent, excellent. So, let's get started with how you started your business.

01:08

Kenzi: Sure, sure so my business kind of bleeds over and you see a personal passion that I had. I think a few years ago about in 2016 I started blogging for fun. I was blogging in the personal finance space and you're writing for a while I kind of realized as like wow you know I can actually make money writing stuff into a computer and publishing it online. You know people really resonate with it and it's something I enjoyed and so I started blogging as a really as a side hustle at first, something I did outside of my main job where I was a marketer and you know the more that I kept working for other people, the more I thought ,"man it would be great to have the flexibility of working for myself and not having to, you know not having set work hours, not having to answer to somebody else and having a lot more freedom with my career and it wasn't until the end of last year in 2018, I was like you know what, I'm gonna do that, I'm going to jump off for my full-time job as a marketer and I'm going to start a business writing content. So, in October of 2018 I jumped off. I quit my full-time job which you know you talk to any entrepreneur and that's a very scary moment. But yeah, I jumped off and it's been about six, seven months into my business and it was the best decision I have ever made by far. I'm so glad I did it. It has been a great journey.

02:26

Ramesh: So, one of the things that I keep hearing about entrepreneurs is that initial movement of wanting to start the business, it's scary as you mentioned, and then other thing is that they also look for support from either family or other members before the jump in. So, was it just your own decision or other people helped you with the decision or how was your family support?

02:52

Kenzi: Yeah so that's a great question. I am married, I have a wonderful husband named Jeremy. He was a land surveyor. So, we work in completely different fields. But that said it's kind of crazy, because one of the things I would actually recommend to other entrepreneurs is if you do choose to have a partner in your life, that partner needs to not, I wouldn't say like blindly support everything you do, because that's not the case. But they need to see your potential when you don't and that's definitely what Jeremy did for me. He you know helped me crunch the numbers. My talent is in writing, it's not necessarily with numbers. I joked that he's my part-time CFO. We sat down, he said you can do this the numbers work out. You're making more as a writer than you are at your full-time job as a marketer, where you are for you know nine to ten hours a day and it wasn't until I had that outside perspective saying hey this isn't crazy, you know you can actually do this that I realized it wasn't just a pipe dream, it was real. So, in that way you know my husband instrumental in creating my business. The other people who were supportive was you know my parents and yeah, I thought you know they find it my college education and I thought they were going to be upset that I you know kind of quit my job in marketing. But they were like yeah you know going into business for yourself is one of the best things you can do. So, I was fortunate to have a very great support system.

04:21

Ramesh: Excellent, actually yeah so that confirms all the research that I’ve come across in this space. The second one is the very first customer. I mean that is where people struggle with getting their first customer. So how did you get your first customer?

04:36

Kenzi: Oh man so that's funny too. So, I went to a conference for personal finance blogging. Because you know I know that's like really dorky, but that is a thing that exists, and I went there to meet other finance bloggers. Because that's where I got my start and writing about money and while I was there, they had something called a freelancer’s marketplace. Because at the time I was a freelancer. I wasn't a full-fledged business at the time and I went there, and I connected with a fellow money blogger whose blog had grown beyond where you know he needed some help writing and we hit it off and he was my first client.

05:19

Ramesh: Excellent. So then after the first client I think definitely you feel

better. But how do you build a pipeline? Like what do you do to get the second customer and then the repeat customers and things like that?

05:33

Kenzi: Yeah so one of the things that I made sure to do was always ask for testimonials from my customers. So, after I complete a blog I'd say, hey I really liked working with you. I'd be interested in working further, would you want to just write me a two-sentence testimonial about how it was working with me and if you do a good job and you over deliver, which I tell people you always need to do, they're more than happy to provide that. So, after that first client you have that social proof that says, yes, I'm worth your money and then people are much more trusting and much more open. I would also say portfolio pieces, especially in these you know I'm a writer. So, people want to make sure that my style matches up with what they want. So, publishing a website that has portfolio pieces was also really important. Even if you know don't have your first client yet, I would say start with portfolio pieces. Whether you are a web designer, graphic designer, writer, whatever it is you do that also gives social proof and that'll help you build on that client base over time.

06:38

Ramesh: So actually, I want to keep focusing on the building the business piece of it a little bit here. So, there are two different challenges that entrepreneurs face. One is not having a consistent income. Right, if you have a job you have a regular monthly income and unless you have a pipeline that keeps building, there may be moments where you may not have an income. So, have you come across in from your experience and if so how did you overcome that particular challenge?

07:11

Kenzi: Yes, I pursued it a little bit differently than maybe most entrepreneurs would. So, I used the time while I had a full-time job and while working on building the business on the side as a time to use the profits from the business to pay off my personal debts. So, I was able to pay off my student loans and my car loans while working a full-time job, while building the business on the side. I did not sleep very much, I will say that. Coffee is your best friend. But I did that because now that I have my business full-time, I'm able to weather those harder months where for whatever reason there might not be as much work in the pipeline, because of a holiday for example, November and December can be difficult for content writers. Because not a lot of people are starting a lot of new campaigns those months. So, because of getting out of debt personally, I'm able to weather those more difficult moments you know when work might be lighter. So that's what I recommend is get your personal finances in order. So that way you can still pursue the business and not be in dire straits if something doesn't work out the way you think it will. Cause it won’t, stuff will go awry, and you have to deal with it. So, it makes it less challenging especially as a solopreneur without other employees in my business that I could take more of those risks that way by being financially secure first.

08:41

Ramesh: Correct. Actually, now you got segue into my second question. Which is as a solopreneur the other challenge that they face is that, if the business is booming and they're getting lot more clients than they can themselves support, they need to start looking at expanding the business. Either hire employees or outsource. So, what is your strategy? Are you in a situation where you have to deal with that kind of situation? If so, how are you doing that?

09:10

Kenzi: Yeah so right now I still keep all of my work internal, except for client outreach. Because I realized I was doing cold email marketing and I realized that it was not giving as much of a return on my time as doing actual client work. So, I just hired a part-time VA on Upwork. I think for 250 bucks a month and what he does all of my email outreach for me. So, I did the cost-benefit breakdown and hey for 250 bucks, I will gladly push that off on somebody else. So that's not necessarily the client work that I'm outsourcing. Because that's one of my, that's really my unique selling proposition is when I work with these agencies. I'm not going to pawn this stuff off on someone else. Because they rely on my expertise as a marketer to write this piece. So, if for example too much work comes up, I simply tell the clients hey if you want this done, you’re either going to have to wait longer or I can give you a referral. Don't be afraid to turn away work. People actually respect you whenever you know your boundaries and it helps with quality control as well. So, for me I keep a list of trustworthy people who I can refer work to and on the same, you know the same line if work ever gets slow for me, I can reach out to them and say hey you know is there any work that you have coming up that you need some help with and they're always happy to refer that. So that's kind of how I handle the solopreneur wave of work. You know it definitely comes in waves.

10:43

Ramesh: Correct. So good, so actually it's good so we're getting a little deep into the discussion on the business. So, you talked about the customers. Can you give us an idea of the profile of the customers that you are dealing with? Are they small businesses? Large businesses or agencies? Just give us some profile please.

11:05

Kenzi: Yeah so, my bread and butter are where working with SMBs, small to medium-sized agencies. So, I normally work with marketing agencies or SEO agencies. As it just so happens, I happen to work with more people that are based here in Texas where I am I'm in San Antonio. But also, a lot of people surprisingly on the west coast. I'm still trying to crack, you know crack the code on what it is. But for some reason a lot of West Coast agencies are outsourcing their content and there's been some changes in the content marketing landscape that I think are responsible for that. But those are the main accounts that I have. I do occasionally take on work from fortune 200 clients as well. Which is, it's nice because I had that experience in my career as a marketer you know working at some big companies on the enterprise level and, so you can take that enterprise experience and give that to the small businesses and that's something they're not used to. Which is that White Glove service that doesn't require the hand-holding and I think that's what really makes a solopreneur stand out when you can give somebody that detail and level of quality that you might expect for an enterprise client, but for an SMB. Because here's the thing, more business owners to each other. I cannot tell you how much of my business is referrals. Just people say hey you might want to work with Kenzi, you did a great job. So that's why it's so important to ensure the quality whenever you're working with these small businesses. Don't write them off because they're smaller, their budget is small. Because they talk, and they will land you a lot more clients than an enterprise client might. Because enterprise, there's so many people vying for those accounts that you know they'll undercut your prices and they can make demands, a lot more demands than a small business might, and a lot of business owners will cave to those demands, when maybe they don't need to or maybe cave is a strong word. But I prefer working with small businesses because of that. It seems like a much more of a collaboration definitely and they're fun to work with. So, I always recommend don't overlook them for sure.

13:16

Ramesh: That's a really good insight Kenzi. So basically, you're talking about number one is the referrals. There is lot more you get from this kind of clients and then second thing I think you mentioned is translating your experience and then with a large enterprise and then bringing that into the SMB is something you're in a very unique position. They're really good insights there.

13:38

Kenzi: Thank you.

13:39

Ramesh: And then you started talking about your unique value proposition. So, can you, is it a domain expertise your value proposition? What is it?

13:49

Kenzi: Yeah so for me what I realized working as a marketer I used to work, it's kind of like meta. I was a marketer working at a marketing agency and I write for marketing agencies looking for marketing expertise. So, it's like a tongue twister. But what I offer is that marketing expertise. Because a lot of marketing agencies, they will write content for their clients. But the problem is the resources are expended to promote their clients that a lot of the times these smaller agencies don't have the resources to promote themselves. So, then their client well is drying up while they're trying to promote other people and they say, oh snap my pipeline is dry. So, they come to me when they say we need someone to write about marketing to attract people who need marketing to our agency and they like partnering with me. Because I have that experience as a marketer and also as a small business owner. So, I'm kind of on both sides and they like that, because you can speak to what the agency needs as well as what the agency's clients needs.

14:55

Ramesh: It's very nice, very nice and then actually I went on your website www.Kenziwrites.com and I looked at some of your resources you're offering and one article that attracted my attention is the tools that freelance writers need or business owners need. So, can you talk a little bit about the tools that use and tools you think other entrepreneurs can benefit from.

15:25

Kenzi: Absolutely so the first tool that I use personally is Asana. It's a task tracking app and I used it during my full-time employment and frankly moving into my own business, I actually, I'm a solopreneur so I have no need to really collaborate a lot. So, I use the free version of asana. It's really important to keep those cost low when and you are a solopreneur. So that works out just fine for me. Also, I know it's an extra cost, but I do recommend people get G suite for your email. You also are able to collaborate with clients and Google Docs better. So as a writer I know some people work in Google Docs and I don't know how they function. Cause I'm like, my brain would just that's too much. So, I do everything in Google Docs and that way whenever a client wants to review my work, all I do is send them a link. They can even make comments in there and they can make suggestions. It's incredibly efficient for the content writing world and I wouldn't have it any other way. So that's another great tool. Something else that I use is a time tracker. I know there are some free ones available online. I use the one called Timeular. It's a paid one. I think it was like a hundred bucks. It's a little cube that you keep on your desk and as you switch through tasks or projects throughout the day, you move the cube and it tracks it for you. It's beneficial especially if you work on an hourly basis. So that way you automatically track oh how much time am I actually spending on this client piece. Because too often I think entrepreneurs aren't charging accurately. A lot of the times we're charging too little and so these time tracking apps make sure that you're charging what you've actually even have done for that client and it's just a lot more efficient and the last tool is a live chat app. So, some of my clients get in touch with me via Skype, some people get in contact on Slack. It really depends on whatever your preference is. Google Chat is another one. But something where people can get in touch with you immediately, especially if you don't want to give out your personal phone number or if maybe you don't have one, it's you know easy to just send a quick question off to a client. Like if I have a question about a source or really anything they need, it's an easy way to get answer instead of you know calling them on the phone. I feel like instant messaging is just a little bit more efficient. So those are the great tools I think any freelancer or excuse me any business owner can benefit from.

18:01

Ramesh: Excellent Kenzi, yeah actually that's one article definitely caught my attention. I heard about Asana from multiple entrepreneurs by the way. So that's that and then-

18:13

Kenzi: Yeah, its awesome. And they won’t pay me to say that. It's just good.

18:16

Ramesh: Yeah exactly. So, the other thing is looking at your experience right, so you have planned your transition from a full-time job in to you know solopreneur ship and the business organically in the sense that you didn't just quit one day and said I want to go start a business right. So, it worked out for you. But is there, could you have done anything differently looking back, anything that you think you could have should have done to start to run your business?

18:48

Kenzi: Yes, two things for sure. The first thing is I mean that's this is every entrepreneurs problem I feel like is charging what I'm worth. So, for example I charge a per word rate. When I first started out it was 10 cents a word and I thought ooh that's so much money and then I worked a little bit and I realized that is significantly under charging. Today I charge double or triple that rate and even then, I’ve been told that's not enough. So, here's the thing if I had charged more in those early days, I actually would have been able to jump off and start my business more quickly. So, it's kind of like in hindsight you look back and you think oh I was so dumb, how could I not have charged more and it's hard when you're new. Because people will try to take advantage of that and get a cheaper price. Because that's, hey that's what all business owners do. We are all trying to get a better deal. But yeah, I wish I had charged more and that's something that really you only learned from experience unfortunately or talk to the other people in your industry, see what they're charging. Don't be afraid to disclose your rates to other people. Because frankly if you're good enough at your job, you won't have to compete with anybody. So, you know get out of that scarcity mindset of, "I can't tell them what I'm charging. Because then it's like my secret sauce." it's not, we all deserve fair pay and the only way that's going to happen is if we're all open about pricing. So, pricing is the first one. The second one is financials. Keeping all the books clean. Oh, my goodness, I was using and again I’ll admit numbers are not my strength. I was using this like cruddy like Google sheets that was tracking everything and like it was just a mess. I could not figure out anything, it was not good. So, before I jumped off into creating my business, I bought a QuickBooks self-employed. It was, I think it was discounted on my like TurboTax subscription. I think it was like 100 bucks a month. It's really not that much. It's cheaper than an accountant and it does a lot of the work for you automatically. You still have to go in there and classify expenditures and things like that. But I can quickly run reports and I can quickly see whether I'm profitable or not. Because that's something everybody wants to know. Am I actually making a profit and when you have a software, it doesn't have to be QuickBooks self-employed. It can be anything. I hear some people talk about wave or fresh books. It doesn't matter what you need. Just have something that's tracking your expenses. Because the business will have expenses and you also need to track your taxes, because everybody needs to be saving for taxes. I personally saved twenty to thirty percent of my monthly income just for taxes. But because of that I'm not surprised by a huge tax bill at the end you know every April, it's not a big deal and it's all thanks to having the finances in order. So, if you're starting a new business, you need to have some kind of accounting software. Something set up. Because it's really going to give you a lot of clarity and help you make better decisions moving forward.

21:54

Ramesh: Excellent, excellent. So, the last two questions. So, one is what kinds of challenges are you facing now and then how you're addressing them one and then the second one is, what plans do you have for your business going forward? So, let's do the first one, what are the challenges that you're facing?

22:14

Kenzi: Yeah one of my challenges is something that I think a lot of business owners face who deal with client accounts. So, I service based business. The service is me writing for somebody and it's all about finding good clients and I don't mean just you know oh these people are going to pay my rate. Because I’ve worked with people who pay my rate and then they turn out to, it's just not a good match. I'm not you know trash-talking people or anything. But sometimes it for whatever reason you know we just don't mesh and so it's about trying to figure out and dedicating more time initially before we sign a contract for work to figure out, okay am I actually going to deliver what you need, and do we work well together. Because for whatever reason sometimes you just don't gel with somebody and it's best to flush that out before you sign a contract and then you're trying to work together. It's just more difficult. So, for me the challenge is always finding people that I am excited to work with every month and I'm just now really starting to fine-tune that and figure out like you know what? Like I'm really excited to work with this small agency. You know we would just mesh and that's because and I'm addressing that by setting up a checklist that I go through for the client onboarding process. I've lengthened the onboarding process. So, I used to just have a phone call and be like, "okay well I’ll send you over your blog's next week." you know it was very minimal and because of that you end up with people that they seem fine on that 15-minute phone call, but for whatever reason it just didn't end up working out and it's not good. So now what I do is I have a series of phone calls as well as a statement of work that we go over. So that way we're clear on the direction of the piece, what they're looking for, how their relationship is going to work, what the deliverables are going to look like and over the course of those conversations, I'm also like secretly evaluating you know their personalities and how we gel together. So, for example if somebody's like overly serious, as you can probably tell I'm like you know bubbly and you know I want to work with people who are also really excited about their work and if its just content to them or if it's you know just something to them, that's not what I want to be. So, it's about being more finicky about who I work with and I'm excited. Yeah somebody you're excited with.

24:48

Ramesh: Right right actually that's really good. So, the last question. So definitely it your business seems to be doing well and you're enjoying what you're doing. So where do you want to go from here?

24:59

Kenzi: This is the million-dollar question. So, the problem with a service based business like writing is that there's only so much that I can do right. The goal of any business is to get more clients, more clients and more work. Well I'm just person and I'm running not just the product, I'm doing the marketing, I'm doing finances. I'm doing everything in this business and as a solopreneur to have a service based business, so I read a really good book a while back and pardon my language, but it was titled "Badass your brand. It's by P.S Sylva and basically, it's like this framework for going through and turning your service based business into a product and the key to products is that they sell while you sleep. So, I can basically be choosier about who I work with to deliver that service and then have a product available that still helps people, but doesn't require a lot of my time. As of right now I'm in the process of creating something that's called jumpstart. Which is going to be, basically like a guide that I can refer my clients to that maybe can't afford my actual content packages. It's going to be a DIY kind of course basically that they can go through and create quality content by themselves. But if they ever need help you know that's when I can say, well I can step in and help you. So, I'm hoping that will kind of help bring instant income for my business, help people and that maybe can't afford a writer and then also you know bulk up my sales pipeline as well. So, I'm excited. I'm working on it right now. So hopefully it will come out soon.

26:38

Ramesh: That is really awesome. Actually, I think many service businesses go through that transformation, they want to go to the transformation. Some are successful, and some are not. But I think you're thinking in the right direction to grow your business. Any last-minute thoughts Kenzi?

26:55

Kenzi: Not really. My only note you know to the listeners would be just keep moving forward. You know keep moving forward whether you're starting a fledgling business or you're thinking about it, it takes a lot of confidence. I would actually say confidence and a dedication to quality are really all you need be successful as an entrepreneur. All the other things like tools and processes, those are nice. But if you're dedicated to those two things, you're really going to go far. So just have the confidence and stay the course as far as quality, don't be compromising on those things and you're going to be just fine.

27:32

Ramesh: Kenzi thank you very much, your excitement really comes through in the podcast. So, I wish you all the best and yeah, we will probably touch base in a year and see how it's going with you.

27:44

Kenzi: Absolutely. Well thank you again Ramesh, it's been awesome being here.

27:48

Ramesh: Okay, take care.

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Starting A SEO Business to Train Small Businesses to do SEO for themselves with Janet Elie – AEP #10

June 3rd, 2019 by

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Guest: ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Janet Elie

​Company / Business name: ​​​​​​ ​​​Launch4Life LLC

Launch4Life, started by two sisters Janet Elie and Gillian Whitney, helps small businesses learn to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for themselves. Janet has over 30 years in the Financial Services Industry in marketing and management, coupled with 5 years of intensive dedication to online marketing and social media applications. Janet has coached and trained small business owners on how to adapt to the social media world.

Tools / Books / Resources mentioned:Tools: Camtasia, Mailchimp, Acuity (bookkeeping), Paypal, SEMrush, Asana (project management), zoom

Show Notes:

1:03 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Don’t be afraid to go against the tide to define your business.Janet introduces her business which trains small businesses to do search engine optimization (SEO) for themselves. It is an interesting concept because most other SEO businesses actually do the SEO.

4:02 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: First start your business and then iterate the business to find the right direction.Janet talks about the transition from corporate life to entrepreneurship. She wasn’t happy with her corporate life, attended a Tony Robbins conference, and decided to take control of her life. Even though she started with helping insurance agents find better prospects, she evolved her business to train business owners to do SEO for themselves.

7:55 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Define your customer ‘Avatars’ with specific details on their pain points, dreams, and aspirations.Janet talks about her target customers who are little bit tech savvy, in their 40, 50 and may be 60s. Janet found that customers who are not tech savvy turned out to be nightmare clients.

9:05 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Building a customer pipeline is key for a sustainable business.Janet talks about building customer pipeline by going to conferences, building an email list, and relying on referrals. The large conferences can be intimidating but help in building email list.

10:29 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: It takes at least a year to get going so don’t expect overnight wonders.Janet talks about the first three years of her entrepreneurial journey where the first 6 months were about tweaking her web site. It took one year to stand on their feet and a good amount of 3 years to find a solid ground. During these 3 years, they kept tweaking business model and website design.

13:16 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Finding a reason to stay motivated is very important.Janet talks about her motivation and drive to keep going. She thinks about the alternative of either being a couch potato or go back to work neither one is appealing.

16:45 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Use tools sparingly and wisely to build and grow your business.Janet lists all the tools that they use in their business. The tools are listed at the top but Asana for project management, Acuity for bookkeeping are couple of new tools that were not mentioned on the show earlier.

19:52 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Focus on knowing your customers, competitors, and marketing your offer.Janet gives 3 specific tips for prospective entrepreneurs. (1) Do your market research to find out if your idea is a viable business (2) Study your competitors to differentiate your offerings (3) Business is 20% product/service and 80% is marketing.

23:02 minute mark:Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Email list is key. Quality over quantity for long term success.Janet talks about few things that she would right if she were restarting her business today. (1) Building an email list from day one (2) Focus on quality blog articles over quantity (3) Create some free online courses to give free value.

00:01

Ramesh: Hello everyone, welcome to the Agile Entrepreneur Podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is about starting and building your own business with purpose, passion, perseverance and possibilities. Today we have Janet Elie from www.launchforlife.com. Hi Janet welcome.

00:28

Janet: Hi Ramesh, how are you I'm happy to be here today.

00:30

Ramesh: Very good. So first let me introduce Janet to our listeners. Janet has over 30 years in the financial services industry in marketing and management, coupled with five years of intensive dedication to online marketing and social media applications. Janet has coached and trained small business owners on how to adapt to the social media world. Hey Janet, this is a great concept that you have here launch for life. Can you just please go over what your business is about.

01:03

Janet: Absolutely. So, this is a business by the way that has evolved over time, you know I think that's probably the one big takeaway is that you might start on one journey and then you end up being someplace else. But basically, our business is really dedicated to helping small business owners, who are already somewhat tech savvy. Meaning they probably build their own WordPress sites, they are doing their own email marketing. So, they kind of like want to be controlling things and they are worried that they're not getting enough traffic to their website and they've heard about these words called SEO, they don't really know what it means or how to apply to their business and, so we're launch for life helps them is helping them sort of unbundle all the different parts of SEO and then see how to apply them step by step. We often say that we help people do everything in baby steps. So, we try to use layman's language and we do coaching and we have a number of different services that will help them build their SEO and then eventually be able to get the right traffic going to their website and this would be opposite of just outsourcing it to an SEO agency, where you're basically going to just like hand over the keys to your kingdom to them then they're going to run it for you. This is really meant for the person who says I don't want to do that, maybe I can't afford that. But I really want to learn how to do this myself and that's our business.

02:43

Ramesh: Okay so search engine optimization, SEO business that's

what you're in and the reason you believe that it's important because most of the businesses especially on the online, if they want to get any traffic or any and to be success online, they have to go through the search engine optimization, so the googles of the world can discover your website and then or the traffic can flow to your website. That's why okay.

03:12

Janet: Yeah because I often notice that you know people are, if I build a website then they will come. You know it's kind of like Kevin Costner's Field of Dreams. You know he built the baseball field and nobody showed up, crickets. And so that's where when they get to that point in their business and they say okay what do I do now? That's where we can be there to help them.

03:37

Ramesh: Alright, so let's say, let me look at and so you have 30 years of experience in financial services industry and then suddenly one day you realize or decided that I want to start this company. How did that transition happen? Why, I mean how did you get the experience in this SEO, can you just explain how you came up with the idea on how you got into this business please.

04:02

Janet: Sure sure. So, it's kind of a cute little story. So, I was you know I'm in my late sixties, 68 and I was getting close to retirement and I had a career where I was traveling all around the country. So, every week I was you know getting on a plane and going somewhere and I was working for a company where I was doing their requests going to visit clients and not liking the story that I was telling them. But unfortunately, because I’ve got paid a salary, I had to do their marching orders right. So, I was trying to figure out well how can I be happier at doing this job. So, I decided to go to a Tony Robbins event, it was called unleash the power and I went there to get the inspiration, so that I could do a better job at delivering their marching orders and what it came away with after that four days is, there's no way that that's going to happen when you're trying to do something for somebody else. Unless you really like it, there's no way that you can have a paradigm shift in what you're doing and so what I came away with is I needed to start my own business and Ramesh at that point, I had no clue what it was that I wanted to do. So, it evolved over time and it basically started that I thought I work with insurance agents, right? What are insurance agent’s big problem? Prospecting. The old ways of prospecting weren't working anymore. So, I thought well I’ll just build them a really good mousetrap, so that they'll be able to go and prospect better. But unfortunately, they were, yes, they're entrepreneurs in their own way. But they weren't willing to make the change, the paradigm shift that they needed to do to be successful with anything that I was recommending. So, I said okay I like what I'm doing, but this is the wrong audience. So, I need to go find the right audience and that's how launch for life developed. So, it started out you know kind of we put the life in there, because we actually thought you know we were working with life insurance and then also launch, because I had attended also a Jeff Walker product launch formula conference. Which if you want to, we'll talk a little bit about that. But anyway, so when I put the two words together, I thought well I can launch your business and then it didn't really matter whether I was working with life insurance agents or just small business owners, entrepreneurs, their business is their life right. So, if I'm going to help you launch your business and it just seemed to work together. So, our business just evolved from that.

06:46

Ramesh: Great, so you decided to go into this business and then did you start on your own? You had partners? Did somebody help you?

06:57

Janet: My business, I have a business partner and she happens to be my younger sister and it was funny, because she was working with me when I had my corporate job. Because there were a lot of things that I just couldn't get to on a day-to-day basis, so she was helping me. Funny thing about Gillian and I is we don't even live in the same state Ramesh. So, we use zoom all the time to collaborate. So, it's amazing that you can have a business and your partners, or your co-workers don't even have to be located right next to you. So, we just decided to start this business together, because she had also gone to the Tony Robbins event with me. So, we kind of play off each other's strengths and that has made us very successful business partners and we're still partners together today, and we just love working together.

07:46

Ramesh: Great, great. So now we have built the business, you've started the business. Now you're in the process of building, so who are your customers?

07:55

Janet: Our customers are kind of like I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast and that is they are small business owners or entrepreneurs. People who have to be tech savvy. We have tried to work with people that are not, and they became my nightmare clients. Because you know when I wanted to hand over the keys, they didn't know what to do with the keys. So, we have to work with somebody who already understands WordPress sites, already understands what SEO means, already has an email platform. So basically, we're working with people who are already in the realm of doing online marketing and specifically probably we are more focused on people that are in their 40s and 50s .so we do have a couple of millennial clients, we have a couple of GenX clients. But mainly we're working with people that are sort of late 40s, 50s, maybe even a little early 60s.

08:57

Ramesh: So how are you getting these customers? Are the customers located in your cities, are they remote customers? How do you go about that process?

09:05

Janet: That's always the tough part. It is trying to get the right customers. Some of them are local where I have you know gone out to different meetups and conferences and built relationships with people like that. Some of them have been referrals and then of course we try to build an email list, so that you know people will find out about our services. So that when they're ready to make this big decision they're already on our list, they've already grown to know like and trust us and so it's truly a combination of different things. It's making sure you have blogs and it's all the things that we try to teach people with SEO. It's not an easy thing, it's like sometimes you go to these big conferences so just go build an email list, aha easier said than done. But at the end of the day it's a combination of things and you know and some ads to try and get people to find out about your business and then offer some free things, so they get to know you and then when the time is right, they're going to buy.

10:08

Ramesh: That's great. So, if you could talk a little bit about how long you've been in the business and how your journey has been in the sense like, hey first six months was like this and first year was this and then when you started actually feeling comfortable about the business. The journey of the past years.

10:29

Janet: Oh, it's certainly been a journey and I think any small business owner is going to go through the same thing. We just think that oh we're just going to build our product and then we open the doors and then everybody's going to be standing outside like, you know we wish we were Apple with the new iPhone. But it doesn't work that way in our business or in our world. So, it took us a fair amount of time just to build the business and I would say it was a good year. Because we had to build a website, which took time. We built our own WordPress site, so we built that and by the way we've been through three generations of building our website. So, what we started out building initially has evolved, because technology has evolved in what people want to see you know responsiveness on websites has changed. So, you know we had to make several changes to our website over time. In fact, we just did a version recently where we just upgraded everything. So, it was then we had to build our email platform, then we had to get out all our social media sites and we had to pick up business cards. Then we had to get people to know who we were and then of course as I said we learned you know who are the customers that we wanted to work with. So, I would say that, I don't even know if we're comfortable yet Ramesh. I think we're feel like we're in a better place today. But it's definitely been a hard journey. Because you think you have got everything in place and then you find out that you need something else and then you get that in place and then you find out you need something else. So, nobody who is an entrepreneur unless you know they got tons of money and they can have other people help them with everything, nobody you know and us included, the journey as always comes with obstacles and challenges. But I would say an answer to your question, it probably took us a good year before we felt like we could open the door so to speak and I would say probably the last year and a half maybe so is when we feel like we've had a really viable business where we've been making money. So, think about that, that's like three years.

12:54

Ramesh: So, I'm actually that's what I keep hearing the second and third year is probably the toughest ones. Because first year is still discovering. So, during these tough times a lot of people quit, motivation is very important. So, I mean did you think about quitting and how did you find the drive to keep going?

13:16

Janet: Believe you me there were a few times I wanted to quit. Because you just go, maybe I don't have it, maybe you know maybe I made a bad decision, maybe I don't know enough, maybe I don't have enough money. You know there's all those things. But I had a drive that number one when I looked at the alternative and I think this is the key thing you have to look at the alternative. If I quit what are my other options and there were a couple of things that were driving my decisions. Number one, that it certainly wasn't ready to stop working and become a couch potato. So that was number one and number two like what else do they want to do? Do I want to go sell insurance? No, I don't want to do that. So, I said no, I want to keep going and three things actually, start working with my sister and we were a great support for each other. So, if you happen to have a partner that's always great. Because then you sort of keep bucking yourself up and we just said you know what? We're brilliant. We really have, we know a lot of stuff and we have a really good story to tell. So, we just need to keep going. Because you know what the world needs us and that is sometimes what drives you, that you have something you want to share and if you quit, then people aren't ever going to have that.

14:39

Ramesh: That's great Janet. I mean it's a very inspiring in terms of, because all of us go through those kinds of moments.

14:48

Janet: Yes, we do. You just say, am I not good enough? Do I not have what it takes? And so, you just have to remember what is your vision, what is your goal and just make sure that you keep that foremost in your mind and just stay on course.

15:05

Ramesh: Right as you are going through this evolution of the business, I'm sure you were using a lot of tools in various areas and can you just share the tools that have been most successful for you in helping build a business?

15:23

Janet: Sure. So, first thing is when you first get into business unless you've got a ton of money, you really are working on what we call a shoestring budget, right. So, you want to try and use as many tools as possible that don't cost anything or very small costs. So, we kept that very much at the forefront of all the decisions that we made. So, we never wanted to be a penny-wise pound foolish. So sometimes we did need to spend money where we thought money should be spent. But we always did our research first to see what we should have. So, first thing first right you got to have a website. So, you just can't be in business without it. So, we had to make the decision, should we build our own WordPress site, or should we get a Wix or a square or something like that. Well we knew that eventually we wanted to own our own website, we didn't want to rent it. So, we made the decision to have a WordPress site. So, we bought you know WordPress, GoDaddy, Domains you know then there was you know the hosting. So, at GoDaddy we had a Divi site for our theme and all those different types of things and then we slowly built our site ourselves. By the way we had no prior experience Ramesh on how to build our website. But we learned step-by-step how to do it.

16:42

Ramesh: I was about to ask you about that.

16:45

Janet: That is hard, that is hard. So, I guess the big thing was my sister did have some experience building courses and that was something that, so she had been a tech writer. So that somewhat gave us some help and she kind of understood some of that. She knew how to work Camtasia. So, some of those things that she already had that knowledge in. So, we built the website, the next thing we knew was that we needed an email platform. So, we actually bought Aweber, which was a cost program and decided that it just didn't offer the features we wanted, so we did a lot of research and we ended up using MailChimp. Which was great for somebody first starting out. Because you know it's free for the first two thousand subscribers and twelve thousand emails a month. It's a great way to get started, you can have automation and all those you know fancy bells and whistles that you need to build your email templates and your newsletter. So that's what we started out with. We also knew that we needed a program called Acuity, which is what we use when we have bookings. So, people can book, we had to have PayPal. We had to have a blog. So that was another reason why we wanted a WordPress site. Well then, we had to have Yoast, so we have a premium Yoast, because we wanted to take it to the next level. We own SEMrush which is kind of an expensive program and you know but we needed that if we were going to do the SEO that we need for our customers. But basically, what we did, I'm trying to think if there's anything else that we've used. Oh, we use programs like Asana. Which again they have a free version and we use Zoom. We love Zoom, that's probably our biggest tool that we use. There is a free version, but we have the paid version. Because there's the two of us, we often meet other clients and so therefore it requires the paid version. So, I don't know, you know I don't have the list right in front of me. But that's probably a good start to all the tools that we needed to have.

18:50

Ramesh: So that's good. So, most of them I'm familiar with. Asana what do you do with that?

18:54
Janet: It's a project management program. So basically, what it does is because we have so many different kinds of projects, we needed to make sure that we could keep them organized and so there is a free version Ramesh and so basically what you have to do is you go in there it's www.asana.com and once you're in there, you can create different projects and then you can assign yourself a task within that with a due date and then if you have a partner, it's great. Because then you can each see what you're doing, and it does a lot of great stuff and its online and you can also get the app version.

19:37

Ramesh: Great great. So now I'm sitting in home listening to the podcast. I want to get started with a business. So what tips can you offer me that I should start looking at?

19:52

Janet: It's interesting. By the way just as a side note I'm also a score volunteer and so I often do volunteer work, working with people that are just first starting up their business and it was interesting, I was talking to somebody yesterday and he wanted to build a brick-and-mortar store and he said I don't know where to start. And I said well you know it's kind of like that sound of music song, you know you got to start at the very beginning. So, you know the first thing is you got to do research. You know you get this great idea, but first you got to go find out is it viable. You know like what I did is like I built this business for these life insurance agents, but I didn't do my research first to find out, is this something that even was welcomed in the world right? We sometimes think that we know what people want. But we have to go and find out what our customers want. So, I told him, I said what you need to do is you need to go and survey at least a hundred people. If there's already, if you already have competitors out there you have to find out what does they like about what's out there, what don't they like and then find out what would they want that would be different that they might come to you and in that maybe you'll see what your niche can be. Which is kind of what we did with our business is we had to go out and survey and found out that there were people who just didn't want to go to SEO agencies, but didn't know what the alternative was. And somebody that would teach them in layman's language, because you know you read a lot of blogs and people teach you all this you know highfalutin language and nobody who's just starting out doesn't understand it. So, it's important to do your research and then when you're ready to start you need to go and learn what are all the tools that you're going to need. One of the things that I always tell people, 20% of your business is your product or service. The other 80% is marketing. So, if marketing is not your expertise, you've got to go learn it. You got to learn about having an email platform, you got to learn about what kind of website you should have, what social media platforms you should be on and you know it's funny I actually do a training that I call it my online marketing machine and I teach them all the different components that you need to build your online. Because even if you have a brick-and-mortar store, you still need to do online marketing. Because marketing is today you know we don't have enough marketing dollars to just you know put advertisements out there. We have to find ways for customers to find us, because they're doing their own searching.

22:34

Ramesh: Right right so it's a great advice. So, Janet this is very good. So now let's, if you were to go back I know it's about three years you've been in the business. So, then what would you do? So, the whole concept here is the agile entrepreneur. So, do we can speed up things for other people, so they don't have to make the same mistakes that we've been making. So, what would you do differently?

23:02

Janet: Okay a couple things, a couple things for sure. I mean I probably give you a long laundry list. But I’ll give you a couple of things that I think are critically important when people are starting out. That is, build your email list right away. Build your email list right away and that is so critically important even and I know somebody who has a business and what he did was, he just built a very quick email site you know nothing fancy. He got his email, his email platform and he started to just offer a lead magnet for free. He didn't even have a product yet. But he had a lead magnet of something that he thought would be interesting for the people that eventually he wanted to be his customers. So that by the time he had something that he wanted to charge for, he already had a couple thousand followers. We did not do that. We built everything first and we built the email list last. So now we always tell our customers, build your email list first. It's like don't resist that list. Because again it's like I go back to the Kevin Costner story with build Field of Dreams, it's that you know he built the base, spent all his energy on the field and then nobody showed up. You have to let people know you're building the field. So you have to and that's what I tell people today is build that email list, get it started, come up with some kind of a freebie what we call it you know a lead magnet and something that's going to get them to start building you know, get building that list and then eventually you know when you got something to sell, then you've now got your audience and it makes it so much easier if you can do that and then the second thing is blogging. Blogging is probably, now looking back it's probably one of the most artistic incredibly important components of your business. Nobody's really teaching blogging very well. So, you know you kind of have to piecemeal it all together and I'm not even sure that we would teach anybody all about blogging. Because I'm not even sure we're an expert. Well I know we're not an expert. But I can see how blogging is so important to your business. Because you know we have a great website and we were religious. Oh, we should blog right. So, every week, every Monday morning hmm we posted a blog. They were probably about four or five hundred-word blogs. They all had great content. But guess what? We were building them without meta descriptions, without keyword phrases, we didn't have internal links, we didn't have backlinks. Our images were oversized, I mean we were literally you know I could now do the top ten reasons how not to do a blog. And so, we had done all that. So, we just thought if we created all these blogs, then Google will love our blogs. Because we're putting out all this fresh content. But hadn't realized that we were doing them wrong. So now we have a hundred blogs and we're now having to go back and redo them. So, the biggest advice I would give to anybody is, its quality over quantity. Do less blogs, maybe you do one really awesome blog a month. But make it big, make it at least 2,000 words, make sure you've got good keyword phrases, do your internal links and you know and your backlinks if you can and then off to make sure your graphics are optimized properly and that you have at least 5 graphics, that's what I’ve learnt now is you've got to have at least 5 graphics in your blog post and those are what's really going to help drive your traffic. So, blogging, email lists, two big things. So that's the other thing. You really need a WordPress site if you're going to blog, if you're going to blog properly. Because get a Wix site or any or Shopify, it's just not going to work.

27:21

Ramesh: Yeah anyway WordPress is the dominant platform out there. So, Janet this is a very inspiring story. I mean to tell you the truth in terms of how you've evolved from one business to another business, so any last-minute thoughts?

27:34

Janet: Well our business still is evolving. Just you know I think it's awesome that you're having a podcast. Because this is something that we want to do one day and it's kind of like on our to-do list. But we're not quite there yet. One more thing that I didn't mention in our call which I think is very critically important is we also built online courses and that was another tool I forgot to mention. We use a program called Thinkifi, www.thinkific.com and online courses are great if you'd like to build a business where you can be sort of making money while you're sleeping. So, you take all of your knowledge, you put it into an online course. Because people are looking for those kind of digital marketing tools these days. You know learning online and so that's another great way to be able to share your products. So, I don't know, have fun you know like really love what we do, and I think if you don't love what you do, then you either need to find another business, you're not in the right business or because we started out building websites and we hated it. So, we just said okay then that's not where we want to spend our energy and our time. So, I think always look for does your business fit your choices. Which for us would be profitability, likability and where we live you know like lifestyle. Lifestyle is a very important component and then I don't know if anybody wants to learn how to do SEO, come talk to me.

29:15

Ramesh: Definitely definitely I think this will be a very good podcast. So good luck with the business.

29:21

Janet: Thank you, Thank you.

29:24

Ramesh: So, thank you very much for your time today.

29:27

Janet: You're quite welcome.

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How to start a passive investment business in real estate with Alina Trigub – AEP #9

May 29th, 2019 by

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Guest: ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Alina Trigub

​Company / Business name: ​​​​​​ ​​​SAMO Financial

Alina is the founder and the Managing Partner of SAMO Financial. It’s a boutique private equity firm specializing in helping a select group of people passively invest in the commercial real estate. Alina’s business motto has been articulated well by Warren Buffett’s indicating that, “Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago”. Alina is the founder of two Meetup groups named, “The Power of Passive Investing through Real Estate”, which gather in NY and NJ.

Alina has helped her clients to acquire and invest in:

  • over 1200 apartment doors
  • over 500 storage units

 over 5MM of funds focused on mobile home parks and storage

Recommended Books & Tools:Tools: Pipedrive CRM, Mailchimp for email marketing

Show Notes:

2:37 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Your own needs can give you an idea for starting a business.

Alina talks about syndication in commercial real estate and how that can give passive income to investors. Alina also talks about her desire to get her investments diversified led her to learn more about syndicates and private placements in real estate business.

 

4:59 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Identifying key success factors in each business will reap rewards.

Alina educates us about the syndication business where experienced partners identify viable real estate properties and then bring the audience into the deals. Credibility of experience and due diligence are absolutely important in the business.

7:26 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Don’t be afraid of challenges. Treat them as opportunities.

Alina talks about starting a side business like she is doing now, Even though she is full employed, her desire to diversify led her into becoming an accidental entrepreneur. Alina talks about the support she gets from her family to get her going.

11:05 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Focus on areas that can open doors instead of harping on issues that limit growth.

Alina brings an interesting aspect of close-knit groups in real estate industry and a gender bias. But she says if one can ignore that it opens up plenty of opportunities. She talks about how it allowed her to move forward once she ignored the cliques.

14:47 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Understanding your business model and tweaking where necessary is important.

Alina talks about her business model where she makes her money by working on the investor relations side. She also talks about how she plans to grow her business by expanding the investor pool as well as expanding the portfolio of asset classes.

17:37 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Get the necessary first steps of starting a business out of the way quickly.

Alina gives advice to would be entrepreneurs with the first tip to get an accountant and a lawyer in the same room to align on a corporate structure. Then she talks about getting a website and building a leadership platform to build credibility.

19:00 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Get the necessary first steps of starting a business out of the way quickly.

Alina talks why it’s important to start early in life to build a business and how other obligations may come in the way later in life. Alina talks about the need to address ‘WHY’, why you are starting a business as it’ll help you get through tough times.

00:01

Ramesh: Hello everyone, welcome to the Agile Entrepreneur Podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is about starting and running your own business with purpose, passion, perseverance and possibilities. Today we have a guest from the real estate industry. Her name is Alina Trigub. Let me introduce Alina. Alina is the founder and the managing partner of Samo financial. It's a boutique private equity firm specializing in helping select group of people passively invest in the commercial real estate. Alina is the founder of two meet up groups name the power of passive investing through real estate. Which gather in New York and New Jersey. Hi Alina welcome to the podcast.

00:58

Alina:  Thank you Ramesh, great to be here. Thanks a lot for having me.

01:01

Ramesh: It's fantastic. So, let's start with the name of your business, Samo financial. Why Samo Financial? How did you come up with the name?

01:11

Alina:  Sure. So Samo is the initials of the first name of my family members. It's my two kids, my husband and myself. So that comes to Samo and my name is certainly part of it as well.

01:23

Ramesh: Oh fantastic, that is really a very personal touch right off the bat. That's great.

01:27

Alina:  Absolutely.

01:28

Ramesh: Alright. So yeah why real estate and why did you start this company?

01:35

Alina:  So my journey in real estate started about five, six years ago. I was always interested in real estate. But never really took a serious action and my concerns for many years have been how to diversify out of Wall Street. All of our investments for my husband and me have always been in stock bonds, mutual funds. Whether its through 401K or regular brokerage accounts and I always wanted to diversify into something else and real estate was one of those components that I wanted to diversify into. So finally, I took an action about six years ago and started doing my research and after doing significant research, I came across the world of so-called syndications in real estate and I can give you a more or less a definition if you'd like me to explain to your audience, what syndications mean.

02:31

Ramesh: Please go ahead. Because I don't know the syndication. I don't think many of the listeners would know right off the bat.

02:37

Alina:  Sure, sure. Syndication entails that a group of people pulls money together to buy a large commercial real estate. Which is exactly what I decided to join in. In this group it's normally done through a partnership and in the partnership, there are general partners, people that do all of the work. Find the property, negotiate, inspect, renovate, find tenants and so forth. And then the other group, the majority of partners, limited partners which are the people that put their funds together and just reap the rewards of being completely passive in that syndication. And that's how I started being completely passive investing in real estate, while someone else was doing all the work and reap in the rewards. After realizing those rewards for several years, I thought that it was a great way to make passive income and I wanted to spread that word and share it with other people. Because syndications are done through private placements. So very few people hear about this concept and even know that this is available. While it's not only it's a way to diversify out of Wall Street. It's also a way to save on taxes through real estate and it's also a way to create residual income and out of this the idea of my company, Samo financial was born and I started my company roughly a year and a half ago where I’ve been spreading the word and helping people to become passive investors and get on the path of creating and building wealth for their families and generations to come.

04:11

Ramesh: So, your target customers are the people who want to invest in real estate through the private equity firm that you own?

04:18

Alina:  Correct, correct. People that either don't have the bandwidth or don't have the desire to do anything actively, but eager to diversify out of Wall Street or into real estate. This is perfect for them. Because again the amount of work is limited to reviewing the offering. Just you know going over the paperwork and that's it. After that the work is done. If they really like the offering, they invest with us and start reaping the rewards through dividends and capital gains and tax savings as well.

04:51

Ramesh: So, you and your company goes and finds the real estate and then vets them and goes through the due diligence. Is that right?

04:59

Alina:  Sure. So real estate is a team sport. We have a lot of partners that we were able to establish over these years, while starting as passive investors and then become an active in the space. So, I work with a lot of experienced partners that have been around real estate for decades and sometimes longer and that run the space and know their asset classes really well. So, we select the partners first, then we select the market and then we select specific deals that we go in and bring our audience into the deals. Only the deals that we personally believe and with my background to former tax accountant and my you know MBA in finance, I feel like I have enough credibility to evaluate the deals and decide whether the deals are good enough for my investors and myself.

05:51

Ramesh: So, you started talking about your personal journey, so let me go there. So, you wanted to diversify. That was the problem you're trying to solve for yourself and that's how you got into it. Did you think about starting your business for a long time and got into it? Are you somehow accidentally got into it because you're trying to solve the problem for yourself?

06:12

Alina:  It's more of the latter. I was trying to solve the problem for myself. But then when I finally solved the problem, I realized the huge potential of real estate and I wanted to spread the word among other people. I really wanted to help other people. It's more or less my moto for those that have my business cards, they know it's actually my business card. I live by the words of the Warren Buffett wrote, which is someone is sitting in the shade today, because someone else planted the tree long time. So that's what I’ve been working on ever since I started my company. Just spreading the word and helping people get into passive investing and reap the rewards of passively investing in real estate.

06:54

Ramesh: So, it's a year-and-a-half journey you said. But you've been working in this area for longer than that. So how was this one, I mean year and a half, 18 months? From get go were you successful or you had, you needed some time to get your feet on the ground? Can you talk about that journey please?

07:13

Alina:  Sure yeah, it’s a lot of effort. It's a 24/7 operation and you know I still work full-time. So, this is in addition to full-time job.

07:25

Ramesh: Oh, is that right?

07:26

Alina:  Yeah and I have a family as well. But you know I'm still, I was and I'm still very very passionate about this topic. I'm very passionate about helping others. I love what I'm doing. I like the investing style and that's what keeps motivating me and pass my why. I think it's absolutely critical for anyone going into any kind of business to know their why. If they know why they are doing the business, that will keep them going no matter what and just like everyone else, you know I had obstacles on way and there are challenges that I need to overcome you know on a regular basis. It's normal part of the business. That's how businesses grow if you are starting out from scratch, which I did. But I don't mind the challenges and the obstacles. I find a way around it and I move forward and like I said real estate is a team sport and I appreciate the help and support of the people that I’ve met throughout my journey ever since I started investing, even passively. I've met a lot of great fantastic people along the way and without that support and help of my family and all these new friends that I acquired, I wouldn't be able to be where I'm at today.

08:41

Ramesh: Actually, you're bringing a very interesting subject. So, you have a job. But many times, the people who want to be entrepreneurs, so they ask me you know how do you find the motivation and drive? So, when you have a job, you have family, so this is on top of all that stuff. So where are you getting the drive from? Why you want to do this?

09:03

Alina:  I'm doing this for my family. I'm a first-generation immigrant and I’ve gone through a lot of challenges when we immigrated to the United States. I was always working while getting both of my degrees, undergraduate and graduate ever since I remember myself. Actually, when I was getting my MBA, I was working full time. I was getting my MBA and I was pregnant with my first child. So, the drive has been there all along. You know I had to kick myself more or less hard to get started. So, I’ve always wanted to start my own company. I just didn't know what it would be and finally after reaping the rewards of being a passive investor in real estate syndications, I realized that this is the business I want to be in and I don't regret you know any minute of it. I completely enjoy what I'm doing. It's phenomenal. I do still get challenges on the way. But like I said without challenges, it wouldn't be as exciting as it is.

10:04

Ramesh: Right. So, I mean definitely your personal Drive comes through very clearly in your conversation. Apart from that other people who helped you become successful? Did you have mentors who either gave you a break or you know helped you continue this drive?

10:25

Alina:  Yeah absolutely. So, number one I have a support of my husband while he's not in the business with me. But he's been supportive of me starting a business all along and you know I give a lot of credit to him and my family overall. Without him I wouldn't be able to be where I'm at today. I did have mentors and close friends that I call mentors and it definitely helped me progress through the challenges and get through them and escalate my business to the level that it's at today. So yeah that definitely was a huge help.

11:05

Ramesh: This industry I don't know if it's some close-knit kind of a community. Because some industries are right. It's difficult to break through. I don’t know if this is or not. But I just want to ask you I mean what kind of barriers did you face. Whether it's gender barrier or other you know kind of things. So, if somebody were to get into this kind of a business what should they be expecting?

11:29

Alina:  Yeah gender barrier was absolutely there. I mean I am in New Jersey close to New York City. So, a lot of the events that been taking place that I go to are in the city and you'll see that the commercial real estate industry is dominated by white middle-aged male and I do not feed that profile at all. So, there have been barriers and even if I go to some local events, I’ve been confused for a realtor and I have to explain every time, no just because I'm a woman I'm not a realtor. You know I do other things that are way beyond being a realtor. The barrier is there. But if you don't pay attention to it, if you just ignore it, it allows you to move forward. It's not something significant in my eyes to concentrate on to pay attention and if you want to succeed in this business. And the minute I started ignoring it completely, it escalated me to the levels beyond. Because at the end of the day you know you need to be dealing with these people that are saying that and just because they said that, it's you know it's an honest mistake. So, it’s totally fine. The minute you do look beyond it, you open up a lot of doors and opportunities for yourself and that's how I look at things. You know I want to have partnerships and joint ventures and I want to grow and expand my business and help a lot more people that I have helped up until this point. And in order to get to that level I need to be open to deal with the folks around me.

13:08

Ramesh: Hey Alina so let me ask you another question about your business. You've been in this business for a year and a half. So are there any numbers that you can share in terms of I don't know a number of apartments, whatever you do in the space.

13:24

Alina:  Absolutely, absolutely. So, at this point we have helped our clients to acquire and invest in multiple asset classes and just to give you a quick background on it, I started investing in commercial real estate by investing in apartment complexes just because multifamily is close to home. I've lived in apartments for a long time, I knew how to evaluate it. I knew what that asset class entail and everything and it's very common for lot of folks to start in the same space. But then gradually I realized that there was a demand of diversifying. Asset classes and after doing additional research, I added two more asset classes to portfolio. Which is storage units, which are also very very conservative by nature and do really well during the recession's and mobile home parks. Again conservative, a lot less expenses, no plumbing expense. And because of the significant slashing expenses do really well in general and do better than other asset classes during the recession. So, at this point for help our clients and our self invest in over 1200 apartment doors in over 500 storage units and we invested in over five million dollars of fund that's focused on mobile home parks.

14:43

Ramesh: Okay so how do you make money in this process?

14:47

Alina:  I make money by working on the Investor Relations side. Being the investor liaison. I help investors understand the process. I help them get acclimated with what it entails. I explain them how the investment works and then once they join us and partner up with us as limited partners, I help them understand what we're doing. Provide the updates to them, offer help and they need help with their self-directed IRA accounts and any questions really about the investment are going through me.

15:23

Ramesh: I see, okay so what are your plans going forward? Like how are you planning to grow your business? Are the growth is sufficient for you to handle that you just want to sustain and maintain?

15:37

Alina:  No, I definitely plan on going. At this point and you know the plans normally change as you grow. At this point I'm planning to grow my private equity practice even further by growing investors base on one end and on the other end, I'm planning to add additional asset classes to our portfolio. Like for instance right now I'm researching the residential assisted living space to potentially add to our investors and our portfolio in the future and bring new partners and bring new experienced operators in. So, investors can diversify even further outside of the markets and we're right now investing nationwide and invest in other markets that we haven't invested in.

16:23

Ramesh: So, one of the questions I keep getting asked is like what kinds of tools do people use in their businesses. So, what are the tools that you use in your business?

16:32

Alina:  Sure, without the tools I wouldn't be where I am at today. One of the critical components for me is my CRM system and I'm using pipe drive. I find that very helpful. It works really well in combination with the email marketing tool, which is MailChimp and that's what I'm using right now. Obviously, Gmail is used to communicate with my investors in general and then there's a whole bunch of things that are used on the real estate side that you know I'm not going to share. But as far as like generic side, generic tools, I would say those are the main components and very very helpful for any sort of business. You definitely need the system and you definitely need an email marketing tool that you use.

17:25

Ramesh: Okay so now I'm a listener. I want to start my own company. So what tips can you offer me? What should I be thinking about in doing?

17:37

Alina:  The first step that I would take is, I will get an attorney and accountant in the room together with you and help you determine who is the best structure from a legal aspect from you know safety perspective and then from a tax perspective and how the two works together. Because those two don't always align and you hear one thing from accountant another thing from attorney. So, I would say speak with both of them together and determine what's the best structure for a company. Set it up, set it up on the federal level, then on the state level to be efficient. Get your website up and running, get your business card and start getting your presence by building your leadership platform by providing value to people and you know not charging for it. But providing value for free, so people can see that you're the authority in the space. You're providing value and they can reach out to you if they have any questions you know to you in the particular space that you're in.

18:42

Ramesh: Great actually that's a very good advice about accountant and lawyer thing. That's very good. The last question. So, looking at your own journey, are there anything that you think you could have done differently if you were starting your entrepreneurial journey today?

19:00

Alina:  Yes, I wish I started a long time ago. I strongly strongly encourage everyone to try out things a lot early in life. You know when maybe you don't have dependencies, or you don't have a family, or you know if you think you know starting something out, even if it's on the side out of your garage or whatever, start that out, give it a try. Because later in life you're going to regret. So always start and when you are starting a business, always always you must have a strong why. Why are you doing it? Why do you want this business? Without a strong why you will not be able to succeed and move forward. Because any business no matter what business you're in, will have obstacles on the way and some are going to be much stronger and much more significant than others and in order to succeed, in order to get up every morning and decide that yes, I want to continue with this business, you need to have a strong way that will help pushing you forward in the right direction.

20:01

Ramesh: Alina thank you very much. Actually, I’ve learnt tons of stuff about this real estate industry and then the kind of operations that you run. Thank you very much for your time.

20:11

Alina:  Ramesh it's my pleasure and thank you so much for inviting me to speak to your audience and to you.

20:17

Ramesh: Great thank you.

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Starting a mindful lifestyle & stress management business with Susan Petang – AEP #8

May 29th, 2019 by

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Guest: ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Susan Petang

​Company / Business name: ​​​​​​ ​​​The Quiet Zone Coaching

Susan Petang is a Certified Mindful Lifestyle & Stress Management Coach. She mentors her clients in techniques to create a mindful lifestyle, not only to manage the stress of daily life, but to find peace and happiness.

Recommended Books & Tools:First book is A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle.Second book is ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck’ by Mark Manson.Third book is ‘Felling Good’ by Dr. Burns.

Show Notes:

1:26 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Personal traumatic experience can be a great motivator for starting a business.

Susan talks about the reasons for starting her business. Her anxiety and depression at work prevented from being successful so she researched and found a method / system that helped her. She wanted to help other people in similar situations. It is not about money for her.

3:27 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Focus on knowing how your customer shops for similar services that you offer.

Susan talks how the first year transition from corporate life to starting a business was tough. In a coaching business, people need to see your face, people need to talk to you and then when they feel comfortable with you, that’s when they’re going to start telling you about things that they wouldn’t tell anybody else.

5:30 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Need to hustle in creative ways to build customer pipeline.

Susan worked in creative ways to build her customer pipeline. She gave lectures in adult education classes, conducted lot of free seminars, and worked with local chamber of commerce.

9:25 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Always start with what you love to do to get into a business.

Susan also started her other businesses like selling crochet products on Amazon because she loved to crochet. She also went into hair salon business because she always loved doing hair. Mindful coaching business is the first where she learnt a skill to get into a business.

12:32 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Keep differentiating your service to find your unique approach.

Susan differentiates her business in 3 ways. First is her empathy for her clients given that Susan faced similar situations as her clients. Second is that she combines a sound science-based approach to a practical approach. Third, her fees are reasonable.

16:321 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Find books that motivate you and keep you inspired.

Susan talks about 3 books that really inspired her. First is A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. Second book is ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck’ by Mark Manson. Third book is ‘Felling Good’ by Dr. Burns.

21:15 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Knowing the customer churn rate in your industry is very important.

Susan talks about how coaching business is different from say salon business for customer pipeline. For example, customers stick for a very long time in salon business. In coaching business, the churn rate is high as customers come only for 3 to 6 months.

21:15 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Do an honest assessment of your skills, knowledge, and personality before you start your business.

Susan gives awesome advice to would-be entrepreneurs. Do a brutal assessment of what you know, what you like to do, and what kind of a person you are. Entrepreneurship is hard. As you keep building business, evaluate the operations for return on investment on a regular basis.

00:00

Ramesh: Hello everyone welcome to the Agile Entrepreneur Podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is about starting and running your own business with purpose, passion, perseverance and possibilities. Today's guest is Susan Petang and she runs a business called the quiet zone coaching. Susan is a certified mindful lifestyle and stress management coach. She mentors her clients in techniques to create a mindful lifestyle, not only to manage the stress of daily life, but to find peace and happiness. Welcome Susan.

00:46

Susan: Thank you for having me.

00:48

Ramesh: Thank you. Nowadays looks like the mindful lifestyle is a rage. Everywhere I see I read a lot of articles about mindful lifestyle. So, when did you actually start your business?

01:03

Susan: I started my business about two years ago. But mindful lifestyles have been around for thousands of years. It's not something new.

01:10

Ramesh: That is true. But I think it's you know it seems like an it's a lot of you know publicity or PR around it. So why did you decide to start this business I started the business?

01:26

Susan: I started the business because I solved one of my own problems and I wanted to share it with other people. I was a sales manager, a corporate trainer, you know all corporate life. But the anxiety and depression that I suffer from foiled my success despite the talent that I had. It made it impossible for me to function. I tried therapy and medication which weren't completely effective and finally I just did a lot of research into anxiety and depression, what causes them, what can you do about them. I learned about mindful living, mindful lifestyles and I created a program around it and I decided that you know it would be a really good idea to share this with other people and I could make a living while I was doing it. So, it wasn't just something that I did to make money. It was something that I did to help other people.

02:25

Ramesh: That's interesting. So, did you have a prior business background before you decided to get into this business?

02:31

Susan: Absolutely yes. I still do own a hair salon. I've been a licensed hairdresser for many years. After I dropped out from the corporate world because I couldn't take the stress and anxiety, I decided to do something creative and I found out that that was just as stressful, and you know drove just as much anxiety as the corporate world did.

02:54

Ramesh: That's right okay. So, good you decided to start this mindful lifestyle and the coaching business. So, I just want to discuss a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey. So how long did it take for you to actually establish your business and get your first customer?

03:13

Susan: About a year.

03:15

Ramesh: Okay so how was that one-year journey? Because the listeners are really interested in learning about starting a business and then being successful with it. So, can you talk a little bit about your first-year journey please.

03:29

Susan: Oh absolutely. After I had created this program that worked for me, I decided I had to put it into a marketable form. Now I have a very strong business background. So, I was okay with things like bookkeeping and sales and you know how do I do all this stuff. I had a business background. When I'm coaching my clients frequently I get people who want to start their own business. And when I do coach them I tell them look you know first of all you have to acknowledge the fact that they are going to be skills that you don't have okay. No matter what they are depending on what your background is and you're going to have to either pay somebody else to do them or you're going to have to learn them. Okay so that first year was, it was very difficult because I knew what worked for a service business in terms of sales and Marketing. So that wasn't a problem. But when you're talking about something like coaching, people are telling you their deepest darkest secrets. It's almost like finding a therapist. So, it didn't work when I tried to advertise things that would traditionally get me clients. You know if I was doing hair. So, what I had to do was I kind of had to go back to my corporate days and say okay it's time to put your feet on the street, you need to network. People need to see your face, people need to talk to you and then when they feel comfortable with you, that's when they're going to start telling you about things that they wouldn't tell anybody else.

05:13

Ramesh: That's very interesting. So, one of the things that I keep hearing in my discussions with other entrepreneurs or people who want to be entrepreneurs is how do you keep getting the customers. Like what are the things that you do to get your customer pipeline going?

05:30

Susan: Well one of the first things that I do is I get my name out there. I do, I work with Help A Reporter and I answer questions that journalists are looking to have an expert answer to. Another thing that I do is I run Adult Ed classes and I get a lot of coaching students from my Adult Ed classes and also groups. They want to continue after the class is done. Another thing I did was I hooked up with a local Chamber of Commerce. I do you know some work with them. You just have to get out there. I do a lot of free seminars and webinars for businesses. So sometimes you have to give a little something away before you get the return on it.

06:20

Ramesh: Fantastic. So now let's step back a little bit and talk about Susan. Susan's personal journey. So, can you talk about your journey that led you, we talked about your hair salon business. But in generally or what kinds of a person are you? How did you end up becoming entrepreneur?

06:40

Susan: Oh well after my experiences with the corporate world, I'm very much a type-a personality. I am very solution oriented and goal driven. So, I would get into these corporations and they would say okay well this is what we're going to do, and I would look at that and say you people are out of your minds, that's not going to work. You know so I had to get out of that corporate environment to become self-employed. So that I could do what I knew was the right thing to do in my heart. You know there are certain ways when it came to, let's say the hair business. You know I treat my clients a certain way, I don't double-book myself. I only use the highest quality products, that kind of thing. So, I want to make sure that my formula for business has always been to offer a very good or outstanding service to my customers at a reasonable price, not too low, not too high and I make a reasonable profit. I will probably never get rich, I will never have a chain of salons. Because I'm very customer focused and that's okay. Because I make what I need, and I think a lot of times people when they're entrepreneurs, rather than do it because of their personality type or they're just looking to make a lot of money. Because why should my boss makes a lot of money. I know to me it's not about the money. The money is kind of a side effect.

08:18

Ramesh: Money will come.

08:20

Susan: Money will come, right. If you do the right thing and treat other people the way that you want to be treated, the money will come.

08:27

Ramesh: So, was the hair saloon the first business or what was your first business?

08:31

Susan: That was my first business. I have had a few little cottage industries that I’ve done over the years, which I still do. I still have an Amazon store where I sell handmade items. Because that's my hobby and after a while I mean how many pieces of artwork and how many quilts and how many crafty things can you put in your house it starts to overflow.

08:58

Ramesh: Correct.

08:59

Susan: So, I put them up on the website, if they sell they sell, that's great. You know if they don't well that's okay, they will eventually. That's more fulfillment of a hobby. But if I wanted to me could definitely you know push that and promote it the same way I did with the coaching.

09:15

Ramesh: Wow so you have a pretty diverse talent here Susan. So, I'm just trying to look at it like how did you get into the Amazon store as an example.

09:25

Susan: I love to crochet. Crocheting is something that I do to relieve stress, a rhythmic activity. That's something that's very important. But I mean how many Afghans, baby blankets and other things can you have? My dogs probably have about seven blankets and it's great. You know it's like what am I going to do with all this stuff? I don't know, my kids all have Afghans everywhere. So, I said you know what why shouldn't I make a little money off this. You know put them up on Amazon handmade and the next thing you know I was selling Afghans.

09:59

Ramesh: Fantastic. So, the mindful lifestyle business you got into based on a personal experience and then the Amazon store, because the skill and talent that you have. How did you get into the hair salon business?

10:14

Susan: That was one of those corporate drops out things. I was always fascinated by hair, even when I was a kid. I was the one who had all the girls in my bathroom with the scissors and my mother would be yelling through the door, does her mother know what you're doing. Yeah, so I went into sales you know I just kind of fell into it and then I ended up as a sales manager and then I ended up as a sales trainer. Worked for several large corporations. I worked for a very large corporation mentoring their call center reps on how to upsell and it just the, it was just too much. You know the pressure was extreme you know as good as your last sale. I was very good at it. But my anxiety and depression got in the way and my daughter said to me was I had taken a maternity leave and my daughter said to me before I went back you, know why are you going back to that? You know you love to cut hair, you cut everybody's hair in the neighborhood. Why don't you just get your license and do that?

11:20

Ramesh: So, based on your experience is that one of the advice that you would give to other people looking to start a business is start from what you know, start from what your passion is and what you're good at. Is that one of the themes that I'm seeing in your experience?

11:37

Susan: Absolutely you should, I counsel my clients when they're looking to open their own business. We go through step by step what do you do now, what do you love about it, what do you hate about it. What do you do that you get lost it when you're doing it and what can you do to parlay that into a business? You've probably heard that old saying that if you love your work you never work a day in your life and that's it. You know I encourage my clients to attempt to find something that not only fulfills their needs, but fulfills a need for other people too and helps other people too. Because that's great. That's a hugely gratifying experience.

12:17

Ramesh: Excellent so that leads me to my next question. So, what is your unique selling proposition or unique value proposition? What is Susan Petang, how does she differentiate from other let's say a mindful lifestyle coaches?

12:32

Susan: Well first of all I understand what people's feelings and situations have been. You know not everybody who comes to me has the same background with anxiety and depression. But if I can survive that, I can certainly help other people get through their day-to-day stress. So, my empathy for their situation is number one. Number two, I combined what's called mindfulness based stress reduction with cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy. So, I took a little bit out of living a mindful lifestyle and stress management and I put it together with sound science. So, it's not a woo woo thing. I'm not sitting in a lotus position dangling crystal over my head every day. This is all the concepts of neuroplasticity I use. That's usually of the brain to rewire itself, it's all based in science. The other thing is I keep my fees reasonable. Which is something that definitely sets me apart from other coaches. I've been criticized roundly for not setting my prices higher. My feeling is that you know my mission statement is teaching a better way of life that changes the world one person at a time. And if I'm charging a small fortune, the people who need it the most can't get the help.

14:04

Ramesh: That's very interesting. So basically, you're delivering more than expected value for what they're paying.

14:13

Susan: Yes, exactly and it goes right along with my business philosophy that I’ve had for the last 35 years which is charge a reasonable price for good service or an outstanding service and I make a profit you know I have to live too. But how much do I really need? You know I’m not looking to go out and buy a Mercedes tomorrow. I'm fine with everything, I'm very happy and grateful for what I already have. Which is part of living mindfully.

14:43

Ramesh: Right. So, one of the other things that people keep talking about is a motivation or inspiration. How do people you know get motivated and get inspired? So how did you get your motivation? Who motivated you, who inspired you to do the things that you're doing?

15:02

Susan: My therapist was key. You know I said to him one day I said I'd love to become a life coach. But you know can I really do that? Yes of course you can. Are you out of your mind? Look at what you become you know. So, he was very encouraging. My partner was very encouraging you know he said look you do what you need to do. You know, and I started this on a shoestring, but he would still, let me you know I’ll front you a little bit of money, so you can buy some brochures and you know stuff like that. Well but when it comes to inspiration and motivation, most of it comes from me. I'm very excited about what I do, I love what I do. Just watching, if I won the lottery tomorrow I would do it for free. It's something that is very enjoyable to me and I get very excited. You know whenever I come up with a new marketing idea or you know I do some reading about a psychological concept and I'm going to apply it to how I work with clients, I get very excited about that. I don't need anybody to help me with that.

16:08

Ramesh: So, are there any books while you're talking about reading any books that you like a lot, or you want to recommend to the listeners?

16:18

Susan: You mean as far as business is concerned.

16:21

Ramesh: It's a combination of a business or it could be a mindful lifestyle you know it could be any of those areas.

16:28

Susan: Okay yeah there are a couple of books. A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, that's a fantastic book. There's another one that Mark Manson wrote that's really funny and I can't remember the title of it now. It's called ‘The subtle art of not giving a Fuck’. It's very funny. The guy is very smart. There's another one called Feeling Good by Dr. Burns right. He was one of the key proponents for cognitive behavioral therapy back in the day. So, anybody who suffers from anxiety or depression or just wants to learn about it, that's an awesome book anybody can use those techniques.

17:14

Ramesh: Excellent. So, let me segue a little bit into running the business. So, we talked about starting your business and how do you get inspired and motivated and some of your background. So, as you're running a business what strategies, what techniques do you use in making sure that the business runs smoothly? I think to some extent you talked about getting the customers by doing what you're doing. Like the workshops and networking events. But from the business perspective they either like the operations, like other things.

17:58

Susan: Well I do take credit cards. So that's very helpful. Because the program that I use to accept credit cards on my phone with the little thing that sticks in, automatically you know all the receipts go right into a bookkeeping program.

18:13

Ramesh: That's a square I think.

18:15

Susan: Yeah, I use Square for payment. You know I'm sure that all of those products that can ease bookkeeping for people who don't know how to bookkeep, I do it. I always keep up. I do a lot of it by hand. My dad was an accountant. So, I have some background in that. But every week I sit down, and I keep my expenses up and you know do my journal entries and all that good stuff. So then when I go to the accountant it's all there. You know the bank statements get printed out every month. I am trying to think what else.

18:58

Ramesh: So, you talked about the marketing, you talked about promotions. I mean do you do, do you rely on a lot of online marketing or marketing through your website to build your business?

19:12

Susan: I have tried that tremendously and you know what? I found that social media marketing and advertising, they will get you some attention. I found my return on investment is very poor. Doesn't work, at least in my business. You know if you're selling widgets well that might be different. You know you get somebody you have a website up there. If you can draw them into the website to buy your widgets, okay. I'm selling a service. So, service-oriented businesses, you have to get your face out there. You have to put your feet on street. So, I'm going to of Commerce meetings so that I can network. There's an organization here on Long Island called simply referrals. They have a different chapter in most of the towns on Long Island and you go there and you talk to other business owners, exchange whatever propaganda that you happen to bring revolving around your business. I have gotten a lot of business seminars that way and usually as soon as I can get my face in front of an audience, then I'm good. Okay that's you know I can usually either start a group from that as a basis of you know as jump point for individual client coaching. But I haven't found, I haven't found that the return on investment is very good with online marketing and social media marketing other than it does bring up your brand awareness.

20:42

Ramesh: I see okay. So, in that same fashion, so what do the challenges do you face currently in building your business apart from the social media marketing?

20:53

Susan: Oh, it's always getting new clients. Because a coaching relationship it's different from here. Like when I get a client I'm good at what I do, so when I get a hair client, they’re usually with me for years. The same does not apply to a coaching relationship. So, I am constantly constantly marketing.

21:13

Ramesh: That is interesting.

21:15

Susan: Yes, a coaching relationship only lasts for three to six months. Occasionally I’ll have somebody come back for a tune-up. Every once in a while, I get a little disappointed. Like I had this one college student and she really wasn't stressed out, she just needed to learn some organizational skills. So, after two or three sessions she was done you know and I was like, oh well you know I was kind of counting on this. But you are constantly constantly looking for new clients in this business.

21:45

Ramesh: I see keeping the funnel going okay. So, and then looking back at your experience, whether it's a hair salon business or the Amazon store business or even this one. What are the things that you think you could have done differently, this is more for a learning for listeners? Like things that you could have done differently to either start the business quickly or run the business in a different manner.

22:16

Susan: Well I wasted a lot of time playing around with SEO. You know search engine optimization and advertising. It wasn't fine okay. I hadn't built my brand, I hadn't gotten enough content out there and again this is going to be unique to each different business. But I do feel like I should have put my face out there a lot sooner. I could have promoted a lot earlier than I did.

22:47

Ramesh: So, Susan as we come towards the end of the podcast, so what tips can you offer to people, two kinds of people. One is people who want to start the business number one and then secondly people who started the business, but they want to take it to the next level?

23:06

Susan: Well when people want to take their business to the next level, start with yeah second one first. Really just keep going on. You have to constantly re-evaluate the return on investment and the success that you're getting from all of your operations. You know you really have to assess and be brutal. So, you know what Facebook free and you know all this other stuff. But if it's not bringing you in any attention, you're not getting followers, cut it back okay. I'm not saying abandon it, cut it back. Put time and attention as well as your money into the things that do give you and you have to evaluate this on a regular basis. You have to keep your finger on the pulse of that. When it comes to people who are wanting to start their own business, I actually go through a whole checklist with people. You have to first decide what kind of businesses you're going to do and as we were talking before, we were talking about this before. You want to do something that doesn't feel like work. What do you lose yourself in? How can you turn that into a product or a service that will benefit other people and that they are going to want to buy? And you also have to do a brutally honest assessment of your drive, okay. Are you willing to sit down and do all this work? Because you're not going to be able to quit your job right away, okay. You're going to have to work your job and work at this at the same time until that becomes big enough that you can leave your job. Are you willing to put that effort and time and money into it? How much money do you have to invest? How much time do you have to invest? Are you the kind of person who would rather sit back and watch TV at night or are you going to be like totally focused on driving more business to your startup come on and you also have to do a brutally honest assessment of your business skill set. Do you have sales and marketing skills? Do you know about manufacturing? Do you know about bookkeeping? Do you know about SEO and things like that? I just happen to have family members who are all about that and I can go to them and ask for help. So, you have to evaluate very honestly what your skillset is, are you willing to learn what you need to learn or are you willing to pay somebody with that skill set to do those tests for you.

25:39

Ramesh: Excellent advice Susan, excellent. I think assessment of the skills, assessment of the inventory of personal skills inventory of the resources that you can rely on to build it and then being brutally honest with all the assessment and then constantly looking at the ROI, return on investment of each of the efforts that you're putting into building the business. Very very good advice. Susan thank you very much for your time today. Best of luck with the quiet zone coaching. The www.quietzonecoaching.com. Thank you very much.

26:14

Susan: Thank you

 

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How Can You Be A Serial Entrepreneur in the Online Business with Marc Andre – AEP #7

May 29th, 2019 by

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Guest: ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Marc Andre

Marc has been a full-time online entrepreneur since 2008. He’s built websites and blogs in a few different industries including web design, photography, travel, and personal finance. He’s sold several of those past projects and currently his main focus is the finance blog, VitalDollar.com.

Show Notes:

1:14 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Entrepreneurs must address the ‘Why’ very clearly to get started.

Mark talks about the reasons for quitting his auditor job and starting his own website building business. Primary reasons are lack of opportunities for growth in his job and dwindling group. The side hustle he was engaged in started taking off so he quit his job.

4:55 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Given that entrepreneurial journey is a long and hard task, it is important to get family support.

Mark talks about the support he received from his wife when he actually decided to quit. Given that there will be loss of income initially and long hours, he is grateful for the support he received. 

6:30 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Managing transitions is very important and retrospection is important to ensure continued success.

Mark had an interesting story about how he managed to replace his salary with his side gig from day one and that eased his transition. After selling couple of his businesses, he thought about transition primarily because of burnout but finally decided to start another venture and continue the same path.

8:59 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Time management is extremely critical for entrepreneurs and a To-Do list may be the most productive technique.

Mark shares his techniques for managing time. His primary go-to method is a To-do list that he maintains on a daily basis and checks off the items. Additionally, he also maintains a big picture yearly goals list as well. He uses Google docs and a notebook for his lists and goals.

12:00 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Be proactive about outsourcing and plan for transition with freelancers.

Mark shares his outsourcing techniques. He uses freelancers for content, graphics etc. and his experience is that even though he finds good freelancers, after some time they move on. So he needs to be proactive. Also, he tried many tools for managing other parts of his business (like accounting) but always went back to simple tools.

16:52 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Be very clear about your target customers.

Mark is very clear about his target customers. For example, his target customers for his latest venture vitaldollar.com are people like him ten years ago. He leveraged his personal experiences to identify the target customers.

20:00 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Find what you like to do. Assess what you are good at. And see if you can make money with what you like and what you are good at.

Mark gives 3 pieces of advice to would be entrepreneurs. First, find out what you like to do. Second, find out what you are good at. Lastly, for the things that match between what you like and what you are good at, research if there is a market for it and you can monetize it.

22:42 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Specialize in a competitive industry to find your niche to grow.

Mark tells us not to be afraid of competition. Competition means opportunities. The way to approach competitive area is to specialize in your area. Example is, for a photography blog, specialize in wildlife photography, travel photography etc.

27:42 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Just start doing it instead of worrying about starting a perfect business. You can always tweak the business.

Mark tells us not to worry about starting the perfect business or doing things exactly right from the start. You’ll learn a lot more from doing than you will just from like sitting on the sidelines. One thing he said he could have done better is outsource more so he can focus on really important things.

00:01

Ramesh: Hello everyone welcome to the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is about starting and running your own business with purpose, passion, perseverance and possibilities. Today we have a guest who has been his own boss since 2008. Marc has been a full-time online entrepreneur since 2008. Marc Andre has built websites and blogs in a few different industries including web design, photography, travel and personal finance. Marc has sold several of those past projects and currently Marc's main focus is a financial blog www.vitaldollar.com. Marc Andre for you. Hi Marc welcome to the podcast.

00:56

Marc: Hey Ramesh thanks for having me.

00:58

Ramesh: So, awesome. So, you've been at it since 2008. So, my first question is: Prior to 2008 you were a full-time Auditor and then you left your job and decided to take a plunge. Why?

01:14

Marc: Really it was the biggest motivation was just a frustration of a lack of opportunities in my job. So, I had been, I’ve been in that job as an auditor for between three to four years and I’ve been in a few other positions and other finance related companies before that. And really you know just throughout my 20s after college I was just kind of frustrated. I didn't really feel like I was in jobs where I had a chance to grow. The job as an auditor was okay. But I didn't really want to continue to be in the same position forever and I was on a very small team when I left. It was just my boss and myself and, so I really had basically you know no opportunities for growth and it was just frustrating, because I'm not the type of person that likes to just stay in one job forever. Like to at least have a hope of you know of something better you know something for the future. And so originally my business star as a side hustle and I was working on websites and you know it kind of started to take off. So, it was just you know I saw more opportunities to grow my own business and to get what I wanted out of my own business rather than my job.

02:31

Ramesh: Okay so but when you left your job and I'm sure you thought of other possibilities. Either started joining another company and things like that. So, I mean why online business? How did you get into it? Like somebody inspired you? Somebody coached you? How did you, can you talk about the process of how you got into the online business?

02:54

Marc: Sure, so it really started several years before that. My last year of college back in 2002, I took a course. It was just a single course on web design and it was really basic. It was one semester long. By the end of semester, we could know enough HTML to basically put up a very basic website and that was about it. But I really enjoyed it, it got me excited and my major was in business. So, I think I kind of saw the potential of like you know using that skill along with my interest in business. You know if I had the ability to create my own website and this was back before like WordPress and all these you know platforms where you could create your own website very easily. This is before they were really around or very popular. So back then if you wanted a website you had to hire somebody. So, you know I saw the possibilities of if I didn't need to hire somebody, if I could do it myself it would be a pretty cool opportunity to use that you know to be able to start a business. So that kind of got me interested and I continued to learn more about web design and online marketing and stuff. But it was very slow. You know I would follow tutorials and read books and stuff over the next couple of years, an experiment. But I never really started anything. It was just kind of messing around and then it wasn't until like 2006 I kind of took my first client for designing websites. Which was family members and then 2007 was when I really decided, and you know to take it seriously and when I actually started my business.

04:37

Ramesh: So how was the plan? How was your family support? Because one of the things that the entrepreneurs or would-be entrepreneurs talk about is sometimes is the lack of family support or full family support. But how was your situation? Can you talk about it a little bit?

04:55

Marc: So, I was married in 2006. Like my first year of marriage that I started my business and my wife, we didn't have any kids at the time. She was very supportive. I think she knew I was frustrated with my job and you know she saw that this was something that I was interested in and she was very supportive. It meant you know I was working on my business part-time. So, it was a lot of evenings and weekends and stuff. So, he had less time the two of us together. She had to make a lot of sacrifices as well. But she was yes, she was extremely supportive. I really didn't, I don't think I talked about it too much with other family like with my parents or anyone else. So, it's really just between the two of us. But she was a big help and then also not even just with getting started, but a year and a half later when we got to the point where I quit my job obviously that impacted her a lot too. Because we were dropping my income and you know if something would have happened to my business and we are totally flopped, we would have been living on her income. She was working too at the time. So, she was definitely very supportive both at the beginning and then also when we got to that point of deciding for me to leave my job.

06:10

Ramesh: It’s great. So, you started your job in 2008 and then you've been at it for the last ten plus years. So, then what did any like times you thought to yourself why did I do this and why am I doing this? Were there down times?

06:30

Marc: Not really. So initially it started very quickly. Like part of it was because we took the year and a half for me to build up my business before leaving my full-time job. So, I was able to replace the income from my full-time job right from the first month that I was working in my own business full-time. So, I really didn't have any regrets you know things went well. About two years ago after selling a business, my wife and I had been selling on Amazon and we had a business selling on Amazon and we actually sold that business and after that I was kind of going through a transition. You know just trying to figure out what it was I wanted to do with my time and stuff. And I did have some thoughts then about maybe transitioning into something else. Whether it would be you know going back to a job as a full-time employee. But I think a lot of it was just kind of maybe burnout going through you know some different online businesses and stuff and I was kind of just at a transition point. So ultimately, I decided at least for now I'm just going to keep you know keep going forward with my own business and not really look for a transition. But I think that was probably the only time where I really had a real what you could call it downtime I guess, and it was more you know just mental and emotional burnout I think.

07:56

Ramesh: I don't know if you want to talk about it. But what helped you come through that? How did you get over that?

08:07

Marc: Part of it was just talking to my wife and you know and getting her support and making sure we are on the same page. Part of it was my mom was a big help too. I talk to her. She was an encouragement and part of it was just you know giving it time to weigh through the options and stuff and try to decide what's best for our family.

08:31

Ramesh: So now let's talk a little bit about running the business. So, when you and I connected through some emails about challenges faced by entrepreneurs, one thing that we particularly mentioned is time management. I mean as entrepreneurs we all face the challenges of time management. Thousand things to do, only so much time. So how did you manage your time? What are the tips that you can share with the listeners that helped you manage your time.

08:59

Marc: The biggest thing I do is, I use it to do lists to keep track of you know what's important. When I first started I didn't. I didn't have a to do list. I just worked you know on what I thought I needed to do and before too long I realized that I was wasting too much time. I was working on things that weren't critical. You know just not using my time in the best way. So, I learned pretty quickly that I needed a to do list. So, my process is I have a weekly to-do list and I create that at the end of the week, each week like for the following week. So, like today as we're talking, it's a Friday. So probably this afternoon I’ll sit down and create my to-do list for next week and then I also break it down by each day. So, I’ll you know create a list of things to do on Monday and then at the end of Monday, I’ll create a list of things. You know I’ll pull things off of my week list and assign them to Tuesday and you know I just do that until. Usually I don't get everything done for my weekly to-do list, every single week. Occasionally I do get everything done. But usually I don't. But that helps me at least to stay focused and I have a list of you know I don't wind up doing something that doesn't really matter and forget about like the most important things. So really, it's just about for me it's about keeping that list and keep me focused. So as soon as I'm done with one thing I can go back to the list and say okay what do I need to do next and I don't waste time in between. But I also have, like bigger picture I have a document on my computer that kind of lists like you know my overall goals that I want like the Year like what I want to get done by you know certain months or you know milestones throughout the year, that I want to hit. And I kind of use those to work backwards when I create my to-do lists. Like if I'm saying, okay I want to get a product launched by the end of June. What do I need to do each week to make that happen? So, I kind of use these over arch goals or milestones that I want to hit and work backwards to keep me on pace to try.

11:16

Ramesh: So, for these lists and then this gold writing, do you use good old notebook, or do you use any tools?

11:25

Marc: I just use Google Docs. It's just a simple you know simple document that I just type in what I want you to know. What my goals are, when I want to hit them and then I actually keep my to-do list, it's actually on paper at my desk. I just take a piece of paper each week and write out the things and cross them off as I'm done.

11:49

Ramesh: That’s great. So, the second part of running a business is either employees, a lack of employees or outsourcing a lot of the tasks. So, what is your approach to running and managing your business?

12:00

Marc: I’ve never had an employee, it's always just been me. I have used a lot of freelancers over the years for different things. I use freelancers for writing. Like for writing blog content and I use freelancers for design, development, my web development. I have used freelancers at times depending on in the past I’ve had a few websites where I sold digital products. So, I would hire freelancers for creating some of those products. Some of the stuff I created myself. But some of it was things I outsource to other people. So, I definitely use freelancers a good bit. Not as much as some people I guess. But you know my process is basically I just try to find somebody that is reliable, and you know that does a good job at a reasonable price and use them for as long as I can. I think I’ve found that with most freelancers are probably not going to be available forever. They'll move on to something else or they'll get a full-time job, or their rates will change, or you know especially the good ones either their rates are going to increase significantly over time or they're going to, I’ve had some like designers that I hired that eventually stopped doing freelance design. Because they wound up creating their own products and selling. So, you know especially the good freelancers usually wind up at some point will probably move on to something. So, try to work with them as long as they can and accept the fact that you're probably only going to be working with them for a limited time and then they'll move on. But I used a few different ways of finding people. I have used Upwork. I use Upwork at times for finding freelancers. I've also used more, I don't know if you call it cold emails I guess. Like so for writers sometimes I’ll just find someone that is writing for other blogs on the same topics that I want to hire a writer for and someone that I think they do a good job and just reach out to them and say, I am looking for writers. If you're interested in other work. Where I'm kind of ham picking people rather than just like putting a job listing up on Upwork and people responding to it. Yeah both methods have worked pretty well. Just depends on the project which way I’ll approach it.

14:33

Ramesh: Okay so I mean what are the other tools that you might be using in running your business. Look at the accounting or any other tools that are vital for your business?

14:46

Marc: I mean to be honest I don't use a whole lot. Because I found, I’ve tried allotting of stuff over the years. But I found that a lot of times those things just make it more complicated for me. So, I run pretty simple, I actually keep all of my financial records in spreadsheets. I talk to my accountant years ago like when I first started working with him. I was like do I need to use quick book and he said, no you know for one-man operation what you're doing you're fine. If you just, you know just spreadsheets and so I do it that way. It works for me. For me it's quicker. You know I don't have to go learning curve of getting familiar with some other accounting software or something. I do use a tool for invoicing. I used this site called Ronin and there's a lot of different you know similar invoicing apps that you can use. But I use that for sending and managing invoices. Although sometimes depending on the client, if I'm doing freelance work sometimes I will just invoice straight from PayPal. It kind of depends on the client. If they pay by PayPal, I usually just use the PayPal invoice.

15:52

Ramesh: It’s great. So, you're just following to keep it simple rule.

15:58

Marc: Yeah like I said I’ve tried a ton of different apps and things over the years and I think about the problem with me for a lot of them is, it's usually like some aspect of my business that I’ll spend a very small amount of time on. So, I don't use it enough to really like get familiar with it and really know it that well. So, I tend to just try to take a more minimal approach and use fewer apps and tools and stuff.

16:27

Ramesh: So, the other thing about business is identifying who your ideal customers are, who you are targeting your business towards and what are the problems that you're trying to solve for them. So, let's talk about your www.vitaldollar.com Marc. So, who are your ideal customers? Who are the people who are targeting your financial blog towards and what problems are you trying to solve for them?

16:52

Marc: So really my target audience is basically people who are in a similar situation to what I was in about ten years ago before I started my business, around the time I'm starting my business. So, I was frustrated with finances. I was feeling like I wasn't getting ahead. I wanted to make more money. I wanted to be able to save more money and so really that's the target audience that I have is people who want to improve their financial lives. Whether it be through saving or making more money and yeah so, it's really basically just me back like 10 to 12 years ago.

17:29

Ramesh: Okay great. So, we talked about how you started the business and how you're running your business. Let's talk a little bit about your motivations. You know let's talk about people who inspired you, motivated you or who continued to inspire you and motivate in your life.

17:48

Marc: Yeah to be honest I'm not really sure that there's really a particular person that motivated me or inspired me to start a business. And like I said earlier it was really just out of a frustration of not getting what I wanted at my job. At this point I would definitely say my main motivation is my family. So, when I started I said my wife and I had just gotten married, we had no kids. At this point we do have two kids. We have a six-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son. So, my wife and my kids are definitely my main motivation and that's what you know what keeps me going and motivates me to do better on daily basis and so...

18:34

Ramesh: So different people you know get motivated by different things like books or movies and things like that. So how about you? How do you find your motivation?

18:45

Marc: You know I really just find motivation based on my day and like what I want to do with my time, how I want to use my time and how I want to provide for my family. So, I really enjoy what I do because I'm able to work from home. I'm able to work on my own. I am able to choose the projects that I work on and that's my motivation is you know being able to continue that lifestyle and that type of work. If I had to go back to a job, that would be okay. I would in some ways thereafter you know being self-employed and working for ten years, there are some things that would be nice about going back to a job, if it was the right type of job. But for the most part I really enjoy what I do and so my motivation is to be able to continue to do that and continue to provide for my family. I don't think I really have too much outside motivation in terms of like books or movies or anything like that.

19:42

Ramesh: It’s great. So, let's say I am your target audience. I want to start a business. So, tell me how you will go about. I mean what are the things that I should be looking at thinking about to start my own business.

20:00

Marc: Well obviously there's a lot of different types of business you could start. For me online business has been great and that's you know that's where my experience is. So that's what I can provide a little bit more guidance on. But my recommendation would be to start to think about the things that interest you. The things that you enjoy spending your time on. I don't think it's a hundred percent necessary or a requirement for you to quote follow your passion. You know with your business I think you could definitely start a business on something that really doesn't interest you, just because it's a good way to make money and would be fine. But I know for me personally I found that I have a lot more patience and motivation working on things that I enjoy, and I think it's a little bit more important if you have a full-time job and you're going to be running your own business on the side. I think you know it takes a lot of discipline to just start a business after working 40 hours a week. I had a full-time job and there are times when you come home and you're feeling like I just don't really feel like doing anything else and if your business involves stuff that does interest you, I know at least for me personally it's a lot harder to push yourself and to motivate yourself to do it. I've started websites on topics in the past that really don't interest me, and they never really go anywhere. Because I wind up not putting as much time into them. So, my advice would be to think about the things that interest you and what you would like to spend your time doing and how you can turn that into a business. There are a lot of different ways. It could be a service. I think service related businesses are a really great opportunity or it could be an online business like a blog or selling digital products or even like a YouTube channel or a podcast or something. So, I really think it's just you know finding the right one.

22:03

Ramesh: So, you talk about four things if I could summarize. One is a personal interest, the second one is the skills that you have, the third one is the discipline that you talked about and then the fourth one I think three experiences of being organized. So those are the four seems to be critical attributes that you're looking for, I mean you're advising people to focus on.

22:23

Marc: Yeah, I think that's a good summary.

22:25

Ramesh: So, a little bit about this online business. There seems to be so much competition out there, a lot of people trying to do it. I mean do you still think there are a lot of opportunities to make money in this online business blogging and these areas?

22:42

Marc: Yeah definitely. You're right there's a lot of competition. My blog would be classified as a personal finance blog and there are literally thousands of personal finance blogs. So, there's definitely a lot of competition/ but there are opportunities too. There are you know people who are just getting started and doing well within the first year or two. Most of my experience in fact almost all of my experience, all of my success really has been with sites that are in more competitive industries. So, my first blog, my first blog was a web design blog. You know a very popular topic, there's a good bit of competition there. From that I went on to photography and again that's you know a very popular topic. There's a lot of existing websites and stuff on photography and now in personal finance. So, my experience really is in the, you know the more popular industries where there is a lot of competition. But the opposite side of there being a lot of competition is there's also a lot of opportunities. There's a huge potential audience out there if you can reach them. If you can you know offer them something that other blogs in your industry don't. If you can stand out somehow. There's also a lot of opportunities related to products. It's like a digital product or in some cases it could be a physical product. My experience mostly is with digital products and also with services too and even with advertisers and affiliate programs and sponsorships and stuff. So, I wouldn't necessarily encourage someone to shy away from competitive industries because there's a lot of competition. Because there is plenty of opportunity to make up for that competition. But what I would encourage people to do and to be honest what I wish I would have done when I started vital dollar a little over a year ago is that I think it's a good idea to specialize a little bit. So, my blog is kind of a general personal finance blog that covers a lot of different topics related to finance, making money, saving money, managing money. If I were to start it today, to be honest I would probably just focus on making money to kind of make it a little bit more specialized and so that's kind of what I would recommend to people is rather than just starting a photography blog, you know start a blog on a particular aspect of photography. Whether it be like wildlife photography or wedding photography or some specific aspect and the same thing as, you know if you're doing a travel blog rather than just being a general travel blog. Think about how you can differentiate yourself and how you can stand out a little bit, make yourself a little bit more unique. So that you're not directly competing with all these other blogs on the same general topic.

25:30

Ramesh: Great, so basically, you're talking about what's called the finding the niche area. So, niching down to the area. Okay so find competitive industries, don't shy away from competition. But find a niche in those industries so you could specialize and differentiate yourself.

25:49

Marc: Yeah exactly.

25:50

Ramesh: That’s great. So, I think you just started alluding to things that you could have done differently. Along those lines what are the things overall not just as the www.vitaldollar.com, but things that you think you could have done differently just to bring more agility into the entrepreneurial business with start quickly, do things quickly and the overall like anything that you could share where you could have done things differently?

26:19

Marc: I probably wouldn't do a whole lot differently. But there are a few things I think I definitely could have done a better job of outsourcing more over the years. Most of my work has been with blogs and I have outsourced some of the writing to freelance writers. But I’ve also done a lot of it myself. Done majority of it myself and I probably could have, definitely could have outsourced more and you know used my time for other like bigger picture things. Working on products, working on promoting blogs a little bit more. So, I think I probably could have done a better job with that. That's probably the biggest thing is and that kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier with my biggest challenge is time management. So, you know I could have done a better job managing my time, freeing up by hiring people to do a little bit more of the work rather than just trying to do so much of it myself.

27:16

Ramesh: It’s great Marc. As we start down this podcast, any last-minute thoughts or things that you could share with the listeners?

27:26

Marc: I think I would just encourage people with, if you're in a similar situation to what I was in where you know you're looking for something different and you're not really sure, I would encourage people just to get started to find like we were talking about just a minute ago. Find something that interests you and get started. You don't have to worry about you know starting the perfect business or doing things exactly right from the start. One of the nice things about online business is, it doesn't take a whole lot of time and money to get started. Especially with like a blog or something. You know you can get started and kind of learn on the go and your first attempt, it may not be successful, it may not be great. But you'll learn a lot more from doing than you will just from like sitting on the sidelines. So, if people are interested I would encourage them to get started and go and learn from there as you go.

28:17

Ramesh: Great. So, get started, don't be afraid of failures and keep it going. Hey that's Marc Andre. Marc Andre runs a personal finance blog about making money and saving money. Marc thank you very much for your time.

28:33

Marc: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity Ramesh.

28:35

Ramesh: Thank you.

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Growing A Consumer Product Reviews Business To 4 million Monthly views with Jeff Rizzo – AEP #6

May 23rd, 2019 by

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Guest: ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Jeff Rizzo

Jeff Rizzo is the Founder & CEO of RIZKNOWS & The Slumber Yard, a digital media company that operates consumer review websites, which collectively garner over four million views per month. The company focuses on providing high quality, concise, and entertaining reviews of some of the most popular consumer products on the market. To date, the company has reached over 70 million people.

 Prior to starting his own company, Jeff worked as a middle-market investment banker at Duff & Phelps where he helped entrepreneurs raise capital, restructure their balance sheets, and sell their businesses, among other things.

Jeff has a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley where he graduated with high honors.

Tools / Books / Resources mentioned:

Tools: Google Analytics, Google Search ConsoleBooks: Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill

Show Notes:

1:35 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Focus your company on specific audience and specific products.

Jeff introduces his business which reviews popular consumer products and publishes unbiased and authentic reviews in a unique what he calls anti-tv manner where there is not much competition. Jeff also talks about the ideal audience, male around 34 years of age, that his business reviews cater to.

4:11 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Be realistic about business timeline and focus on your key strengths.

Jeff talks about how it took 3 years or so for him to get his feet on the ground with his business as he was learning as he went along. He survived those 3 years by relying on family support but knowing that time is on his side as he is only 22.

5:09 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Get the product out the door first and evolve based on feedback and reviews

Jeff talks about how his business model evolved where the initial focus was on selling products but he realized that unbiased youtube reviews is the  better option and switched to it based on feedback.

9:04 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Market research and market validation is key. Focus on specific niches.

Jeff talks about the market research he has done to identify 2 areas where the competition is low for high quality video reviews and started making reviews. As he kept getting more and more organic traffic, he kept investing more.

12:36 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Identify key search engine optimization tools and focus on them to grow your business. No reason to be fancy.

Jeff talks about the tools he uses such as Google Analytics, Youtube Analytics, Google search console, Ahrefs, google adwords to grow his business.

15:40 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Motivation is key for entrepreneurs. Identify your key motivators.

Jeff talks about two factors that motivate him: (1) To prove his detractors wrong and show that he can be successful (2) create wealth for his family. He also talks about books that inspired him of which ‘Think and Grow Rich’ by Napolean Hill is at the top.

18:55 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Retrospection is key to grow your business.

Jeff talks about one thing he should have better is to stop and think about long-term. He also talks about expanding his business by adding more categories of reviews and also trying to get the best people and train them.

23:24 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Get a good business partner if you can and always have more cash than you think you need,

Jeff’s advice to entrepreneurs is to get a good business partner based on his outstanding experience with his partner Matt. Jeff also believes that would-be entrepreneurs should have adequate money to get them through tough times as business always takes more time.

00:01

Ramesh: Hello everyone welcomes to the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is about starting and running your own business with purpose, passion, perseverance and possibilities. So, today's guest is Jeff Rizzo. Jeff Rizzo is the founder and CEO of Rizznos and the slumberyard; a digital media company that operates consumer review websites. Which collectively garner over four million views per month. The company focuses on providing high quality and concise and entertaining reviews of some of the most popular consumer products in the market. To date the company has reached over 70 million people. Prior to starting his own company Jeff worked as a middle market investment banker at Duffin Phelps where he helped entrepreneurs raise capital, restructure their balance sheets and sell their businesses among other things. Hey Jeff welcome to the podcast.

01:11

Jeff: Hi thank you so much for having me.

01:12

Ramesh: So, you have a bachelor's degree in business administration from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley and it looks like are you graduated with a high honor from there.

01:25

Jeff: That's right I love that place.

01:25

Ramesh: That's awesome. Alright so Jeff let's get started with some of the basic stuff about the business. So, what is your business about and what do you would do?

01:35

Jeff: Well our business is very simple. What we do is we take popular consumer products and we publish reviews about them. Are they good, are they bad, are they worth your money and we try to have a little bit of fun along the way. So, we try to do like anti TV. So, what you see on TV is very polished, it's very professional. What we like to do is make our videos and our content as though your neighbor gave you information. We think there's something that's really valuable in the authenticity of here's when I think of a product, we weren't paid to say good things or bad things about it, here's what we think.

02:11

Ramesh: I see can you give me an example, some examples of the products that they review.

02:17

Jeff: Well we really do anything that piques our interest and a lot of times we choose the products based on what our audience asks for. But a lot of times it'll be technology products, headphones, speakers, wearable technology. A lot of home goods, so we do a lot in the bedding space and the home good space sports and outdoor. It really has to do with our audience you know our audience is mostly males. You know probably the average age is about 34 and so we just try to placate, or we try to play to whatever they want.

02:47

Ramesh: I see. So which websites should they go to look at some of your reviews?

02:53

Jeff: Well they can go to either. So www.rizknows.com has a lot more of our technology reviews and www.myslumberyard.com has a lot more of our home goods reviews.

03:03

Ramesh: Okay great. So how do you make money?

03:07

Jeff: So, we make money off advertising. It's very simple. We get a lot of people to watch, we get a lot of people to come to our website and then we sell ads against it.

03:16

Ramesh: Okay so let's talk a little bit about your own journey. When did you start this business?

03:23

Jeff: I started in the year. I want to say late 2013.

03:29

Ramesh: So about five years in the business. So, what's the motivation? Why did you want to start the business? You've been doing quite well with the Duffin Phelps and all that stuff.

03:39

Jeff: It was great, I loved it there. I had a wonderful time. I know I can always go back to the investment. At the end of the day I went to business school. I went and got a degree in business. I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur and, so you know one day I wanted to leave and try something on my own and I fiddled about for a long time until I finally got some traction. But yeah, I think anybody interested in business always has dreams of being an entrepreneur, just like you.

04:04

Ramesh: So how long did it actually take for you to start the business?

04:11

Jeff: Well you know it took me about three years to get any traction. You know most of it I lived off loans from my dad. I lived at my parent’s house, I made no money and I was really inventing our business model as I go along. But I obviously had a luxury, I was 22. So, you know I had a lot of things that were afforded to me that a lot of other people don't have. So, I could take the time to try and learn about this business and really there weren't that many businesses like us at the time. I mean there's a lot now. There was a good number then. But there wasn't really a template on how to do it. It's not like we are manufacturing something where there's an ironclad template on how to do it. So, I was just basically learning as I went along.

04:52

Ramesh: Okay so talk a little bit about if you can about how the business evolved. Because you talked about the business model. What was the initial concept and then how it evolved over a period of time?

05:03

Jeff: Well it started that I wanted to be an online retailer and I thought you know one of the best ways to drive traffic to my website would be that I’ll make educational videos. Because at the time there were certain categories of products that you just couldn't buy everywhere. Amazon was big, but not as they are now, and I said well you know what I’ll start selling things on a website and I’ll make videos about them to teach people about them and it took me all of about two three months to realize well people really want the education and I'm not nearly as sophisticated enough to build a very large e-commerce platform. So, when am I start just doing the videos, do my best job there and I’ll let the retailers do what they do best and I'm really glad I did not become an online seller. Because I think I would have been out of business in the first year.

05:55

Ramesh: I see. So, did this evolution come with the knowledge that you've been gaining or was there a mentor, advisor, other people guiding you to get to where you are?

06:09

Jeff: Well of course everybody has friends and mentors along the way. I had nobody that was in my space, that even knew anything about my space. Most people thought I was crazy. Because I was sort of at the forefront, there really weren't many people doing YouTube videos. So, I was laughed at when I made YouTube videos and now we see just how gargantuan YouTube is. So, you know you have people that help you along the way is just with general business items. But nobody could give me a template on how to run a YouTube business.

06:40

Ramesh: So, it looks like based on what you said, it took about three years for you to get comfortable of the business and then the money that the company is making, is that right?

06:51

Jeff: That's right.

06:52

Ramesh: Okay okay. All right so now let's switch little bit about Jeff Rizzo as a person. So, who is Jeff Rizzo? So what kinds of motivations and drives, what's your personal journey?

07:06

Jeff: Well I think I’ve got a fairly interesting one. But you know I went to junior college. Didn't get into a lot of colleges I want to and then I worked really hard to get into Berkeley and got into Berkeley as a transfer student and you know I was far behind a lot of the other students and I really competed hard to get a job in Investment Banking and I loved what I did as an investment banker and then one day I wanted to start my business. It's you know it's I guess somewhat typical right. But not a lot of people really transfer to Berkeley and go on and do all this stuff. So, I think I'm a little bit unique for that facet.

07:44

Ramesh: So, during the three years as you are trying to find your ground in the business, it's not easy three years, right? So, lots of ups and downs, lots of mental struggles. I don't know about you but in general people go through whether I did the right thing, or should I go back to job. So, can you talk about your journey during those times when you're trying to no find some ground.


08:07

Jeff: It was very dark, and I was 22 and you obviously know how big social media is now and, so you know I think a lot of it was motivating. I had a really big chip on my shoulder, because everybody thought I was stupid and because I had left a great job in finance and it was really dark. I had no money. I was living at my parents house you know and my business really wasn't anything. But you know obviously was all worth it, because now I’ve got a giant chip on my shoulder and I just want to make our business as successful as I can. So, it was tough then, but it's a lot better now and I just don't want to ever do it again.

08:47

Ramesh: Right right. So, you talked a little bit about the market research you have done, the ideal customer you said the male and then 34 years old. So how did you go about the process of doing the research and how did you find that sweet spot of the customers for your business?

09:04

Jeff: Well I focused on a couple of categories where I knew that there wasn't a lot of information out there. I wanted a burgeoning industry that was really interesting that checked off a whole lot of other boxes and I found one or two and I started making videos and it just took off. Because the competition was relatively low, the demand was really high for videos. You know there's a lot of other things sprinkle in. But at the other day it came down to just supplying and demand. Nobody was creating high-quality entertaining videos. I wanted to do it and it was about a category that was growing quickly.

09:36

Ramesh: So, I mean market validation is one of the things that I believe in. So, for you to find the market validation for your ideas, was it that traffic that is coming to websites that validated the idea? So how did you know that you were on the right track?

09:52

Jeff: Yes, I woke up one day and I was looking at the videos that I had created, and I was wondering hey is anybody seeing you know these videos. I was obviously working as a consultant at the time just to make something and I think it was about 150,000 views over a few videos and I was like whoa this is not something small and then I started to invest in everything.

10:18

Ramesh: So, to get to that 150,000 or whatever, did you do some promotion? Did you put some money in? Or was it organic traffic that you're getting you know.

10:29

Jeff: It was all organic traffic. I think to date as a company we spent about two thousand dollars on marketing and that includes t-shirts that we made for a bunch of people to wear around. So, we've spent almost no money on marketing.

10:45

Ramesh: Wow so that is actually very interesting Jeff. So, I mean can you give some listeners some ideas how that happened. Is it just entertainment of the videos itself? Word of mouth or what is it?

11:01

Jeff: I'm sure word of mouth played a part in it. I just can't quantify that. It just so I gotten lucky. Everybody gets lucky. I got a major break. It was at a time when people weren't really creating as many YouTube videos. Certainly not on the reviews side of things and yet Google started to put YouTube videos on the first page of Google. Particularly so on mobile devices. So, there was like two major trends that I lucked out. I didn't realize it at the time, but I lucked out and it just completely took off. I mean I owe most of my success to the fact that I was in the right place at the right time. So, you know of course the videos speak for themselves. So, they need to be helpful and you need to do all those things. But at the end of the day Google started putting YouTube videos on the first page and people started using mobile devices more and that was really the secret sauce.

11:52

Ramesh: That is very fascinating. So are you a technical person. I mean you get dirty with the technology or do you rely on other people to help you in that area?

12:01

Jeff: I know enough to get by that I'm outclassed by almost everybody I need on the tech side. I can you know I can code a little bit. I know a little bit about computers. I know a little bit about cameras, I know a lot about filming and lighting and audio. I'm a jack-of-all-trades in a king. You know you put me up against somebody that does it for a living and I'm pretty garbage.

12:27

Ramesh: That’s good. But you have enough information to get by. So, what are the tools that help you in your business? Things that you rely on the most.

12:36

Jeff: Well we use Google Analytics a lot. We use YouTube analytics a lot. We use Ahref a lot. We use Google search console a lot, Google AdWords a lot. All of the kind of you know the general stuff. I'm sure you're very familiar with a lot of these tools. A lot of the basic things, we don't really have anything proprietary.

12:55

Ramesh: Okay so basically the search engine optimization related stuff, keyword research looks like that those are the kinds of things that you're doing.

13:04

Jeff: Yes, and I would say you know this is a proprietary either. But we just have such a large audience that we pull a lot of our great Intel from them.

13:13

Ramesh: That is actually is a very good technique that I’ve learned where, yeah so you learn from your customer and then the pain points that are having, that's great.

13:22

Jeff: It's exactly right, I mean we obviously lucked out there too.

13:27

Ramesh: That is great. So, okay so now I went on your website. I did some research and then I was doing a little bit of research on you and I found some things. Number one he talked about combo sleeper right. So as one of the characteristics, I would like the listeners to know and then you have other people who are back sleepers or things like that. So, can you talk a little bit about that?

13:56

Jeff: Yes of course I love talking about this. Okay you know one of the things when we talk about mattresses, which is you know we talk about a lot of categories. But we really like mattresses too and so part of it is when people ask us hey what's the best mattress? Well you can't really answer that right. It's like asking any question, it all depends and so one of the biggest things it depends on is what your preferred sleeping position is. Whether it's side, back stomach or if you sleep in a variety of positions, a combination of position. So, among the other things we like to assess what people's preferred sleeping position is and then you know other things come into play. Height, weight, height to weight ratio, sleeping temperature. I mean there's just so many things that come into play. But sleeping position is perhaps the biggest thing.

14:45

Ramesh: All right and then the second question about you is that you write poetry, I’ve learned okay. So what kind of poetry do you write?

14:52

Jeff: Oh, that's a joke, I think somebody put that up just to play with me. Yeah, I think you know me now already enough to know that I am not a poet. I am a pretty average person.

15:03

Ramesh: Okay the third one I found out, probably I'm sure this is true. So, you were a fourth grade Spelling Bee champion.

15:12

Jeff: That's right, I actually wasn't Spelling Bee champion. I think that's wrong also. But I got a hundred percent on every single spelling test in the fourth grade.

15:22

Ramesh: Oh fantastic. So, height of the academic achievement.

15:26

Jeff: That's right, that's right.

15:28

Ramesh: Okay so all right so now let's switch a little, like who are the people that inspire you? So, when your personal journey or the business journey people that motivated you.

15:40

Jeff: Well I think anybody out there that is building a business is motivated by people that don't believe in or part. Like I say have a chip, a lot of the athletes that I follow they have a chip on their shoulder. So, I think at some point some of that comes down to, I just really want to prove some people that put me down and made me feel stupid, wrong. The other part of it is that I'm inspired by my family. You know there's so many people out there with inspirational stories. But at the end of day I want to build long term wealth for my family and be able to provide for my children and give them a better life than I had and provide for my wife and all of those things. So as much as I get inspiration from other successful entrepreneurs, a lot of it comes down to I want you and I need to do this stuff for my family. You know it's as simple as that sounds that's really what makes me want to do it and of course I really want to work hard for my team. My business partner Matt is the greatest person you'll ever meet your life and I never met anybody that worked harder than him and I'm so lucky to have him on my team. So, I just never want to let down my team, that's part of it too.

16:47

Ramesh: That's great Jeff. So, a couple of other things, are there any books or movies or things like that inspired you or found interesting?

16:59

Jeff: Well you know actually this is interesting. So, when I was first starting my business, I was having a very tough time and I knew I was on to something, but it was tough because no one believed in it. There really weren't a whole lot of businesses like it and I kind of questioned myself every single day. Should I quit and get something more traditional and it was really a roller coaster and I was just feeling great one day and feeling terrible the next day. My mom heard on the radio about a book called Think and Grow Rich and it's an old book, I think it was written in the 40s.

17:29

Ramesh: Napoleon Hill.

17:30

Jeff: That's right, that's right. It's one of the top ten right business books ever and I had never heard of it and, so I bought it in and there's a story in there about a guy, I forget his name. But he ended up mining for silver. And him and his cousin I believe, they had the silver mine and they started making money and then all of a sudden one day it had dried out, then they worked at it for months and months and they made no money and then they just sold it off and they said you know what? We thought we had something, but we don't have it. They sold it to a geologist who ended up going out surveying it or he sold it to a scrapyard owner I want to say who found a geologist, surveyed the land and said there is a massive deposit of silver three feet beyond where they stopped digging and I felt like that was perfectly analogous to my entrepreneurial journey that I just couldn't give up, because I was three feet away. In fact, I wrote three feet away on a notebook that I still had to this day.

18:33

Ramesh: That is fantastic. I mean I think as entrepreneurs definitely you know when it seems like the end of the road for us, just beyond that is actually the light. Looking back Jeff what are the things that you think you could have done differently as a piece of advice for the listeners?

18:55

Jeff: I think I should have paid attention a lot more and stop to think a lot more and I'm trying to do that more now. But I'm still not great at it. Just stopping to think, you know I think if I would have taken a couple of weeks to really think about the long-term prospects of my business and not just work day by day and been so consumed with the day by day, I think I would have moved a lot quicker towards my ultimate goal. As silly as that sounds right I mean everybody says that's so cliché. But I wish I would have taken two weeks to just reexamine my business and where it was going and clearly that just makes me feel really stupid now. But I wish I would have done that.

19:42

Ramesh: But as entrepreneurs we face the challenge that the near-term making the next month's check, it's almost a paramount right. So, I think you're pointing out the right thing which is having a longer-term picture will help out. But I think we have the pressures of the near term.

19:58

Jeff: 100% agreed. But it just makes me feel so ignorant and so stupid and I really want to vow to try and see the forest through the trees for now and I'm really really disappointed that it took me this long to build my business.

20:14

Ramesh: So, you're about five years into the business and then looking ahead I mean you feel that you're in firm footing now or are you bound by the vagaries of the Google search engine algorithm change? Do you think suddenly if the change algorithm that you might not get the traffic, you might not get the business. So, I mean what are your thoughts?

20:32

Jeff: I'm not worried about it one bit. Not at all. In fact, I welcome it. I want them to do it. Because Google's incentives aligned with mine. They want to match you up with relevant content and I want to provide relevant content. I think I provide the best content out there. I think it's more engaging, I think it's more helpful, I think it's more entertaining, I think it's more personable and, so I really think long-term Google is moving towards what we're doing. They're moving away from fly-by-night review sites that don't put any time in their work and that are just trying to rip off affiliate commissions. I really think long-term Google is trying to match people up with what we're doing versus what other people are doing. So, I have no worries whatsoever. Plus, I think the long term, I think we’ve got a lot of things indicating that video will continue to dominate and that's probably our core competency.

21:27

Ramesh: So, looking ahead how do you plan to expand or continue the business? What are the thoughts you have? Are you planning to grow into more categories of products or how are you planning to grow the business?

21:43

Jeff: That's exactly right. I want to do more categories. Firstly, I want to do a better job in the categories that we have, and we need to hire more staff and I mentioned that it's a non-traditional business model. So, it's finding staff is actually really difficult. Luckily, we have a great team. But we need to do a better job than the categories that we're in and then we need to move into new categories as we see them and as we discover them, and I’ll tell you what, there are a few that I'm really excited about. But we're just not ready to just yet.

22:12

Ramesh: Okay so without naming the companies like who are your competitors. Like what kinds of businesses or websites or whatever, who do you see as your competition?

22:24

Jeff: You know our competition is every media site out there. Everybody does reviews from The Wall Street Journals and all these guys New York Times. So, everybody is our competitor and at the end of the day we're competing for people's eyeballs right and their attention and, so we really compete with everybody. Of course, we compete more with the review sites that are in our space. But you know when people are searching for things online, it's so easy to go down a rabbit hole. So, everybody is a competitor and the only way that we can differentiate ourselves is make our content better and more entertaining and more engaging and more personable.

23:00

Ramesh: That's excellent. Hey Jeff as we come towards the end of the

podcast, so I'm going to ask you probably a few more questions. One is based on your experience based on both the ups and downs of your journey, what are the few like three to five things that you would like to give an advice to people who want to start the businesses?

23:24

Jeff: I think the best thing I ever did was get a business partner and I’ll tell you what? Matt my business partner, I cannot say better things about him. I mean I got so lucky and everybody talks about that you should hire people smarter than you. Maybe it's not always a reality, but Matt is certainly smarter and works harder than me and somehow, I got lucky to get him. So, first thing I would say is get a business partner. I don't care how much the company you give up, you know half of whatever is more than a hundred percent of zero. So, get a business partner. Second thing would be being have more money in the bank than you think that you'll need. I think you need probably five times as much as you think you need. Because everything takes longer and possible more than you expect it to.

24:08

Ramesh: Right right and that is very true.

24:11

Jeff: Very very true, everything does.

24:14

Ramesh: All right so any last-minute thought Jeff?

24:19

Jeff: Last minute thoughts are well thanking you so much for your time and having me on I'm humbled that you would even take the speak with me I just want other people to become entrepreneurs and be a big part of their communities and be productive members of society and I'm so lucky and fortunate to be an entrepreneur. I want everybody in your audience to become an entrepreneur.

24:39

Ramesh: I believe that too. I mean you come across as a very self-effacing guy. You know always seems like eager to learn and then giving a lot of credit to people that work with you. So, you're a very, you know come as a good guy all right.

24:57

Jeff: Thank you very much.

24:59

Ramesh: That's fantastic. So, wish you the very best in your business to you and Matt. So, thank you for your time.

25:05

Jeff: Thank you too. Hope you have a wonderful day.

25:08

Ramesh: All right take care.

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How To Start A College & Career Prep Business with Jason Patel – AEP #5

May 23rd, 2019 by

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Guest: ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Jeff Rizzo

Jason Patel, the founder of Transizion, a college and career prep company that connects the best consultants and mentors who provide advising to high school students, college students, and professionals. Transizion prizes itself on excellent customer service, a 100% customer-satisfaction rate, and client success. Jason is a purple belt in Brazilian Jiujitsu, former boxer, an avid outdoorsman. He brings his competitive spirit everywhere he goes.

Show Notes:

1:06 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Focus your company on specific audience and specific areas.

Jason talks about the focus of Transizion Inc. to help high school students pick the right college and major, college students to transition into graduate school and professionals  about networking and interviewing.

3:36 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Business opportunities can knock on the door from anywhere. Keep all possibilities open.

Jason talks about the beginnings of the company where his volunteer help with a kid to get into a good school presented him the opportunity to start his own prep company. He also talks about how he bootstrapped the company with six to seven thousand dollars of his money inspite of his student loans etc. because he believed in the cause.

8:13 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Starting a business may not be that difficult but one needs to iterate on the business model to find the right one.

Jason talks about the process of starting a business which did not take much time but the need to iterate the business model until he found the right one. His initial business model of trying to contract with schools / public sector organizations was a money sink but a learning opportunity until he found the right model.

12:42 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Identify your strengths and focus on them instead of your weaknesses.

Jason talks about his competitive spirit, his unique strength of learning from failures/mistakes, and how middleclass upbringing in New Jersey helped him become a better person. He talks about the importance of focusing on strengths instead of weaknesses.

15:40 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Differentiation from competition is key. Focus on having a unique value proposition. 

Jason talks about two key areas of differentiation: one, his highly trained mentors and second the unlimited value based pricing & packaging.

17:11 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Keep learning from great inspirational books. Entrepreneurs need motivation to stay on track. 

Jason talks about some great books that inspire him and keep him motivated. Books mentioned are: 50th law (about 50 cents singer), Shoe Dog (Phil Knight, Nike), Elon Musk(Tesla), Howard Schultz (Starbucks), Hard things and hard things (Ben Horowitz).

24:43 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Rely on key apps and tools to improve overall productivity 

Jason talks about the tools that help him in running his business and improving his productivity. Tools mentioned are: Trello for project management, Errands for task management, Amazon Echo for alerts, Mailchimp for email marketing.

27:19 minute mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Launch your first product quickly, iterate, and prepare for a long journey. 

Jason gives the following key tips: 1) Launch the first product as soon as possible and iterate 2) Eat healthy and get good sleep – It’s a long journey 3) Don’t quit your day job until you are certain your side gig income is sufficient 4) Be mentally strong – Entrepreneurial journey is long and hard.

00:00

Ramesh: Hello everyone welcomes to the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is about starting and running your own business with purpose, passion, perseverance and possibilities. Today we have a unique business model started by Jason Patel. So, Jason Patel is the founder of www.transizion.com, a college and career prep company that connects the best consultants and mentors to high school students, college students and professionals. Jason is a purple belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a former boxer and avid outdoorsman. He brings the same competitive spirit everywhere he goes. Transition prizes itself on excellent customer service, a 100% customer satisfaction rate and client success. So, let's go talk to Jason. Hi Jason welcome to the podcast.

01:02

Jason: Hey thanks for having me really happy to be here.

01:05

Ramesh: Fantastic, so thank you. So, let's start with your business itself. So, what is this www.transizion.com about?

01:13

Jason: Right so what we essentially are is a college and career prep company and what we do is we connect really talented mentors to college students, graduate students and professionals looking to take the next step of their journey and what that means is if a high school student for example needs help with college selection or college application guidance, we'll connect a mentor to them who will guide them through the process. If a graduate student needs help with the next step of their lives, whether they should go to law school or just get a regular graduate degree or something of that sort, we'll connect them with the mentor. We'll help them shine a light on the answers that the student is looking for and help them with all the applications for the next step which is a graduate school, and this is all guidance and advising and then for professionals let's say you're a manager or an executive looking to move jobs or rise up in the career ladder and we connect them with the mentor or we'll help them with the resumes and cover letters and the interviewing process which is really big. Another part that the mentor will help with this an elevator pitch, because networking is so important. So, the idea is to connect really smart people with people who need the help and that's the way we really add value to our clients lives.

02:31

Ramesh: Fantastic. Hey Jason when did you start this company?

02:34

Jason: I officially started it in 2015. But I would say I’ve been doing this sort of work in an unofficial capacity since the year 2010, 2011. I've been advising and guiding students and other people on these topics for almost a decade now. So, I really very much enjoy it and I’ve changed a bit as business model a couple of times and it's been a really exciting journey ever since.

03:02

Ramesh: Okay so you took what your experience under your passion into this coaching and started your own company?

03:09

Jason: Exactly exactly and I'm assuming you're going to ask me how exactly this all happened a little later. So, I’ll leave it at that. I got started with this on my own and then I chose a scale and hire other people to help me along.

03:21

Ramesh: Actually, you read my mind. I was going to go there right away. So how did you start, like why didn't you continue doing what you were doing? Why did you think about starting a company?

03:30

Jason: So, what end up happening was that when I was a student at the George Washington University, which is located in Washington DC, I wanted to be more a part of DC's cultural fabric. The city is really beautiful. I still live here; my company is based here and ultimately the city had given me so much that I wanted to give back and especially to the people who've lived here for so long. So, what I ended up doing was volunteering with a lot of students in the DC metro area and these are students who are come from middle-class, lower income households they, a lot of you know some of them come from single-parent households. I just wanted to help a lot of, help students when they need help but didn't know where to go and then I help these students with the college process. How do you choose a school? How do you enjoy college? How do you choose a major? How do you fill out college applications? What's a good structure to writing a college essay? All of these subjects and it turns out after helping these students after a year, a couple of them did really well in the application process and one of them in particular got a full ride to a couple of top schools in the country and he studied biotech or biomedical engineering to make prosthetic limbs for veterans and children who had their limbs essentially blown off in conflict ridden areas or areas that were once ridden with conflict and still have mines that are in the bushes or in the forest from the grasslands around where they live and all told this student's mother she was very real with me. She said that if I was going to volunteer to help students all the time, she knew that I was going to go broke and that I wouldn’t be able to help as many students as I wanted to. So, what ended up happening was that she advised me to start a business and scale my curriculum and scale the way I teach students to a much larger level and that's how transition was born. It wasn't really even my idea. It was a mother's idea and she's the one who implored me to really do this on my own to make some money doing it, so that I can actually give back while forming a proper business model around what I was doing.

05:43

Ramesh: It's great. Actually, so this podcast is about for people who want to start a business if they have an idea. So, I think this is a good discussion. So, the question I have next is did you have to put in a lot of money to start the company or if so where did you get the financing?

06:00

Jason: So, I would say it's this, did I put in a lot of money? I would say in relation to what other companies raised you know foreign aid, in an angel round or a Series A, no I did not put in a lot of money. But on a personal level yes, I put in tons of money that caused me lots of mental anguish to be quite frank with you. I initially funded the company on credit cards. I was tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt and then I had money saved up. So instead of putting that to student loans, I put it to starting my business. So not only did I put in I want to say around six or seven thousand dollars of my own money, but there was an opportunity cost there. I chose to use that money for my business instead of paying off my loans instead of traveling across the world which is what a lot of people my age does. Instead of going on vacation somewhere I chose a sort of business with it. So, I would say the opportunity cost of doing that was quite high and in general six seven thousand dollars is a lot of money to anyone. So, I think a lot of times we as startup entrepreneurs and startup entrepreneurs especially, if we look at other companies we read these articles and we learn about how much other companies have raised in whatever around and we get kind of jaded. We think that a million dollars isn't a lot, because this other company did thirty million dollars in a series B and that's not true. I think each entrepreneur has his or her own journey and you have to judge how much money you raised on the bona fides of what your current situation is, and you know to be frank with you, I'm not a tech guy either. So, you know this is a service business with a tech slant to it, that's how we connect students to our mentors, exactly. So not being a tech guy this is a lot of money. The tech space, this is not a lot. But for me and what my expertise is, it was a lot. I studied politics in college. So, it's not like, it's not like I knew what to do when I was putting investing that money in the first place. So, it was quite a bit of learning to be done.

08:05

Ramesh: Right, so how long did it take for you to actually start the business and then get into an operational mode?

08:13

Jason: To start the business to get into an operational mode it took two or three months. Actually, it probably took six weeks. It did not take that long and the grand scheme of things. Because I am a go-getter. I would say my weakness is an entrepreneur is that I'm not tech savvy or I wasn't as, at that point in time I wasn't very tech savvy. But I knew that I had hustle and knew that was willing to work hard. So, getting things started wasn't really that difficult. It was really finding the footing in the foundation which was kind of difficult and I'm assuming that's going to be one of the next questions you'll ask later about the journey. Because this is of course a podcast about entrepreneurs and how they built, established businesses. But getting to operation wasn't too hard. It was iterating afterward which was really difficult.

09:03

Ramesh: I see. So then after the operations how long did it take for you to get the first set of customers?

09:10

Jason: It took about two three months to get my first customer. And frankly I had no idea how to market. I went into business with rose-colored glasses and idealism thinking that if I just established a business and I promoted it on my own social media channels, that customers would flock to the business because I had such a great idea. Which ultimately was so untrue, and it was such a you know to look or way of looking at things that I cost myself a lot of time and money to learn about how business works. So, I had a business model that didn't work out. I got a customer in that business model, the customer wasn't a high dollar client. But you know I defended that customer and worked with the customer like they were my own brother or sister. So, it took me two or three months and even at that point I did not stick with that business model. So, I would say when did I get the first customer that was a part of the business model that we have now? It took probably a year. So, it took quite a bit of time.

10:19

Ramesh: So, do you mind talking about your business model a little bit?

10:23

Jason: Yeah absolutely. So, when I first got into the business I want to talk for one on one career services and then workshops to schools and organizations that wanted college and career services offered to them. So, I originally was, how do we go in front of a group of students and discuss with them what makes a good college process? How do you find the right college and things like that and I begin to realize that the contracting process with schools and organizations and the government was brutal. It was so brutal and the only reason, the only reason why there are big companies in this space is because you need to burn lots and lots of cash in order to get in the room, let alone get a client, get a contract with the government or these organizations. So, I had that business model for close to a year. It was a complete utter disaster to be frank with you and I spent all my money and it was not very good. But that process was really important as a startup owner. Because you need to iterate and learn more about where you want the business to go and where the customers are. So, I would say that part of the process was extremely important in how I learned what the business was all about. So, then a year later after I decided to ditch that business model, I went to a more one-on-one approach. Where we would offer only a one-on-one service to these college and career students and in doing that I realized that parents and students wanted these one-on-one services and they wanted them for not an exploitative price. Which I think a lot of, which I think some consultants do. So, after doing that there was, we hit I guess quote-unquote quite a product market fit and we've been growing ever since then.

12:13

Ramesh: That's great. Actually, thank you very much. I think sit ups and downs I think that's what is fascinating to know about the journey. So, let's switch topics a little bit and then I want to understand a little bit more about the Jason Patel, the person. So, what's your background growing up and going to college and things and what are the things that interest you, what are your hobbies?

12:42

Jason: Right so as a person I would say that I'm very competitive and I have a lot of deficiencies and weaknesses. But one thing I think I'm good at is being able to learn from mistakes and learn from failure. So, when I was a kid and it was brutal at the time. But when I was a kid I got bullied quite a bit. I suffered from a lot of that you know physical abuse at school and whatnot and I was a skinny brown kid after 9/11 and you know it was tough. Most people were very nice to me. But you get human beings who just have negativity in their hearts and I got bullied quite a bit for a long time and that's where I learned I would say how to be mentally strong and really push through bad times in my life. So, what ended up happening was that I took that attitude, that attitude I had about persevering into college where I studied political communication at the George Washington University. I had a great time at GW. But I would say that most of my learning came from outside the classroom. Meaning that I was in a fraternity, I played football, I began martial arts, or I started boxing at a local DC gym. I competed at a very high level at the national amateur tournament and then I suffered a pretty significant injury to my labrum. Which forced me to stop boxing and go into jiu-jitsu to, basically which is just as damaging to the body but in a less, in a lower impact sort of way. So, you know having everything taken since then I would say that I'm not super technical. But I'm very open to learning from other people. I grew up in middle-class New Jersey to two immigrant parents from India who showed me what it was like to work so hard growing up and my parents always told me that if you, you know if and when you make it in America always give back. Because America was the country that gave to us and that's why it gave to you. So never be selfish about any success that you have and if you do succeed and if you do make something of yourself, you're always a work in progress. But as you become that work in progress, you should always be willing to share with your community and share with other people. Because in America no one makes it alone. We all have a stake in each other's success. So, I would say, you know as a person that's really where my fundamentals are at.

15:21

Ramesh: Okay hey Jason thank you very much sharing your personal story. It's difficult at times, but it’s great okay. So now switching to the business side of it, what do you think is the unique value proposition of transition? Like what is that you are trying to offer something that's different in the marketplace?

15:41

Jason: Yeah absolutely. I would say there are two key prongs to what we offer customers that a lot of other companies don’t, or our competitors don’t, and the first part is that we really, truly heavily vet our mentor’s mm-ham and with that said when I say we vet our mentors, we interview them, we train them. It's not like we just take anyone off the street who wants to work and have them work. We really vet them and connect them so that our customers really love the experiences that they have. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that we don't count ours. So, a lot of companies that they'll say that you'll have, you'll be able to work with this consultant or mentor for five or ten hours. We don't do that. All of our packaging and pricing is unlimited. We'll say here's a scope of work, you can talk to this mentor for as long as you like it doesn't matter to us.

16:31

Ramesh: I see, so easier one-on-one remote or like a people your mentors actually meet with the students in person?

16:40

Jason: So, when we first started the business it was done in person. Because you're a local around DC. But as we started getting more customers, frankly we started getting customers around the world. Canada, Israel, China, Korea, California, you name it we have a customer there. So essentially, we're now a remote company and we built an entire process around having the best customer service in a remote capacity.


17:11

Ramesh: So now I want to switch to people who motivated or things that motivated. First thing is any books that you recommend that you inspired you or motivated you in your business and your personal journey?

17:27

Jason: Yeah absolutely. I think from a personal standpoint a couple of books that I strongly recommend to entrepreneurs or other people who are going to struggle, but this one is kind of cheesy but it's actually a great book. It's called the 50th law. It's by Robert Greene and 50 cents. It's about 50 Cent's lives when he was growing up in South Jamaica Queens and all the rules of power that he used to survive. Because frankly if you are born you know in his shoes you're not supposed to become a success and this guy became such a successful musician and entrepreneur, I really respect it and I tend to respect people who don't necessarily go far. But I respect people who go far in compared to where they started. So you know born in the inner city or rural America and you know couldn't afford college and becomes somewhat of a success, I really respect that, I really respect people that are like that. So that's one book, that's one personal book that has meant a lot to me. Another more recent book is called shoe dog, it's by Phil Knight, who was the founder of Nike. And it's basically his entrepreneurial biography. Where how he started Nike, what were the motivations behind it and what were the early days like. That book is incredible. I started reading it and I simply could not put it down. Some other books I would say that I really enjoy are the, one book is the hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz, it's a management book. He's one of the great venture capitalists and he helped found Netscape. So, he's one of the fathers of Internet you know internet browsing history. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is great for personal well-being. I'm a big believer in stoicism. I think a human being should definitely embrace stoicism. Because we live in a world with a lot of negativity. You can't allow that to bring your soul down. Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance, another really great book. I mean Elon Musk; the guy is incredible, and Ashlee Vance wrote a book that again and you could not put it down. I was on a long-distance flight international overseas. I read it in one sitting. I mean it's that good. Yeah, it's a fascinating book. Another one is pour your heart into it. Its by Howard Schultz. It's his basically autobiography. He's the guy who made Starbucks into what it is today and he's running for president now. Fascinating fascinating guy and what makes them so interesting is that a lot of business owners or you know they don't talk about their failures or what makes them vulnerable. What about their past haunts. But Howard Schultz really just know goes into his past about you know his father having a workplace injury, not being able to work again. His mom trying to hold the family together. They're living in the projects in New York. I mean this is some rough stuff. I really respect how he came from nothing. Yeah, I would say in general man there are a lot of books that you know I love reading. I love love love reading. There are books that are about politics and history that I simply cannot put down. Books about the Roman Empire you know Mark Antony, Julius Caesar.

20:29

Ramesh: That is my passion as well. So that is, I can really connect with you. So that's my passion. That's great yeah.

20:34

Jason: Yeah, it's one of history's great, history's greatest empires. You have to respect what people built and to that point about the Roman Empire I'm really interested in Hannibal or Barta, I don't know people pronounce it differently. But he's the Carthaginian who crossed the Alps. You know one of the greatest military adventures, one of the greatest military feats of all time bringing what you know twenty thirty thousand men and elephants over a mountain? Range of mountains. It's crazy, it's unbelievable. But as entrepreneurs who are we? We do crazy and unbelievable things. As entrepreneurs we strike out on our own, we try to go for our dreams. Things that probably won't happen simply because of the percentages. But here we are, we're crossing our own mountain range to get things done to confront our inner demons and to make hopefully the world a better place.

21:25

Ramesh: Jason that is quite a breadth of books man, that's fascinating. That's very good. So, a couple of other areas I want to probe and number one is you talked about your parents as the people who inspired you motivated. So apart from your parents anybody else that shaped your life either personal or entrepreneurial journey?

21:48

Jason: Yeah absolutely one I mentioned earlier you know 50 cents. Again, really unorthodox choice. But the guys journey is incredible. Howard Schultz, I mentioned before Elon Musk, these are people that inspire me. These are people that I want to be like. But when I switch gears from businesses field to another field, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Cincinnatus of Rome. You know these are men who could have exercised power at great great power over their country in a vulnerable time and they chose not to, and I think that's really something that impresses me as a man. You have the chance to exploit lots of people and you don't. That is a very powerful thing. Because usually the way history goes as we know, when powerful people have a chance to exploit you know how many times out of ten do they indeed exploit? You know more often than not, it's very unfortunate. I think people who choose to buck that trend are quite fascinating and I think Lincoln, Washington and Cincinnatus are really like that. And then... Yeah go ahead.

22:50

Ramesh: I mean you have a very fascinating perspective on all these things, it's great.

22:56

Jason: Yeah and then I appreciate that and then from a personal standpoint I have a couple friends in my network. All of my friends are really people that I want to be like. They make me better. They're my age, they’re all different. They do different things and they never strive for less than. They're always striving to be better and moving forward. Now one of my best friend's is a guy named Vic. He's a very private guy, so I won't divulge too much information about him. But you know he didn't grow up in the best area, had a you know kind of a tough life and I met him at the George Washington University at the steps the first day of school and we've been best friends ever since. I mean he's a guy who works hard and you know when I asked him a question would you want your life to be any different? He tells me no, because he wouldn't be as hard working as he is now. I'm think that kind of perspective is really refreshing. I've had you know I have friends from home who didn't go to college, but they're still you know they're working in a union or they went to the military who are you know really impressive people. You know overall, I would say that who inspires me, I name those people. But in general, the people I'm around tending to inspire me. That there are bits and pieces of them that I want to take into my life and really emulate. I would say is the group these are human beings that I want to be more like.

24:21

Ramesh: Great hey so going back to the business little bit of towards the end of this podcast, you said you are not a technologist, but you do and technology to grow your business. So, what are the tools that help your business that you could share with the listeners that they can benefit from?

24:43

Jason: Absolutely I think as a leader of a business what's critical is that you need to know how to manage your time. Because you can get money back, you could blow money on a bad business initiative where you didn't have the right information, or you went into a project with haste and an impetus and if things didn't work out. Well you can always get money back. But you will never get back your time. So, I think that managing time is important. So, with that said one app that I really like is called Trello and Trello helps you manage different aspects different projects of your business and you can manage it in something called boards. Each board has a card and within each card you can have a calendar and a checklist. So, you can break down your little projects into the smallest degree, so you're keeping track of how things go. I think Trello is pretty great. I use another app called Errands. Which is on a personal level obviously manage my personal life. Because not only am I balancing business, I'm balancing my personal life. So that's been really great to use as well. It's basically like an alert system. And on more basic or fundamental level, I use Amazon echo. Pretty great you know I was really skeptical of the device. But it's great for reminders and using it as an alarm clock and then to switch gears and go to you know tech for websites, YouTube has been a great resource for learning for basically getting my sort of online MBA as I was learning about business from Stanford School of Business, Bloomberg, Harvard Business School, there's so many great channels there that have helped me learn more about business and learn about what I don't know. It really helps get rid of the fog of war and then moving forward when it comes to initiating and executing business, MailChimp has been great. You know google drive has been outstanding. These are the fundamentals of helping me manage different files and different sorts of assets, as we try to deliver value to our customers.


26:57

Ramesh: Great great hey the last question. So, based on your entrepreneurial journey and your experiences for somebody who wants to start a business or even I mean started a business that are running, to run them successfully what are the three to five things that you'd advise that they should focus on?

27:19

Jason: I would say the first thing is you have to talk to your customers iterative. Your first product is something you should launch right away. If you're trying to get perfection with your first product you're already late. You should release your first product and then learn how to change it as time moves on. So that's a first thing. Your first product will never be your last product. It's always going to be changing. Second thing is being very guarded about what you put into your body. Because you have a lot of people relying on you as you scale the business. Be healthy and get your sleep. Maintaining your health is really important. Because the more you could put into your body, the more output you'll have. I think we have this trope in entrepreneurship where we're working a hundred hours a week. Which is true, I mean it's true. But if you stay up every single night and you're getting two hours of sleep, eventually you're going to break down and have a panic attack. Because your mind isn't as flexible and as strengthen as it would be if it had sleep. The third thing I would say is don't quit your day job unless you know your day job will allow you to make up that lost income with the time that you'll put into your business. I quit my day job a little too early and you know I suffered quite a bit because of that. But that's a mistake I tell entrepreneurs now. You know everyone wants to quit their job and go for their dream. It's a great thing and you will eventually do it if things work out. But you absolutely don't want to do it early. Don't go into it in such a hasty way. Because ultimately, it's your bank account and your rent, your grocery bills that will come calling. Because you made those things suffer. Fourth thing I would say is the mental aspect of it is huge. You want to talk to people and you want to discuss these things. I would say particularly as men we don't do a very good job in discussing some of the things that we go through mentally and even if you're the first person to talk about these issues with your friends, you’ll be doing them a favor. Because they'll be more open discussing these challenges next time and things like stress and anxiety will really get on you and in your soul if you don't talk about it and then the final thing I would say is you really want to learn how to productize your time. Hearken back to one of my first pointers which was you'll never get time back. You know when we're looking forward as a business, productizing your time means how do you sell your time in a proper way that leads to multiples as business. You won't do that at first, but later on you'll learn how to do and that's how you're going to scale.

30:07

Ramesh: Yeah this is actually very very good advice. The last one is what you're trying to make a service business a product business, that's what you're trying to do.

30:17

Jason: That's exactly it. You said it in so many fewer but better words.

30:21

Ramesh: That's fantastic. Hey Jason, I mean the one word that comes to my mind with this podcast is fascinating. You are a fascinating person, you have a fascinating background and then I think the business is very interesting how you have evolved. Thank you very much for your time Jason.

30:36

Jason: I really appreciate you having me on and hope to be a guest again sometime in your future.

30:41

Ramesh: Definitely, we definitely will do that thank you very much.

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Starting a Business: Solve a personal problem to build a profitable business – Tara Langdale Schmidt – AEP # 4

May 21st, 2019 by

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Guest: ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Tara Langdale Schmidt

Tara Langdale Schmidt is the inventor of the VuVa Neodymium Vaginal Dilator, a pelvic therapy device that has helped over 22,000 women world wide. She also helps customers find the correct physicians and pelvic floor physical therapists in their area if needed.

Show Notes:

1:22 Minute Mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Find a solution to a problem to build a business for the long term

Tara talks about her personal health issue related to pelvic pain and how it led her to find a solution. Her business was borne out of her own need to find a solution to a vexing health issue.

4:56 Minute Mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Take the necessary steps to protect your intellectual property rights and obtaining customer feedback.

Tara talks about the initial steps on how to start a business. As her business deals with physical products with intellectual property, she had to go through the steps of patenting (provisional and non-provisional) which is somewhat expensive and also uncertain. She also talked about the clinical trials and making of the product with injection molds. The initial rave feedback from the trials gave her confidence to proceed after 18 months.

8:00 Minute Mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Tap into your network and you’ll find at least one person who believes in you.

Tara talks about how to be an entrepreneur and how to finance the company. She started her business in Florida. She tapped into her network and talked to Rob Smithson who owned a printing company. He believed in Tara and bought into the company as he knew other people struggling with similar problems. He introduced Tara to other people in his network and she got the necessary funding needed.

11:13 Minute Mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Use Guerilla marketing techniques when traditional marketing & advertising is unavailable

Tara talks about the challenges of marketing and advertising for her company’s products. Even though the products help women address real health issues like sexual health issues and vaginal atrophy, social media companies like Facebook, Instagram etc. restrict her company from using retargeting ads and images of her products. Even though it’s still problem, Tara is using guerilla tactics such as podcasts and informational content to get through these challenges.

14:19 Minute Mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Pricing and Distribution of your products are two very important decisions for any business

Tara thought she could get her customers by going through OBGYN physicians but she found that physical therapists dealing with women having pelvic pain are the best resource. She also talks about pricing the product fairly and how she didn’t listen to the advice she got from other men about pricing the product high.

17:56 Minute Mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Entrepreneurs need motivation and your support network will provide you that motivation

Tara talks about the sacrifices she had to make in starting the business such as quitting her college midway and the health issues she had to deal with and how she persevered through all these challenges. She also talks about her parents support throughout and how her mother’s business background helped her.

21:57 Minute Mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Your AHA moments may not always be solutions but problems themselves may be the AHA moments.

Tara has an interesting take on ‘Aha’ moments of breakthrough. She talks about how her challenges are her ‘Aha’ moments. The Aha moments of discovering that physical therapists understand women’s pelvic pain problems better than ObGyn doctors and advertising challenges related to her product.

25:52 Minute Mark:

Agile entrepreneur takeaway: Key entrepreneur tips are to patent your ideas and think through differences related to selling physical products such as shipping etc.

Tara gave some really good entrepreneur tips. She emphasizes the need to protect your ideas by patenting. She also talks about thinking through specific challenges related to shipping physical products such as weight, customs etc.

00:02

Ramesh: Hello everyone welcomes to the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is about starting and running your own business with purpose, passion, perseverance and possibilities. Today I'm excited to bring in front of you a very unique guest with a very unique company and a very unique product in the market. Her name is Tara Langdale Schmidt. Tara Langdale Schmidt is the inventor of the VuVa Neodymium Vaginal Dilator. A pelvic therapy device that has helped over 22,000 women worldwide. She also helps customers find the correct physicians and pelvic floor physical therapists in their area if needed. Hey Tara welcome to the podcast.

01:00

Tara: Hi how are you today?

01:02

Ramesh: Pretty good. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

​01:04 

Tara: Thank you for having me it's always nice to have a platform to share my story and so we can help more women worldwide.

01:10

Ramesh: That's great. So, let me get started with the basics. So, if you could tell us a little bit about how you started the business and when you started the business and the business and the product itself.

01:22

Tara: All right well a little background. I had four years of, I’ve had a lot of surgeries and things like that for pelvic pain. But back in 2013 I was kind of at my wit's end. I had been told for four years by my physician to take Advil and drink wine when I was complaining of painful intercourse and it took a lot of searching myself on the internet to find the name of the actual condition I had, which was vulvodynia and that's just one of the pelvic pain conditions that can cause painful intercourse and I asked my physician, do I have this. He said I think you do and I said okay so doing a lot of research I found that, it was kind of an unexplained nerve pain condition, they don't know what causes it. So, I remember back in 1996 when my mom had fibromyalgia, and nothing was helping her, and they thought it was in her head and they didn't, they tried you know vitamins or they tried really strong painkillers and things, and nothing was helping her, and she met this woman that used Neodymium magnet therapy for her nerve pain. So, a light bulb went off when I read the word fibromyalgia and vulvodynia in the same paragraph online, I'm going to take neodymium magnet therapy and put it inside of a vaginal dilator. Which have, dilators have been around for over 30 years already. But there's no dilators with anything inside. So, I took a hollow set of dilators and put some neodymium magnets inside and within two weeks my pain had decreased within 60% during intercourse and then if you use the dilator right before intercourse for twenty to thirty minutes, it was about 90 to 95 percent gone. So, I knew it was a muscular issue. Because the muscles must, what happens is you start to associate intercourse with pain when it starts to hurt and so then your muscles start to clench and then you start to deal with another issue, which is muscle tightness on top of the nerve pain. So, if you can stop and relax the muscles before you have that fear of penetration and use a dilator first on your own, then you can really decrease the pain during intercourse. So that's kind of how this got started and I was like oh my goodness I am going to help so many people and there's no side effects, it's completely safe. It's not a Lyrica medication or amitriptyline or gabapentin that they're putting these women on. So, it's a win-win you know, and it's been proven to be successful, which is great.

03:57

Ramesh: So, Tara thank you for sharing your personal story. So, this business started from your own personal experience. So, did you have any business background prior to starting your own company?

04:09

Tara: I’ve always been of entrepreneur even. I mean when I was 11 I made my mom's first website. I had run another company where we had kiosks and malls kind of from the ground up with another business partner. I was general manager of restaurants. I've always been a leader and I just kind of fall into that role. I understand people and I understand that everybody has lives, and I appreciate my employees and I’ve always kind of been a leader and I just kind of take that role.

04:41

Ramesh: So, you're destined to be entrepreneurs.

04:43

Tara: Yes, yeah.

04:45

Ramesh: So, can you share how the initial struggles of starting the company. What are the process, the steps that you went through? A little bit of the journey initially please.

04:56

Tara: Yeah so, the first thing that you would want to do and what we did was you want to get some sort of protection. So, when you file for a patent or do a patent, first you do a patent search then you file a provisional patent. A provisional patent you have a year to file the non-provisional. A provisional is when you don't really know how you're going to make it, but you want some protection because you know you have a great idea. So, we filed the provisional and then we had within a year to file the non-provisional. I think a lot of people ask me, a lot of entrepreneurs ask me how much this cost. The whole journey for our patent was probably about $35,000. You can spend that and not get your patent and I just want people to know that. You can spend a lot of money and not get your patent as well. It cannot be awarded to you. So, I always tell people just because you spend the money, doesn't mean that you're going to get it. But so that was kind of the first thing we did was the non-provisional patent. Then we had to get the molds made. The injection molds, which can be very very expensive. So, we priced out getting injection molds made. We had them all made right here in Sarasota Florida. We started having our products made and then unfortunately we had to spend a lot of money on the molds before we could even test our product with other people. Because you need to make your product and it needs to be yours. So, we did that and then we started giving it out to people and we were just getting rave reviews. So, we're like we need to do a proper clinical trial. So, there's a company here in town called physicians care clinical research. We said you know design a study for us, because you know we don't know how to design a clinical trial. So, they designed a clinical trial for us with you're Michael Swore, who's a pelvic pain specialist here in town and when you do a clinical trial you have to go to the hospital, the actual clinical trial company has to go and submit the clinical trial through the hospital has to be approved through the IRB and it was. So that clinical trial was successful. It was a small group, because it was very hard to find women that had vulvodynia, aren't on antidepressants that haven't taken injections, that aren't on medication. It's basically impossible to find which was our study subject. So, after about a year and a half we finally said just give us the data for the 11 or 12 that had finished. But the data was so great, and this product is so safe, we were like let's just go ahead and we just you know launched it and it's been great ever since.

07:33

Ramesh: So, as I'm listening to your story two things popped up. One is your business is not like an online business, like a you know put a shingle up there and then start it. Right so yours involved investment up front, that's one and it took time for your first product to come out in the market. Be has you had to do other steps like clinical trials. So, let's first talk about the investment financing. How did you finance your business?

08:00

Tara: So, I was pretty lucky. I have a friend and he owns a large printing company. We do large format printing. We make flexographic plates, it's called trinity graphic and he is just a smiley bubbly person that knows how to get stuff done and he knows, everybody loves him. He has great relationships with people and I went to him and because I was kind of bored. Because I'm just a go-getter and I was like Rob I'm kind of boarding this before I thought of my idea. Do you have any ideas anything you want to do that I could run? He has this big factory and he said you know my factories running really smooth right now, I'm not as there as much as I used to be, I'm trying to think of something else. So, he gave me a paper and it all had to do with printing all these ideas. You know pick one, you can run it, we can get a store, this or that. And so, he gave me the paper and then we were travelling that summer off and on and when I was sitting at the doctor's and I thought of the idea, I'm like I got to call Rob. I'm like he'll just know how to do this. So I met Rob for lunch and I said Rob I was like I'm just going to talk about my lady parts for a bit and you're going to have to listen and I'm telling you that these women need help and this helped me and so he listened and he never once questioned me and he started talking to people in his factory and they're like my wife has a problem with that, my wife, my wife, my wife and then we met with the CEO of a large enzyme company called Enzyme Medica. He's been in the medical world forever, he's like this sounds very promising. So, we got kind of the green light from everybody and he just started writing checks and the majority of the company is mine, he said this needs to be a woman led company and I couldn't have asked for a better. He never once doubted me, and he's been my number one spokesperson, he talks about it everywhere he goes. So, I was very lucky I didn't have to, I still did a business plan. I still did a pitch deck and I did all those things. We did stuff together just in case we needed it. But I was really lucky when it came to the investment side.

10:14

Ramesh: Tara, I think it's a little different. In the sense we think ourselves as lucky, but you always were a hustler, right? So, you thought of your friend and you networked with that person before. So, all those things were leading up to your success. It's not that, I don't believe that just happen overnight. So, I mean I think your personality, you know your ability to hustle and think out of the box, I think all those things I think helped you find your business partner. That's fantastic.

10:48

Tara: Thank you.

10:49

Ramesh: Yeah how about the initial struggles, like in the sense are you waiting for the clinical data. You don't know how it's going to come. So how did you navigate those emotional ups and downs of, because you started the company in 2013, but you didn't have the product in 2016. That's about three years. So, can you tell us a little bit about what are the challenges you face during that time and how you navigated them?

11:13

Tara: Well you know this type of product, when I tell somebody I make vaginal dilator set, you know people do they're like what and then they kind of laugh at you and things like that. Most the time we got very good feedback, but sometimes people just didn't get it. There aren't a lot of other dilator companies on the market, which is great for us and then of course we're the only ones that have the magnetic component inside of our dilators. I would say the struggles were just getting our products made correctly the way we want it. Because you know the cap on the end how it seals things like that. Another struggle which we've had is marketing. So, we can't market our product like a lot of other companies and that's very hard. So, you're trying to get it out there on you know everything's marketed on the Internet you know mainly, and you're not allowed to advertise a lot of places. So, on Instagram, and Facebook and all these things where you're going to reach these women that are having these issues and that are just sitting at home googling trying to figure out what's wrong with them like I did, we have a hard time reaching them. Because retargeting ads, we're not approved for. Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest. I can have a Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest page, but my ads aren't approved ever, and it could be a picture of a you know 55-year-old woman with menopause just sitting there smiling and because it says it leads you to our website, it will deny you and, so I feel like, I see a lot of things. I see ads for women's you know sexual health items on Facebook, but we're not allowed to and we're talking about vaginal atrophy and menopause. It's really not fair and I see commercials on TV you know for ED for erectile dysfunction, they've even started blocking my normal posts that aren't even paid, and I don't have any pictures of the product now on my post. Just you know say I have in the past, but now you know I’ll talk about bad you know atrophy or vaginismus and they'll just block my initial post and not even an ad. So that's definitely our biggest struggle and was our biggest struggle is our advertising and I have you know, I’ll do a podcast, or I’ll talk about that and then I’ll get emails with advertising companies. I've hired the best, I’ve hired top marketing companies and they can't even get approved with Google employees, ex Google employees and things. So yeah that's been our biggest struggle I would say.

14:00

Ramesh: I mean it's a medical problem though. So, I'm a little confused why it is, but you are going through the problems, you know the first hand I guess. So, tell me the other thing is many entrepreneurs talk about the problems of finding their first customer. So how did you find your initial customers?


14:19

Tara: So, like I said a little bit earlier you know Rob would walk around his factory that had 50 employees and talk about it. So, our first customers we didn't charge. Cause we just wanted feedback. If you want to talk about truly our first customers and we didn't charge them, those customers. But the feedback was so great. You just start talking about it and when you talk about it, I could talk to five women and two of them will come to me after and they'll say I have this problem or my mom has this problem, or my sister has this problem. It was actually not hard to find customers and then we went to the APTA physical therapy trade shows. Which there's actually pelvic floor physical therapists. So, there's actual physical therapists to work manually on your pelvic floor, which is basically a basket of muscles and no one knows that and actually a lot of physicians don't even know that and it's sad and we went, and we met them, we talked with them at these trade shows. Because it's called the women's section of the APTA. So that was actually great because they're the ones who actually used dilators in the office and then they have women go online and purchase dilators themselves and so that was a good marketing channel for us was to actual meet the physical therapist. Because we realized we need to not mark it right now to the OBGYNs. Because they're not really, they're more you know medicine and surgery unfortunately at that time. It's getting a little bit better and, so we started marketing to the actual pelvic floor physical therapists and they you know it just kind of, we just grew very fast, very fast.

16:02

Ramesh: So fantastic actually you know from my business background I know about four things. One is a product, second one is a pricing, the third one is a promotion and the fourth one is what's called a placement or a distribution. So, looks like this distribution you found the physical therapy, it's a better opportunity for you than the doctors. Is that what it is?

16:21

Tara: Yes, yes and as far as you just mentioned pricing, you know so I'm dealing with the manufacturers who are men, my business partner that's a man and you know people were talking to a lot of men and these companies and they wanted to price it a lot higher. They're like look at the benefit you're giving people, you're giving, and I said but you don't understand, I said these women have IBS, they have lower back pain. They have like in sclerosis, they have all these other problems endometriosis that they're going to the doctor for such as myself. It's not one condition they have and we're helping it and then they're better. So, I wanted to come from someone with a lot of different medical issues, I wanted to make it affordable for these women and I don't think about oh I’m an entrepreneur and just the money side. I actually care about the customers and I think that that's why our companies became so successful as well. Because I think the customers can tell that as well.

17:22

Ramesh: That's great Tara. So, talking about success, do you consider your company to be financially successful at this point of time?

17:31

Tara: Yes, we have been now for at least about two years.

17:38

Ramesh: Okay so that's great. Let's talk about you as a person. I think you had to sacrifice few things in your life to get to where you are and what you wanted to do. So, can you talk a little bit about the sacrifices you had to make, about education, about personal life and things like that please.

17:56

Tara: Yeah so you know like its to talk dealing with all the medical issues and things, I was in and out of college. It was really hard to focus when you have so many different medical things going on. I had a car accident, back surgery, two cholesteatomas, tumor type cyst taken out of my ear you know deaf in last year, just things like that. All these random, very random random things and along with endometriosis. But I think College is good. But honestly the classes were so, some of them were so irrelevant to what I wanted to do that were mandatory. I felt like it was a little bit ridiculous. Also, one of the colleges that I went to got in trouble. A university here in Sarasota for things like promising people, you know you're all your financial aid will be taken care of and this and that and I had taken two months off from one of the tumor surgeries in my ear and in my head. So, they held my transcript hostage for about three years until the Attorney General made them give it to me. So that was a big chunk of when you're doing college you know and then somebody you want to switch, because they're doing you know they're doing wrong things, but three years later they got caught by the Attorney General and a humungous lawsuit with tons of students you know my transcript was held hostage and I'm not going to keep giving them money, when I knew that they had done, they were doing things wrong. You know that was a struggle and then of course I bartend in this entire time when I could and working every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. You don't have much of a social life and then you wake up and you work on your business during the day. So, everybody else is out having fun, partying, doing everything like that but that was fine with me, because I knew I was going to be successful and guess what those people are still partying, and I have a successful company.

20:00

Ramesh: That's great Tara. Thank you very much. So, who's been your mentor and who have been your mentors through this journey or in your life?

20:12

Tara: Well my dad who passed away in 2011. He was always Pro Tara. You can do whatever you want, very proud of me. My mother ran a business on her own. It was mocha Express, it was called. We drove around to different refineries and big corporations in Washington State. She sold them coffee and muffins in the morning, Express. Back when Seattle's Best Coffee was around and, so we did that, I saw my mom get a small business loan you know herself and fell out all the applications and I always felt like there's really nothing that I can't do and then one of my biggest mentors would have to be my business partner Rob. Because he just, when you're in business I think it's really important how you treat people and I really expect the same treatment back and he just gets along with everybody so well and we get along so great. I just think it's great to have really good business relationships and you know that you treat with respect and that they treat you with respect vice versa.

21:24

Ramesh: Oh, fantastic Tara. That's awesome. The next couple of questions I would like to ask about the business. So what kinds of tools that helped in your business? We talked a little bit about a promotion, you are still working through them. But were there any breakthroughs that you had apart from Rob? Rob definitely has been a major breakthrough. In any specific strategies or things that you did that created the aha moment for you?

21:57

Tara: Well I would have to say like what I mentioned a little bit earlier like realizing oh my goodness there's pelvic floor physical therapists. Which I didn't know when I created the product. So yeah that was like who are these people and they use dilators all the time and I need to market to them. So that was great and then probably learning how to market when you're not allowed to market a lot of places. So, creating these Facebook pages, creating landing pages that go from one to another. It's all a puzzle and I was working on it yesterday my ad shut off. I mean it's literally a struggle every day. I would say that an aha moment for me would probably be, my aha moments I would have to describe them as different. Because when I have an aha moment I wouldn't say things are going better at that time. My aha moments are wow this is bad, and we need to fix it. So, we need to change the conversation like when I get banned from advertising, well I need to figure out a way to advertise and we need to put out an article that's saying that these platforms aren't letting us advertise and what's wrong with advertising about pelvic pain? So, my aha moments are more challenges that I find. I went to ACOG which is where all the doctors and OBGYNs you know are walking around. They walked up in the things that came out of their mouths. I said this is the problem. I had one doctor go, women that I see don't want to use their vagina anymore or you know what are dilators? Oh, my goodness you've been practicing I'm pretty sure for 35 years and you don't know what a... It was absolutely horrendous. So those are my aha moments where I realize I need to market to physicians more. But I actually have to teach them what dilators are for and then teach them that there is a resource of vaginal physical therapy pelvic floor physical therapy. My aha moments are more challenges I feel.

24:08

Ramesh: So, looking back are there any things that you think you should have done differently, could have done differently?

24:19

Tara: You know that's a good question. I really don't. You could say, this has been easy, and it's been hard at the same time. So, it's been easy. But I don't think I would have changed anything about it. I've had the best time. Helping women everyday and then getting an email, you know once or twice a week saying you know I got pregnant and I never thought I was going to be able to, it is so rewarding you would never think you're doing anything wrong you know. You're literally just helping people every day. I'm trying to think. You know we grew slow, so we didn't go get this big building and we didn't do this. I worked out of a small office then I grew to a bigger area in Rob's factory. Then I grew to a bigger area. So, we didn’t, I am not a money spender and we didn't do anything extravagant, we're not in debt and I really had a great time.

25:24

Ramesh: It's a fantastic. So, I mean personally I’ve learned so much just during this podcast, I'm sure our listeners also will do and then just talking to you, it's a very inspiring story. It's a motivating story. I hope a lot of listeners and I get inspired motivated and I hope a lot of people get to know about the you know the solutions to the pelvic pain. So, I really thank you once again for coming on this show, any last-minute thoughts, comments?

25:52

Tara: I would just say if you're thinking about being an entrepreneur, just double check your competition. Make sure that your idea is protected. But really look at your competition and pricing and I always tell people this because if you're doing a lot of things that have to do with shipping, always look at your product weight and in everything like that and it's cheaper to ship a pound of feathers and it is. You know I'd rather ship feathers than ship water. Because it's going to be a lot cheaper. So, there's so many things that you need to look at when you're dealing with a product that you have to ship in the mail. Just don't be an entrepreneur with anything that's really heavy, that's what say.

26:39

Ramesh: I see. So, the product positioning from with respect to competition, product pricing and the product to a distribution with respect to weight and those things and then the last one is a protection from a copyright and patenting perspective. Oh, that's awesome. So, these are the key things that people should think about. Especially for a physical product like yours.

27:02

Tara: Yes, yes physical products.

27:04

Ramesh: Yeah okay excellent very good. Tara thank you very much. So inspiring entrepreneurial journey. So, folks that's the end of the podcast here. Thank you very much Tara.

27:15

Tara: Thank you very much for having me.

 

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Building businesses with Business Consultant, Best Selling Author, and Radio Host, “Spunky Old Broad” Dr. Gayle Carson – AEP #3

May 13th, 2019 by

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Guest: ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Dr. Gayle Carson

As President of the Carson Research Center, she served as a consultant to 50 industries on six continents, advising them on current business trends and cutting edge opportunities to stay ahead of their competition. The author of five books, she hit the Amazon’s best sellers list, was a winner of the Best Seller Quill Award and was inducted into the National Academy of Best Selling Authors.

Currently, she hosts over a dozen radio shows per month and is the founder of the sobradionetwork.com She is also the only woman in the world who has a Doctorate, a CSP (Certified Speaking Professional), CMC (Certified Management Consultant) and an FIMC (Fellow to the Institute of Management Consultants)

Show Notes:

2:21 minute markAgile entrepreneur takeaway: Create your own jobs if you don’t want to work for anybody else. Gayle talks about how she created her own jobs after completing her college because she didn’t want to work for anybody.

5:27 minute markAgile entrepreneur takeaway: Keep talking to people about things you are good at and comfortable with. Gayle talks about how she kept talking to students about things she knew which led into coaching and afterwards public speaking. And that’s how her business grew organically.

7:18 minute markAgile entrepreneur takeaway: To become an entrepreneur, start by understanding what is in your heart and in your head. Gayle talks about starting with what’s in someone’s head and heart before she starts coaching them on becoming entrepreneurs. It’s not easy to become an entrepreneur.

9:12 minute markAgile entrepreneur takeaway: Successful entrepreneurs differentiate themselves from rest of the pack. Gayle emphasizes the importance of standing out from the crowd with some unique differentiators.

12:48 minute markAgile entrepreneur takeaway: Keep believing in yourself to persevere through difficult times. Gayle talks about how she never gets depressed in spite of multiple surgeries, multiple chemo therapies, loss of a husband and a son. Please listen to this one section if not anything else to find your inspiration.

15:00 minute markAgile entrepreneur takeaway: Find your innate personality and use it as your strength. Gayle shares a funny anecdote from her childhood days to tell us that she has always been spunky and she uses that to get the drive in her life.

17:18 minute markAgile entrepreneur takeaway: It’s important for people to know that it’s never too late. Gayle talks about why she focuses on people over 50 years of age because she thinks it’s never too late.

20:58 minute markAgile entrepreneur takeaway: Be unique and do your market research to be successful. Gayle advises would-be entrepreneurs to find what they are good at, be unique, and do market research before jumping in.

22:53 minute markAgile entrepreneur takeaway: Just focus on the most important social media platforms and stick to them. Gayle talks about why it’s important to focus only on the important social media platforms (in her case facebook, linkedin, twitter).

00:01

Ramesh: Hello everyone, welcome to the agile entrepreneur podcast. This is your host Ramesh Dontha. This podcast is about starting and running your own business with purpose, passion, perseverance and possibilities. Today I'm excited to introduce a very inspiring guest Dr. Gayle Carson. Gayle as president of the Carson Research Center served as a consultant to 650 industries on six continents. Advising them on current business trends and cutting-edge opportunities to stay ahead of the competition. She is an author, speaker, a coach and a mentor. She was selected as 2007 legend of the speaking profession. She currently hosts over a dozen radio shows per month and is the founder of www.sobradionetwork.com and she has founded the www.spunkyoldbroad.com website and she continues to be very active as a coach inspiring lots of entrepreneurs. Hi Dr. Gayle Carson welcome to the podcast.

01:20

Gayle: Hello Ramesh, how are you?

01:22

Ramesh: Pretty good. Thank you very much for accepting my invitation. I looked at your profile you're a very very

Inspiring person.

01:30

Gayle: Oh my gosh well thank you so much.

01:33

Ramesh: All right so let's get started with the question on my mind and probably on everybody else's mind. What is this SpunkyOldBroad.Com?

01:42

Gayle: Well that's a website for especially for women 50 plus. You know I I’ve had a lot of websites and I’ve been in business a long time and I found that in recent years as I worked with more and more women over the age of 50, they kind of got to that age and thought it was all over and I'm past 50 and I said no, it's not. You can do whatever you want. So, I founded the spunky old broad. It's all trademarked. I have clubs and worked with women who are over 50 who are doing fantastic things.

02:14

Ramesh: So, have you been an entrepreneur all your life or was there an inflection point in your life?

02:21

Gayle: No all my life, all my life Ramesh I have my first job, if you want to call it a job. It wasn't a job. Because I’ve really never worked for anybody was when I was 13 years old and my father had told me if I ever broke another pair of glasses, I was going to pay for them. Because I had broken 22 by that time and I got to the optometrist office picked up my new glasses and came down to my father's car, he was waiting by the curb and I put the glasses on the seat of the car and promptly sat on them and broke them. So, I didn't want a babysit, which was the only thing available to a 13-year-old and I went through the newspaper, which was the way you found jobs in and became an Avon lady. So, I’ve always created my own jobs. I've worked in a radio station and I created that job when I was like 16 and I’ve just always created whatever I wanted to do to get experienced sold people on. It was a camp counselor where I taught music and dance and drama when they didn't ever have anybody like that before. So, I was just always an entrepreneur and then I came to Florida when I finished college and started my first business when I was 21.

03:39

Ramesh: So, what was the first business again?

03:42

Gayle: Well I had a modeling school and then I developed it into a chain of career schools and I had a SAG after talent agency. So, we did movies and commercials and print jobs and so forth and also had a convention service company. Which also did the theme parties and spouse programs, industrial shows etc. for the conventions that came to South Florida. So, I ended up with seven offices, 350 people which I never want to do again and then I sold that and went into the speaking business and spoke in 50 countries in 49 states had a thousand clients and 50 industries and then started coaching and consulting and writing books and now I do all the other things you mentioned.

04:32

Ramesh: Yeah so actually I was looking at your profile and then it's a very interesting statement I found. One is you are the only woman in the world who has a doctorate, a certified speaking professional, a certified management consultant and fellow to the institute of management consultants.

04:49

Gayle: That is true and that and a nickel will not even get you a cup of coffee. So just shows you what initials will do after your name. I mean I'm very proud of all of that. But it just contributes to Who I am.

05:03

Ramesh: Yes, so one thing that seems to be fascinating about your background is you've evolved in a sense that you started with something, but you didn't just stay in that industry as that. But you continued to like, then you said from a whatever you started even into speaking and then from there you went into coaching .so how did this evolution happen?

05:27

Gayle: well it really happened naturally. Because when I had my first business that I talked about how I got my students and how I got my contacts and how people got to know about me was that I always spoke that's what I went out and I did. I spoke and gave speeches and I just did it all the time and it was very successful and people who I booked as speakers and who were you know very well-known speakers said to me well you know you want to join the National Speakers Association. Because you're a better speaker than we are, and I thought well yeah right you know, but I didn't have time. Because I was running my businesses. So, one time finally after three or four years I went to the convention and realized that I could make a living at it and that's when I put my business up for sale and went into speaking so and then the speaking led to coaching and consulting. Because people I spoke to said Oh we'd love to have you come in and do this and do this and do this and that led to writing articles and then books and then training manuals and one thing really just led to another. I mean it was a very, it was very very you know I would say easy, not easy to go into these businesses. But it was just very organic the way it happened.

06:47

Ramesh: That's interesting so one of the things in this podcast is about people who want to be entrepreneurs are people who are already entrepreneurs, but finding you know ways to be more successful. So, let's say your coach and you've coached many entrepreneurs and I think one of the areas that you said is you know helping women. So, let's say if women in her whatever age right so in the middle of her life she comes to you and she wants to be an entrepreneur. So, what is your approach? How do you go about it?

07:18

Gayle: Well I have to know where her head and her heart is. I mean people say I want to do this or I want to do that, but they don't really know what's involved in any of that. So, when you start talking about what an entrepreneur has to do to be successful, it kind of puts people off or they say wow I'm ready for it. So, you know being an entrepreneur means doing being chief cook and bottle washer when you start. You do everything and then eventually you hire people. But if you've never had any experience in your own business or you've never even worked, then you've got to ask yourself some very deep questions. So, we start off with questions, so I really understand what's in their head and heart. But if they have had experience, if they've been a part of Corporate America somewhere, then they have to understand what it's like to be an entrepreneur. Because you don't have the resources of a big company behind you. There are no paid benefits. You know you have to do everything and you don't necessarily get paid for it. So, there's just a lot of questions that have to go on before anybody or before I advise anybody to become an entrepreneur. Because it's not as easy as it sounds, and you know they picture themselves being their own boss and running their own life and working their own schedule and yes all of that is true. But also, you're responsible for everything. You don't get paid until money keeps coming in and there are all these other things that you have to worry about and much of it is promotion and PR.

08:54

Ramesh: So, I mean you have coached many people. So, what are some of the main characteristics of the people who have been successful? And also pointing out people who could not make it I mean what are the reasons behind their failures?

09:12

Gayle: Well I think the reason behind the failure is there's just no business. So, they don't make any money and eventually they have to either shut the door, because they can't afford to keep it open anymore or they have to find a way of bringing some money in. So, it's really lack sales and lack of customers that gives people the non-ability to succeed and as far as what makes it possible, they need to be unique. They need to be different. They can't be like everybody else, they can't offer what everybody else is offering or they're one of many. So, they've got to take themselves out of the pack in some way. But that may take anywhere from six months to five years depending on what they're doing and what kind of business they have, and you know whether it's online or offline or do they have a retail space. Are they operating out of their home? Are they in one of these shared spaces? I mean there's just so many things that go into it. That's the things that make it successful or not successful.

10:17

Ramesh: Okay so I mean that's how I think the spunky old broad does it makes you very unique. I mean even though it's just you could say it's a brand positioning. But you combined all the elements of your personality looks like into this unique positioning that you put out there.

10:30

Gayle: Well it's true. I mean I’ve got the whole thing trademarked and there aren't a lot, when I started in business there I mean which was a hundred years ago really. You know I’ve been in business for over sixty years. So, when I went into business there were no women really and then when I went into speaking there were hardly any women and I had to wear my little navy-blue suit, which was not my color and my little tie, and I had to be able to get on stage and strike a power pose and say I'm Dr. Gayle Carson and I'm here to teach you whatever it was I was speaking on and you know so it took a lot. But I'm very disciplined and I'm very persistent and so just by hanging in there and doing what I needed to do, you know it's like I mean I literally called a hundred meeting planners a day to be able to speak. I just called 500 people a week. Now I didn't talk to 500 people and you can't do that today, because nobody answers their phone. But that's what it took, and you know not a lot of people are willing to do that.

11:38

Ramesh: So was there any time you had downtime you said what am I doing, why am I doing maybe I should quit and then go back to getting a job or something along those lines.

11:51

Gayle: Well there were times when I said what am I doing of course. But I never really wanted to quit, and I never wanted to go get a job, because I never had a job. So, I was never going to go into that world anyway. Because I'm just not you know as people say I'm not employable. Because I just won't do things that I don't think are ethical or honest. I won't do things that I think are stupid you know to do, and I won't do things that don't make my heart sing. I have to love what I do in order to do it.

12:25

Ramesh: That's fantastic. So, Gayle while I'm along these topics I went to your website and I read about you right. There were some personal issues that he had to deal with. Whether it's a health issues, whether it's your husband, with son. I don't know if you want to talk about those issues, but how they affected impacted you personally on your business?

12:48

Gayle: Well to be open to everyone who is listening, I have lost my husband, I lost a son. I am currently going through my fourth case of breast cancer. I've had 16 surgeries. I've been through chemo, I’ve been through radiation a few times and now I'm going through hormone therapy. But it sounds, and I don't mean to be altruistic Ramesh when I'm talking to you about this. But it just it really it only made me stronger. Because I just don't give up. Am I sad my husband is gone? Absolutely. Am I sad my son is gone? Absolutely. Do I wish the cancer on anybody else? Absolutely not. But that's called life and you have to deal with it and that's another reason why an entrepreneur is successful or not. If you let these things get you down or you let people talk you out of something, then it means you didn't have this belief in the first place. So, I continue for example before our conversation today, I worked out for two hours. I work out every single day. Even through the pain, you know everything else I go through. I've had to adjust things because of what I'm going through. But I still do it, because if I didn't I would turn to mush and so yeah it affects me. But it also doesn't affect me, because I'm very very disciplined. I also do not get depressed. It's very hard for me to be depressed. So, you know I'm pretty much wake up happy and go to bed happy and that's what counts.

14:34

Ramesh: Gayle I'm sorry, it's extremely inspiring thank you very much for sharing your personal story. I mean at the beginning I said it's an inspiring story and it continues to be an inspiring. One of the things I read I think you get asked a lot how to do you stay so positive? You know and where does the inner spunk come from? So, can you talk a little about where is the drive coming from?

15:00

Gayle: That's a really good question that I'm not sure I can answer. Because I don't know where it's coming from and I’ve just always been like that. I was in my first dancing recital when I was three and I did a somersault. That was January, we were doing the months of the year and I was first, I was January. And I did a somersault, my crown fell off. I put it on and I evidently put it on backwards and the crowd started laughing and my mother told me I don't know this you know for a fact, but my mother told me that I put my hands on my hips I told the piano player to stop, I didn't move until everybody stopped laughing. I then adjusted my crown and finished my dance and I was 3 years old. I was in my first piano recital when I was 5. So, I’ve just always pursued what I wanted to do just like you know the Avon lady when I had broken all those glasses. It's just I don't know it's just when I make up my mind to do something I just dig in and do it and I really don't know. I'm not a person to stay negative and I just keep going and I don't know where it's coming from. But I was like that in high school. I got through high school in three years and I still danced, and I played the piano, gave a recital and in college I went through in three years and always worked while I was in college and was on all the musicals and did radio shows in college. So, it's just something I’ve always done you know and I could tell people where it comes from. But it's just innate with me, it's the way I’ve always been.

16:46

Ramesh: Oh, the three-year-old story is fantastic, that's is great. And then other thing I think you really are passionate about the Silver Line. Like people 50 and about is, something drove you to you know focus on that area is it because of your personal situation or do you think there is a need for people in that age that they really need to get some help?

17:18

Gayle: Well both, really both. I do think that when you're over 50 and you haven't had the experience, or you haven't reached your dream or you're still looking for that magic something, I think you need a coach. I think you need someone to guide you and so yeah, I do think that. In terms of do I think that it's because I think that it's a golden opportunity? I mean people you know start thinking about retirement they're 50 or 60 and I’ve never of course wanted to retire, and I will never retire. However, I think that it's important for people to know that it's never too late. I get so excited when I see somebody who's 80 who's gone back to school to get their high school diploma or goes to college to get certain classes. I think it's terrific when people decide they want to take up a new hobby and they're over 50 or 60. I think it's great when people start learning new skills. I mean I just think it's an opportune time you've spent your time raising your family or working you know at something to make a living to support your family and now you're freer and I believe it's your time. And so, I do believe that it's necessary that people get some coaching if they can't do it on their own and I also think it's the prime time for people to strike out and go for their dream.

18:52

Ramesh: Fantastic. So, I mean you've been a mentor to many people and a lot of your mentees have been quite successful. But who was your mentor? Like mentors. Who inspired you? You talked a little bit about your dad. So, I mean any other stories about your dad or people who have inspired you?

19:14

Gayle: Well really, I have to say it was probably my mom more than my dad. My dad was a pharmacist and he was in a very small town and he was very successful. He was named president of the New York State pharmaceutical Association. So, he was a very very successful person. However, my mom also raised me with a lot of discipline and a lot of, but a lot of love at the same time. But when I was eight years old I had to be able to call in my father's drug orders and you know I could hardly read his handwriting. It was almost like a doctor's and you could never go out with a second boy that asked you out, it was always the first one and you know it just, I mean I didn’t always do what they wanted me to do. I mean they did not want me to move away from home. They did not want me to go into my own business. They did not want any of those things. But you know in the end they were proud of me. So, I mean they didn't even want me to marry my husband. Because we were different religions and he had two children. But we were married for forty-five years before he passed away. So, it’s just you know I think my mom was my biggest mentor. Have I had other mentors? Have I had coaches? Have I joined mastermind groups, yes to all of that? But I think my greatest mentor was my mom.

20:42

Ramesh: Fantastic so towards the end of this podcast if I could focus a little bit on people who want to be entrepreneurs, what advice would you give them?

20:58

Gayle: I would give them the advice of really looking at what it is they're saying they want to do. Probably looking at three four five or more businesses who may be doing the same thing or almost the same thing. See what makes them tick, see what's involved with them, see how successful they are. See what they had to do to get where they are and then how they can separate themselves by doing it in some other unique way. But I think that they shouldn’t just jump into it. I think they should look at you know what it is they're interested in and see if there's a market for it where they are and how they want to do it. That's number one. So, whether it's going in and maybe working for someone in that industry and seeing what it's all about and how they get there their business and what kind of tools they need and so forth. I think that's a very important thing. I also think it's good to ask maybe some close friends or some people you meet in organizations you belong to what they think of this idea that you have, whatever it is and see what kind of feedback you get. Now you don't have to listen to anybody, you can just listen to your own heart. But I think it's important to take a look at what's going on around you and do you fit into that niche whatever it is.

22:27

Ramesh: That's fantastic, thank you. One of the things that comes across in my discussions with and definitely people in the Middle Ages who start the business is the social media. So, the challenges associated with staying involved the social media using that as a tool, how have you adopted to the social media and then what are the tips that you can give to people?

22:53

Gayle: I have not adapted very well. Because that's not my strong suit. However, I do spend a little time on certain platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter. Those are my three. I'm not on the others. And then I also have hired people to do my social media for me and they do it far better than I do it, I could tell you that. I think that that's one of the problems that entrepreneurs have. you can get really sucked in on social media. You can you know you go there for 10 minutes and you're there for 10 hours. So, you really have to limit yourself if you're going to do social media. But I would certainly either suggest taking courses in it or hiring somebody. Because the algorithms change, what is good one day is not good the next day and I think it's really really important if you're going to be on there to do a good job at it.

23:53

Ramesh: It's fantastic. So Gayle thank you very much. It's been truly truly inspiring. It's inspiring to me. I keep going back to your website and reading more about it. So, there you have it folks Dr. Gayle Carson www.spunkyoldbroad.com, the only women in the world with multiple, a doctorate, a CSP, a CMC and then FMC. So, an inspiring story, Thank You Gayle.

24:21

Gayle: Oh, you're so welcome thank you for having me.

24:24

Ramesh: All right

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