IAM2506 – Reignite Your Focus and Commitment: Day 184 Journey

In this special episode, Gresham Harkless reflects on attending a Discovery Day with Neighborly, a franchisor with a wide range of brands, including standout options like 4 Candidate, an appealing fit for one of his prospects.

Gresham discusses refining his process by potentially merging the initial and second calls with prospects to build stronger rapport and qualify leads more efficiently.

He admits he hasn’t yet taken anyone through the entire broker process, but recognizes that many in the industry aren’t actively generating leads and rely too heavily on organic efforts.

Moreover, he stays focused on gradual improvement, working to manage his various responsibilities while striving to be just a little better every day.

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Transcription:

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Intro 00:00

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:28

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. And this is a special episode of our I AM CEO Podcast.

And this is actually going to be a snippet of a snippet, so to speak. I'm just doing an intro because I've been starting to document my journey into starting what is now called Blue Star Franchise.

We're also going to do a kind of sub site within CB Nation called Franchise CEO. So you'll see some links in the show notes related to that.

But just wanted to give you a little bit more insight, give you a little bit more color in some of the aspects of why I'm actually doing this.

Because one of the things I was doing as I was going through training to start up this new business was realizing and hearing from the founder of FBA, the Franchise Brokers Association, that it'd be really cool to document your journey going through and building this out.

I think it's something that would be super helpful, obviously for people that are looking for and thinking about starting franchises.

But frankly, if you're starting anything, any type of business, I think it's really cool to kind of just even see the journey and how it's been going from there.

So I'm going to share a few of those snippets from the, from the first couple of videos that have been created.

But definitely, of course, subscribe to our YouTube, check out a lot more where I figure out exactly where we're going to post this.

So I'll have that information that's available to you. But regardless, if you're a builder, continue to keep building, continue to do your thing.

The world definitely needs exactly what you're trying to build and needs you to be your unique self.

So make sure to run your own race, because nobody can run your race like you. This is Gresh signing out. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

And just like that, it's day 184 of the Franchise Broker Journey. I'm back home, went to the Discovery Day with Neighborly. Learned a lot. There's a lot of different concepts and brands they represent.

Also, the other brands too, which I think are some power brands, that I also heard about, which I heard about 4 candidate, which is really good.

It's one I felt like was a really good option for one of my candidates that I had a territory check done for.

But it brought all these to life. It colored in a little bit more on what they are.

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I even heard from an internal broker per se. It's like when sometimes they get leads, the leads ultimately come in the door.

When they come in the door for them, they start to go through their process themselves, but they just have 19 prayers to kind of understand.

It's interesting because one of the things I heard and then one of the things I wanted to experiment with is that I have an initial call.

But if I combine that initial call with the second call, what that looks like and having the flexibility to be able to do that is something that's really, really important.

But I think it also builds a rapport because I think that if you break it up, it allows the first call to be fairly quick.

The second call, it could be a little bit longer where you're going through each of the different brands.

But if somebody shows up for two calls, then you know that you have a more viable candidate.

But with that being said, nevertheless, it's a process to ultimately kind of go through to really understand what it's like to take someone through the entire steps.

And again, I haven't done that. And I think that's the reality that you can kind of beat yourself up about.

But one of the things that I feel like I've learned is that a lot of people are not doing a lot to generate leads and opportunities from what I can tell.

There are some things that I've heard experimental here and there, it seems like a lot of people are just keeping it kind of close to the vest, or they're doing it organically.

So as with most marketing and most business, and that's what you will kind of hear even from a franchise standpoint, it's important to invest into the marketing and the advertising and those things.

And a lot of times those brands would do that on their behalf. And the reason that they want to do that is because you need that to grow.

So if you have enough marketing, you have enough advertising, then you can continue to kind of grow the business.

I feel like what you find is most people don't, most businesses don't. And even I see that, we have a larger in the marketing business.

We have a larger amount of like websites we're hosting or websites we build not as much marketing of these businesses.

So with that being said, it's interesting to kind of see because you're seeing that within this broker industry and that I see that's where the opportunity is.

So, with that being said, just have to put those things together and make those things happen.

But I think going through this process has allowed me to kind of recommit. I didn't necessarily hear anything that made me say like it was an aha moment.

But I think it definitely reminded me that some of the things that I may be struggling with which is time.

Time commitment is the biggest thing and it's not just deciding time it's just like having a lot of things that are pulling at you they're pulling at me can cause some of the things that I'm hearing from other people.

Many other people are involved in other things. So doing it part-time is definitely a struggle.

It's definitely possible, but you just got to be really on it, when you're doing it. And I think that I have some complimentary things, but not all, not exactly, directly those things.

And actually, everybody from my class is kind of struggling with the same thing.

Needless to say, for me to take out time to do this, it kind of reignited in me that desire to get good at it.

But I think I also look at it as like, there's time. There's time to continue to get better.

You wanna crush this next six months of the time that I've been doing it, but, or really, if you look at it from a quarterly standpoint, it's gonna be like eight months, or really it's almost may now, so seven months.

But you wanna continue to kinda do those and get better. So that being said, just continue to chop at the tree, continue to kinda get better and see what happens.

But I feel a little bit more committed, but I think I'm a little bit honest too around, I have, I lost a key member of the marketing team right before I left.

So there are still kind of on the web team, I should say. And I think there are still kind of things that are pulling at me and that are a reality.

So it's just balancing those to continue to kind of take steps forward and be 1% better than I was yesterday. And I feel like I've been able to do that over the last few days.

Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help. And of course, I look forward to giving you more and more updates.

 Outro 06:48

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Check out the latest and greatest apps, books, and habits to level up your business at CEOhacks.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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