🚀 Build a Business That Funds Your Life, Not Steals It - 149

Speaker A: Hi, guys. Everybody had a impressive lunch. All right, so first of all, I want to say thanks to William for having me here today. And, um, I got to go back to what Nick said just a little bit time ago. He talked about the choices, um, that you have to make because you're responsible for everything that you do. And then two, the numbers need to make sure that you put some specific metrics on your end goal. But the first one is choices. So my one word is uncomfortable. And, uh, this came to me recently, just about two months ago, a good friend of mine, Evan Carmichael, some of you might know him, He's a big YouTuber. He teaches this concept of finding your one word, because everything is going to pretty much evolve around that one word. So my one word is uncomfortable. Get comfortable. Being uncomfortable. And I learned this about a year ago from my jiu jitsu coach. For those of you that ever trained BJJ, sometimes you have a 200 pound guy on top of you trying to choke you out. And, uh, as uncomfortable as that feels, it teaches you a lot about yourself in those moments.

Speaker B: Brandon, let me tell you the truth. It's not about who you know, but who knows. You. Brand Up. Um, it's your story. You can rewrite it if you so choose. It's your life. You decide those moves. Brand Up. Um, you want to talk about getting the bag? He built a seven figure brand from scratch. Brand Up M is the Brand up podcast. But you already know. Enough talking, bro. Let's start the show.

Speaker A: So I have to use some slides because, uh, some of the stuff that I'm, um, gonna share with you is fairly technical, but I'll try to keep it short. And then we'll, uh, we'll dive into some specific use cases. But by show of hands, let me see how many of you have a local business who sells something locally. Right. And what about online businesses? Anything that has to do coaching e commerce products. Cool. All right, perfect. So, fancy title. This is my favorite thing. So my, um, specialty is client acquisition, mainly through paid ads. But I have some pretty cool tips on, um, applying it with organic traffic as well. So what I'm going to show you is literally my tried and true methods since 2015. So I immigrated to the States in 2013. I'm originally from, uh, Eastern Europe. Um, I brought my wife here actually in 2013. I was here in 2012. Then I went back a couple months and, um, that was my biggest sell. When Nick asked, what's your biggest accomplishment? Um, that was selling the American dream to my wife. She couldn't speak a word of English, all her family was there. And I said whatever I said. But I convinced her to move across globe with me. And uh, we've been together since then. So this fancy title pretty much just means to sell more shit so you can do more of what you love, not the other way around. I'm a big believer into whatever you do in your business should fulfill your lifestyle and not just try to always chase, oh, I'm not gonna start my business because I don't. It's not something that I love. I feel like we all have different journeys in our lives and sometimes you just have to do the shit that sucks. And Mike Tyson said this, you just have to be disciplined because discipline is doing something that you hate, but doing it as you love it. And sometimes you just have to go through that in order to make things happen. So the real test for what I'm about to share with you is it works. The strategy works really well for businesses that have to educate the consumers before they sell it. And a.k.a. those are just sales calls. How many of you do sales calls yourself or you have a sales team.

Speaker B: Cool.

Speaker A: Perfect. So all of this, um, and on top of it you can probably bring up any kind of industry and I'll show you how this can apply. So getting clients, obviously NC words and all that, it's cool. But at the end of the day a lot of people have this thought that you have to just grind your ass off and post daily. And because you see Gary Vee and all these big names telling you that. But a lot of times we don't look behind the curtain to see that they have big themes. So I'll show you how you can actually do it even if you're a one person show. Because let me ask you this, actually, when you start your business, what's the most important thing? Yeah. And then if we go. Exactly. So are the lifeblood of any business. Doesn't matter what you do, what you sell. So here I am in 2012. Came to us for the first time. Clearly my. One of the only phrases that I knew was are you guys hiring? So I didn't have the entrepreneurial mindset. I came here, I got uh, a job and then I got a second one and a third one. So for three years straight, that was my only mindset. Uh, to just work my ass off seven days a week, three job two, three jobs every single day just to save some money. Wasn't any entrepreneurial goals at that point. However, going back to what Nick said Recently, choices and decisions, right? So I always had in my mind, my end goal was to build a life, build the American dream here in US and, uh, it started with really small goals. My first goal when I moved was park. Like, not get a job until I get a Social Security card. So that was a small goal. Then get a driver's license so I can drive and get my ass to work so I don't have to use my bike every day because I got hit by a taxi driver and almost fucked up my knee. Right? So all these little goals are important to set up. Now relay that in your own business, sometimes you just have to set small goals in order to achieve the bigger one. So I saved every penny for about two and a half years. some point in time, we decided it's time to go into a short honeymoon. So we went to Dr. But my problem, I was still employed at the time. So what I realized, instead of me enjoying my time with my wife in doctor, I was thinking at the fact that I'm not back in Boston and I'm losing money. Fucked up mindset, if you think about it. But that was the time that I decided that was the trigger that said to me, you need to make sure that you can build something that can make you money even when you're not there. So I came back to Boston, I bought a truck. So after 2 1/2 years, I saved up about 25k. I bought a box truck, and, um, I started delivering some furniture to, um, some stores locally. About seven months in, we hit about 2 to $300,000 in sales. And, um, what happened was I shared the story with a, uh, couple of guys last night. Being an immigrant requires you to file a bunch of immigration paperwork. So every seven to eight months, I had to pay a lawyer to extend my status here in the States. So he rips me off of 10k, 5k for me, 5k for, uh, my wife. Because he submitted two applications that went back to back and they were pitting on different purposes. My wife went to apply for F1 visa, which is a, uh, student. And I applied for being a resident because we were together legally. Those two applications both got canceled. And the week later I got a deportation letter in my mail saying, you have three days to leave the country. If not, you're going to become an illegal immigrant. So I'm like, fuck, man. I just saved up all my. I just used all my savings, bought a truck, built a business. And the business was X figures in, but it was profitable already. What do I do Next. So what happened was eventually two days later, by plane ticket flight back to Romania. At this point I had a business partner which stayed in Boston and ran all the operations. But um, I was the one handling all the marketing and all the sales calls. So for seven months while I was in Bucharest, I lived on US time zone, taking all the sales calls to a VoIP system and making sure that I can run all the marketing campaigns. So I call it, I really call it a blessing and a curse at the same time because I was able to remove myself from the business operations day to day. And I really dived into what eventually became my specialty, which is marketing, client acquisition and um, everything that came afterwards. So my mission literally for the rest of my life is to help 1 million entrepreneurs and business owners create a rewarding business that fulfills their lifestyles. So as you can see, eventually what happened, um, I started to enjoy going on vacation, started to speak on uh, some events, was on Bradley's uh, podcast. Um, speaking of other events, I interviewed some of the guys in here you might know. So if you go to um, Tunes or Spotify, you pretty much be able to listen all these guys on my podcast. So let's dive into the three phases of generating clients with the process that I'm about to share with you. First, one is strategy. So number one is leads are the lifeblood of any business. Then number two, we'll dive into how to never compete. And I know a lot of people nowadays talk about building a personal brand. I'll show you how you should actually think twice before you start a personal brand versus a business brand. The main reason is you're not going to be able to exit the personal brand. You're able to pivot it. And I'll show you one of my favorite case studies, which is my wife's business. And three, how to use a very cheap link method to become omnipresent. Um, if you guys relate to, you go on Amazon, you find a product and then that thing, if you don't buy it, it follows you all over the Internet. I'll show you how to do just that pretty cheap. So we got a couple stages. At first you got customers, dream customers that might be problem unaware. They don't even know they have a problem that you can solve them with the services or product that you sell. Then there'll be people that know that they have a problem, but they don't know what's the solution. Then they know who this, what the solution is. Now they search for things like think about a Plumber, like plumbers near me, um, roofers, things like that. And then you have, where you want to be is when they search for your name. When people search for the name of your business or the brand in this case, it puts you in the most favorable spot. Why? Because you, nobody competes with your brand name unless you have some smart competitor that might bid on those keywords. But this leads me to this. We all heard this, right? It's not about what you know, it's who you know. Everybody agree? Exactly. It's not who you know, it's who knows you. And that's actually traffic. So I'll cover two types of traffic. We got search, which is pretty much dominated by Google, number one search engine. And then the second biggest search engine is YouTube. And then we got interruption marketing channels which are your facebooks, your Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest. But let's look at some important um, case studies. So if somebody goes to Google and searches for plumbers near me, that person has the intent of hiring a person that needs, Right, like you need a plumber. Let's say your bathroom is all messed up. You go to Google, whoever pops up first you call it, ask for them to come over. Then you paid it. But then you have on Google you also. Because pretty much in our business the ah, most common questions is but what should I even create content about or what should I make my um, content topics. Literally you don't even have to use any tools. You go to Google and people will type in there and you'll see in there it says people also ask, this is directly from Google. Then you have the people that search for how to unclog a sink and then you go to YouTube. Then you'll see the same thing. But now we have two different intents. People that want to hire a service provider and then you have people that want to do it themselves. So be aware of this. Then we have, I don't know if um, you guys know this but TikTok is also a search engine. So nowadays you go to TikTok and search for different services. It will show you ah, as long as you type in on um, these three dots and filter to the most relevant the, then you can see what others search for. So now you have all of these topics that people are literally typing in on TikTok, same thing on Pinterest. Um, they now accept vertical videos. So it's pretty much becoming a regular. But Pinterest, it's also a search engine especially for uh, woman products. Last night we uh, talked a little bit about real estate investing. Same thing. You type in the topic, you'll see who pops up first, and then you can actually see what other people are searching for when it comes to these topics.