Unlocking Global Opportunities: Beyond Borders in Entrepreneurship (with Sally Pederson)

Speaker A: What if your business had a 24? 7 sales and marketing team without the overhead? Here's why that matters. 78% of leads go with the first responder. The odds of qualifying a lead drop by 80% after five minutes. Only 27% of leads are contacted by a sales rep, 63% of companies take longer than an hour to respond to new inquiries, and 50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. Businesses that use AI for lead response see a 67% increase in conversion rates. AI powered chat increases sales by 30% and companies using AI also reduce customer support costs by 30%. And automated follow ups can boost lead engagement by 50% or more. And that's why I built an AI automation agency called Leadloops Pro. Leadloops texts new leads instantly, follows up after hours, reconnects old contacts, handles Google reviews, recovers abandoned carts, and even a voice bot that answers calls. Basically, it's a tiny army that never sleeps. You can learn more at leadloops Pro. The other thing I want to tell you about is I'm now offering a free marketing report@getafreemarketingreport.com all you have to do is give me your business information and I check your online presence and send a detailed report in a day or two showing what's working and what to improve. Again, that's@getafreemarketingreport.com welcome to the Frugalpreneur podcast. I am your host, Sarah St. John. This episode is what I refer to as a showcase episode where I feature a bootstrapped entrepreneur and they briefly share their tips, tricks, tactics, techniques and tools that help them bootstrap their business and the successes and failures along the way. My hope is that each of these showcase episodes will provide at least one valuable takeaway that you can implement or right away in your own bootstrap business journey. Now onto the episode.

Speaker B: I've always been a business owner for almost my entire working career and working life. But what really changed things for me with my current business was I would help people along the way before I made it a business. Because it's the life that I live. It's all the things that I've been doing for getting close to two decades now. But the pivotal point when it became a business was during the pandemic when I saw the things that the government was doing. More specifically when Canada had threatened to not issue passports or not renew passports to people who did not get vaccinated. And then when the trucker protest happened in Canada and the Canadian government froze bank accounts of people who were protesting and froze bank accounts of people who contributed or helped and m supported the protesters was absolutely appalling. As a country, we are allowed to protest. It's our right. And I just thought, if this is how bad the governments are getting, and the tyranny of Canada acting as a communist country was absurd and ridiculous. And that's when I realized people really need to know about options they have available. I used to think when I lived in Canada that I'm Canadian, my company has to be in Canada. All, uh, of my bank accounts have to be in Canada. Everything I have has to be in Canada. But that's not true. And once governments around the world really started to show their true colors through the pandemic, um, that's when I realized people need this information so they can make the best decision for themselves and never be stuck under the control of any one single government anywhere in the world. As I started as a consulting firm, I didn't have a lot of overhead, which was great. A lot of the things that I used were everyday things that I was already using with the Internet and a few things. So there was only a couple of additional softwares that I've picked up along the way. So I've kept my overhead very low. But I've also been a writer for a while. So what I write about, I've written in various magazines and publications. And I've also written a, uh, few books as well. I have a couple that are available on Amazon. My most recent is called A Passport to Freedom, a comprehensive guide to acquiring additional citizenships. And another book called Tax Free Living. The writing and giving people information has also helped, along with doing smaller programs and workshops. A summit as well. So there's a lot of ways, apart from having clients that have helped the business survive. I don't believe in failure. I think everything is a learning experience. Sometimes we learn why things didn't work out or why they just didn't work out the way that we wanted them to. I think for me, in a way, it was the same thing. It was my very first summit. Financially, it was a success. I did very well. I was really happy with it, but the number of attendees, it was a failure, in my opinion. There wasn't as many who showed up for the summit itself, which was disappointing for me because I really want to get the message out to let people know that there are options out there. But I've also learned with that though, that sometimes it's timing, timing of the day, timing of the week, people have intentions of coming up. Other things happen that they have to deal with. And that's why people have multiple summits and do things differently. Maybe some more advertising for it. Registration number was really good, but it was the actual Live on Time summit. It was a virtual one. So I would have to say yeah, it was definitely attendance wise to me. Felt like a failure because the numbers weren't there that I wished that were there. But on the flip side of it, the numbers wise financially that I made from it was very good. So it was a little bit bittersweet. It was both. But definitely a big learning experience and I will be doing more summits again. You can get paid to write articles for various publications, online magazines, those types of things are available where you can still be giving out information. You're promoting your business and you're getting paid to do that. At the same time writing a book potentially, if it works for you. Obviously that it does take time to do. Self publishing is a lot faster than traditional publishing as well. So that could be an option. Or just having small, inexpensive, but very informative things that you can sell or have people get so they can have wins. Whether it's a workshop and you charge a small amount for the workshop. But making sure that people have valuable information where they're going to come back and they want to work with you or buy your programs or have you do whatever service that you're offering. There's many ways. People really just kind of have to look at what they offer people. And having good reviews is also another one. Testimonials just there's so much information on the Internet, a lot of it's not true. So just because it's on the Internet doesn't mean that it's true. And so we just need to make sure that you're a person and they want to work with you. It comes back to that. They like know and trust you and that's definitely going to help. I think people really need to think about what they're doing and why they're doing it. Do you want to have a long term business or are you looking to just make some quick money to pay the bills? And sometimes it is a little bit of both. I mean, obviously we need to make money to pay our bills, but having a business is a long term. It's work. It's not that easy. The book came out the four Hour Work Week. When we truly look at business owners, they don't work a four hour work week. There might be a few that do, but they've been in business for a very long time and they put in a lot of hours. You don't just start a business thinking it's going to be successful and work four hours a week. That's like finding a needle in a haystack. I don't want to say it's impossible because maybe there's one or two people in the entire world of 7 billion who have done it, but it's not normal. You have to put in a lot of work. So it needs to be something that you are somewhat passionate about. You need to keep your eye on the goal. What is it that you're really trying to do? Because the shiny object syndrome kills a lot of businesses. They get distracted, they try this, they try that, they do this, they do that, they change this. And they're all distractions, taking away from what a person really wants to do. And so for me, I just like to guide people to know that there's so many options out there. You're not stuck in one country. You shouldn't keep all of your eggs in one basket. So for more information about what we do is on the website global citizenlife.org O R G and we have all kinds of events and workshops and summits and information that people can really learn about diversifying to reduce their taxes to zero or single digits, protect their assets, get citizenships and residency in different countries around the world, and just truly live a life that they desire.

Speaker A: I hope you enjoyed that episode and were able to take away a, uh, valuable nugget of information that you can implement right away in your own business. If you feel your story would be valuable for the listeners of this show, please visit Frugal Show Guest what if your business had a 24. 7 sales and marketing team without the overhead? Here's why that matters. 78% of leads go with the first responder. The odds of qualifying a lead drop by 80% after five minutes. Only 27% of leads are contacted by a sales rep. 63% of companies take longer than an hour to respond to new inquiries. And 50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. Businesses that use AI for lead response see a 67% increase in conversion rates. AI powered chat increases sales by 30%. And companies using AI also reduce customer support costs by 30%. And automated follow ups can boost lead engagement by 50% or more. And that's why I built an AI automation agency called Leadloops Pro. Leadloops text new leads instantly follows up after hours, reconnects old contacts, handles Google reviews, recovers abandoned carts, and even a voice bot that answers calls. Basically, it's a tiny army that never sleeps. You can learn more at leadloops Pro. The other thing I want to tell you about is I'm now offering a free marketing report@getafreemarketingreport.com all you have to do is give me your business information and I check your online presence and send a detailed report in a day or two showing what's working and what to improve. Again, that's @getafreemarketingreport.com.