TheMikeODonnell

Today is April 16, 2012 and I am moving to Montreal on the 29^th. My time in the USA is running short so I figured I would reflect on what I have been up to lately.

Towards the end of March I went out to Del Mar, San Diego for the first Equity Investors Network meeting. I went out 2 days early and stayed at Justin’s house in Pacific Beach on Thursday night. It was great to out and spend time with Justin and Dreama and also meet their two kids Stella and Sebastian. They are also in the process of moving and on April 29^th they will be moving to Panama for 4 months and then back up to Vancouver to raise their kids.

Friday through Monday night I stayed with Ben at a hotel in La Jolla. This was really beneficial because it gave us another 4 days to build our relationship and get to know each other better before I move to Montreal. The EIN conference provided some really good information and was definitely worth my while going. The material itself was good, but in my opinion it was very high view looking down kind of information for the most part. I picked up some actionable items and things I can do, but I received the most benefit out of the networking and relationship building I did on the trip.

During the conference, Ben, Heidi, her friend Galen, Farukh, and I decided to form our own Investment group between us. For now we are joking calling ourselves the AMAYA group after the restaurant we were in when we decided to go in on deals together. Basically we will bring any deals we find to the table and the 5 of us will review the deal and do due diligence and then if it is a deal we want to pursue then we can all join in or only a few of us depending on whose services we will require. As the low man on the totem pole from an experience standpoint this has been great. We have already had one conference call in which we discussed presenting to a major Golf Appliances company. As the person with the least concrete experience and money to invest, I have positioned myself as someone who will basically do a lot of the grunt work so I can get in on some deals. This will be great experience for me and give me the chance to implement the knowledge and techniques I know. I am also excited to get to Montreal because Ben has already had preliminary discussions to get involved in 7 different Equity deals in Montreal. By becoming his right hand man, I can move my way in to his Equity Investment deals too and be of great value to him.

Shortly after returning from San Diego, I went to a BenPhilly meeting in West Chester. This is a premier entrepreneurship group full of business owners from Pennsylvania, New jersey, New York, and Delaware. I met a ton of great people and also had a chance to hear James Malinchak speak. My biggest take away from his speech was that I really need to focus on Income Generating Activities and pay people to do the $10 an hr work instead of wasting my time doing it myself. After his speech he gave away a ridiculous offer because he is best buddies with Charlie McDermot, leader of BenPhilly, and I was able to get his “Millionaire Secrets Revealed” product, a Sales Letter Template collection, and the chance to go to a 4 day event at his house in Las Vegas all for only $297. This truly was a ridiculous offer and I am excited to delve in to the material.

This upcoming weekend is Blue and White weekend at Penn State. I wasn’t planning on going because I’m moving so soon, but my buddy Jordan is flying out from Texas so I want to see him before I leave. Today, I emailed a couple of my old marketing professors to see if I can speak to their classes on Wednesday or Thursday while I am up at Penn State. I don’t know what I will speak to them about yet, but as someone who was sitting in the same seat as them last year I think I have a lot of value I can bring to them. At the end of my speech I am going to try and see if any of them want to intern with my company. It would be designed similar to the internship I took with Justin where it would be unpaid and they could commit as many hours as they want. I have a ton of information products and things I can teach them during the internship. I’m hoping that I can get them to write a lot of the content for my website and also help me launch a side website that I can use to sell some products on the internet. I guess it will depend on the skills of the intern and how much I can teach them, but I think it would be awesome to get my own intern.

Related Blogs

I quit my job yesterday, but I didn’t feel the rush of excitement that I expected. I should be excited to now have all of this free time to work on the things I want to do, but for some reason I am not. I’m not sad, just not full of excitement. In my head, quitting my job is not an accomplishment, it is just the next step towards accomplishing my goals. Quitting my job doesn’t bring any money in the door, getting started working with Ben and Paul and Krusz brings money in the door.

Sitting at home on my first day of unemployed entrepreneurship makes me realize how lucky I am to be partnering with Ben as I move forward. The ability to have an accountability partner and someone to bounce ideas off of is immeasurable. Recently, I sat back and evaluated my “business” and what I have going on, and I realized that I don’t have a business at all. What I have is a lot of lucrative projects coming my way and many outstanding personal growth and learning opportunities ahead of me, but not a business.

For right now, these projects are exactly what I need to get my feet under me and some cash coming in the door. However, in time I am going to need to build my RIF base as they would call it at SimplexGrinnell. One off projects are great, especially those that may last a year or more and provide extra opportunities down the line, but eventually I will need to build some type of continuity in for me to really call what I have a business. I have continuity with the Millevois and that is what I need to replicate. Multiple customers that pay me on a monthly basis for services rendered.

I’m starting to run into problems as I try to start building out my website and get  some SEO groundwork going. The problem is that I am not focused right now. I have SEO/LSEO services I am going to be offering in Canada, a possible Product Launch in Pittsburgh, Consulting, SEO, or Equity Deal that I may work out with Krus, ACN opportunities that I have been completely blowing off (even though this is the continuity I am looking for), and the upcoming EIN conference which is going to send me on a bunch of other tangents. I know my website is going to be for SEO/LSEO services in Philadelphia, but is that really what I want to do? If any of these projected big income opportunities hit, do I want to be stuck doing this kind of work? I definitely have some serious focus issues pulling me in different directions, but I would prefer it this way instead of having all of my eggs in one basket.

In closing on this little reflection, I would have to say that the song that I can’t get out of my head right now is Talahina Sky by Kings of Leon. Here are the lyrics:

Weeds blow tall on a broken train track
Ruth B. draws we’re fixin’ to get high
Maybe we’ll hit the bluffs and find ourselves the same old rum

But everybody says this place is beautiful
And you’d be so crazy to say goodbye
But everything’s the same this town is pitiful
And I’ll be gettin’ out as soon as I can fly

Life goes by on a Talihina sky

The hopped up boys are lookin’ for their trouble
The knocked up girls, well they’ve all got their share
Ruth seems out of her mind, swears she won’t give in this time

“Life goes by on a Talihina Sky and I’ll be getting’ out as soon as I can fly.” I keep singing these words in my head. I grew up with a great family in a great area but I need to get out. Not from my family, but from the Rat Race that I almost entered when I graduated college. Most everybody follows the same path of high school -> college -> work your ass off for the rest of your life, and I need to get out. Moving to Montreal is my chance to Fly and it is up to me to make sure I fly. Cause whether I succeed or not, Life Goes By on a Talihina Sky. Making the right decisions and staying disciplined is just as easy to do as it is not to do.

Related Blogs

Today is Thursday, March 1, 2012 and it truly is the calm before the storm. On Saturday morning at 5am I am leaving with my family to go on vacation to Punta Cana for a little bit of relaxation. When I return on March 6 I will be quitting my job and that’s when the fun begins. The following paragraphs explain the storm that is to come and the impending changes to my life.

If you read my previous post, then you know that I have started my own internet marketing/search engine optimization company and have partnered with another company in Montreal, Canada. Right now, I still am working with Millevoi Bros. Auto Sales in Philadelphia and achieving great results with helping them grow their used car business. When I go down to present the February report to Mark in a couple days, I will also be asking for a referral to meet with his friend who owns a jewelry store in Philadelphia. As far as Canada goes, I will most likely be moving to Montreal the second or third week of April for about 5-6 months. My “contract” (In quotes because I don’t have a contract per se. I will be a sub contractor being paid on a monthly basis for services rendered) is with Benjamin Beauregard from Convernet to manage the business portfolio he is acquiring from the Consumer Choice Awards. The Consumer Choice Awards is similar to the Consumer Reports in America, but they rank local businesses in Canada whereas the Consumer Reports ranks products. Historically, the Consumer Choice Awards (CCA) has had 3 service offerings to their customers. Each service offering revolves around the customer being able to use the CCA logo because it instills consumer confidence. The first service offering is a bill board for the company with the CCA logo prominently displayed on it. The second is a featured article in the CCA magazine. This is similar to having an article written about you in the Consumer Reports. The third offering is a video series, either TV commercial or YouTube video that can be used to promote the business. Back in October 2011 Ben approached Marcel, the owner of CCA, to inquire about offering a new service to the CCA customers, search engine optimization services. Ben had known Marcel for a couple years after meeting him at a Tony Robbins event and had done minor work with Marcel in the past. Marcel agreed to Ben’s proposal and Ben started crafting the SEO service offerings that we would be providing. In November 2011 I was speaking with Ben on the phone about how I was planning on leaving my job and he decided to bring me into the picture. He explained to me that we would be offering 3 tiers of SEO services to the CCA customers. Tier 1 would be basic link building, Tier 2 would be link building plus link wheels and link pyramids, and Tier 3 would include the services of Tier 1 and Tier 2 and also include local search optimization to the mix. Jumping forward to present day, CCA has just completed a launch in Calgary and received 100 opt ins for Tier 1 service and 3 opt ins for Tier 3 services. Ben is going to start the on-boarding of these 103 customers by himself and when I get to Montreal in April I will start helping out and taking more responsibility. Statistically, we are planning on providing search engine optimization services for anywhere between 500-700 customers by the end of this year.

Knowing that I will be moving to Montreal, I have started to teach myself how to speak French. I downloaded the French Rosetta stone and was diligently working through each module for almost an hour a day through December and January. At the end of January I went out to Austin, Texas for the Third Annual Traffic and Conversions Summit and have been too busy (You will know why by the end of reading this post) to make time for French since then. Today I finally started back up and spent about an hour and a half getting myself back into the swing. I plan on getting a French tutor when I move to Montreal to help me master the language.

While I was at the Traffic and Conversions Summit in Austin, I had the opportunity to join the Equity Investors Network. This network was created by Perry Belcher and Ryan Deiss during the weekend of the event because they wanted to try and crowd source investment banking opportunities. Perry and Ryan make a lot of money teaching people how to use innovative marketing techniques, but the majority of their income is derived from growing businesses that do around $2-3 million per year to around $20 million per year. Their idea was “Why should we as SEOers only charge a client 1k-2k per month for our services when our services can literally triple the customers business and profits?” Wouldn’t it be smarter to negotiate for equity in the business, say 30%, and then when we triple the business we have now made a boat load of money. So this is what they have been doing for a couple years now. Either buying businesses or negotiating equity in them and then growing and selling the businesses. The problem is, you can’t just go out to business owners and say, “Hi, I want to buy your business.” It just doesn’t work like that. With a limited amount of resources and deal flow, Ryan and Perry were doing about 10 businesses per year. However, they realized that if they taught their Digital Marketer followers how to do exactly what they do, then they could create a community of SEOers who are buying and selling businesses. This would bring much more deal flow their way and give them the ability to partner with people on the biggest deals because they have the most experience and credibility. So anyways, I am now a member of EIN and at the end of March, I will be flying out to San Diego for 5 days to learn and train on how to do what Ryan and Perry do. They will be covering soup to nuts on how to source products and raw materials from China, how to negotiate for equity, all of the legal aspects involved, etc. By being a part of EIN I now have a network of lawyers, CPAs, investors, you name it, at my finger tips and we are setting up regular meetings in major cities with other EIN members. When I first signed up and became a member of EIN, I didn’t realistically think that I would come home from San Diego and just start buying and selling business. I just wanted to get in because the knowledge and experience I would get would be invaluable. However, with Ben and Justin and Nitten from India and Heidi from Minnesota going, I will now have my own in network of Investment bankers that I can partner on deals with together. Ben and I have already talked about how we can go in on smaller deals together to minimize our risk and learn the ins and outs of doing equity deals.

Recently, a friend and mentor of mine, Mike Kruszewski started his own business. Krusz was the top salesman in SimplexGrinnell for both Canada and America for 5 years in a row and my personal mentor before he left the company to go to Waymans. He is only in his late 30s, but he is a veteran when it comes to the life safety industry and he has important contacts throughout all of Philadelphia. Krusz noticed the importance of electronic reporting for building inspections as a key differentiator for the top companies in the life safety industry. He also noticed that there were really only two major electronic reporting companies in North America that had a stranglehold on the market. So he decided he was going to start his own electronic reporting company. Of course I was the first person he came to because he knew that I was knowledgeable about search engine optimization and knew the steps he needed to take to get his business off the ground. So we met and I explained to him everything I have going on and basically positioned myself as the perfect asset he would need to grow his business. I discussed the EIN and how I want to start asking for equity and naturally, he responded that he wasn’t going to give up any equity. Yada yada yada, I’m not concerned with that right now. I gave a lot of free consulting at our meeting to build my own personal value and credibility and show him that I had what it takes to blow his business up sky high. He didn’t take any notes. At the end of the meeting I told him that I would source some programmers for him to build his database/website for a friendly fee of $500. I was giving him a break with the $500 because I could have charged much more, but I guess he thought this to be on the high side. I got in touch with 14 top programmers from around the world and scheduled some Skype interviews. Before I interviewed them I spoke with Mike and he told me that he was in touch with a programmer that said he could do the job. I told him I had interviews scheduled so he had to make a decision before I spent all of my time interviewing. His guy wasn’t the best communicator, so he said only do a few interviews and then get back to me. I interviewed the CEO of a major development company in Pakistan that had 50 developers on board and could offer Krusz start to finish support including web design. I also interviewed the business development manager and senior systems analyst at a huge development company in India that also had an office in California. These guys had 500 developers on board and full start to finish support including web design. They also just got done building an electronic reporting site for a residential inspections company. I guess you could say I blew Krusz’s guy out of the water. Oh wait, I also secured the services of these companies for $12 per hour instead of the $30-40 per hour that is customary for the United States. So yea, I wasn’t concerned that Krusz wasn’t initially interested in giving up equity because I knew that I could position myself as the ultimate partner in growing his business. As of today, he thinks he is going to contract me to do his SEO work once the site is up and running, but that is not the case. By the time we get to that conversation, I will be back from the EIN Summit in San Diego and ready to play hard ball. I don’t expect him to accept my initial offer, which is ok. I want him to try for 6 months to grow his business himself in Philadelphia without my help. I’m fine with him paying for an SEO company because I can offer what they can’t, a fully integrated, complete marketing solution to taking his company national. When I come back from Canada, I expect him to have made a small footprint for himself in the Philadelphia area, but that’s about it. Then will be the perfect time for me to strike.

While I was waiting in the airport for my flight home from San Antonio in September, I met a man named Paul Baer. Paul was at the LMASS event and had made his living from being an expert salesman and also selling his own oil additive to NASCAR teams. Paul was 65 years old and was accompanied by his assistant Jeff. Jeff was in his 40s and was recruited by Paul from his old job as a stone mason. Paul wanted to train Jeff to take over parts of his business. Jeff had access to all of Paul’s resources from membership sites to training courses and software programs. The world was at Jeff’s fingertips, but according to my conversation with Paul earlier this week, Jeff didn’t have the entrepreneurial spirit and couldn’t cut it. Anyways, I spent 3 hours in the airport with both Jeff and Paul discussing the event, our skills, personalities, goals, etc. We hit it off and really got to know each other well. Before we parted ways we exchanged contact information and have kept in touch since September. Around the time that Paul had to part ways with Jeff, he started pursuing me. I was a young guy with a ton of drive and ambition, educated, owned a small business, and was ready to make my mark. The perfect person for Paul to partner with. Paul is an older guy who in his words “can sell sand to a camel” or something like that. He is very long winded and throws a lot of metaphors in, but that’s his style. He is an expert old school salesman with years of experience and $$ to prove it, but he isn’t super strong when it comes to the internet. As an active member of the warrior forum under the pen name “Old Dog” he noticed that the majority of the people in the forum were the exact opposite of him. All of these internet marketers were just that, computer people. Very few of them knew how to actually sell and were terrified of prospecting by cold calling actual businesses. After a little more research, he realized he stumbled upon a great information product idea. You see, when people have real jobs, their companies pay for tons of training for them. For example, at my company, I have gone through both Acclivus and The Sandler Approach for sales training. However, all of these self employed internet marketers aren’t exposed to this sales training and need to learn it somewhere. Yea, there are tons of online sales training products out there, but each generation of internet users needs something new and fresh. Introducing “Old Dog Sales Training.” Paul has developed an offline sales training course and turned it in to 10 different modules to be sold separately on the Warrior Forum through WSOs (Warrior Special Offers). Each module will be a low end information product and will launch about 3-4 weeks apart from each other. After they have all launched separately, he will put together a WSO for the entire package. Remember how I said he has all of the software and resources under the sun, but he didn’t have a great grasp on how to utilize them? And Remember how I said by the end of this year I will be providing SEO services for close to 700 companies (AKA I will have proven systems in place)? Well, Paul wants to do a Joint Venture with me where I market his products through the Warrior Forum and elsewhere and we do a percentage split on all of the profits. More on this to come as we continue to develop our plan.

So the other day my friend Meg calls me and asks me to come to a business presentation at her house. I haven’t seen her in a while so I decide to go over. The presentation was for a company called ACN and everyone at the house was given the chance to start their own ACN home business.  You would think I had too much going on and would refuse, but I considered my options and decided to join. The only setback I could see was that the model was based on network marketing, which I am not very fond of. But with the connections I made thus far and those that were about to come, I decided what the hell, I can just talk about it and people will want in instead of me being salesy to my friends. The concept for the company is that they take away the marketing acquisition costs for all of your major companies like Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, Peco, etc. In short, I basically have my own franchise of each of these companies and can sell service plans at a rate cheaper than any introductory rate you could possibly get anywhere else. I haven’t gotten started full fledge with this company yet, but I plan to use these abilities to approach all of the business owners I am going to meet as a way to lower their electricity, gas, cable, phone, etc. bills. As long as they keep paying their bills, I make a small residual percentage each month. So I guess this is my long term strategy. However, I’m still not satisfied with using their network marketing business model, so I have something much bigger in the mix that I am meeting with Justin about in San Diego to discuss. I need to read over the ACN bylaws to make sure I can legally do this, but basically I want to create a national lead generation website for ACN home businesses across the country and charge a flat membership fee for as many referrals as I can give them per month. Basically, I would partner with Justin to get the membership site up and running and then utilize my SEO company to siphon traffic to a video page with a sign up form at the bottom. We would be targeting people who are looking to save money on their bills. This still hasn’t even been developed yet, so I will talk about this at a later date as things move forward.

Moving down to some of the littler stuff I am doing. I wanted to start running some experiments with channel SEO and Amazon was the top channel I wanted to utilize. So I bought the private label rights to a book called “101 ways to get started scrapbooking.”  Yea, I know scrapbooking is girl shit but I just picked a category at random because it doesn’t really matter. I did the research and found a niche keyword to target and I created my own graphic for the book. Now all I need to do is rewrite parts of the book so Amazon can’t target it as a PLR copy and I need to buy an ISBN number for the book before I can start selling it. The pain in the ass is that it’s a couple 100 bucks to get an ISBN number and I also need to pay a monthly fee to sell on Amazon. I’m just too busy right now and cash flows aren’t the best in the world for me to run this test at the moment when it is the only product I am going to be selling on Amazon. Going to revisit this after EIN Summit and will probably also try selling a physical product at the same time on Amazon.

This last little project came to me the other night at the dinner table. My mom lost her camera so my dad bought her a brand new one for the trip. Before she opened it, I told them I wanted to run a quick test. I did some keyword research and found that the term Samsung SH100 Review only had about moderate competition to it on Google. I decided that I was going to shoot an “Open the Box” video review of the camera and use video SEO to try and achieve a first page ranking. Then, I signed up for an affiliate account with Amazon so whenever anyone saw my video and then bought anything from Amazon, I would make a few bucks. Just made the video live yesterday so we will see how things go with this test. Hoping to make a couple 100 bucks or something for the 3 hours of work I put in.

Whelp, I’m exhausted from all of this writing. At least I have all of my thoughts down on paper now so I can’t forget anything. Time to eat some dinner and then I am playing Lacrosse tonight for the first time in over 11 months. Pretty excited, even though I will probably suck from being out of practice. Then of course, next stop is Punta Cana.

–

The Calm Before The Storm by Michael O’Donnell

Related Blogs

From Unpaid Virtual Intern to Owner of an International Marketing Company in 14 Months

          Its spring semester of my junior year at Penn State and internship season is in full swing. I just came back from a semester abroad in Ireland so I’m already behind the ball after missing the fall career fairs. After many interviews and many rejections I have finally narrowed my internship selection down to 3 companies. The first 2 companies are offering standard paid Marketing internships. The work responsibilities don’t look very challenging, but on the brighter side: (1), they are paid job opportunities in my industry, (2) if I take either internship I will probably get hired right out of school and (3), they will be reputable names to add to my resume for future jobs. The 3rd internship opportunity is an unpaid virtual internship working for an entrepreneur named Justin Lee and his wife Dreama. To be completely honest, one of the reasons why I applied for this internship was because it was unpaid and I figured there wouldn’t be much competition if I wanted to use it as a fall back. Like many internship-hungry students, I didn’t even research the opportunity until I received an email about a phone interview. In my research, I learned that Justin and Dreama were successful entrepreneurs who owned multiple businesses. I always dreamed of owning my own business, so I figured working directly with someone who has already accomplished this goal would be a good start.
My internship started during the first couple weeks of summer. It was a virtual internship, which meant that I would be working on the computer from my house. It was also unpaid, which meant that I wouldn’t be spending a ton of money that summer. At least my meals were free and I didn’t have to pay for gas to go to work. I told Justin that I would work 7 hours a day and made a commitment to myself that I would stick to my promise. We decided to correspond daily by email and weekly on the phone to track my progress. During the course of the summer, I would be helping Justin build an information product called InternProfits. InternProfits was going to “provide entrepreneurs the tools and resources to find, hire and manage interns to help grow and expand their business while creating educational opportunities for tomorrow’s talent today.” My first responsibility was to help build the internship database. This included calling every college in the United States with 3,000 students or more and collecting data on their internship programs.

I made phone calls every day for roughly 2 months to help build the InternProfits’ one-of-a-kind College and University Database. At this point, many interns probably would have quit because they weren’t seeing the immediate returns they expected. When friends and family asked me how my internship was going, it was hard to explain to them that I was making phone calls 7 hours a day for free. They didn’t see the value in it and at times neither did I, especially when I compared myself to friends with big time internships at companies like Proctor and Gamble. I would be lying if I told you that the thought of quitting never crossed my mind, but my phone skills were getting better and better and I knew that if I could prove myself to Justin, I would be able to take on more responsibility.

Eventually, I proved myself to be the most hardworking and productive intern and I was able to move on to bigger and better things. As Justin hired more interns, he allowed me to manage/train them on the most efficient ways to build the database. At this point each intern had his or her own roles, some focused on learning to write press releases while others learned social media. We all contributed a portion of our time to build the database. The next few months were extremely exciting for me because Justin brought in industry experts to create his famous Easy Intern Assignments. As top dog intern, I was given the privilege to learn internet marketing techniques and strategies from gurus such as Sam Bell, Sean Malarkey, Yaro Starak, Brian Horn, and Michael Taggart, to name a few. Google their names real quick to get an idea of the opportunity that was in front of me. It was HUGE, and I was sucking it all in like a sponge! After each training session, Justin gave me a set of goals that he wanted me to accomplish and then he set me loose. Instead of telling me exactly what to do, he allowed me to learn through trial and error. I quickly mastered article and video marketing, search engine optimization, blogging and link wheel creation, social media integration, and many other important strategies.
At the end of the summer, Justin presented me with the opportunity to stay on until the end of the first semester. It was my senior year and I already had a full schedule with school, club lacrosse, and making time to go out partying with my friends. However, we were building up for the InternProfits soft launch and I was learning so much about internet marketing and business in general that I couldn’t possibly decline. I became a time management expert and was able to work about 3 hours a day for InternProfits without any significant changes to my schedule. As the soft launch approached, we gained momentum and were excited to finally see the result of all of our hard work and effort. The launch week came and went, and when the post launch numbers were calculated, our high expectations were crushed. InternProfits didn’t do nearly as well as we all expected it to do. We were all pretty depressed for the first few weeks following the soft launch after seeing what looked to be a lot of hard work go to waste. However, after the Thanksgiving holiday, Justin and Dreama realized that InternProfits was still an amazing product and they decided to restrategize.
While Justin and Dreama focused on changing the InternProfits service offerings and price points, I set a goal to start my own business during the spring semester. I was no longer working on InternProfits, but I was still speaking with Justin on a regular basis. He became my mentor and offered me as much training and guidance as he could to help me get my business off the ground. He still included me in high-level decisions with InternProfits, like redesigning the sales funnel and planning out prospect communications because he knew it would benefit me. He also offered me more free trainings on Local and Mobile Marketing from Laura Betterly and Adam Horwitz. I took all of this training and tried to launch my own local and mobile search marketing company at Penn State. With Justin on my side to keep me focused, I was able to land multiple meetings with prospective clients. However, I quickly learned that all of the techniques and strategies in the world wouldn’t help me if I didn’t know how to sell them. By the time graduation came around, I didn’t have a single client and I lacked the confidence I needed to start my own business. Time for the real world.

Three weeks after graduation, I started working in sales for a fortune 500 company. I set conservative goals of learning about business for 2-3 years and then one day setting out again to start my own business. With no short-term plan to get me there in 3 years, I fell into the 8-5 rat race and became a bum. I went from overflowing with ambition, to coming home from work to take a nap on the couch and watch television. I may have given up on myself…but Justin didn’t. Every time we talked on the phone he asked me what ideas I was working on and when I was starting my own business. It’s pretty hard telling your mentor, who has provided you all the tools you need to succeed, that you are wasting away on the couch every day when you come home from work. Eventually it wears on you and you have to snap out of your funk. I had to either set a plan to achieve my goals or stop pretending and get some new goals. The thought of working towards my first promotion 3 years down the road didn’t appeal to me, so I whipped myself into shape.

In mid September, 2011 Laura Betterly was hosting a conference in San Antonio on the topic of Local Search Optimization. This was exactly the type of business I wanted to start and the perfect opportunity for me to get focused again, but I wasn’t planning on going. I was paying my student loans and trying to put some money into savings and the idea of spending money on a plane ticket to go to a conference on something I already failed at wasn’t at the top of my priority list. That is until I had to face Justin on the phone again. I attended that conference and it turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. Within 40 days of returning from the conference I had my first paying client, a used car dealer in Philadelphia named Millevoi Bros. Auto Sales. Not only did I return from the conference super focused, but I also had the chance to network with people who were interested in the same business as me. My relationship with one of those people in particular, Benjamin Beauregard from Convernet, has helped launch me into the position I am in today.

So how did I go from having a single client in October to being the owner of an international marketing company by February? First, I started my company called Hyacinth Marketing, LLC and began offering local search engine optimization services to companies in Philadelphia. I was finally able to put to use all of the knowledge that I had been learning for the past year and half and apply it to my own business. As I started to see outstanding results, I communicated them with my friend Ben who already had a successful local search marketing business. When the time came for Ben to expand his business into working with clients all across Canada, my business was the first business he approached to partner with.

Unfortunately, my story has to end here because I am still living it! I’m building my client base here in Philadelphia and we are on-boarding over 100 clients throughout Canada within the next 2 months. I wrote this article because I wanted to reflect back on where it all began, with an unpaid virtual internship. Unpaid internships are a very controversial topic in the news these days and every time I turn around I hear another horror story. Yes, I agree, there are some terrible unpaid internships out there that offer no value whatsoever to the intern. The sad thing is that these are the only stories that make the headlines. There are plenty of unpaid internship success stories, and if designed correctly, they can provide immeasurable benefits to the intern. I went through the InternProfits system and I am living proof that an unpaid internship can be a win-win for both the intern and the company.

Related Blogs

In the 2 weeks since my first customer visit a lot has happened. On the 29^th I revisited the Millevois to show them the results of my video testimonial experiment and I have to say, I knocked it out of the park. The video monopolized the first page of Google for the term “trustworthy Philadelphia mechanics” with 6 links on the first page and 2 links fluctuating on the more competitive term, “Philadelphia mechanics.” After presenting my results and discussing local search in more detail, we decided that the best way to position the Millevois was as a used car deal because there is a lot of room for growth in that area. The energy after this meeting was amazing, and both Mark and I left with our minds spinning about how great of an opportunity we had.

I followed up again with them yesterday to present my strategies for how we could position them in the used car dealership market. This is a very, very competitive SEO category of search terms, but through my research I figured out that we could break through the competition using LSEO. The basis and energy for this meeting should have been just as positive and productive as the last meeting, but in all honesty I gave a poor presentation and we both left the meeting very blah. There are tons of statistics out there on the importance of non verbals in effective communication and even though my words and facts were straight, my non verbals were horrible.

So what happened to me? Well, we started a new training on Wednesday mornings in work which forced me to wake up at 5:30am to get to work earlier. I didn’t sleep much the night before so I was dead tired, and on top of that, I was mentally strained from a long day at work. I should have known better to make a customer visit yesterday when I could have easily stopped by today and given a much better presentation. Mark could feel my lack of energy and it translated to him as a lack of confidence in what I could do for him. All the great momentum I built up with the video results seemed to go out the window. I was able to salvage the meeting and make sure we were both on the same page, but now I sure as hell know that I need to be on top of my game the next time I stop by to see them if I want to close this deal.

Apart from the sales process, I have been making progress on the business building side. I have been in contact with a small group of people from the LMASS conference who have successful Local search businesses. We are in the process of creating a mastermind group which will include a bi-weekly conference call to discuss different local search techniques and strategies. We are all in different geographical areas so this will be a great forum to bounce ideas off each other and build our businesses. I am also in the process of adding SEO services to the my product line. This isn’t final yet, but more to come in future posts. I’m also in the process of designing a website which I plan to launch in December/January so stay tuned.

Related Blogs

On Thursday, September 22, 2011,  I approached my first potential client for my Local Marketing company idea. I haven’t signed the customer up yet, but I am fairly confident that my sales hook will make my offer irresistible. The  company I approached was Millevoi Tire and Service Center because I know the owners personally. My family has been using the Millevois for years because they are honest people and they get to know every customer personally. I got to know them on a personal level during high school when I worked as a clean up guy for the mechanics.

Now just because I am friendly with the owner doesn’t mean they’re just going to throw business my way. I simply picked them because it was a warm sales call instead of going in cold. As someone just starting out, I needed a way to build credibility fast because I don’t have any past customer success stories or testimonials to back me up. I decided to incorporate the principle of free work (Yes FREE!) to build my credibility before even asking for a dime.

I approached the situation by asking if I could try an experiment with their company. Once they inquired about the experiment, I gave a short history about how I have worked in internet marketing for over a year and how I just got back from a high level internet marketing conference called LMASS. This instantly gave me some credibility, but here is the kicker. I told them I learned a couple of tricks at this conference and I wanted to try an experiment to see if I could get a customer testimonial video of them on the first page of Google in less than a week. Oh, and by the way, the search term “Philadelphia mechanics” gets 1900 local searches per month. What business owner in their right mind would turn down this opportunity? That’s what I thought!

So now I’m in the door and if my little experiment works out (which it has for a couple search terms already) then I have a really good chance of making the sale. So without further ado, here is my customer testimonial video:

I’ll follow up next week after I review the results with the Millevois and hopefully I have my first client under my belt!

Related Blogs

This week, I had the chance to go away on the first business trip of my career. With the exception of the fact that I had to fly out on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, this was a very exciting experience for me because it marked the first of many career advancing opportunities to come. I’ve been working for about 3 months now and up to this point the extent of my sales training has come from my mentors, John and Mike, and my experiences with customer visits. This was a great base for me to get started, but I was really happy to finally experience the formal sales training that Acclivus had to offer.

I’m a firm believer that to really learn and incorporate sales techniques you need to be out trying them on a daily basis instead of learning about them in a class room setting. However, I think the learn by experience route is most effective when you have a solid base to build off of. Up to this point, I feel like I have been picking up many techniques, but I was lacking in an overall strategy to my approach. I would meet with customers and know what questions to ask, but I was never really building towards anything besides just getting raw information I could use to put a “competitive bid” quote together. I was also just setting meetings for the sake of setting meetings instead of truly qualifying my customers to make sure they were a good use of my time. In hindsight, my overall work strategy over the past month and a half that I’ve been selling has been to create a lot of activity and hope that by sheer numbers I could close a couple deals.

Now that I have completed the formal sales training, I feel like it has filled in all of the little gaps that I was missing. I’m looking forward to getting back to work because now I think I can work a lot smarter than I was instead of just working hard. I’m also eager to use some of the new techniques that I have learned to try and uncover customer pain points and drive value to get away from the dreadful low bid situation.

Related Blogs

Unless you were a finance major, chances are when you graduated college you only had a basic idea of how to manage your personal finances. If you were in a business school, you may have had the luxury of taking a couple required financial courses such as an introductory accounting course or intro to financial markets. These types of courses are beneficial to your overall financial knowledge, but they do little to create a framework from which to build your personal finance system.

Typically, students open up their first personal bank account during their freshman year of college. They get a checking and a savings account and as long as the bank treats them well, there is little incentive to change things. The pain to create a personal finance system does not outweigh the convenience of keeping things the way they are. I was in the same boat until I read Ramit Sethi’s book, “I Will Teach You To Be Rich.”

Ramit geared this book specifically to college graduates who want to get a hold of their finances. By creating a personal finance system, you can overcome the majority of psychological barriers associated with saving and managing your money. Instead of consciously keeping track of where you are spending your money and how much you are saving, Ramit offers a system that takes advantage of automation so you don’t have to worry about where your money is going.

Recently, I decided to use Ramit’s advice and build my own version of his personal finance system. For the last 4 years, I have had a basic PNC account with checking and savings. Now, my personal financial infrastructure includes an INGDirect Orange Savings Account, a PNC Virtual Wallet, and a linked PNC Points credit card.

Using INGDirect, I can have up to 20 different automated savings accounts. I haven’t taken full advantage of these benefits yet because I honestly don’t have concrete savings goals right now. Currently, I have my ING account automatically take $500 out of every pay check to put into savings, but once I get organized I can automatically send money into multiple accounts. For example, I could have it automatically send $20 towards my future wedding, $20 towards my next vacation, $50 to an emergency account, $30 towards a business experiments account, and so on. You can see how powerful this account can be over the long term towards reaching your savings goals. As Ramit would say, it allows you to have “guilt free spending” because you know all of your savings goals are being taken care of.

I also decided to keep my PNC account and upgrade it to a Virtual Wallet. Besides an easy to understand, organized user interface, my favorite feature is that it helps you track your spending. Similar to www.mint.com, the Virtual Wallet breaks your spending down into categories such as restaurants, gas, entertainment, etc. This feature is great because you can clearly see where the majority of your money is going instead of playing the guessing game.

The final piece of my infrastructure is my credit card. Growing up, I always told myself that I wouldn’t get a credit card because it is too easy to get into debt. This statement may be true for some people, but if you have the discipline to live within your means, then a credit card can be a huge asset to your finances. I chose to get a points credit card because I get points (read free money) for every purchase I make. By linking my credit card to my Virtual Wallet, I am able to track where all my money is being spent instead of falling into the psychological trap of just placing it on my card.

Taking the time to set up an automated financial system has incredible long term benefits when compared to a basic bank account. Automation lets me make a decision once and stick to it instead of having an internal argument every time I receive a pay check. Multiple savings accounts give me the peace of mind that all of my savings goals are being met instead of keeping mental notes on one large pool of money. Finally, tracking my spending allows me to analyze my spending behaviors and make educated adjustments as needed.

Related Blogs

I have always worked on trying to manage my time as efficiently as possible. While I was in college, I was a master at making the best use of my time during the day so when night time rolled around, I would be able to go out with my friends. I read and incorporated all of the time management advice I could find on the internet to make sure that I was optimizing my free time. This allowed me to get my work done earlier and in less time, so I could spend the bulk of my time doing the things I enjoyed.

One of the key strategies I used was outlining the goals/assignments I wanted to complete each week on a post-it note. Then, on a separate post-it note, I would outline the steps I needed to complete the night before I was going to do them. This allowed me to get my thoughts together and plan my work out ahead of time so I knew exactly what I needed to do each day. If I had a research paper do on Friday, I knew that on Monday and Tuesday I needed to spend time doing research, on Wednesday I needed to make a quick outline of the paper and start preliminary writing, and on Thursday, I needed to fill out the rest of the paper. By constantly cycling through short and medium term post-it notes, I was able to segment out both my personal and educational goals into manageable chunks.

The next element of my time management strategy was setting specific time limits on every task. Having an end time is extremely important because it keeps you from swaying off track. If you know that you are only going to spend an hour on a given task before moving on to something else, then it forces you to be as efficient as possible. It sounds self explanatory from a time management perspective, but time and time again in both the academic and working world, you attend meetings that seem like they have no end in sight. Without having a predetermined agenda and time span, you are wasting your time and the rest of the group’s time.

Finally, the third element of my strategy was to approach each task with complete focus. This means no distractions or multitasking! With the exception of light music, nothing else should distract you from finishing a task once you have started it. If you’re checking Facebook, watching TV, texting your friends, and trying to write a paper all at the same time, you’re never going to get anything done. Every time you switch between tasks, it takes time for your mind to switch gears and start thinking about what you are currently doing. If you focus on each task separately, you can reduce the amount of wasted time and increase your overall productivity.

Since I have graduated college, I have added a new element to my overall time management strategy. Once I started working, I quickly realized that my time was limited from when I got home to when I had to go to bed. There just wasn’t enough time for me to play sports with friends, read books, relax, write on my blog, etc. So I started thinking about even more ways to optimize my time. After analyzing my time, I realized that I spend about 2 hours a day in the car. Instead of listening to the same old songs on the radio  everyday, I started downloading audio books and podcasts. I’ve only been using this strategy for a short period of time, but during my “wasted time” in the car, I have already read Jeffrey Gittomer’s Little Red Book of Selling 3 times and listened to Alex Epstein’s The Triumph and Tragedy of the Oil Industry once. This week I am planning on downloading more audio books or just stopping by the library to check out their audio book collection.

No matter how old or how experienced you are, there is always room for improvement in time management. I have outlined the 4 most important elements of my time management strategy, but there are many more effective techniques that you can adopt. The most important part about self improvement is taking action. You can spend all day researching different time management techniques (But you wouldn’t because you have 100 percent focus and set deadlines now) to find the perfect strategy, or you can take action now and start managing your time efficiently.

Related Blogs