What Makes a Successful Entrepreneur in Modern Business With Dr Steven Greene | Biz To Biz Podcast

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news. Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast. We don't like to wear ties when we talk about business, and we'd like to talk about business, sales, and entrepreneurship here on the podcast. And they— and the sponsor of B2B Vault is Nationwide Payment Systems. And today our guest is Dr. Stephen Green. And he has a company called MakeTheGrade.net, and he helps business owners and executives clarify their marketing messaging. And we're going to talk about that today, and we're going to dive in with Dr. Stephen Green. Welcome to the show.

Allen, thank you very much. Happy to be here.

All right. Awesome. So tell us a little bit, like how long you've been in business and where you're located.

Uh, yeah, I, I have— I started this business in 1997, last, last century. Uh, I am located in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. Uh, I have based my pedigree— just to be clear, I am not a medical doctor. I got a doctorate in education and educational psychology. So I've kind of made a study of business entrepreneurship, from the, the motivational and the psychological standpoint. And, and what I figured out, uh, is that there's a lot of ways that the— what— how people communicate, how business owners, entrepreneurs communicate their service, their whole context, can make a huge difference in how successful they are. And then the last thing I'll say about it is— and this really got exacerbated and really got highlighted when COVID kicked in. Face-to-face is, is really a different world. Virtual, which is where a lot of— obviously everything went with COVID— is a very, very different way to interface, very different way to build and sustain relationships. Uh, so that's really where, where my niche is, is, is, is surviving and thriving in this virtual space, taking advantage of the ability to you know, deal with, you know, people all over the world, but you got to be super clear on how you do it.

At least I remember during COVID and everybody was like, oh, how do you do a Zoom meeting? And before COVID I would tell people like, oh, I want to do this software demo for you. And they would be like, well, we're in Texas. I'm like, yeah, no problem, let me send you a link. You'll click on it and then you can see my screen. And they're like, What, what are you talking about? And it was like pulling teeth sometimes to get people on these like Zoom calls and then do a screen share and walk them through like how to use the software. They're thinking like we're going to drive over there and, you know, do it, you know. And, um, now, you know, it's pretty normal. People are much more open to, uh, having—

it's, uh, it, it's— I mean, I, I I'm not sure this is something to be proud of, but I can spend 11, 12 hours a day on Zoom between clients, between prospecting, just between life anymore, even family stuff. You know, like you hang out with your friends sometimes on Zoom. It's easy. The thing that drove that too is technology. It's a human acceptance. But I was working virtually in about 2016, '17 on AOL and Prodigy, if anybody remembers Prodigy.

Oh, yeah.

You'd say, hello, Allen Kopelman. It would go, whoa. For like 3 seconds, like we're dating. Maybe I'm dating myself, but, uh, you know, um, the, the technology, in other words, Wi-Fi availability, high-speed internet, better computers, better cameras, better audio has really helped this. And, uh, same with podcasting, you know, podcasting is kind of a subset of this. Podcasting is thriving.

Uh, yeah, when I first started my podcast, I won a contest from this company, and you you know, the guy was like, oh, now you can get this podcasting kit, right? So I got my first camera, my first microphone, which I still have sitting on a desk somewhere. And, um, it was a, you know, now I'm probably 320 episodes or so in, in almost 3 years podcasting. So it's, you know, and I always change it up. I've changed the studio. This is a brand new, like, studio setup now.

It's looking good.

You know, so we kind of change it up every couple of months to make it, you know, interesting. And, you know, so one of the things, you know, I always have problem, you know, everybody has problems, you know, small businesses, because one of the big problems is, is, you know, figuring out your marketing message. And then the other issue a lot of small businesses face is where our competitors are multimillion or billion-dollar companies. And how do we combat against that? Because we don't get You know, they can buy all the ads on Google, they can buy all the ads on Bing, they can buy all the ads on social media. You know, they can spend more in one day than we can spend in a year. And, you know, so it's always interesting how, you know, you have to be clever to like to get enough, to get enough attention. So one of the things that you, when you, you know, when we were connecting, you were like, So here's, here's, you know, some of the questions you had. So here's the two. I'll read the first one that I liked. What's the biggest mistakes early-stage entrepreneurs make and how can they avoid them?

And let me preface what I'm going to say by saying it, it, you must avoid them or else this could kill your business. You might not even launch a business. So the biggest mistakes I see And, and I'll qualify this by saying I've worked with thousands of entrepreneurs over my whole tenure, is they're so focused on their product or service that they neglect the other things that are very, very important, especially if they're solo and they're trying to run the whole shop by themselves. So they're focused on delivering whatever widget or whatever better mousetrap that they have created, or maybe not even, maybe they just have an idea. Or a service and they neglect or they don't perfect important things like their messaging, their social media, at least to a degree, their content, the way that they develop leads, the way that they close, even legal. I've had a few legal people on my podcast just talk about real simple stuff like contracts because there's a lot of situations where people, people get into entrepreneurship, they start selling stuff. And then all of a sudden they learn that they're in a copyright violation. Some big company, like you were just saying, owns the copyright on it and they close them down in like 10 minutes.

Oh yeah, we had that happen to us. We had a domain, we had a domain up and then somebody, we got a thick letter from this company that they own the rights to that. So we said, well, we didn't find anything online, right? They wanted the domain, so they ended up buying it from us and giving us some cash.

No, that's not too bad. Yeah, there you go.

The domain. But I've seen other things where, uh, visited a restaurant once, I saw the name outside the restaurant and I was like, um, you guys do know like that's a famous restaurant in Chicago? And they were like, what? They said, how would you know that? And I said, well, you know, being in the, you know, hospitality business. And sure enough, about 2 weeks later, the— that company is a huge company in Chicago. They got served with papers and they were flipping out because they had spent probably about half a million bucks on glasses, dishes, tables, everything with the name on it, which is, you know—

well, that's, that's a part of my point, is you— this is homework you need to do before you go live and invest everything. And you got to make sure— and sometimes people just don't think about it— but in my particular lane, uh, I focus on the messaging. I focus on how does, how does the entrepreneur, how does my client, how does my connection communicate what they do? How do they— because my background really is the education world, so I, I'm thinking in terms— the, the vision and the lenses I look through are how does this person, how does this male, whatever, how do they communicate what they do, why they do it, who they do it for, what the value proposition is to their potential client or their prospect, and people think, oh, I, I have a, a webpage or I have a little ebook I made, or, you know, I have some kind of a lead magnet. And sometimes they, unfortunately, they just gloss through it. They just wanna get their stuff up there cuz they figure that lead generation's gonna be on volume. If I get 1,000 leads, maybe 100 will make an appointment, I'll close 20 and I'll make X. You can stack those numbers so much more in your favor. When you really put an effort and, and you get the right voice of how you wanna do it. There's so much I could talk about here. I don't wanna, you know, just go off for 45 minutes, but I do a 3-hour workshop just on this. But, but I think it really, the, the purpose of our conversation now is really just for, from the standpoint of awareness and trying to make entrepreneurs, even if they've been in the game for a while, aware that the messaging is so critical. A lead magnet, even the title of a lead magnet can make or break you. It doesn't sound like it's that critical, but, but it is. And there's all kinds of studies and statistics to prove this. So that's what I focus on. I focus on somebody comes to me and say, listen, I want to do this. All right, let's break it down. Let's make sure that what you're putting out there is correct based on what you really do, based on what you provide, based on what your audience is, what your ideal avatar is, and how they want to perceive things. If you're selling a high-ticket item, presumably to people with more money, you— the language you're gonna put in your lead magnet or your webpage is gonna be different than if you're selling a low-ticket item to potentially a, a lower socioeconomic group of people. And it's not a bias thing, it's just, it's just reality. Right. So these are, again, these are things that people don't think about. I guess that's why I'm here to help educate them. Uh, but this, this is essentially what I think people should consider. It's a long answer to what I think is a super important question.

Yeah, a lot of times, you know, I'll see people and they'll think up a name for like their business and they haven't gone to go look and see if the name is available, social handles are available, and the domains. And it's super important to like, before you start investing a ton of money, to make sure all that's available and gobble it all up.

There are so many stories like the story you told about the restaurant. It's, it's unfortunate, but it just happens. And some people, they, oh, nobody's going to care about me. I'm a little business making $100,000 maybe. No, no, they care. And I, I have a lot of trademarks and I have a couple, uh, copyrights and there's services that search. So I actually have to pay, just FYI. Uh, I don't do it to be like annoying or pain in the butt, but they search. And every— they search out there, they search listings, they search websites, they search filings, they search all kinds of stuff to see if there's a violation. I've had to defend my copyrights 11 times in like 8 states.

Wow, that's crazy.

Yeah, it's annoying and it's expensive. You, you always win, it's just tough to get a recovery, but it eventually happens. But again, uh, I— to get back, I focus on the education, I focus on the idea of What do you really want? Because you got how long, right? What are people's attention spans now? It's like the attention span of a fly, right? They got— you got 6 seconds to basically catch their attention, to do a pattern interrupt, get them to pay attention, to get them to understand why you can give value, and then to maybe click through to something. And if you can't do that in 10 to 15 seconds, unfortunately, you may not get a second chance. So the wording has to be right. The, the, the way it's styled has to be right. The messaging has to be right. It, it's, I can't overstate how important it is. I guess I get a little fired up about this because I, I've seen when people do it right, the success is like they can't believe how it's working. And when they do it wrong, they can't, they get so frustrated because they can't believe it's not working. And, and that's really it. And it's so, the margin of error is, is not great. It's, it's tiny. Just there's so little things can really make big differences.

You know, then the other— okay, you know, I see all— I, you know, it's interesting how that all comes together, you know, from the legal perspective and then like from getting the right, you know, making sure the names are available and like every— your plan as a business person, you know, coming together. So here's the other thing that you wrote that you— that you gave me a sample question of is what is the triangle of success And how has it helped entrepreneurs? So I was—

Oh, I love it.

Triangle of success.

Incredible, incredible question. Listen, here's what, here's the way I try to structure my offerings and my business is this. I believe there's a, there are 3 critical pieces to a successful business. And I'm focusing mostly on entrepreneurs, but I think this is true even at a corporate level. Number 1, the one point of the triangle, one vertex of the triangle. Is your product. And, and this is the thing, it's so obvious, but how many companies out there, how many entrepreneurs are selling something that nobody wants? They believe it's a good idea, but it's like, why isn't it selling? Well, maybe it just isn't something people want.

Okay.

So you have to have a viable product that's priced in at a point where people are willing to buy it. Again, it all sounds so logical until you start breaking it down. When I start to consult my, my people, The second vertex of the triangle is a system, preferably an automated system that can, with, within reason, automatically generate leads, put them through a funnel, qualify them, and eventually set up a conversation. Because I still believe— I'm a little bit old school— that the best way to build relationships is through communication. And ultimately, while you can sell automatically, you're going to keep clients better through some kind of eventually having a meeting. But, but the point is you have to have a system. Nobody wants to sit there and spend 23 hours a day on lead generation. The third vertex of the triangle is mentoring. And this is the place people don't— they skimp the most. They're willing to invest in developing products. They're usually willing to invest in systems, sometimes overpaying thousands of dollars for somebody to promise them they'll be on first page of Google in 6 minutes. SEO, whatever. That's, that's just is. But mentoring, people undervalue it. And I'm not saying that because I'm, I'm a mentor and I'm a consultant, maybe in the same way you might be. I'm saying it because your time is your biggest asset, right? Everybody agrees with that, right? You only have so much time. You only got so many seconds on this planet. So if you can save a week, a month, a year, and accelerate your ability to progress, accelerate your ability to, to, to to sell, to make money, isn't that worth investing in a person or a group of people or mentors that can get you there? Sometimes you need more than one. My specialty is the content. My specialty is, is, is like one and two, like the product development and the messaging. There are people that are coaches on all kinds of things, public speaking, uh, all these ancillary skills that you need to have. Presentation skills. I could— you want to hear something? It's in, in 2023, and I think it's going to be the same in '24, the, the quickest way to make money online, like if you had nothing, you woke up one day and say, oh my God, I need 10 grand by next month or something bad's going to happen, right? Quickest way to make money is you, you, you build a— you drive people to a mass event, a one-to-many event like a webinar. Whether you do it through a landing page, whether you do it through social, you drive people to a webinar, you do a webinar, you teach them a bunch of stuff, you give them tons of value or whatever you feel like you can provide. And then you do a, a, a product offering at the end. So whatever it is, you know, you know, you gotta, I don't know what I got here. You gotta, you gotta, you gotta a piece of metal. You gotta a silver coin. It's my, one of my lucky coins. It's a, it's a cat. It's a tiger. Anyway, so my lucky, my lucky, it, it's, it's a, in Korea, cats are considered good luck.

I don't know why. So is that one, is that a Panda coin they call?

No, it's, it might be. It's, it's, it's from Korea. It doesn't matter. The point is I wanna sell this. Right? Right. What's the fastest? I got 100 of these. I can sell 'em for $100 each. I can make 10 grand. What's the fastest way to do that? Is you get the word out that you're doing a webinar and I say, let me show you this. It's incredible. It has this, it does that, it cures this, it cures that. It'll make you, you know, whatever. And it's If you do it today, it's normally X. Today it's $20 and you can walk away. You can only buy as many as 5. That's how tremendous it is. But the fastest point between nothing and resolution is to do a webinar. Well, what's the biggest problem with doing a webinar? Some people are afraid to be in front of a camera. Right. Some people don't have the technology. Maybe they got to, they got the free Zoom and I'm not knocking Zoom. I love Zoom.

No, I ask people to come on the podcast and they're like, there's video? And I'm like, yeah, there's video.

Hey, come on. We're, we're good look, two good looking people here, right? We can, we can, we can flaunt it a little bit now. But what I'm saying is that the fastest way to do it may not be the most suited for that person. Well, I'm a little shy. I'm not comfortable speaking on a camera. Uh, what if people don't like me? What if I make a mistake? What if I start coughing? What if my hair's all— I don't know. Uh, so that, well, instead I'm just gonna make a landing page with an offer. I'm like, okay, nothing wrong with that, but you're probably not gonna sell as much and you won't sell as quickly, but you can do it. So, the point is that you also have to develop skills, right? And this is where mentoring is critical. So, I can come to somebody and say, listen, I've done 400 podcasts. I've done— I don't know how many webinars, probably 2,000. I lost track. And I can teach you how to do it if you're willing to learn and you're willing to practice. Nobody's going to get great in 5 minutes, right?

Yeah. Well, that's the guy who mentored me about podcasting. He's like, the first 100 podcasts are going to be horrible until you figure out, till you get, you find your voice, you know, and you figure it out. But it's like horrible because like most people start a podcast and they give up before they even hit 10.

The average is 13.666 episodes. Wow.

Okay.

For everybody that has 500, 3,500, you got a lot of podcasts. Congratulations. But everybody who has a couple hundred, there's like 500 that are like less than 10.

Yeah. Because it's kind of amazing that, that the podcast companies like Apple and Spotify don't like move them out of the— I think they should move people up the list.

It's sort of a, it's sort of a self-attrition thing because the less, uh, views or what do you call it in podcasts, the less listens you have. Right. You move down the ranking anyway. Right. But the point is that it, it, it's a learned skill. Nobody was born knowing how to do a podcast. Right? You gotta learn how to do it. Nobody was born with a microphone attached to 'em. Right? So you gotta learn how to do it. You gotta invest in yourself. You gotta hone your skill. But isn't, isn't that exactly the same as sales? Right? Is anybody— some people are naturally better with people. They're more extroverted, they're more charismatic. But really, sales is relationship building. I think most people would agree with that.

Yeah, one of the things, one of the things like I'll talk to new business owners or people at like a business incubator type of situation where there's maybe students or people who are thinking about starting businesses. One of the questions I ask them when I get up to speak is how many people think they're a salesperson? And then nobody raises their hand. And I'm like, well, how do you think you're going to— you're going to sell your product? You have to be the salesperson.

Yeah, yeah. You know, to start off, I think You have to think as entrepreneurs, kind of this fancy French word, right? Everybody thinks it, it has this cachet, but really you could, the English translation should be a salesperson with nobody else helping them that's gotta sell their own product and do every, wear every hat possible. That should be the translation.

That should be the new definition.

It should be. That's what I say. No, the, the, I, there's memes out there once in a while, say things like, an entrepreneur is somebody who refuses to work 40 hours for somebody else so they can work 100 for themselves.

Pretty much.

It's pretty much what it is. Those of you out there know, you know, who feel what we're talking about. Um, but, but, you know, to, to kind of bring it back to your question, uh, that's what the Triangle of Success is. It's a guide. It's a framework that I teach my, uh, students and others who are willing to listen. They don't have to do all three with me. They don't have to do any with me. Uh, but I think you got to take care of business in all three. And there's subsets to all of them. Like, the product includes a lot of things we were talking about earlier. You know, is it legal? Is it not legal? Like, you know, illegal, like you're selling, but like, is it legally set up properly?

Right.

If you're selling something, do you have contracts? Do you have a terms of service? Do you have a privacy agreement? There's a lot of stuff you have to know about. Anyway, but that's the idea. And I, it's a cool, it's a cool, I have a really cool logo. Like, I, I'll send it to you if I didn't already. Do you want to put it on the show?

Um, so it— so if you were going to give new, uh, an entrepreneur, new entrepreneur, 3 pieces of advice as we're finishing up the podcast today, what would the 3 pieces of advice you would give a new entrepreneur? They're thinking about starting a business.

Number 1 is, are you willing to do what it's going to take? You're going to get tough when the going gets tough. Because it will. And it's just the reality. I mean, there's businesses that have been around 100 years ago broke, right? I mean, yeah.

Oh yeah, we've seen the environment.

Sometimes it's, it's, it's the boat you're riding and sometimes it's the water you're riding on. So, that's the one thing I would say, really ask yourself that. Number 2 is, is just along the way, be honest with yourself. Is what you're doing really working? And if it isn't, have the courage and the self-assurance to change because people get stubborn and they, they get invested in things and there's nothing wrong with that. And, and you know, sometimes persistence does win, but sometimes you're going down the wrong street and, and you gotta make a, a pivot. And then the third thing is, and it, as we just got to talk about, search out more experienced people you trust who can help you. Whether they'll do it for free, whether they'll charge you. It just, it, you'll thank yourself later because the time you'll save will more than be worth whatever it might have cost you to do it. And if I can throw a fourth one in.

Okay.

I don't know if the three was the way I told you to ask the question or not, but, but I really more and more believe this too is, is find other people you can work with. And help each other. Like, in other words, network.

Yeah, networking. And also create, you know, some partnerships of sorts, joint ventures, collateral partnerships and things like that. So that you—

like, I'm selling education, but I, um, you know, I meet a lot of people in the legal world. I refer business to them. I meet people in the health field world. People need health insurance. When you go— guess what, people? You got a job, you quit being entrepreneur. Out there, they don't keep paying your healthcare, which you, you definitely want to keep. So, you know, things like that, you got it, you got it. You want to make business relationships with people. And I, you know, it's getting out of the scope of what we got today, but I could tell you I got a whole formula on how to, how to do joint ventures and how to capitalize on them. So, but, but those are the 3 things is, is be honest, know what you're up against, be willing to pivot if you need to, get mentorship, and, and be part of a community. You know, this is one giant community, and we celebrate when other people do well. People get nasty. Oh, that guy made $5,000, only made $1,000. Like, if they can make 5, you can make 5. You got to celebrate other people's success.

So definitely one of the most important books somebody gave me when I started this business was the book Who Moved My Cheese. And I'll never forget, I was like, what's this guy giving me this book about?

Yeah, that's a classic.

Yeah, we were at this meeting and he goes, everybody go home and read this book. We're there to learn about a product and tomorrow we're going to talk about it. And I took away from that, you know, a very important lesson. You know, being in this, I've been in the same business 25 years now, right? I would tell you Who Moved the Cheese used to happen like once a year in the beginning. Who Moved the Cheese now is like technology is moving so fast, right? Especially now with AI, like things are moving way quicker than, than we've had.

The interesting thing about that book, that book was by Spencer, Spencer Johnson, right? I was gonna say Steven Johnson, but Spencer Johnson, the guy who wrote it. Wasn't even really a business person, right? He was a doctor.

Yeah.

And, but he observed, he was a very observant person. And, and it's one of those things that's just so obvious. It's like, why didn't I think of that? You know, when you read, and the book's not, it's only like, you know, it's not like, it's a small book.

You can read it in one night.

Yeah, easily. And, and, uh, or you can, it's like almost like Think and Go Rich. You can read a chapter or even a few pages here and there. Right. Um, yeah, no, but that, that I would put that, lump that into the concept of mentoring, right? It's personal development, reading, but you don't, there's nothing in the entrepreneurial space you have to reinvent yourself. It's all been done. It's all been thought through. Somebody else already did it. You just gotta figure out a way to do it yourself that fits into what you're comfortable with and what you're willing to do. But, you know, learn from everybody else. They're, they're around. You just gotta find them. Yeah.

You just gotta talk to people, network, you know, whether you're networking online, You know, like I get invited to like these networking things through LinkedIn and you meet 10 people, you might meet somebody, you know, or you might learn something from somebody in a business like that. So I want to thank Dr. Stephen Green for being on the podcast today on B2B Vault. Follow us on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or on wherever you listen or watch podcasts. It's pretty cool. You can watch on Spotify now, video, which is pretty cool.

And Allen, can I do a giveaway here? Can I give something away?

Sure, if you want to.

I don't want to interrupt you in your—

that's okay.

We got to give away— you go to www.getgreen.net.

Okay.

I will give you a video. Okay. It's about 50 minutes long. It is the exact same system I use to help people develop lead magnets. 7 steps. You can start it, stop it. I believe me, it's, it's a 4-figure ticket when I do it. I'm giving it away. Anybody who's listening to this, getgreen.net, but green with an E on the end because I'm extra special. That's what my mom says.

You're extra special.

All right. Well, like the color with an E, but I'm extra special.

That's really cool for our listeners. Go to that link and get your free download and probably get— come away with some valuable information.

Remember, I'm a lead magnet guy, so I'm not going to give you a crappy lead magnet.

Okay, sounds good. So like, follow, and subscribe. And everybody, peace out and have a great day.