Recovering from Rejection: Sales Tactics and Business Adaptability with Michael Belnap

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This is the launch your business podcast because we know starting a business is challenging, but it doesn't have to be confusing. Each week we'll give you the tactical advice and the necessary tools to scale your business without feeling burnt out. I'm Terry Rice, business development consultant and staff writer here at Entrepreneur Magazine. Let's dive in. Today's guest, Michael Belknap, has a drive for entrepreneurship in business. He's the founder of Mountain West Pest control, owner and CEO of Social Stance Media, and owns 30 rental properties. As a dynamic and visionary leader in the field of social media marketing, Michael is known for his innovative strategies and exceptional results. As CEO of Social Stance, Michael has revolutionized the way companies Connect with their targeted audience and build a strong online presence. Outside of work, Michael is a dedicated family man and an avid sports enthusiast. Whether he's hitting the gym, hiking, or spending quality time with loved ones, Michael understands the importance of nurturing personal relationships and taking care of yourself. Today we'll chat about the lessons that he learned from his days as a door to door salesman and how to recover from rejection, the power of hands on learning and why you shouldn't be afraid to get started and why Adapt or die is a good model for entrepreneurs. And look, as a heads up, there was a slight audio issue at the beginning of the recording, so we're going to dive right into the conversation.

People reach out to me and say, hey Terry, I want to start a business, but I'm not sure what I'm passionate about. And they think they have to lock in on this one thing forever. But you're a great example of how you can start several businesses that you enjoy and are successful without feeling like pigeonholed into one thing.

So we'll get to that soon.

But for right now, do you mind just introducing yourself?

Yeah, for sure. So my name is Michael Belknap, definitely sort of an entrepreneur at heart. Live here in Utah, enjoy the outdoors, hiking, own a number of different businesses from like the service industry to real estate to social media. But yeah, that's a quick rundown about me.

As I mentioned before, I actually spent a month in Utah about 10 years ago when I was training, when I first got a job at Adobe and, and just really enjoyed the outdoors. I mean, there was like the Bridal falls, there was like that Y that you can hike and all that good stuff. And in addition to learning how to do my job, it was fun just to kind of unleash a lot of creativity. And I know one of your first companies, you're actually doing door to door sales. So I imagine between each of those doors, if you got to know that was time for you to reset a little bit. Can you just walk us through, like, not to use the pun, what, what company that was and what the experience was like doing door to door sales. Because a lot of our listeners are afraid to hop on a call and I don't blame them, but you're actually knocking on people's doors, making sales. So can you just explain what the company was and what the process of selling was like?

Yeah, so yeah, that's a really good thing. I'll tell you this. I think doing door to door changed my life, like for sure. In a lot of Ways, positive ways, but really, like, simple. I was just. Actually, I was young, I was like 22 at the time. I was in college and I had a bunch of my buddies that went out and did like door to door sales. And they came back like, I made a ton of money, like 50, 80 grand in four months. And I was like, wow, I'm poor, newlywed, like all those things, right? So, yeah, I went out and did door to door sales, selling pest control. And anyways, it was good. It was a great experience for me and it took me all over the country and that was a great learning experience. Because what that did for me is it allowed me to overcome objections, handle concerns, you know, be, be driven, make sure your schedule is done, execute all of those things. And so it brought me like a lot of good people spit people skills. It just brought me a ton of things. Right. I mean, I use those skills on the door because if you think about it, you know, if you got to go knock on somebody's door, like, I still get anxious doing that. You know, that's what I find I've been doing a long time, but I still get anxious doing it. But when you can knock on someone's door, have a conversation with them and sell them something and build that rapport within 10 minutes, I mean, that's not a lot of people can do that. And that's a skill set that I think you can translate into any business.

So I'm going to double click a bit more. So after you go to someone's door and they're kind of rude to you and you know, you have to go knock on another door shortly, how are you resetting between that initial, you know, reaction, which wasn't so pleasant to still showing up, you know, as someone that people might want to talk to you when you knock on their door, like, what, what was that transition?

Like when you have these, these situations where, like, you do have somebody that sort of is a pain and sort of can rain on your parade that day, which happens like, I mean, even today, like my freaking Facebook got hacked and we had a whole bunch of things going on and it's like all these things happen. And, and that's the same when somebody sort of comes at you on the door. The key that I found is like, how do we then, you know, get our mind right? And you sort of heard this phrase, like, you don't want to get too high and you don't want to be too low. And I think at the same time, like, when you face those types of Obstacles. When someone's in your face yelling at you, saying, get out of here, you sort of not. You can't let yourself get too low and get hung up on that. So you have to have a short term memory. You know, in sales, you've got to have a short term memory, get off the door, get onto the next. And when that happens to me, the thing that I realized I have to do right away is I got to get to another door, I got to get to another cell, I got to go talk to somebody and get that off my chest. Because if I sit there and I think about that and I dwell on that one, my day is going to be horrible. I'm going to have a bad attitude. I'm going to be negative about every little thing that comes up. So you got to get off of that and move on to the next. And sometimes that's hard. I think it can be a hard thing, but you just have to go on to the next, have short term memory and move on.

And that's a good lesson for all of our listeners. Right. Because when I face rejection, what I do is I think, okay, cool, that happened. Now what can I do about it? And if I heard one no, I'm going to pitch three more people. If I hear no from all, then I'll pitch three more, and so on and so forth. But you can't let that fear of rejection stop you from making money, especially if you're selling a good product or service. You just have to push through it. So. So I appreciate that, but I know that you we're going through your career journey here. I know that you also invest in real estate. So could you talk to us about how you went from the door to door sales to also doing real estate? What was that transition like and where the idea even come from?

Yeah, so my dad is actually a huge inspiration on me being an entrepreneur in general. And he's also big in real estate. And so I remember even as a little kid I'd go to work with him. Like, I'm talking like five, six years old. Like, my thing when growing up is like, I love sports, but when I wasn't doing sports, I was like, I'm going with my dad to work. And so real estate came along just because I worked with him for a long time. I bought like my first property was a little mobile home in a trailer park at like 19. And then, yeah, we just kept buying some properties. And I just love real estate. I think it's really cool. And I learned a lot of things, by the way, from doing sales that translated to doing real estate, you know, and because a lot of times in real estate people need to sell a house or, you know, they're just trying to find a way to get out of their current situation. So being able to use like a sales skill set of addressing those concerns allowed me to really go buy a lot of properties. And now we have. Now I've got like 30 rental properties, which is sort of fun and but we just built it along the way. I did it on the side of me focusing on my other businesses, but I found real estate was something that I could do on the side. And we specialize in like lease to own is really what we do. But it's fun. I learned a lot of that from my dad. I just sort of piggybacked off of him. I worked for free for a long time with him just to learn what was going on. But it was good. It was been really good.

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Yeah, I think you bring up a good point that may not be applicable to everyone, but being willing to work for free just to master a skill. And it always baffled me that people will pay to go to college for experiences and connections and to learn things, but they won't work for free for experiences and connections and to learn things. It's like, well, you paid for it, why won't you do it for free? You Know, especially if you're, you know, post the years when you might go to college. But. But even just volunteering for a few months with someone who's already a bit ahead of you on what you want to do can just be transformational. If you can check your ego to an extent and be willing to learn and not get paid for it initially. So I'm glad you brought that up.

Yeah, I think that's extremely undervalued today. So many people think, oh, whether it's college or I can just get things easy, they come easy. It's not really ever the case. Right. If you really want to go learn something, I think one of the best ways is just to go and say, hey, can I just follow you around? Can I be mentored by you? Right. And yeah, I think that's cool. I mean, there were days where my dad was like, hey, you need to go clean the toilets today. And I'm like, oh, no way. I don't want to do that. But the point he was teaching me is you got to do everything, you know. But along the way, then it got me into a position to make deals, how to handle contracts, negotiate, find homes, all those types of things, how to handle a renter, how to handle, like, all of that. And so, yeah, a lot of good growing came from it. But honestly, for me, those were the things that made me have good expertise and knowledge in that field.

Let's keep moving forward because again, one reason I was so excited to have you on here is like, you've had an amazing career and you're humble about it the way that you're talking about it, but it's amazing how you've moved from one situation to another and found success. So let's talk about your other company. Now we're on company number three, which is Social Stance. Can you just first of all give us an understanding of what Social stance is and what you do?

Yeah. So we are a social media marketing company, and we focus on driving growth for new brands. And what we do is we specialize in new and engaged followers for the brands, and then we help deliver on targeted email lists for them. And then in addition to that, we also focus on building our brand's affiliate marketing programs, where we'll run their whole affiliate side, from doing the outreach, vetting influencers, to handling the responses, contract negotiation, and then just driving sales for the brand. But our goal at Social Stance is just to build brands and grow them.

So my next question is, how did you go from pest control to real estate to social Media marketing.

Yes. That's actually a great. My buddy was just actually asking me this. He's like, it's so funny that you were a pest control sales rep and then you had the technician and now you're dealing with these massive brands and influencers. And so I think it is sort of no one puts the two to two together, right? You just never would think that. But I'll go back to the whole thing with sales. Like, the whole sales process is create a need address and eat close, right? Like, that is the sales process. And I think if you can master the sales process, create a need address and eat close, it can take you just anywhere. Like, it can take you from pest control. You know, when I started Mountain west pest to real estate to social media marketing, and what I found is the reason why I got involved in it is because I felt like there was a lot of money in social media. And I found that a lot of brands even were like, michael, we need. We need influencers. And so I used to just charge these, like a consulting fee really to these brands to build out their programs. But we ended up just dialing in that program where I don't, I do consult with, with brands. But at the same time, what I, what we've really done now is just build out this program for brands where we can handle all of their stuff. And so that's really how it came about is we. I just felt like there was a need for brands. Like today, influencer marketing is marketing, especially if you're a brand. That's how you're going to promote your product. That's how you're going to grow. And if you don't have an affiliate marketing program, this is what I tell brands all the time. If you don't have an affiliate marketing program, you're leaving money on the table. And if you have an affiliate marketing program and it's not dialed in or optimized, you're leaving money on the table. So we just saw a need with that and just rolled with it. And so that's a big reason why I got involved in like, social media marketing, et cetera. And I had a background in sales already, so that made a lot of sense for me now. It's just I wanted to tap into sort of this wave that we're seeing in like, social media right now.

There's two things I want to say, so I'm going to say that and then ask you a question. So for our listeners, if you don't know what affiliate marketing is, essentially what you can do is promote a product or service that another company sells and if someone clicks to you on your link and makes a purchase, you get paid for it. So on my end, I use ConvertKit for my email marketing platform. If you go to my website, I'm going to talk about that. If you click through and purchase ConvertKit, I get about 30% of the revenue on a recurring basis. So not bad. And again, if you're looking for an email marketing platform, please go to my website right now and do that so I can feed my kids. But on your side, again, you the listener. If there are products or services that you use on a regular basis and trust, I want you to Google whatever that product or service is and affiliate program to see if you can do the same thing where you get paid for sharing this information with your audience as well. But Michael, let's go back to you because again, we have this leap from, you know, from pest control to real estate to, to social media. And you gave a really great explanation of how if you can sell one thing, you can sell anything. And it's almost similar to what I always say, like you can master any skill or any endeavor as long as you take the right actions, use the right tools and leverage the right mindset. So on your end, what I'm curious is to know what new tools did you have to learn or how did you have to educate yourself about social media marketing before you felt comfortable offering it as a service? Because a lot of our listeners might have similar ideas, but they're plagued by imposter syndrome. They might think, oh, I didn't go to school in this case for marketing or affiliate stuff or whatever it is. So how did you prepare yourself to confidently make this transition?

Yeah, that's actually a really good question. I actually didn't know. So I knew about social media marketing. I did not know a ton about affiliate marketing actually. In fact, when I first got started, not a lot of people, at least for me, I didn't really know that, but people started talking to me about it. Then I found, wow, there's actually a big need. So I was like googling, like affiliate marketing. But I think the cool thing is today there's so many resources out there on how to learn all of these things. And the big thing is when you go back to sales, it's about creating the need again. You and I both know this. If you can find a need and address that concern or that need for any, any consumer, any brand, business, you now have a business. You now have something that's Successful. And that's really what it came down to is along the way, I just found those things of like, oh, you know what? This could work. And then I just researched. I just researched the crap out of it. I was like, I got to learn everything about this. I got in touch with people, listen to them, listen to their podcast, sort of like this, you know, and that's a big. That's a big tool for me. And then once I did, I just dove in. You know, it's just like knocking a door. You got to go, and if you want to learn how to do it, you better go knock the door to figure out what works and what doesn't. And we just went and rolled with it, and it was really successful, you know, and the brands loved it. But I found on the brand side that there were brands that didn't even have an affiliate program set up, and there were some that had affiliate program set up, but they're like, I don't have the time, the knowledge, the know how to go in and approach these influencers. And I was like, well, man, we deal with influencers all day long. Like, this makes a ton of sense to start combining the two. And then we just build out an actual program on how to do that where. And the other thing is, some of these brands, they have incredible products, incredible ideas, but they don't know how to even negotiate with an influencer because it sort of is a skill set as well, right? It can be learned. But not all these brands knew how to do that. And so we just dialed that into the nines and said, hey, we'll handle that for you. And then we'll handle content management, quality control, and make sure we're driving sales.

One overarching theme that I'm hearing, which I think is very encouraging, is your willingness to just learn new things to get your hands dirty, to do a lot of research. And I feel strongly that even without expertise, like, just having a lot of grit and curiosity can be more beneficial often than having experience in education. Because if you have grit and curiosity, you go forward, you're looking for answers, you want to discover things. If you have experience in education, you're going backwards saying, well, here's what I learned, here's what I. Here's what worked in the past, and you can't be a future proof brand or entrepreneur if you're not willing to have that grit and curiosity. So I think it's a great example of how that can benefit all of us.

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For details let's this one's going to be tough to answer because we kind of already did, but what are you some transferable skills that you picked up from one opportunity to another that you feel led to your success. And we talked about grit and curiosity already, but what other skills did you find that are transferable? And again, I'm saying this because a lot of our listeners are leaving corporate and they're like, hey, you know, I don't even know how to become an entrepreneur. Or they're starting their second company. They're like, you know, I feel like I'm starting over again. So I think just hearing how you discovered some of these other transferable skills could help them as well.

One thing I would tell you is, and my dad taught me this a lot, but it's he always says adapt or die. He's like, you got to adapt or die. And I mean, I'm sure you've probably heard that too, right? Like, you've got to adapt or die. And so the big thing for me is all these things that we're talking about, like even for someone that's in corporate America, that wants to go and start their own business. Or maybe it's a dad that's like, hey, I've got this idea. The big thing that this whole world comes around to is this adapt or die. In my opinion, it doesn't mean that even if you're an entrepreneur, it doesn't mean that your business is just going to die if you don't adapt, but it just means you're going to get left behind, right? So even in your own life, when you, when you can create a need, address, need, close, that means you've got a business. And then the big thing is to make that a sustainable business is you have to adapt or die. And that adapting part means learning what the market's doing. What are your customers saying? What are your employees saying? You know, all of those things keeping, keeping up on trends that are going on in your business or in your industry, those are things that are about adapting. And as you do that. And by the way, adapting could be small and simple, or it could be really large. Sometimes you have to pivot. But those little things of just adapting or dying, I've noticed I can translate a lot of those things from all these different industries. And obviously right now you got a lot of listeners that they, they already have good ideas. They probably have good work ethic. They probably even have the grit and grind. Especially if you're in corporate, you're probably grinning and grinding every day. So it's just about taking those things now and applying it into your business and then rocking and rolling and then adapting along the way. You'll be really successful.

So, Mike, I'm going to ask you my favorite question and get ready for this one. What is one lesson about entrepreneurship that you wish you learned sooner?

Yeah, I love this question. I'm a pretty optimistic guy. I always look at the glass half full because I don't have time to look at it as half empty. Right? But the thing that I would say is, one thing I wish I would have learned is I always thought that if I had this great product or great service, that I'd have lifelong customers and if I took care of my employees, these employees would be here for life. Or if I had partners, right? Like these partners will be here forever. And, you know, I had the rude awakening because that's really not the case. Right? I mean, I, I would say it like this, and this might be a little harsh, and this isn't, but I'm going to say this right. Like they say, plan for the worst and hope for the best. And I'll say it like this. If you have partners, expect them to screw you. If you have employees, expect them to leave. And if you have customers, expect them not to pay. And that's not always the case. But you need to expect that because this is what I would say the constant with that is having contracts in place. Like, I tell my clients this all the time, like, we'll put a contract in place. But the best contract is one that you and I never have to look at, you know. And the reason why is because if I'm looking at the contract, there's a problem. But I say that because if you have a partner, which, by the way, I'm Hunter, I highly recommend having partners. I've had incredible partners. I've got some of the best people because at the end of the day, the better people that you have around you, that's what being an entrepreneur is. Because otherwise, if you don't have good people around you, you're just a full time employee working 80 hours a week. That's really what you are. So you do have to have good employees, you have to have good partners and you have to have good customers and you will have good ones. But the thing that I wish I would have learned is just having contracts in place super important for you, your employees, your customers, because it gives you a peace of mind. It doesn't have to keep you up late at night. So anyways, those would be the things that I wish I probably would have learned earlier in my career.

Well, thanks for giving everyone a heads up on that so we don't have to learn the hard way. I do appreciate that. But before I let you go, I'm sure a lot of our listeners want to learn more about you and social stance. So where can they do that?

Yeah, so you can go to my LinkedIn. It's just Michael Belknap. You can go to Social Stance Media, hit us up on Instagram. I do make it a point to respond to every DM or email. So if you go to Social Stance on Instagram, you can send us a DM there and get in touch with me. And then the other thing I would tell you is this, by the way, Terry, if you're ready, we'll throw a little promo for all your listeners.

Let's do it.

Okay, let's do it. So let's say this. So for any of the listeners that if they want or they're interested in doing maybe affiliate marketing or building out their program, if anyone that wants to sign up for the program or come check us out, hop on a call. We'll give them $1,000 credit into any of our giveaways for our programs. And so that way I think that they have a little bit of incentive to say, hey, I heard Terry. I'm going to hop over here and you can see if you can help us on the affiliate side.

And that's our show for today. You can learn more about Michael and social stance by visiting socialstancemedia.com and look, do me a favor. If you found value in this episode, help us reach others by subscribing and leaving a review. Thanks for listening and I'll catch up with you next time. Apply what you've learned on today's show. You'll find the show notes and more resources at TerryRice co. Podcast. Again, that's TerryRice co podcast and the best way to support this podcast is by subscribing, telling a friend, and leaving a review. Also, you can get more tips by following me on Instagram terryrice or follow me on LinkedIn. This episode was produced by Josh Wilcox of Brooklyn Podcasting Studio and edited by Dan Lardy. Special thanks to my wife, Dominique, for keeping our kids relatively quiet as I recorded. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next time.