Your Questions Answered. How to Get More Leads and Make Your First $100k.

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If you're thirsting for asphalt, melting your work boots, tape measure has anger issues, nail guns, talking smack again and hard that baked onto head level refreshments. We definitely have that. Cool off with Gatorade Summer Blaze available only at Circle K. When you're feeling the heat, Circle K makes your day. Today, I'm answering your specific questions in regards to getting more leads, making more money, and enhancing your mindset. This is the Launch youh 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. One benefit of my role is I get a lot of questions coming towards me and I always say questions create content. So I use those questions to inform my social media content, my newsletter, and even today's podcast. And that is exactly what we're gonna do today. I'm gonna answer your most pressing questions that were submitted. So thanks for everyone who submitted these questions. But if you didn't get a chance, I have another opportunity for you to get your questions answered by me in real time. It's called the solopreneur Office Hours, which are brought to you by Entrepreneur magazine twice a month. I take your questions live and you can even submit them in advance. You can sign up for the next opportunity by going to TerryRice Co office. That's TerryRice Co office. This is your chance to get your questions answered while also learning from your peers. And like I said, that's exactly what we're going to do right now. So let's dig into the mailbag and get started. And this one's coming from Chris, who lives in Buffalo, New York. It's pretty straightforward. How do you get more leads? So for Chris and everyone else, here's a few ways you can do it. The first one is social media, which probably is not a surprise to you, but here's what I want you to do. Start promoting your newsletter through social media in advance and let me explain what I mean by that. Let's pretend you have a newsletter coming out on Friday and it's five tips to lose weight by the summer, something like that. On Monday you can have a post on social media that says, here is one way to lose weight by the summer. Go through whatever that step is and then say for four more ways, make sure you sign up for my newsletter because on Friday I'm going to drop the additional steps you can take to lose weight by the summer. That way you're pre qualifying why someone wants to get on your list because you've given them some value and if they want more, they have to sign up for your newsletter. So if you follow this approach, tease out the outcome of your newsletter before it comes out. You'll have an audience of eager recipients because they know your newsletter will provide value to them. Here's another one, and this one's very specific to people who use ConvertKit for their email marketing. ConvertKit has this new network called the ConvertKit Creator Program, which is pretty cool because if you're in this network, when someone signs up for your newsletter, there is then a prompt to join the newsletter of other creators in the newsletter, right? So pretend Mike and Tim are both creators. If you sign up for Mike's newsletter, right after you do that, there'll be a prompt saying, would you also like to join Tim's. Now the cool thing is you can grow very quickly because you have other creators or entrepreneurs recommending their audience to join your newsletter. I just started this and the results have been amazing. I'm getting 20, 30, sometimes 40 people signing up for my newsletter per day just by recommendations from other creators. So if you want to try that out, go to convertkit.com features creator network or just google convertkit creator network, it might be a little bit easier to find. And the last way to easily generate leads is to host webinars. Think of a topic that'll solve a problem for your audience, promote it on social media, and at the end you're going to say, if you want more help implementing the solutions, here's how I can help you. It's that simple. And if you don't already have a large audience on social media, I Recommend Doing a LinkedIn Live or an Instagram Live. Reason being these often get broadcast to people that are outside of your followers. So you might pick up some followers as well as attract these leads. And trust me, if you're an introvert, this is way better than standing on a stage. So give it a try. On the next question, this one comes from Jeremy from San Francisco and I love this. He's saying, how did you make your first $100,000 as an entrepreneur? That is so specific, Jeremy. But let me dig into it and there's actually three steps that I took. The first one was subcontracting, and this was new to me. Subcontracting is when a company outsources some of the work involved with a project to a third party. So on my end, I initially was doing digital marketing services. So I reached out to agencies that offered branding and marketing services but did not offer digital marketing. I then said, hey, you can enhance your service offering by hiring me as a contract. I will do digital marketing for your clients and that way you'll have a more robust offering for them. This worked. So I was doing work for the clients, but I was getting paid through the agency. So on your end, here's what you should do. Think of other companies or entrepreneurs that have a need for your service but aren't currently delivering it to their clients and and or might be understaffed and could use you to backfill on some of their projects. And continuing with subcontracting, I also started leading corporate training sessions by doing contract work at General assembly, which is a school that teaches the skills of tomorrow. It allowed me to work with top brands including Walmart, Calvin Klein and l'. Oreal. Now, subcontracting works because one yes from a partner. In this case, General assembly can give you access to dozens of their clients. It'll help you bring in a steady flow of work without being responsible for lead generation or sales. And leading those workshops at General assembly helped me discover another approach that drastically increased my revenue. Selling from the stage. This is where you speak for free or for a nominal amount, but then promote your services at the end of the session. So here's what I did. I contacted local co working spaces and libraries and offered to lead free talks for their community at the end of each session. Like I said before, I let attendees know how they could hire me for one on one work. Eventually I was able to get paid to speak and generate leads from the stage. I also took photos from the event so I could build my personal brand and land more partnerships. The best part? You don't have to lead these in person. You can take the same approach by leading webinars for organizations that already have access to your target audience. So on your end, look for those organizations. It could be a Chamber of commerce, could be a mastermind, could be a college. Either way, you want to find an organization that already has access to your target audience and say I'd love to deliver this speaking topic which is going to transform their life in exchange for the opportunity to get in front of their audience. And once you do, generate those leads by letting people know you can help them afterwards. So I did those two things and my revenue was continuing to increase. But to be honest, I often still wondered where my next paycheck was coming from. And that's when I made another shift that boosted my revenue and put my mind at ease. Monthly retainers. That's an agreement for a long term project or support between you and a client. The fee is paid normally on a monthly basis. After months of uncertainty, locking in monthly retainers helped me feel like I didn't have to constantly hustle in order to make ends meet. And as a result, I was able to be more present with my clients and with my family. So if you want to do this, you first have to determine how you can continually support your clients. It could be monthly strategy sessions or ad hoc support. If you want to increase your odds of landing a retainer, focus on companies that have a high turnover. They're going to need your help to train in new employees. That's why I focused on agencies. Everyone left so often. I could train the new hires and the people that left would often bring me in to train their new agency. So it was a win win for everybody except the people who had to keep on hiring new hires. Anyway. That's what worked for me. So that was my path to 100k. But it doesn't have to be yours. So noodle over some of those suggestions. But the most important thing is to get started and take action. Last question. Here comes From Katie, who lives in Washington, D.C. and I was actually born near there. So glad to help you out here, Katie. And the question's pretty straightforward. How did your mindset progress as an entrepreneur? Yeah, I mean, I'm glad you're talking about mindset, because when I first started my business, all the talk about mindset seemed like fluff to me. Right. I just wanted to know how I can make money so I could provide for my newborn daughter. She was only a few months old at the time. Unfortunately, that triggered a scarcity mindset, which is the first one I want to talk about, which slowed my growth and caused me to charge less for my services. A scarcity mindset is when you believe there are limited resources, so if someone else has something, you feel like there is less of that resource available for you. And that mindset caused me to be jealous of people that I perceived to be doing better than I was. And as a result, I charged less for fear that clients would go to them instead of to me. So how did I get rid of that mindset? It's probably an important question. Right. First of all, I did the math and realized at my current rates, I'd have to work 30 hours a day just to make ends meet. And that was not going to work. Right then I came to the realization that my low prices were actually scaring away my ideal clients. One person actually said, wow, you're cheap, before declining to work with me. She could have just said no, but she put that part in as well. As a result, I raised my prices, had less clients, but made more money. After raising my prices, I was cruising along for a while, but then I realized I'm just cruising along. My business was steady, but it wasn't scaling or scalable. I knew I had to make some changes, and to do that, I had to leverage a growth mindset. People who have a growth mindset believe that even if they struggle with certain skills, their abilities are not set in stone. Right. They can grow. They think that with work, their skills can improve over time. One new skill I had to develop was public speaking. I knew if I could master it, I'd be able to grow my business by speaking to large audiences. But I started really small. My first engagement actually was a group of 10 college students from Colgate University. I struggled, but they were much more kind and patient than I would have expected, because in college, I was not that kind or patient. But it went very well. And then over the next 18 months, I led over 100 speaking engagements. Like there are some days I Couldn't even talk straight because I was still tired from the day before. But I was eventually able to get paid to speak and attract leads from stage notice. I keep on saying this, right? The more you speak in public, the more you build your brand, your leads, and your revenue, right? So again, I'm cruising along, but that feeling of just cruising hit me again. I knew I had to make some big changes to my business model if I was ever going to give my family the life that I wanted to support them. Right? The backyard, the swimming, swimming pool. I don't know, a bunch of bikes for my kids, all the things, right? That's when I started leveraging an exponential mindset. And someone with an exponential mindset might look at the past and see that it took five years to get where they are today. Right? That's what happened to me. Then they would set a goal to get where they want to be in only two years. So you're accelerating growth by challenging yourself and others around you. And again, someone with an exponential mindset believes they can use their past momentum and success to accelerate their process. So to achieve exponential growth, I did three things. First is I hired a business development lead to pitch my services. Their job is to go on social media, reach out to my followers, and say, I see your following Terry. Would you like to buy something from him? They say it better than that, but you get the point, right? I also knew I had to start running paid ads for my online courses. That is how you scale, by putting dollars behind your brand and reaching a larger audience. And I also sell licensing rights to those same courses to colleges and universities. So my online course, as of now, costs $150. I can sell it to a college or university for tens of thousands of dollars. That's how the growth occurred. So where did I get all these ideas from? You might be wondering that, right? It's from observing and being in conversation with people who have already achieved the same goals that I set out for myself. That's why it's so important to find mentors, but mentors that aren't that far ahead of you because their tactics might be outdated. And you can learn from and implement their solutions to get the outcomes you're looking for. And if you Google it, you'll understand that your mindset is a set of beliefs that shape how you make sense of the world and yourself. But you can shape your mindset through learning and applying what you learn from others. So do a quick audit of the people and the information that you're being exposed to. Is it helping you or is it holding you back? Hopefully it's the former. Okay, that's all we have for today. Thank you so much to everyone who submitted their questions, but now it's your turn again. Just punch on over to Terryrice Co Office so you can register for the next solopreneur office hours and get your questions answered in real time. Thanks again for listening and I hope to see you there. 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.