IAM2490 – Secrets of the Franchise Broker Journey

Gresham Harkless shares a transparent and reflective update marked by personal life events and professional roadblocks. After missing the previous day’s video due to his son’s birthday and a long bike ride, he dives into the core issues he’s facing: lead quality, conversion uncertainty, and growing frustration.

Gresham highlights the difficulty of identifying which marketing channels or candidate profiles are effective, as the current results lack clear patterns.

He reflects on whether his abilities are well-suited for the broker role, and begins to wonder if launching a franchise himself would have made more sense. Despite feeling mentally drained and unsure when to cut losses, he remains cautiously optimistic, reminding himself that even two to four successful deals could change everything.

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Transcription:

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Intro 00:00

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:28

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. And this is a special episode of our I AM CEO Podcast.

And this is actually going to be a snippet of a snippet, so to speak. I'm just doing an intro because I've been starting to document my journey into starting what is now called Blue Star Franchise.

We're also going to do a kind of sub site within CB Nation called Franchise CEO. So you'll see some links in the show notes related to that.

But just wanted to give you a little bit more insight, give you a little bit more color in some of the aspects of why I'm actually doing this.

Because one of the things I was doing as I was going through training to start up this new business was realizing and hearing from the founder of FBA, the Franchise Brokers Association, that it'd be really cool to document your journey going through and building this out.

I think it's something that would be super helpful, obviously for people that are looking for and thinking about starting franchises.

But frankly, if you're starting anything, any type of business, I think it's really cool to kind of just even see the journey and how it's been going from there.

So I'm going to share a few of those snippets from the, from the first couple of videos that have been created.

But definitely, of course, subscribe to our YouTube, check out a lot more where I figure out exactly where we're going to post this.

So I'll have that information that's available to you. But regardless, if you're a builder, continue to keep building, continue to do your thing.

The world definitely needs exactly what you're trying to build and needs you to be your unique self.

So make sure to run your own race, because nobody can run your race like you. This is Gresh signing out. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

And just like that is day 164 of the Franchise Broker journey. I'm actually traveling as I mentioned.

I missed yesterday's video. It's my son's birthday. So we had a birthday party. I went for a 15 mile bike ride.

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So I didn't really get a chance to sit down and kind of do this video. But that being said, not much happened as far as movement.

I think we traveled. I understood that the one candidate I have that might be a viable candidate that probably isn't even a viable candidate because I'm not sure how everything is from a financial standpoint.

He's going to find out hopefully this week whether or not something can be done, you know, financially for him, maybe get a small project going through.

But it's kind of wild, you just kind of put all faith, you know, all faith and thoughts up to God.

Because at this point, I feel like there's not a lot that I can really do differently than what I've been doing.

Like I have, I want to say about 130 or so leads. Of those 130 leads, I think we've reached out to everybody. Like it's just a lot of, a lot of junk that to kind of go through.

I think the thing that makes it difficult is we don't have what we should know to double down on to see what is working better, what's working out, what's not working out.

I think that's kind of the biggest frustration I think I have right now is like if I really want to say, hey, is this type of candidate I want to work with?

And let me lean more into this type of candidate because they got on the finish line, then I'll have a little bit more viability.

I think this person is a viable candidate, but honestly, I'm not even sure because financially he didn't work out.

And then if you try to create a profile from that, then you're just going to get more people that potentially are doing the same.

So that's just the challenge of this in the beginning stages of just getting everything going.

I think especially with high ticket sales that have a longer sales cycle becomes even more challenging.

All I could do is continue to kind of keep chopping at the tree, continue to do the things that I know that you're supposed to do to be successful and then ultimately take it from there.

It's extremely frustrating, though, I'm not gonna lie, just because you kind of feel, we're in this point, and I've been feeling this way for the last couple of weeks, not over the last month or so.

It's like, man, did I make a mistake as far as like going this route? Should I have just started a franchise instead and then figured that out?

But I really thought, my skillset will be a really good fit for this, but I don't know.

It's almost like the people that are doing the marketing and sales of it, the lead generation, are just literally doing volume.

If you're able to do volume and you're able to have people call that volume, then that's where the opportunity comes about.

But if you're trying to be like highly segmented, laser focused, and have a tar and things like that, I wonder if it is gonna be viable.

And it's too short of a time for me to see, like we're getting leads in.

So it's not like we're not getting leads in those leads just aren't getting past step three really.

But you can i can argue and say like only three candidates from Facebook got or meta got to step three which is more than the other.

But if you're looking to compare then it's a no-brainer and it's crazy because you've invested so much more money into Google Ads.

And it just hasn't worked out but I go back to what I heard in the very beginning it's like you always want to have two kind of simultaneously thing simultaneous things running so that you can compare you want to A/B test.

Because if you wait for one and then you do the other you're behind the eight ball so if i could talk to myself now with what I know now what i would say is i say I don't know.

I don't know yet I could do anything differently. I would just say experiment and test more.

Like I'm doing cold emails, I'm doing LinkedIn outreach. So I'm doing a lot of different things.

It's just, none of them are bearing fruits. So because they're not bearing fruits it becomes, when do you know to like fold them?

When do you know to hold them? When do you know when to fold them? And I'm feeling like I should be folding a lot of things.

But if I fold all those things, it comes back to like, what do I do now? Do I just go on my leads which I don't think that's the right route because I don't think they're going to be quality.

I think you just got to continue to kind of work through it. And I think again, you're not even halfway through the year.

You could easily see like two deals come through and that can literally make my year, three deals, four deals come through and I can make my year.

So keep holding true to the process and make it happen. Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help. And of course, looking forward to giving you more and more updates.

Outro 06:38

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Check out the latest and greatest apps, books, and habits to level up your business at CEOhacks.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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