Marcus Sheridan, (http://thesaleslion.com) had a chance to interview Gary Vaynerchuk in front of 3000 people at Social Media Marketing World 2016. He researched, planned, and researched some more.  But sometimes things don’t go according to plan.  Find out what he did when things went off the rails, and how he responded to adversity, on this episode of The Solopreneur Hour.

 

Mike and Marcus Discuss:

 

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8:13 The Interview with Gary Vaynerchuk

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38:13 From Pool Guy to Sales Lion

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55:47 The Balance video series

 

[spp-tweet tweet=”You cannot see the end of the trail until you start walking – Marcus Sheridan Episode 436 of Solohour.com”]

 

Overview of Marcus

Marcus Sheridan raised in a small town of Callao, Virginia. In 1995, Marcus graduated from Northumberland High School. He attended graduated magna cum laude from the West Virginia University. He graduated with a B.A. in Spanish with a minor in Physical Education. In high school, Marcus served as the captain of the football, baseball, and wrestling teams. Between 1997 and 1999, Marcus served as a church missionary in Chile. Sheridan is also the author of three self-help books that are all published. These books include Stop the Yawns, Heavenly Father’s Angels and Teen Talks to Stop the Yawns. Marcus owns and founded of The Sales Lion.

Marcus Sheridan is the founder of www.poolschool.us, which is among the most informative and educational swimming pool online sites. Marcus married his high school sweetheart, Nikki, and they both have four children: Danielle, Joseph, Larsen, and Casey. In the year 2007, the Indiana University named him as the Young Entrepreneur in Residence. Marcus is the first person who came out with a rating system for the fiberglass pool manufacturers.

His successes can be traced as a communications and business leader from his missionary activities in Chile. Having never spoken Spanish before, Marcus was put in a position to teach and speak to large audiences, which eventually killed his fears of public speaking. This fear would later turn into a great strength. By the time he ended his mission in Chile, he had already realized he had a knack for communicating to others. He later utilised this ability by becoming a full-time professional speaker.

River Pools and Spas

After his missions in Chile, it was when he married his wife, Nikki, and completed his degree at West Virginia. In his quest for his first job after college, his two close friends from home approached Marcus. The friends had just started a company in the swimming pool industry- River Pool and Spas. The two friends asked Marcus to be their first employee in the fledgling company. He responded positively to the request and joined the company.

Charged with running the place as his two friends were working out, in the field. He stayed on in the company and later became the third partner in the enterprise. The company had been running okay until 2008- this was when the stock market experienced a major collapse. This failure resulted in a drastic fall in the values of the homes. This way, few people could afford luxury goods leave alone in-ground swimming pool. It was in these stressing business moments that Marcus started to study online marketing principles. He engaged himself in reading things like inbound marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing among others.

On reading the principles of marketing, Marcus, and his partners realised they needed to be great communicators, and this would help them act like consumers. By acting as a consumer, they could be able to answer any question online leading to more traffic on their website and this translated to increased sales. With their 20-page website,