Aleksander Vitkin Podcast

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Hi, this is Aleksander Vitkin and today I’m going to talk about if it’s actually possible to build a freedom business. In this podcast, I’m going to cover what is and isn’t real and what you can and should aim for and what you should probably stay away from.

We’re going to take a look behind the scenes of the so-called Instagram millionaires and we’re going to take a look at what actually works and what you should focus at, as a current or future business owner if you want to build a big beautiful business. I’ve noticed that business is not four hours a week, so I think we can all agree on that.

You’re not going to be running a business from a pool with business just running for four hours a day and the rest of the time, you just spend in boats or just having fun, that’s off the table completely. But what people actually realize is business requires you to spend more time than a job. In a job, yes you can work nine to 12 hours a day, most people work eight to nine hours a day and they spend an hour and a half in traffic.

In business, you’re constantly thinking about it, even if you’re not working. I recommend working eight to 10 hours a day on business, yes, but the rest of the time, sure you can go hang out with friends, you can do gym, yoga, mountain climbing, rock climbing, sports, but at a certain level, you’re constantly engaged with business. I just came back from a dinner with 11 super-successful guys, all of them are running six and seven figure businesses.

We were talking about business most of the time and the rest of the time, we were talking about just funny things that happen and just funny things in our lives and people next to us, they were like: ”These guys are so loud, they’re talking about the same kind of things, the whole table.”

It’s because we’re entrepreneurs. The main thing we’re thinking about is business, because we’re really passionate, interested and engaged with it, we’re focused on it, it’s the thing that drives us. The simple truth is, we work more and we work harder and smarter than any employee that I’ve ever seen.

It is about taking on more responsibility as you’re developing yourself, you’re improving yourself, so that you can take on more responsibility, so that you can influence the world more in a better way and in a more significant way. And if you listen through interviews by co-founders of Facebook or Elon Musk and other really successful billionaires and entrepreneurs, this is what they’re focused on, because it gets boring. Sitting there with your laptop next to the pool, it just gets boring.

If you have a purpose, if you’re doing it for a reason, it doesn’t get boring, you just keep improving and you keep growing stuff and you keep getting more influence and more people are interested in what you’re doing, you’re gathering a sort of following and you’re improving people’s lives, that is worth it and that’s what I’ve always been focused on.

So I would not focus on the freedom, I would not focus on the lifestyle as the main driver in business, I’d focus on impact, changing people’s lives and improving things around you, making you more efficient. This is what entrepreneurs are good at, this is our purpose.

If you want to focus on that, business is for you, if you don’t, if you just want to make $5,000, go to Asia and Tinder, there’s high-paying sales jobs and you can just learn sales and just do that for a while, no problem at all or you can be an online freelancer, but business is for people who want to take on more, they want to take more risk, they want to grow something, they want to improve people’s lives and so on.

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Omar is going to share with you how he built a 6 figure creative agency.

Omar helps 6 and 7 figure companies tackle their messaging, positioning and he helps them build a premium brand that does not just compete on price. He helps people setup high ticket offers through their branding that allows them to sell services and products that are not a commodity.

Omar went into his business journey from a freelancing perspective. He was constantly working on developing his skills. Then, he started looking for mentors and joined Business Mentor Insiders mastermind. He learned many valuable skills like marketing, sales, copywriting and many more. These skills help you elevate your standards in the service that you are offering.

As a result, he was able to shift from being a freelancer into an agency that solves bigger problems. Not every designer can consult businesses on branding issues. A designer has an order taking type of mindset. He is not able to sit with a business owner and help him solve a problem in his business.

When talking to a business owner, Omar does not just look at design. He takes into consideration every aspect of the business and gives valuable advice that can improve business results. He has wider vision and long term goals. It is a process of a evolution.

Omar is working with 6, 7 and even 8 figure businesses. He had the opportunity to speak with Fortune 500 companies.

When it comes to branding, the pricing is just a small aspect of the whole equation. Omar’s company builds a solid brand. This helps to project a higher professional quality to what they are offering rather than a horrible website. If you have a website that does not align with your service, then, it is going to be very hard to build trust in your customers.

Omar knows how to build trust and confidence in his clients and knows how to present it with branding.

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Freelancers on Fiverr who are just getting started are more willing to negotiate down their price. These freelancers may have 10-20 years experience, but because they are just starting out, they want to work not for the money, but for the reviews. They want to build their social proof in order to bring their prices up.

A very good strategy you can take to hire the best freelancer is to nurture relationships with a few freelancers. You can talk to a bunch of level 0 sellers and find out who have more experience. Take in place who well they communicate with you, because that is a crucial part when working remotely.

The whole process for hiring is finding the right candidate and then figuring out the price that the candidate is willing to work for.

Have conversations with your freelancers and make them understand what you are trying to build. That way you may find someone who believes in your vision and who can provide high quality work on a consistent basis. It’s a lot more efficient to do the screening process manually than sending them a form and then figuring out their expertise based on their answers.

If you really like the work of your freelancer, then you may want to convince them to work for you on a consistent basis. First of all, hire them through Fiverr. Then, if everything is well and the communication is great, then you can tell them that you want a lot more work relationship with them. Send them you agency website and if they are interested in, they can apply to become one of your team members.

Most of Damiano’s team members came through Fiverr and in addition to that Damiano hired his best virtual assistant through Fiverr. She takes care of so many things in his agency right now and she is doing really great work.

It is a lot easier to test people through Fiverr than through other freelancing platforms. You can buy an order really easy and see how they perform and with technical stuff and communication. That has been the major factor that made Damiano choose Fiverr over other freelancing platforms.

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Hi, this is Aleksander Vitkin, and in this podcast, I’m going to cover the five reasons why you should quit your job as a developer, sales, or account manager, and start your own agency, escape your job, and build your own business to travel the world, and make a bigger impact in life.

The first reason is, probably, if you’re working in a company and you have a job, and you’re a developer, or a sales person, or a tech, you’re doing what the company is telling you to do. Usually, they don’t have a very well-defined niche ’cause a bigger company, most likely, has five, six different types of niches that they cover, and you’re not able to specialize.

You’re not able to laser target and focus on a specific type of client that you learn how to deal with, and build your own assets. What do I mean by this?

Let’s say you get a job in agency ABC. Now agency ABC, they deal with 15 industries, and they’re usually really big companies. What do you learn from dealing with really big companies? You learn how to communicate with their account managers. You learn how to communicate with their project managers. You learn how to communicate with their staff in general. You learn how their company works from the inside a little bit. What else do you learn? You learn what to deliver to them based on their requirements, based on how your company works and your process, but you don’t learn how to build a structure like this.

You don’t learn how to build a process like this, and if you do build something, it doesn’t belong to you. You’re not going to own it, so you’re just going to be doing random things based on your company’s requirements and not be in control.

As your own agency owner, if you start and build your own agency, and you sell tech, creative, or marketing services, you build everything from the ground up, and you own it. And the second reason why you should quit your job as developers, sales, or account manager, and build your own agency is you want to own the assets, and why is that? It’s because if you own a business, if you build a business, and you create the processes, you’re going to own it which means you can sell it.

You’re demanding charge or the women in charge. You know how it’s built. You know from the ground up how it’s built. You have all these processes that you build yourself, so you know how to build for any business in the future, so you learn lifelong skills that you can keep forever.

You build assets that you can keep for a long time, and then sell the assets later on. My friend, William, he sold his agency for $1.4 million. I have other friends who sold it for less as well, for 400k, 600k. This is all possible because they own the agency, and the could’ve gotten the job and made 60, 70, 80, 120k, depending on the type of job in an agency, but instead they built their own.

They got their own clients.They focused on a niche.They figured out how a specific industry works from the inside out, and they have deep industry knowledge which is very, very valuable.The third reason why you should build your own agency is you get to work with smaller clients which has several advantages and also a few disadvantages.

If you learn to work with small clients, you learn how small businesses are built, and which businesses succeed and which businesses fail. This allows you to learn the skill of being an investor without having to spend money. In fact, you’re getting paid to learn the skill of being an investor, and as you’re learning this, you’re learning multiple business models instead of just being in a business and doing a job, following a process, and managing the CRM, or being a production engineer, or whatever in the production environment.

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You are going to find out how Severi built a 6 figure local marketing agency in Finland. He is selling marketing services to real estate companies.

Severi started his business journey as a freelancer and he was not making much money at all. He was very worried if he would be able to pay his rent next month. He had to choose what type of food to eat, because he had to save money for other things. Then, he joined the Business Mentor Insiders mastermind and everything changed for the better. After just one week of becoming a BMI member, Severi closed his first sale.

Severi has made $10K revenue in his business last month. The profit margin was 70%, so he has made $7K in profit. He got from $1K a month freelancing to buying a business with all the branding, systems, processes and case studies.

Severi was doing most of the delivery himself. But he also has his cousin who is his first employee. He is helping Severi and lowers his workload, so that Severi can focus on the more important parts of the business. Furthermore, Severi is looking to hire a project manager and someone who is going to take care of the marketing funnels.

Right now, Severi is working with people who are going to work with him for a minimum of 3 months. The reason for that is because the sales cycle in real estate is quite long. After the 3 month period, if the client is happy, he can continue on a monthly basis.

Severi’s clients prefer to work with him, because he has skills like marketing, design, copywriting, Facebook ads. Severi acquired all these skills from the Business Mentor Insiders mastermind. This is the secret knowledge that differentiates him from his competitors.

Severi is able to convert cold Facebook traffic to paid customers. He wants to scale his business by productising the offer and get really good contractors in place.

This business is for people who are willing put in the time and effort into making it work. People need to be smart enough and not think about how they can grow rich overnight. They have to have a long term vision.

The best advice that Severi can give to beginners is to know your market and find a problem in a niche that you are interested in. Figure out how you can solve that problem and do your best to provide high quality work.

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In this podcast I’m going to talk about the five things that the most successful 2% of entrepreneurs do that most people just won’t do because they’re too stuck in their ways or they’re too lazy or they just don’t want to succeed or they don’t know how to succeed.

So in this video I’m going to give you the five things that I have noticed from my own research and experience, and talking to my most successful friends on what they do that allows them to be more successful than others, and after this video, be able to replicate at least some of the results if you implement.

So, the first one is one of their habits is or one of their things that they understand is that time tends to be circular in the sense that you have to keep relearning lessons unless you learn them in a very specific way. For example, I learned about six years ago that when an employee says a certain thing and it doesn’t matter what it is, it’s just a certain type of behavior from employees or freelancers that you work with when they say that or they do that this is a sign that you should not work with them anymore because most likely they’re unhappy about something but they’re not telling you and they’re well beyond the point where you can save the relationship.

So I notice, and I note when this happens to ask them questions and make sure that they’re not going to, like sabotage the business for example, I know that and yet, I have repeated that mistake three times where I don’t check and then an employee quits at the most inopportune times. I knew it and yet I repeated the mistake and that is because I didn’t learn it in a way where it’s foolproof, and the way to learn it in business to make it foolproof is to add it to your process folder, okay because it’s actually impossible to remember every single thing and have like this perfect emotional connection to it so you magically remember it every time on command.

So just write it down and add it to your process folder in Google Drive where you have your hiring modes and just have it in a place where your easily able to access it, so when you do employee reviews or reviews on how your working with freelancers that you automatically bump in to this as one of the check boxes in your checklist for should you keep working with this person? So the second thing is they know that they don’t know anything and that they’re still learning. Okay, this seems very counter intuitive but this is the most successful guys that you know Aleksander and it’s from your own experience.

Yeah but once someone says that they know everything, that they have it figured out, that they’re already the man, like I’m the man, I know everything, like I’m good to go, I’m the boss, I am a business master. Once you’ve met someone like that, once someone behaves like that you know they’re on the way down, you know that they’re going to fail eventually, because anyone successful understands that their success is this very fleeting, temporary thing that they can hold on to and eventually they’ll have to let go of it.

They know that they’re gonna have to keep learning, they’re gonna have to keep improving and if they don’t they’re to fall like a stone and sink into the ocean essentially so they’re not gonna succeed in business any longer. The moment someone thinks they’re the shit and they’ve made it, you know they’re on the way down or at least they’ve hit the top.

The most successful guys, they keep learning, they stay humble, and they just keep developing themselves because they know there’s no such thing as static growth, you need to improve not stay the same.

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Florian has spent $2.9 million in ad spend for a period of just 18 months. He is a consultant who helps coaches get more clients with Facebook ads and funnels.

Facebook ads can sound very simple to some people, but in fact it is a very complicated subject.

Facebook advertising is all about testing. You have to spend a lot of money to see which ad performs better. Facebook algorithm changes very often. Some things that have worked a month ago, does not work anymore.

Florian has a lot of very successful clients and he has learned many new things from them and their companies. He learned how to generate high ticket customers from Facebook ads.

The most important thing that Florian learned from the coaching and consulting business is the technique to sell a 4-5 digit product within 24 hours starting from a link click to having the amount of money on your bank account.

Many people want to launch product because they are waiting for the pay day when the money comes in. But, Florian is not a big fan of launches. Many bad things can happen during a launch. You may not have wifi, or a link is broken. Everything has to work perfectly. It’s stressful. If something is broken, you do not get your money.

Florian is relying on having an evergreen system. He is running Facebook ads all the time. Florian has sold many services and products. You can sell everything with an evergreen system.

The main difference between selling a service and a product is if you are doing a high ticket program, you need a sales call. People want to talk to a person if you they are going to spend $500 or more. It’s very hard to sell a 4-digit product without a sales call. They need to be 100% sure that if they are going to spend that much money, it will worth the investment.

The best way to sell a product is to test what works best for your audience.

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Kamil is going to reveal to you how he built a profitable agency after running an import business.

Kamil runs a digital marketing agency and he is selling google ads. He has been in business for a year and 5 months and he is doing around $5.8K in revenue monthly with 80% profit margin. His business is much more stable now than it was in the beginning.

Kamil is going to get married in a month from now. Due to the fact that he is a business owner and his business can run without him, he has time to prepare for his wedding.

Kamil had another business where he was importing electronics from China and selling them to businesses. It was a much different business where he had to invest a lot of money to buy inventory. There were all kind of problems with the shipping. After 6 years he saw that there is no future for him in this business.

Then, he got introduced to BMI mastermind where he started his digital marketing agency. With the agency business, the stakes are lower, the revenue is much higher. He does not have to compete on prices.

Kamil has created processes for his employees that they need to follow in order to run the company properly. New employees are being introduced to the systems and after a few days/weeks, they are able to follow the processes. As a result, he can disappear for a week, be available only 1 hour a day and still run a successful and profitable company. On the other hand, he had to put a lot of time and effort in his previous import business even on the weekends.

There is a huge difference between running a business solo vs being part of a large community of entrepreneurs. It is very hard to get discouraged when you are part of a mastermind. You have so much proof around you that makes you work harder. Furthermore, you can ask people questions and receive answers from people who are a little bit ahead of you and who have faced similar problems in their businesses.

Moreover, you can meet with other people who have successful businesses, which is a huge motivation. You can exchange ideas, get valuable advice and talk about business.

It is very important to hire the right people. A very valuable thing to know when hiring is to hire based on motivation. Your employee should care about your business and he/she has to be motivated to deliver high quality work on a consistent basis.

Sometimes motivation is more important than skills, because motivated people can learn the needed skills in no time. You have to employ based on motivation. Without the motivation, the best skills won’t make a difference.

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Emmanuel is going to share with you 4 mindset shifts to build a 7 figure business.

If you take these 4 mindset shifts into consideration, you will be able to go from a beginner to a successful business owner that makes a lot more money than a typical business.

1 – Get out of tactical thinking. Pure tactical thinking is if you ask yourself these questions:

How do I create a Facebook ad, so that it becomes profitable?

What is the funnel that I need to use to get more leads and clients?

You have to get out of tactical thinking and start thinking in a more strategic way. Create a strategy that will help you go from a beginner to your desired business level. This is not a tangible thing. It is something that you have to do consistently over a long period of time that eventually will lead you to the results that you want.

This is not a funnel that will change your business. It is a commitment to getting better at the thing you are doing.

2 – Independent thinking. If everyone is doing something, it has very little value. That is the harsh truth about business. Your brain is designed to do what other people are doing.

If you want to be very successful in business, you have to do things differently than your competition. That’s where your results are going to come from. You have to look at what makes most sense and make your decisions based on that.

Find information, read books, learn courses and use them as tools. Don’t use them as your bible.

If everyone else is doing something, run away from it. It’s that simple.

3 – Long term thinking. When you run a business, you have to always look at the bigger picture. You cannot expect your business to succeed from day 1, because there is not an overnight success.

4 – Commitment. You cannot do all these things if you are constantly going out, dating, partying too much. You need to have a stable life structure. Your mind has to work properly. Don’t travel all the time. You are allowed to visit 1 or 2 locations maximum per year.

What is more, you need to have a proper work routine – you go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. You pre-cook your meal, so that you are not wasting your time eating and then you do 5 – 8 hours of focused work.

Join our growing entrepreneur community on Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/139597470073188/

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Aleksander is going to share with you how to start an online marketing agency in 2019.

The easiest and fastest way to get results in business is with an agency. We discovered that it is better to build an agency, because you can learn the skills in a few weeks instead of spending a few years building audiences.

The most simple funnel is Upwork. You create a profile and create 4/5 reviews on the profile. You can get your existing clients to hire you through Upwork or anyone who is willing to pay you money.

Then, you should upgrade your account and you can start sending proposals. You should start sending at least 10 proposals per day and get around 10% – 20% reply rate. A very efficient way to increase your reply rate is with video proposals. You can use Loom to record ultra customized video proposals.

I would recommend you find all the information about client in the online space. Review every single part of their business on the loom video proposal. If they have zero information, you can give them more general advice based on their industry. You prove with case studies on the loom proposal that what you do is legit and that you are the one choosing the client.

You get 4 sales calls per week and you follow a basic sales process. The most important thing is to get people from Upwork on sales calls. Upwork is a tool to generate leads. You are not there to freelance and follow all their rules.

Some people get their first sale on the first call and others not. It depends how fast you can learn. On average, our students in the mastermind have 25% close rate and one sale a week.

People are afraid that they are not an expert in their field. Learn the basics following some online courses. Most people that you will be talking on Upwork don’t know what you can learn even from a Udemy course. Furthermore, you can spend an hour a day researching the funnels and the processes that companies use. You can become good enough to deliver a service in a matter of weeks and then you can start become an expert in a matter of months.

If you don’t want to sit there and deliver the service yourself, you can start hiring and training people. You can charge your clients a lot of money and hire people from Upwork to whom you can outsource the work. You pay the freelancer no more than 30% of the project. Never charge less than $1K per project if you sell services like ads or funnels.

It is much better to close clients on a retainer basis, because you won’t need to think about how to close clients every week or so. Later on you will be able to choose which clients you want to work with.

Build up your portfolio and add more reviews on your profile. That way you will get your profile ranked higher and you will build authority that will help you close more clients easily.