REACH OR MISS - Entrepreneurial Marketing Success

Riggs Eckelberry doesn’t look like a bomb-thrower. And yet, he’s driving the disruption of a trillion-dollar industry that has fallen behind the times and is affecting the health of millions. That industry is Big Water. Simply, those billion-dollar centralized water systems aren’t coping with demand, and water quality is getting worse. The answer? Instant InfrastructureTM. Businesses are doing their own water treatment, using modular, prefabricated systems that are trucked right on site. They get better water quality, lower rates through recycling, and even improved environmental grades!

Ten years after launching public company OriginClear, Riggs and his team are offering those truck-in-place modular systems in the USA, while licensees are building products internationally using OriginClear’s low-energy, chemical-free innovation.

Most passionate about

• I’ve been working in the industrial water industry, which is an enormous, trillion-dollar industry. Yet, it’s not doing its job; only one-fifth of sewage is treated worldwide.
• Two-and-a-half billion people worldwide have no direct access to clean water. And the change is very slow; the water industry is falling behind the population growth. The Coronavirus brought a sense of urgency to this industry.
• If you want to transform an industry, find the people who don’t have excess to it—like Uber, which allows people who don’t have access to taxies and the transportation industry to become part of it by using their own cars. It’s the same as Airbnb, which allows people to use their homes as hotels.
• This opens up dramatically new markets without killing the old market. Both Uber and Airbnb transformed their sectors by allowing more people to play in them. That’s what we’ve done with the water industry.
• One of the main questions here is: How do you find a global solution? And you must always sell the global problem with a local solution that can scale up.
• So, the idea that came to mind was to use our big, very healthy investor base of 10,000 shareholders. Why don’t we let them invest in water projects directly, as opposed to the company?
• All of a sudden, instead of pushing the rock up the hill, we found the rock on downhill.
• In this post-virus economy, we have three priorities for investors. One is yield—they must make a good percentage on their money. Two is liquidity—they must be able to convert to cash easily. The third is safety.
• We established Investor Water, a global marketplace that connects everyday investors to water projects. We are now in the process of running three projects as proofs of concept.
• The marketplace for water projects has become one of our global priorities in the decade to come. That’s why it’s so exciting.

Riggs’s career and story

• I was raised as one of six boys. My father was an international businessman and we stayed for many years in countries like Canada and the Caribbean. We spent many years in Europe. We always had a non-American viewpoint.
• After high school, I was supposed to go to all kinds of colleges, but I chose instead to get involved in the non-profit space. For years I was paid almost nothing but was in that ‘save the world' kind of mentality.
• In those years, I had many kinds of fun roles, like being a sailor, a skier, and a marine officer. When I needed to choose my direction, I chose technology because I thought that it was the only way to break out of how things are: the fossil fuel world, the minimum sanitation world, and the like.
• I ended up in New York doing some pioneering computing work. Fast forward to the early ’90s. I was on the West Coast and got involved with the new dot-com industry. I experienced some amazing 10 years, including the dot-com I learned so much about disruptive marketing, which I called Mistake-Based Marketing, in which...

Justin Goodbread, CFP®, CEPA®, CVGA®, owner of FinanciallySimple.com, is a nationally recognized financial planner, financial educator, wealth manager, author, speaker, and entrepreneur. He has 20+ years of experience starting, buying, owning, and selling businesses. Justin is a two-time winner of the Investopedia Top 100 Advisor award and Exit Planning Institute’s Exit Planner Leader of the Year.

Recently, Justin published his first book: The Ultimate Sale. In it, he shows business owners how to create long-term value and accelerate growth in their company with the ultimate goal of selling the business for top dollar when the owner wants to retire.

Justin already wrote the first draft of his second book, and is on a mission to publish a book per year aiming to publish 10 books before the age of 50.

Most passionate about

• I’m most passionate about trying to change the future for so many business owners, here in the US and around the world.
• A study by the Exit Planning Institute says that out of 5.6 million Americans who have small businesses and entrepreneurships, only 4% will sell their businesses for the price the owners think they’re worth.
• That’s amazing, especially because, for most business owners, their largest single asset is their business. What I’m into today is changing the narrative and the outcome for business owners, so that whenever they desire to exit, they are ready for it financially and are emotionally prepared to walk away from their business.
• To increase a business’s value, you need to know where you’re headed.
• The main difference between a business that will be able to make an exit and a business that won’t is called ‘owner dependence.’ It’s when the business is completely dependent upon the owner—the owner’s mind and the owner’s ability.
• The one thing the owner needs to do if they want to make the business ready for a very profitable exit one day is to remove themselves from the business, to make the business owner irrelevant.
• They should build a dynamic team, a dynamic process, dynamic multiple systems, to the point where the business can function and thrive without the owner's involvement.
• We are working with the owners not only to build the team that will be able to lead and run the business without them but also on how to let it go.
• I’m young, I’m 42. When I sold my first business, I was 22. I found myself trying to figure out: What’s next? The reason for that was that I made the same mistake that so many Americans and business owners around the globe do: Our identity becomes our business.
• When our identity becomes our business, it becomes tough on us to sell or transition, or perhaps leave the business for any reason: death or divorce or disability or disagreements. When I leave it, what’s next in life?

Justin Goodbread’s career and story

• I started my first business when I was 16. We had a landscaping business. It was in the ’90s and my mom and dad, who homeschooled us, wanted my brother, sister, and me, as part of our education, to learn how to work, to learn how to be business owners, to learn to be entrepreneurs.
• My mom and dad—who were not business owners or entrepreneurs—invested their life, their resources, their savings, their time in teaching my brother, my sister, and me how to think like business owners.
• By the age of 18, my brother and I were in landscaping and made more money than my mom and dad did.
• My brother and I were landscaping together. We bought our own equipment, found our own customers, serviced the customers, and positioned it. Ultimately, we both went to college, so we walked away from our business, selling it for a nominal fee.
• After that, my brother and I started separate businesses. He went into the pool business, building high-end swimming...

Jesse Krieger sits squarely at the intersection of publishing and promotion – having signed two publishing deals on two different continents and navigated the world of becoming a best-selling author twice.

In addition to being featured on over 50 media outlets for his best-selling book Lifestyle Entrepreneur, Jesse has been an entrepreneur his entire adult life and holds degrees from University of California, Berkeley, as well as National Taiwan University and Beijing Normal University.

It has been his honor to publish 100+ books during his 6-year tenure as founder & publisher of Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press - The Publisher for The Passionate.

Most passionate about

• Today I’m the publisher of Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press. We are the “Publisher for the Passionate.” I also run a crowdfunding platform called Publishers that connects writers to readers and finds the right publisher for them.
• I’m most passionate about creative entrepreneurs who have had incredible life experiences and who want to share them with the world through a book.
• I spend most of my time working with authors through the crazy process of creating, publishing, and promoting a book, which, for them, is also their business development tool. It’s what they want to be known for.
• It gives you, as an entrepreneur, the chance to step forward and release your work to the world. It gives you the opportunity to connect with people you’ve never met, in places you’ve never been, and have a profound impact on their lives in a positive way.

Jesse’s career and story

• It’s all really started with my love for music. I got my first guitar at the age of 13. I wasn’t interested in business growing up. I just wanted to ditch high school and play Jimi Hendrix with my band. I followed this passion to LA, where I went to music school. Then I went with friends to Europe. We played there in bars and clubs and even on the street. It ended in Nashville. I went to study sound engineering there and met my bandmate and my first business partner.
• We were recording and producing music all the time and I established my first business, which was a record label, to manage our music.
• I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole adult life. I really have never had a normal job. Toward the end of my 20s, a lot of people started to ask about my approach to starting different kinds of businesses, and traveling, and being able to travel while running a business. During 2008 and 2009, it wasn’t so common “just to be an entrepreneur.”
• I started to write about my approach. It felt consistent to me. The act of thinking and writing about how I approached coming up with new business ideas, how I approached testing them out, how I thought about the kinds of travel experiences I wanted to have in a year—I built that into my planning.
• These answers, which I wrote in the book, helped me clarify my philosophy and share it with others.
• I didn’t self-publish this book. It was published by two publishers. I was first published in South East Asia in 2012. I turned to Malaysia and Singapore and talked at book fairs. I signed books and kissed babies, the whole thing.
• I had a business history in China and in Asia. We were doing promotional products and flash drives, those kinds of things. Then I decided that I wanted to start studying Mandarin.
• I found a publisher in Asia. It was a unique story: a big white guy who speaks Mandarin and published a book in Asia about business. There weren’t as many business books in Asia as there were in the Western world.
• I wanted to do it in Asia before I tried to publish my book in the US. Two years later, my book was published in the US, and some of my friends were working on books of their own. They started to ask me if I could do it for them. Six years later, I said...

Kasey Jones, founder of A Better Jones is deeply passionate about helping people, teams, and organizations grow. She has defined her career leveraging creative and innovative methods to build long-lasting relationships with the people that matter most to your business - buyers, partners, and community.

Kasey’s experience spans nearly every aspect of sales, marketing, business development, and community organizing at startups including Notion, GoodData, Postano, and even Obama for President. She discovered her affinity for the startup life by working on political campaigns where she realized she thrived in chaos, had a knack for doing big things with few resources, and loved the challenge of being perpetually in over-her-head.

A passionate advocate for underrepresented sales professionals, Kasey also cofounded The Other Side of Sales, a podcast and resource committed to evolving the culture of B2B sales to be more inclusive and to empower underrepresented sales professionals. Also, Sales Hacker has named her one of the 35 Most Influential Women in Sales and a Sales Influencer to watch for 2019.

Most passionate about

• I’m the founder of two businesses. I have ‘A Better Jones,’ which is a growth strategy, coaching, and demand generation agency for startups in their early stage. We help startups grow faster and we have a variety of ways to do that.
• Also, we just launched a new project called Our Galaxy. It’s a community, content resource, and coaching platform designed to assist founders and business leaders in building authentic personal brands that help them grow their businesses and careers in what we call ‘a non-icky way.’
• I know a lot of founders out there who are humble or from more of the technical side, and a personal brand seems a little unappealing to them. We help them understand that building your personal brand is about getting known for the work you do and being respected in your industry in a way that helps your business grow.
• It’s usually among more product-led founders. They tend to believe that the product should speak for itself and they don’t need to have a public role. They often say that they don’t feel comfortable bragging on social media.
• I’m a firm believer that everyone has a story to tell, a lesson to teach, or insights to share. When you go out there and you’re transparent about the things that you’re learning and the things that you’re doing, then your industry and your buyers trust you more. They’re more likely to buy from people and from organizations that they trust.
• Another thing that I’m working on now, worldwide, is this pandemic and how it’s impacting business and the economy. So, I’m working on a coaching program for startup founders who feel like their businesses are poised for growth but who don’t have the right plan or resources. They need help to get deep and intensive about this, to accelerate this growth.
• I’m creating an opportunity for them to get into groups and take part in the process that I usually do, but in a group setting. We also know that the founders’ journey is really lonely.
• I see a lot of entrepreneurs, especially here in Oregon, who are massively pivoting their companies, while others are just waiting for things to get back to normal. And I think that this isn’t going to happen. Yes, things will ease and things will get a little better, but we will not go back to where things were.
• There is a very big need to listen to your customers and understand what they are going through. Listening to your customers is always the biggest need, but because things are changing so quickly now, you need to be having constant conversations with your customers and learning to adopt what they are telling you.
• We used to hold a lot of events with our customers. Well, that’s not going to happen.

Kasey’s career and story...

Sarah Evans, founder of Sevans Strategy and Sevans Digital PR, is a digital PR strategist, consultant, global brand correspondent and keynote speaker, who works with companies worldwide to create and improve their social and digital PR strategies. Her team is able to advise on branding, marketing, advertising, and public relations.

Additionally, Sarah has been a digital correspondent for several companies including Paypal, Cox Communications, MGM International, Cisco, SAP, Wal Mart, Shorty Awards and more...

Sarah got her start by helping small to midsize businesses build their digital PR efforts. She is currently a member of the Forbes Agency Council. Previously, Sarah worked with a Chicago-area crisis center to raise more than $161,000 in three weeks exclusively via social media, and is honored to be a member of the Guinness Book World Record holding #beatcancer team.

Most passionate about

• My world is all digital PR. I started my business around 11 years ago and it has gone through a lot of changes and evolutions, highs and lows. It has grown and not grown (when I had my children). However, I feel very lucky to work with the clients whom we work with in the digital lifestyle and technology space. We have customers all over the world, from Israel, and from Russia, and from across the US, and I absolutely love what I do.
• I view digital PR as much more comprehensive. Of course, we do traditional media relations—getting clients sourced in TV, print, radio, and the like—but we also look at social earned organic and even some social paid components.
• We help clients create their own content for their websites and we help them get placed in media outlets. We get them the opportunities to get placed in unique outlets, as podcasts, or YouTube influencers, or Instagram influencers.
• We are looking for all the opportunities that a brand can use to either share their story, connect with the community, or leverage a moment in time.
• I’m not technically a maker, but I test out things every day. I consider myself a tech enthusiast and a beta tester. Each day, I’m trying out 5 to 10 new products and looking at how they can resonate with consumers, how we can use them from a PR perspective, and how we can integrate them into a publicity plan or connection opportunity.

Sarah’s customers

• Our customers all have sorts of technology angles to their products. What all our customers have in common is that they are all technology leaders or influencers, or they have technology related to their brand.

Sarah’s career and story

• I was a PR major in college, so it’s something that I always knew I wanted to do. When I was very little, I was hosting tea parties and putting on events, inviting everyone, bringing people together. That was really what I wanted to do with my life.
• My mother was the catalyst for that. We started from: Bringing people together is my mission, so what kind of career can help me do that? I discovered public relations and went through a very traditional career path. I started with corporate public relations, then health care, higher education, and agency work.
• I didn’t realize that I had an entrepreneurial spirit. However, I took the risk 11 years ago and haven’t looked back. I’m very, very happy.

Sarah’s best advice for entrepreneurs

• My advice is to make some of their own advice. Every day, I’m learning something, so I think the advice I would have given 11 years ago, five years ago, or three months ago would be completely different.
• The one thing that has remained the same is that you have to have a thirst or hunger for what you do. It’s very easy to get depleted emotionally, or down on yourself. When you get into the tranches, you find out how difficult it is because not everyone...

Sean Castrina lost his "dream job" 25 years ago and decided he would never be dependent on an employer for his financial security again. He became a millionaire at 36-years-old by becoming a serial entrepreneur, starting more than 20 companies and currently running 9 companies.

His newest book, the World's Greatest Business Plan, helps people by providing a simple step-by-step plan for those who cannot afford to fail. He has contributed to some of the most recognized media outlets including Forbes, Inc., Yahoo Finance, MSNBC, as well as guest lectured at some of America’s finest colleges.

Most passionate about

• What I’m passionate about for the next 30 days (and for the previous 30 days) is finishing my third book, called The World’s Greatest Business Plan. The reason I wrote this book is that too many business people and startups don’t have a business plan.
• I went to Amazon and read the first pages of 10 books all about business plans. One book was worse than the next; they were outdated, they were written by professors, they were way too exhaustive.
• I thought, ‘There must be something simpler,’ so I wrote The World’s Greatest Business Plan. We are giving it as a gift during these times of coronavirus. It’s a good book that will help you formulate a plan for your business or talk you out of going into this business.
• I see so many startups fall. The main reason is because the startup founder falls in love with their idea. They look at their idea as a success and they picture this idea working. That is the point where they start to write their business plan. However, a business plan should absolutely challenge your idea.
• A business plan should accomplish a couple of things. One, it should convince you, the founder. It should also convince investors or partners, whoever gets involved in your business. It must build confidence in everybody that is involves.

Sean’s career and story

• The businesses that have succeeded well for me are the businesses where I personally experienced a problem—the need that I had trouble solving.
• Twenty years ago, I started a handyman company. Well, that is the least sexy business you can imagine. I don’t know the difference between two screwdrivers...
• I owned a magazine in cities on the East Coast at the time, and I wanted to convert the dining room in our home to an office. We had a newborn child and I wanted to work from home ... and I couldn’t find anyone to do the job. I saw a tremendous need!
• I started Advantage Handyman, not a sexy business. Well, it has now turned into Advantage Contracting. Twenty years later, it has eight companies that will do anything for your home. It started from a need I experienced and has moved to a multi-million-dollar business.
• And that’s only one of the businesses I started - 11 companies over the years.
• The difference I see between a business and an entrepreneurship is that you can decide to leave your job and start your own business, and you have something like six months of entrepreneurship, but then you have your business and all you want to do is make a living from the business for many years to come. That’s a business. This person is not an entrepreneur.
• An entrepreneur is the one who is looking to build more and more companies and seeking opportunities.

Sean’s best advice for entrepreneurs

• Solve a problem! From the beginning. Don’t fall in love with your own idea … yet. At some point you can, after you have done your business plan.
• A good business starts on one of three foundations. You want to start a business that solves a problem or meets a need, or, satisfy a desire. Ninety-nine percent of all businesses need to have a massive audience for that.

Biggest failure with...

Amy is a digital Swiss army knife. Internationally recognized as an influential voice in the realm of community, audience, and content, she has worked in media, cybersecurity, blockchain, and marketing technology.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark named her as one of 5 women bloggers to follow, and PeerIndex named her the 15th most influential woman in tech on Twitter.

She was a member of a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff at the Miami Herald and once converted a two-prong electrical outlet to a three-prong grounded outlet without electrocuting anyone.

Most passionate about

• I have been working on a couple of projects with a group that worked together, and today I’m talking with a few companies about getting involved with community and audience development, which is the sweet spot where my skills intersect.
• The phrase “audience development” came out of the journalism world. You first have a product, which is the journalism, and then there is the audience, which you want to develop to read and watch the product.
• Audience development, as I see it, is looking at your users from a new point of view—thinking differently. On social media, companies start to look at their customers more as fans, followers, and community. It’s almost like you’re entertaining them today.
• Customer development is similar to community management but it’s more typically for media.
• I believe that, as a result of these times, we are going to change in terms of the business world and workers—not only because of the Coronavirus epidemic, and not only in a good way. An epidemic is awful, but I hope we come out of this with more empathy.

Amy’s career and story

• I started as a traditional journalist quite a long time ago. During the recession of 2008, there were many layoffs in journalism. I decided that I wouldn’t go back to traditional journalism. Social media had just started and I was a power user of Dig, StumbleUpon, and Facebook. After just a few months, I was getting around 50%-60% of my old salary as a manager. I thought, ‘This is new, this is interesting. Let’s see where it can go.’
• As a reporter for The Miami Herald, I was recognized as the only reporter who lived in the community. I was more trusted because I was somebody who actually lived there.
• The main difference between being a journalist versus the new social media publishers is that journalism is always about the news. It’s commercially packaged, but its main purpose is to inform the community. Otherwise, you would lose readers, and if you lose readers, then you lose the advertises. Meanwhile, as a business, having a great blog, at the end of the day, is about the company—either for branding or marketing or sales, but it has a different purpose.

Amy’s best advice for entrepreneurs

• Listen to your customers and talk to them, though that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to do everything they say. There is a very fine balance between listening to your customers—your clients and your followers—and being too distracted by that.

Biggest failure with customers

• It’s kind of a challenge because I tend to learn from failure and then put it behind me, so I don’t see it as a failure anymore.
• I think my biggest failure was with the company that I co-founded. I definitely learned from that. We had very different ideas about how to build the company. I think we were both aware of that but maybe we didn’t realize how far apart we were.
• My partner thought we had to get to a certain number of clients in 12 or 18 months, while I thought that, to get to this number, we should get just a couple and perfect the aspects that we needed to perfect. The wrong thing was that we acted like this didn’t matter when, the truth was, we never could overcome

A born entrepreneur and self-starter, Lance Tyson is an authority in the sales world with a passion for developing strong business leaders. Lance has worked with some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment, including the New York Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys. After leaving school to start his first business, Lance began working for Dale Carnegie. He rose through the ranks eventually building the most successful Dale Carnegie operation in North America.

After a fifteen-year run, Lance sold his interest in Dale Carnegie in order to form a new company, Tyson Group. The focus of Tyson Group is to diagnose your sales team and propose solutions that deliver results that make sense for your organization and needs. We aren’t just a company that provides training—we are a partner that provides solutions

Most passionate about

• Our organization helps entrepreneurs and salespeople compete in this complex world. That’s what I’m passionate about. Many of the entrepreneurs we work with are very product-heavy. Sometimes they aren’t equipped to sell things but they have the enthusiasm to sell.
• At the Tyson Group, we coach, train, and consult sales leaders and their teams. I always say that entrepreneurs and salespeople are the last great worriers.
• There are plenty of opportunities today for push marketing like Amazon but there are also plenty of opportunities where things should be sold, and to be presented. At the end of the day, people buy from people.

Lance’s career and story

• I’m an entrepreneur by nature. My father was an entrepreneur. I left college in my senior year. It was the time when the Berlin Wall was coming down and I read an article about imports and exports. We decided to start a company that was import-export. I was going to become a broker.
• One of the companies I was calling on decided I was pretty good as a salesperson, so they hired me for salary.
• I went back to college and at the same time was very passionate about self-improvement. That was the time of the Stephen Covey movement, the Tony Robbins movement, and I wanted to apply to one of those companies.
• At the same time, a friend of mine introduced me to Dale Carnegie’s book, which I still believe is the finest book you can ever read about being a leader and a salesperson. When I was trying to join one of those self-improvement companies, I found out that there was a Dale Carnegie office in Philadelphia.
• The guy who had the sponsorship of the office ended up hiring me. My role was to sell their ‘sales program’ of 12 weeks to companies and entrepreneurs.
• Then I got married and, because you needed a college degree to teach Dale Carnegie, my wife forced me to go back to college so I could teach there. Over time, I became an owner of one of their organizations and we ended up buying several of their organizations around the U.S.
• I always had a passion for sales because I did a lot of training and sold a lot of sales programs to companies and business owners. And I’ve seen a lot of great success.
• We sold our interest in 2010. Then I started the Tyson Group and another company.
• As an entrepreneur, you need to sell yourself to the bank, to investors, to vendors, to new employees, and, of course, to users. So, I really believe in the process of sales. A lot of entrepreneurs fail on that. They are so excited about their product that they forget that everybody else might not be so excited about it.

Lance’s best advice for entrepreneurs

• Entrepreneurs must understand that the sales process is the buying process inverted. I would say to entrepreneurs that they need to find out who would want their product and why they would want it.
• Entrepreneurs manage to sell thanks to their enthusiasm. The Latin root for enthusiasm is “enthuse,”...

Bill Cates is an internationally recognized client-acquisition expert, author, and speaker who motivates others to take action with proven strategies. 

A successful entrepreneur, Bill started and sold two book publishing companies. Turning his attention to help other businesses grow, Bill has written four best-selling books: Get More Referrals Now, Don’t Keep Me a Secret, Beyond Referrals and Radical Relevance.

Bill is also somewhat of an adventurer. He has trekked through the Himalayas of Nepal and the Andes of Peru. He has lived on a houseboat in Kashmir, India, climbed Machu Pichu, reached the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, camped in Arctic Circle… and Bill has toured the country as the drummer in a rock and roll band.

Most passionate about

• I’ve been in business for 40 years, always in marketing and in growing businesses. I built two book-publishing companies and sold both in 1989. Then I got into the business of writing, speaking, coaching, and helping other entrepreneurs build their businesses.
• I love writing. I plan to write a book every year now for the next five years. Today I also enjoy doing a lot of videos.

Bill’s career and the story of the WHWE community

• I published cookbooks. I started when I wrote my own book. I worked for American Airlines, so I wrote a book about airline careers and started selling it a bit by myself. I was using direct mail, mail orders—this was long before we had the internet. Then a woman asked me to help her self-publish a cookbook, so I did that.
• I realized that cookbooks were a really good business. People love to read cookbooks, and not only for cooking. They enjoy following the process of preparing a dish. People also collect cookbooks. So, I borrowed $40,000 (which was a huge amount for me) from my father.
• I came back with several cookbooks that we sold in cooking stores, kitchen stores, and gourmet product stores. I published 45 cookbooks throughout the time I had my business.
• After nine years, I discovered that I didn’t really have a passion for what I was doing. I was looking for the next thing. A friend of mine told me, “You have built up a lot of knowledge, you’ve got a lot of experience, and you can help other business owners. You can write, you can speak, you can consult, you can coach.”
• I never really thought about that and I slowly got into it. I started helping some clients. In 1995 I began writing my first business book. It was called Unlimited Referrals and it was about how businesses can create more word of mouth. It’s not available anymore.
• My most recent business book is Radical Relevance, which is about how to cut through the sea of noise that the internet creates. Creating word of mouth is more relevant now than ever. You need to have the right mix of marketing and sales.

Bill’s best advice for entrepreneurs

• The second rule in my book, Radical Relevance, is to give your customers or clients a seat at the table. What I mean by that is to not ever develop a product or service or any marketing or sales messages without first talking to your customers or clients.
• We think we know what’s in their heads and hearts, and to some degree we do. We think we have empathy for them but there is nothing like talking with them. What happens is that we start learning things and getting phrases and words and expressions that we can use and that we wouldn’t have thought of.
• One of the great questions to ask our clients is, “What do you value about what we do and how would you describe to other people what we are doing?” When I asked that, one of my clients said, “You make asking for referrals as natural as breathing.”

Biggest failure with customers

• I’ll...