REACH OR MISS - Entrepreneurial Marketing Success

Ari Rastegar, Founder and CEO of Rastegar Property Company, has earned a reputation as a thought leader in real estate with his innovative, technology-driven investment strategies. He specializes in recession-resilient real assets and multifamily real estate developments, building portfolios designed to reduce risk and maximize capital appreciation potential.

Rastegar Property Company has acquired over 20 properties across the Sun Belt over the past year and a half.

Most passionate about

• Reinvigorating buildings and renovating them, bringing them up to class. Being able to bring a superior product to our tenants—that's really our main focus at the moment.
• We have things going on with building a thousand homes south of Austin. We're building multi-family, we're building industrial near Tesla's new plant.

Ari’s career and story

• I was born in Austin, Texas, where our company is headquartered.
• We're a real estate, private equity firm, and we've done business in 38 cities in 12 states.
• Right now, we're very focused on vintage multifamily, which is basically older apartment complexes—30-, 40-year-old apartment complexes in very good locations.
• My grandfather and my father are both Iranian immigrants to America.
• I was a literature major in undergrad. While I was in law school, I had an inkling, around 2005 or 2006, to start building single-family homes.
• I partnered with a local developer and borrowed $3,000 from the father of one of my friends from college. Shortly after that, the financial crisis happened.
• I got kicked in the teeth pretty hard but was fortunate enough to get an introduction to a very, very wealthy person that was on Wall Street and moved me into New York.
• I worked in various businesses as an entrepreneur under this kind of umbrella of wealthy people.
• I worked directly in real estate for several years and then decided to start my own company. Now it has been almost six years.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• We're very much data-driven.
• As a company, we follow the math, we follow the trends. We track data from the light bulbs to the water heaters to make more effective investment decisions.
• It’s about coming to the right answer for the consumer and taking your ego out of it—collaborating, having a great team, but really understanding what they truly need and taking yourself out of the equation, delivering that in a win-win environment in which they're getting some sort of value. My hope is that it would be an extraordinary value.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• I was running an entertainment company in 2011 for some very, very wealthy real estate people whom I had become close within the real estate world. There was a lot of trouble during those years, as people know.
• We did everything right by our standards. We sold the tables. We booked big sponsors. We had Sports Illustrated. We had the Black Eyed Peas and Puff Daddy and all the big performers.
• And then the biggest ice storm in the history of Dallas, Texas hits the Super Bowl two days before and all the flights get canceled.
• It was a failure in the sense that financially, at the time, with all the chargebacks and returning the money to the customers and things of that nature, it wasn't profitable. We lost money as a business. So the failure from a monetary standpoint comes from that vantage point, which I took very hard.

Biggest success with customers

• One specifically was during COVID.
• When the world really shut down, we became extremely active. We started buying like crazy and we were able to procure financing.
• We partnered with a huge insurance...

A British designer by trade, Bonjoro is Matts second company, founded out of Sydney Australia. What started as a sales hack for an Agency he was running, Bonjoro went from hack to side hustle to global business in 18 months, and now has team across 5 continents.

Matts love of building great products is only surpassed by that of building great culture, and his goal is to be the next Zappos, to be most loved brand in the world.

When not heads down in product, Matt spends his time rescuing wildlife, teaching his daughter about beekeeping and running one of Sydney’s largest tech founder networks.

Most passionate about

• I love building great products.
• The second thing I love most is people. I'm very much an extrovert. So, I love the idea of building great products and then using them to help people connect with other people better.

Matt’s career and story

• I’m from the UK originally, and I came to Australia eleven years ago. I was originally an industrial designer. I earned an MBA and fell into running an agency.
• We found that by sending videos to individuals, we get much more engagement. A few agencies wanted to use that technique, and their customers used it, so in 2017, we launched a technology company developing personal videos called Bonjoro.
• It's all about connecting with customers at key points on the customer journey. What we find is that they're investing a little bit of time checking in personally with leads. Using videos and media is incredibly powerful in terms of engagement.
• Today, I run that company full-time. The product team is here, in Australia. Then, most of the rest of our team is outside Australia because our customer base is located around the world.
• Right now, it's really about taking the business to the next stage. So we kind of three years behind in Australia, it is definitely not Israel or the West Coast of the States.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• I think you have to stay connected to the front line.
• I don't pick and choose. We just send to anyone a personal video and ask them to respond to me personally, to give me feedback. Every single day, I ensure that I talk to a couple of customers on the front line.
• I have a handle on how well the product is performing and how well our funnel is performing overall, qualitatively.
• That gives me a better ability to work with my managers across marketing, across customer success, and across products.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• The first business that I mentioned we tried to start, we actually built the product and raised lots of money. Then it failed quite spectacularly and we made a critical error.
• A lot of people loved the idea and loved what we were doing. We had a lot of paying customers. Then none of those activated. There wasn't a sense of urgency within what we were trying to do.
• Call that a failure of research, or call that making assumptions that were wrong, but ultimately, we couldn't keep that business going.

Biggest success with customers

• I think it was deciding to go full-time into the Bonjoro product when we already had another business running.
• It wasn't ever meant to be a business but it looked like we should invest some more time, in this project and it became bigger and bigger so we decided to focus on it as our main business.

Matt’s recommendation of a tool

• Amplitude or Metabase.
• We use both to track data, measure it, and help inform decisions.
• It is absolutely crucial to helping marketing improve their...

Kristin Zhivago is the president of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management company. She and her team build lead-generation campaigns for small and mid-sized companies, including websites, SEO, online advertising, social media, and video.

Zhivago has built a solid team of professionals in the various digital channels; writers, designers, and developers; project managers, and client success managers.

She is an expert on the customer’s buying process and the author of Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy.

Most passionate about

• I started a digital marketing management company in 2017.
• I was a revenue coach, mostly for tech companies. Basically, I helped people grow their companies, work better with customers, and do a better job of selling and marketing their products.
• Before that, my husband and I had an agency in Silicon Valley back in the early days. We helped introduce pretty much everything that we use today; The semi-connectors, computers, email, voice mail, and the like.

Kristin’s career and story

• When I was a revenue coach, I often did rent-a-VP services. I would turn around a marketing or sales department.
• We specialize in digital marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization, online advertising, social media, and so on.
• We work mostly with small to midsize companies. There's less politics in companies of that size.
• We want the client to be as smart as possible about what's going on. It's their marketing and we work together to improve what needs to be improved.
• We're growing our company steadily. We bring on clients as we can absorb them because we're a service-based business.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• The first thing is: Don't be afraid to interview your customers after they buy from you.
• If you interview people after they have bought from you, they are no longer playing poker. They're no longer negotiating. They won't tell you what they're really thinking when you're selling to them. However, after you start working together, they will tell you what they were thinking.
• After they buy, they have a vested interest in your success. They want to make sure that you stay in business and can help them. So, they'll tell you what they were thinking.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• When I was 17, Pratt & Whitney gave me a catalog and said, “Here. Go out and sell.”
• I finally met one old guy who came out and said, “Okay, all right, well then, tell me how your drill bit is better than the one I'm using now.” And of course, I had no training. I just had a catalog. I couldn't answer the question.
• I was so embarrassed, so I walked out. I thought to myself, ‘I'm going to learn everything I can about technology and sales.’ And that has been my path.

Biggest success with customers

• This was way before anybody was talking about the buying journey. I was one of the first people to identify that it isn’t how we sell that matters. It’s about how they buy. Our job is to make it easy for them to buy from us.
• We have a client who sells luxury yacht cruises.
• She was really in trouble at the beginning of last year.
• There were two words—and I can't tell you what they are, unfortunately, because, you know, it's our thing—but we put those two words in the ads. It was a huge success, bigger than what she hoped for.
• I love business-to-business, so we keep working on it. It has proved to me that there is such a thing as immediate recognition.

Kristin’s

Hi, my Reachers.

This is the seventh ‘Mountain Episode’. It seems like you really love this amazing series of the Reach Or Miss mountains project; Today, I want to share with you the 7th and newest episode where successful entrepreneurs share their mountains stories.

Listen to these incredible mountain stories I heard from the successful entrepreneurs I recently interviewed on my podcast.

You can then listen to the full interview with each of them and hear about their visions, struggles, and how these entrepreneurs reached their success.

From the entrepreneur that climbed with her client on “the hike of the gods” in Italy, and was amazed,

To the one who decided to climb the highest peak in Utah; Kings Peak, but found out they climbed the wrong peak…”

To the entrepreneur whose mountain was to save the financial future of his family,

To the only entrepreneur that said: “To be honest, I don’t feel like I’m climbing a mountain today. I feel like my mountain climbing journeys ebb and flow.”

And the entrepreneur that moved to the mountains in Asheville, North Carolina and said “It’s pretty impressive, and it’s just incredible to be so rooted in nature here. Being in the mountains is a blessing that I had never thought I would experience like this.”

I hope these mountain stories will encourage you to find out what should you – as an entrepreneur looking for your breakthrough to success – take from their stories to help you find the necessary steps to reach your peak.

Many entrepreneurs climb mountains, while others use mountains as a metaphor to describe what is necessary to conquer the peak – including the fatiguing yet rewarding journey to the top. Still other entrepreneurs use mountains as an analogy for a significant goal they wish to achieve – such as becoming a billion-dollar-market-cap company.

For many years, I’ve compared the act of marketing; taking possession of your potential customers’ minds and of building awareness, likability, and trust of a leading brand, to the act of climbing the highest mountains.

You climb step by step to the peak, reach your position as a market leader and a leading brand, and then start climbing a new mountain with a new product line or another brand.

The idea of mountains as representations of a strong position in the market is mentioned by Al Ries and Jack Trout in the excellent book, Marketing Warfare.

“In military warfare, mountains and higher altitude areas represent strong positions and often are used to present a strong defense. In marketing warfare, the question is one of who holds the mountains in the consumer's mind.”

So, at some point after the launch of my podcast for entrepreneurs, I started to ask the successful entrepreneurs I interviewed about their habits or dreams of climbing one of the highest mountains in the world.

Listen to these new inspiring mountains’ stories, find which entrepreneurs and stories you identify with most, and review your entrepreneurial objectives, market overview, and plan. By making your business as strong as possible, you will be able to quickly and easily achieve entrepreneurial success.

Lisa McLeod: “When we reached the top, I remember thinking that people are just a dot on this earth, so you’d better do something with your time that matters.…!”

Lisa McLeod

Lisa McLeod is the global expert on purpose-driven business and the bestselling author of Selling with Noble Purpose: How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud.

Lisa has spent two decades helping leaders increase competitive differentiation and emotional engagement. Her work debunks the myth...

Curt Mercadante helps businesses and entrepreneurs increase their authority brand exposure to the right clients so they can make more money.

For 25 years, he has counseled small business, entrepreneurs, as well as some of the largest corporations and associations in the country.

He’s built three profitable businesses, including a 7-figure Public Relations and Advertising agency.

Curt is Gallup-Certified Strengths Trainer, host of the Freedom Mindset Radio podcast, and author of the bestselling book, “Five Pillars of the Freedom

Lifestyle.

Curt and his wife sold their home and most of their possessions. Now they are just traveling around with their four kids.

Most passionate about

• There's business, which is important, but to me, the key is aligning your business with your family, your relationships, and your self-care.
• The most important thing in our life, my wife and I, is that we sold our home and most of our possessions. Now we're just traveling around with our four kids.
• The reason we're able to do that is because I've built what I consider a freedom business. It allows me to work virtually and serve my clients by doing what I love, what I feel like I was meant to do.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• The biggest thing is that we often think, when it comes to entrepreneurship or sales or branding or dealing with customers, that our biggest tool, our biggest weapon, is our mouths.
• People love to be asked about themselves. People love to talk about themselves. And so when you ask the question and then just kind of shut your mouth and sit back and listen—you learn, right?
• That learning mindset helps you to grow. It helps you to serve the client and what they want. We often think that we know what the client needs, whether it’s a potential client or an existing client. In either case, you have to use those ears. And then you’ve got success.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• I built a successful seven-figure public relations and ad agency over 14 years. It grew and grew and grew. The problem was, I built a company around the definition of success that other people had.
• I took money from clients who maybe didn't value me. I took money from clients whom I didn't really like working with, who didn't fit my vision. I built that up over time and I became obsessed with growing the company, to the detriment of my health and my family. I wasn't the husband and father that I knew I could be.
• From a revenue standpoint, I woke up on a Tuesday morning and I shut it down. I said, “I've had enough.” I had been having anxiety attacks for years.

Biggest success with customers

• When I shut down my agency, I started my new company, coaching and consulting and doing workshops and boot camps with entrepreneurs.
• I had built my company off of rock-solid sales principles, having conversations with people, and not relying on “I'm just going to run a bunch of ads and hope I get clients.”
• Impact story: That one sentence that clearly communicates the positive impact your clients get from working with you. If you don't know those things, I don't care how many ads you run, how much money you throw at it. It's going to be garbage in, garbage out.
• Time-honored principles of communication: Know your customer, know your impact story, and then together, a process that used the tools available to you at that time.

Curt’s recommendation of a tool

• From an authority branding standpoint, and depending on what industry you're in, it’s such a valuable tool because people are there to do business.
• People put information about their work on LinkedIn. And so, LinkedIn has those tools to find people and get...

Michael Nemeroff is the CEO and co-founder of RushOrderTees, a fast growing eCommerce custom t-shirt printing and apparel company. Founded in 2002 when Michael was only 17 with his brother and sister, RushOrderTees specializes in screen printing and embroidering services for everyone from teams to small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.

Over the past 18 years, the company has focused on the customer experience by streamlining the entire process with its innovative design studio, incredible service, and the quickest deliveries in the industry.

Most passionate about

• Being in this pandemic, probably what I'm most passionate about is getting the business back in shape after the huge decline we saw. Essentially, when the NBA shut down, we lost 80% of our revenue.
• We want to be the most trusted place where you can get custom t-shirts and custom-printed apparel.
• Right now, we're trying to do blocking and tackling better.

Michael’s career and story

• This is probably the third business that I started.
• It was like a combination of being on the computer, being a fast typer, and getting lucky that my brother took the first design course, didn't want to do his homework, and gave it to me.
• I turned it into affiliate marketing. I had a need to make money because that's what we needed to survive.
• My dad was kind of done, shutting down his business with my mom and Ben, his friend said to him, “You’re a great sales guy. Come on the road with me door to door. We'll sell shirts to pizza shops and restaurants. I'll show you exactly how it works, where to get the shirts, where to get them printed, and you can be making money this week.”
• Initially, my dad didn’t have the mindset to do it but then my brother pushed him to do it. And he actually got in the car with them. In the first two days, they sold three different places. I think it was like making about $1,500.
• I launched a website and a marketing campaign on yellowpages.com. The website just said, “Russia disease needs t-shirts, click” and there was a blinking phone number.
• That was the entry into taking custom t-shirts online.
• It was usually a localized business where you would go to a t-shirt shop and meet with the guy. He would tell you when you get them and you'd work out the design with him. So, the online t-shirt idea was a hit.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• First, I would tell you about how we feel about the customer. I mean, they are the business. Without them, there is no business. We’ve had to take a very customer-centric approach from the beginning. Otherwise, anything we delivered would have consequences where the customer would be upset.
• Second, I would say is to sell something cheap and quick, or have a proof of concept. Otherwise, you could waste years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on something that might have been just an idea and not worth spending time or money on.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• When we were growing the business, the problem was that we over-promised.
• We told too many customers that we would be able to hit their deadline. We actually didn't know that we weren't able to, because we just didn't have the production capacity. We were really young.
• Over-promising and under-delivering is a real issue because you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to say you can do something you can’t do. But I also think it's a part of growing.

Biggest success with customers

• We do one thing—which is custom t-shirts and apparel—quickly. That’s our success.
• We didn't really innovate, but in terms of the industry itself, like making something new, but we brought something to the industry that it didn't have because

Known as a top Entrepreneur Mentor and Business Architect, Mike has had a hand in starting or owning 15+ businesses across multiple industries including technology, real estate, fashion, digital marketing, and high-level entrepreneur masterminds and coaching. His businesses have generated more than 9 figures in total sales. He’s also the author of the forthcoming book, Twice born: How a Crisis Can Remake You.

His love for travel takes him and his wife to an average of 5 countries per year and one month in one of the world’s most beautiful cities to stimulate creativity, to create renewal, and to enjoy a life of adventure. 

Mike primarily mentors and coaches 2 types of entrepreneurs: the e-commerce entrepreneur with the mastermind he co-leads with Colin Wayne who has a 9 figure Ecommerce brand and the Entrepreneur with Expert knowledge (coaches, authors, speakers, consultants, podcasters) with his Symposia Mastermind.

He’s been featured on Business Insider, Forbes, Fox Radio 16 times, spent 1447 hours with Tony Robbins.

Kimberly uses her business and marketing expertise to show spiritual coaches how to create financial success while shifting consciousness on this planet. She brings nearly 20 years of business development experience to the table, including 8 years on Wall Street. Five of those Wall Street years were as a managing partner at a broker dealer, valued at $165m, that she founded with 8 colleagues.

With recognized efforts in changing people’s lives, Kimberly Maska is gifted with the ability to intuitively see a client's business and craft a strategy for success.

Most passionate about

• My big passion right now is the spiritual coaching certification program that I created.
• It is about really understanding how to approach your clients.
• My clients are what I call “spiritual entrepreneurs.” Really, they’re anyone who wants to help shift consciousness on the planet, who wants to help people awaken, take that red pill, and get through it.
• I show them how to coach and how to use the spiritual laws and spiritual rules that we all know to bring that into the coaching.
• It's much different from what I would call life coaching and. My clients not only bring in these spiritual laws but also get to use their own modalities.
• I'm in the middle of writing a book about it as well. So, that's my big focus today.

What is a spiritual entrepreneur?

• The spiritual entrepreneur is someone who wants to help shift this planet. They want to help people find their joy or connect you to God.
• They want to help people find their connection to whatever they call it—God source, infinite intelligence, the universe—so that they're living their purpose on this planet and not being in the stressful, upset, low-vibration place that most people sit in.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• The best advice is to really know who your client is.
• This is something that I see when people come to me, probably about 99% of the time. The reason why they can't get it to work is that they don't actually know who their client is.
• When there's no connection and someone doesn't really know their client, it falters. It doesn't really work. And even when someone joins my program, I do what I call a kickoff call with them. On this call, I help them get very clear on who their tribe is.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• I would say my biggest failure came in a roundabout way. It came because I didn’t fully step into my role as CEO with my team, as the team that I had in place was creating the problems with the clients.
• I think I had turned over the reins a bit too early, and I turned them over to people who were not in full alignment with what I was teaching and how I was speaking and connecting with my clients.
• You can call it failure because I had the wrong people in the wrong place but it was also my greatest lesson.

Biggest success with customers

• I have a unique way of looking at clients—of our responsibility to clients and their responsibility to us.
• I like to say “the customer isn't always right” because there's the idea of responsibility. I take full responsibility for what we did, but the customer also has to take responsibility for themselves.
• That's what I teach my clients as spiritual entrepreneurs. I'm really showing them how to be spiritual leaders.
• And as a leader on this planet, coming from that level of alignment with our higher selves, we have to be 100 percent responsible for ourselves. So, when I'm talking with the client, if...