The Bulletproof Entrepreneur™

Cindy Rodriguez is the founder of Start Fierce Business Solutions Inc. She’s always had a passion for digital design and making things pretty but felt like something was missing. She found the missing piece of the puzzle when she was introduced to marketing while working at BookIt.com and was hooked.

Throughout the years, she’s worked as a freelancer honing her craft and working with clients while also helping business owners with marketing advice. During that time she realized that she was always giving people free business advice that went beyond the typical designer/client relationship. After a lot of soul-searching, I was inspired to start the Start Fierce Business Podcast (formerly The Fierce Entrepreneur Podcast.) to help people grow their businesses.

Resources

Start Fierce Business

John Livesay, aka The Pitch Whisperer, is a sales keynote speaker, consultant, author and master story teller. He’s known as being the transformational catalyst who helps sales teams around the world become revenue rockstars. His TEDx talk: Be The Lifeguard of your own life has over 1,000,000 views. He is also the Co-Founder & CMO of QuantmRE which is a blockchain real estate company. His new book Better Selling Through Storytelling was released a few months ago and he is also the host of a successful podcast called “The Successful Pitch” podcast, which is heard in over 60 countries.  He’s been featured in numerous arounds in publications like Forbes and Inc and John has appeared on TV as an expert on “How To Ask For What You Want And Get A Yes.”  I’m pleased to have him on the show.

www.johnlivesay.com

https://www.amazon.ca/Better-Selling-Through-Storytelling-Essential/dp/1642793728/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=better+selling+through+storytelling&qid=1557284226&s=gateway&sr=8-1-spell

In this episode of the show we sit down with Samson Nwakanma the co-founder of Gidijobs. Samson is a project management consultant, entrepreneur, and personal development trainer who teaches on the topic of employability, personal development and the art of self mastery. We talk about everything from his personal journey, his battle with dyslexia and insecurity and how he overcame his personal challenge to cofound one of Nigeria's leading job placement agency.

Resources

www.gidijobs.com

Judy Robinett is an entrepreneur, business thought leader, consultant, and super networker. She is the author of Crack the Funding Code, How investors think and what they need to hear about funding your startup. She’s been profiled in Fast Company, Forbes and Huffington Post. In over 30 years as an entrepreneur, she has served as the CEO for both public and private companies. She’s been on the advisory boards of several VC firms including Illuminate Ventures, which is an early-stage venture capital based in Menlo Park. In her many years of experience in business, she realized that lack of funding is the #1 reason most businesses fail. Her new book was written to help business owners start on the right path to ensure that their companies do not end up in the business statistics.

Resource

http://judyrobinett.com/

This episode is brought to you by Collision Conf. Visit www.collisionconf.com to get your tickets to attend the #1 startup conference in the world.

www.odogwu.com/judyrobinett

Martyn R. Lewis is an acclaimed business professional with a vast background in all aspects of revenue generation. Born and educated in the UK, he emigrated to Canada in the 1980 and now resides in the Sonoma area of northern California. Prior to founding his own company, he had extensive executive management, sales and marketing experience. His positions included President and CEO for Drake International, North America, where he led a large, multi-divisional sales force to reverse a declining trend to growing the business at more than three times the rate of the industry. Prior to Drake, Martyn was with Digital Equipment of Canada for ten years. During his tenure at DEC he led several hundred sales professionals, culminating in the position of VP Marketing and Sales Services.

Prior to joining DEC, Martyn worked in the major accounts division of ICL in the UK. During these years, he participated in countless sales training programs; his proficiency rose to the point that he became certified to deliver one of the leading sales methodologies. He attended peer-level executive retreats, where he met and worked with the key opinion leaders and authors on the topics of business, sales, and marketing. In the mid-90’s, he left corporate life to start his own consulting company, Market-Partners Inc. It would be easy to say that he did so to escape the clichéd “corporate grind,” but the reasons were much more complex. Because as successful as he had become, he was not what most would define as a “natural salesperson”. His interests ran to engineering; tearing down and rebuilding his Lotus sportscar, designing and handcrafting high-end audio systems—science, methodology, planning, and results.

Yet throughout his sales career, Martyn continually ran into the myths and legends of the “art” and “black magic” supposedly utilized by top-drawer sales wizards. And perhaps for a tiny minority of overachievers, that might have been true. But his concern had always been for the majority—the whole sales force—to succeed, and perhaps not spectacularly, but certainly consistently and profitably. Martyn wanted to apply the elements and rules of science to sales and marketing, to prescribe method where madness often prevailed. And he wasn’t going to be shy about it, as his company’s original tagline was “The Science of Sales and Marketing.” Of course, with science comes research, and he knew that if they were to bring true scientific discipline to the needs of their clients, they had to exercise that same discipline in their own efforts of observing, recording, and analyzing what they found. Working now at arm’s length with his clients’ sales forces brought a much wider view of all the inherent issues that affect sales success.

And it was at this point that he and his team started to see a repeating pattern. These organizations all had offerings that delivered value to a particular market yet too often were falling short of hoped-for results. They uncovered the disconcerting fact that while most of their clients were doing good work offering a good product, the results all too often suggested otherwise. After seeing this phenomenon so many times, it was obvious to Martyn that something was missing; there was something more at play, and he needed to find out what that was. As their work continued to evolve and they talked to ever more individuals across organizations about how they buy and why they don’t, a number of observations began to materialize.

And once recognized, defined and documented, these revelatory observations crystallized into hard data and now form the basis of his foundational concept of Outside-In Revenue Generation. Martyn and his team have since distilled the theory, shaken out the bugs as it were, and by putting it into practice, have seen the results. He has seen their work create over a billion dollars of prospective business for a leading high technology company. He has seen it enable a small company that was stuck at revenue of some $20m to being able to sell themselves for well over $500m within a few years. He now knows that the approach that they have created provides significant, swift, scalable and sustainable results.

Martyn has consulted in 33 countries with the result that his work has been used across 44 countries, in 17 languages, and has impacted over 85,000 sales professionals. He is internationally recognized as an extraordinary speaker, having delivered numerous keynote addresses live, on radio and television and he is a pioneer in utilizing webinar technology through his sister company, 3GS. Martyn acts as an advisor to a number of executives in the high technology industry and is active on several advisory boards and boards of directors. On a personal note, Martyn lives in Northern California wine country where he enjoys the local food and beverages. He also enjoys music, cooking, hiking and the performing arts and has a particular passion for airplanes and English sports cars. He gained his first pilots license at 16 and has maintained a lifelong interest in aviation. He now flies his own plane combining his passion for aviation with his love of dogs by flying rescue dogs for charity.

He also coaches and mentors young adults into the business world and works with young entrepreneurs in the townships of Johannesburg with the Ubuntu Mission. https://buyingjourneydna.com

Barney Feinberg began his career as a CPA learning the language of business. At the age of twenty-five, his career journey took him to live in Asia for seven years, where he was COO for a large clothing conglomerate.

There he learned how to assimilate into a multitude of cultures, always with the purpose of building strong relationships at work. As an executive recruiter for the last 25 years, Barney grew to understand that the most important factor for greater success in any job is the chemistry you have with the people you work with. Through his company & recently published book, The Chemistry Factor, Barney has merged his 18 years as a life and executive coach with his recruiting skills; dedicated to helping executives authentically connect with others by more clearly defining & empowering their values.

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Brian Marcel is the founder and Chairman of International Bar Code System (IBCS). As an industry pioneer, he’s known for expanding the reach of barcode technology to underdeveloped areas of the world. Branded by students and peers as “Mr. Mentorvator,” Marcel has more than 25 years of hands-on, high-level senior and corporate entrepreneurial experience and can provide fresh strategies to create new business structures and technologies that will shape the future.

“If I can encourage young entrepreneurs to launch a business in this industry and create exciting solutions that also change the world, I’ll be satisfied,” says Marcel. “There’s a lot to learn on your way to the top, and learning the right tactics will help you sink or swim.”

From modest beginnings, Donald "Don" Lee Sheppard — is a veteran business executive and entrepreneur who quickly rose through the ranks of a few major international benefits consulting companies before launching his own employee communications firm, Sheppard Associates.

In his new book, The Dividends Of Decency: How Values-Based Leadership Will Help Business Flourish in Trump’s America. Sheppard underlines the importance of businesses maintaining strong moral values not merely because it is “the right thing to do” but because the practice pays off with better long-term bottom-line performance.

He supports his premise with fascinating insights into the struggles he faced in his own business endeavors, presenting a compelling narrative urging experts and business owners to counter Trump’s corrupt influence.

Sheppard Properties LLC

Melinda F. Emerson, known as SmallBizLady, is America’s #1 Small Business Expert. She is an internationally known keynote speaker and an expert on small business start up, business development, and social media marketing. In addition to being a former columnist for The New York Times, she is frequently quoted by other media organizations including The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Fortune, MSNBC and Fox News.

 Emerson’s small business advice is widely read reaching more than 3 million entrepreneurs each week online. She is the host of #Smallbizchat, the longest running live chat on Twitter for small business owners. She publishes a resource blog www.succeedasyourownboss.com. 

Emerson is the bestselling author of Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months and the ebook How To Become a Social Media Ninja. She is the founder and president of the Quintessence Group, an award-winning marketing consulting firm based in Philadelphia, PA. Notable Clients Include: FedEx, ADP, Pitney Bowes, American Express, Dell, Staples, Sam’s Club, Chase Bank, Facebook, IKEA, Verizon, Wells Fargo, and Xerox.

Website: www.succeedasyourownboss.com

Facebook facebook.com/smallbizlady

LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/melindaemerson

Twitter @SmallBizLady

Google+ google.com/+MelindaEmerson

Fix Your Business: 90-Day Plan to Get Back Your Life and Remove Chaos From Your Business can be pre-ordered from www.succeedasyourownboss.com and on www.amazon.com

From former junior tennis pro to startup founder, publisher and Ph.D. candidate Abdo Riani's story might be something out of a fairy tale. As a young boy growing up in Tunisia, Abdo's passion and talent for tennis took him around the world to various professional junior tennis competitions. This exposure helped him catch the eye of an American college recruiter who offered him a scholarship to come and play tennis at the University of Texas Pan-American.

While studying and playing tennis, Abdo caught the entrepreneurial bug and decided to try his hand at a few business ventures. Many failed, but eventually, he started to see success and gain some traction. Feeling that he had many lessons to share with aspiring entrepreneurs, he started Startupcircle. Co where aspiring and rising entrepreneurs can connect with and learn from successful founders over daily live Q&A sessions. This live mentorship program guides entrepreneurs to their first paying customers and beyond.

In this episode, we cover his entrepreneurial journey and discuss the mechanics of hosting online summits with influencers as a growth hack for business success. We also talk about the productivity hacks he uses to manage his busy schedule as a startup founder, publisher of a daily show and Ph.D. candidate in Finance.

www.abdoriani.com