Working Without Pants - Creative Entrepreneurship

In today's podcast I sit down with Josh Elledge of UpMyInfluence.com. Josh got his start with a business called SavingsAngel - despite having no money to get the business off the ground, he managed to generate over 6 million in revenue by landing free media coverage because he was convinced 'exposure is everything'. He was right and he learned so much about the power of exposure that his whole career took a shift and he became a consultant to help others harness the power of good exposure.

Nowadays Josh is all about giving back and empowering people to apply everything he learned. Through Up My Influence he teaches people how to do their own PR and has built a service based platform and productized offering agency that is disrupting the public relations industry. The old way of doing PR just doesn't work any more and now Josh is using social media to help thoughtful entrepreneurs turn into media celebrities.

In this podcast you will gain insights into how to increase influence, authority and revenue. It's all about creating wins for others who are more influential than you and building meaningful connections by being genuinely helpful.

David is the author of The Irresistible Consultant's The Guide to Winning Clientsand The Executive Guide To Consulting. He joins us on the podcast today to discuss how to get better at the sales part of consulting.

David's background was on the corporate side of marketing research and sales. He then became a consultant with a boutique firm and worked his way up to partner and then branched off with a colleague to start his own consulting practice of their own. His partner departed after only a matter of weeks, leaving him without a rainmaker to bring in clients.

Tune in to hear the story of what steps he took to turn himself into a rainmaker and learn about the consortium model that made him a successful expert writing guides on how to make sales in consulting.

This episode will have you rethinking how you write emails to clients and you'll learn to avoid common pitfalls by anticipating client's responses and getting everything on the table while negotiating.

Madeleine is the CEO of Content Refined, a content marketing agency built to scale offering productized content marketing packages. The agency is made of up herself, her business partner and a business manager working in tandem with a remote production team and project managers. Together they they bring in over 50K a month in recurring revenue!

Tune in to hear Madeleine share about how a life experience brought on the opportunity for her to suddenly get everything off her plate and hire other people to run her business... so she go could on pregnancy leave.

There are great takeaways in this episode, including insights on how Madeleine and her team acquire new customers, how they review and consistently update SOPs and how they handle churn.

On this week's podcast we have Mike Michalowicz, the author of Clockwork. Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan, Surge, and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur.

Mike's book Profit First helped me to pay down 15K of credit card debt all while paying myself a better salary. He's gone from being an entrepreneur to becoming a full time researcher and writer. He touches on behavioural psychology and breaks down real applicable strategies that can help you to live a wealthy lifestyle.

All too often the reality is that entrepreneurs often work their tails off without getting paid and Mike's aim is to change that. Tune in to hear us dive into 3 of his books: The Pumpkin Plan is all about niching down and figuring out your ideal customer, Profit First shares a system for paying off credit card debt, and Clockwork is all about getting your business to run more efficiently without you. Bigger is not necessarily better, you just need to have the right strategies.

Today's guest on the podcast is sales nerd Chris Ortolano of Outbound Edge. Not only does Chris do sales consulting for companies, he's also the creator of a community I always recommend to people: Sales Stack Slack.

On this episode we learn a bit about his sales process and the buyer journey at Outbound Edge, but what you really don't want to miss out on are the tidbits about how his Slack community came together and how it brings value to over 1,500 sales professionals. Through this Slack channel the pros connect and share their knowledge, discuss tools of the trade, converse about hiring processes, leadership and more.

The biggest takeaway here is learning how to build something similar to this community so you that people gravitate towards you and seek you out as a thought leader.

Alex Pirouz is the founder of Linkfluencer, Australia's Leading LinkedIn Training Company.

Through Linkfluencer, Alex is on a mission to transform social selling on Linkedin and build the next generation of influencers. What influencer marketing breaks down to is essentially becoming an expert in your space. People want to deal with experts. They want to work with people who are featured in the media and who are recognized for what they know.

In this episode Alex shares his thoughts on why he believes influence is the key to business here and now. In 2018-2019 it is more important than ever to be an influencer in your field and if you don't have influence in the next few years, you're simply not going to exist.

Influence is all about making a positive impact on other people's lives at a grand scale. As an entrepreneur building a startup, you have a responsibility to have an impact. Don't miss Alex's insights on what's coming down the Linkedin pipeline and how you can get started now.

This week on the podcast I speak with Mandi Ellefson the author of Hands Off CEO. Mandi's business is all about helping entrepreneurs and agency owners to live the dream by building a company that can run without them.

Here on the podcast we're all about location independent businesses based on freedom and in this episode Mandi shares her 5 step process on how to free up 10 extra hours per week and use that time to make your company run without you.

One of the challenges stopping owners from stepping away is that the foundation of the business itself is the owner and the owner's knowledge. As the business owner, you're always at the center of everything, constantly catching things to make sure everything goes forward. The business is so dependent on the owner that it's hard to sell and be confident that the team can grow without them being around to keep things from falling apart.

Sounds familiar? Tune in to hear Mandi's process, so you too can work towards becoming more of a hands off CEO. It's all about structure and she's broken it down in the roadmap she shares with us.

This week I speak with Mike McDerment, author of Breaking the Time Barrier and CEO of Freshbooks, the hugely popular invoicing and accounting software built for owners, not accountants.

Mike left business school in his 4th year and started an agency building websites in the early 2000s. He started off building basic websites for his clients and quickly learned the importance of going beyond creative pages to validating the conversion science behind each site using SEO, Pay Per Click and conversion consulting.

Tune in to hear the story behind the 'ah-ha!' moment that pushed Mike to get his agency to a point to where it could run without him so that he could move into his parents basement to build the software now known as Freshbooks.

Don't miss Mike's advice on the importance of customer proximity and hear his book recommendations for learning through the startup building journey.

On this week's podcast I speak with Michael Zipursky, CEO, author of The Elite Consulting Mind and coach to elite consultants. Michael is in the business of helping consultants to scale and grow, to attract more clients, to increase fees and win more proposals. But mainly, his intent is to create what he has coined as 'meaningful success', which refers to not only generating more revenue but also aims to create the right business structures that allow consultants to have more freedom and flexibility so that they can do the things that bring them joy in life.

His website ConsultingSuccess.com was born out of a desire to create a place and a community where consultants can share stories of lessons learned and mistakes made while growing their business. Today there are over 900 articles, resources and videos on these topics, with aims to help consultants connect and learn from one another on how to grow their business.

Don't miss this episode to hear all about how Michael's unique experience building a successful consulting shop in Osaka, Japan taught him new ways to create and build relationships, and also showed him that being open to doing things differently can lead to more meaningful success.

Are you familiar with The Seven Day Startup by Dan Norris? Stop Thinking Like a Freelancer by Liam Vitch? The Sober Entrepreneur by Russ Perry? All of these past guests of the podcast launched their books with Tom Morkes' help, through his business Insurgent Publishing.

Insurgent Publishing is in the business of running online event based marketing campaigns for brands and businesses. Whether it's a book launch, a course launch, a summit, a challenge or a product/service being sold over a specific time period, Tom can help your launch through by facilitating large scale campaigns with partnership and influencer promotions.

At the same time, Tom creates and launches his own books, content and products through his personal website TomMorkes.com. Quite clearly, Tom is at the top of the game when it comes to marketing and building thought leaders online. Tune in to the podcast to hear Tom's unique journey that started off with a military background. if you're interested in becoming a best seller, growing your audience and becoming a thought leader... don't miss this episode!