How do you deal with fear?
I’m pretty fortunate in how I manage fear. Maybe a little bit lucky. As long as I can remember, I’ve never really been too scared about fear. At least in the sense of business.
Obviously, I have my days where something might seem scary, but I never internalize it too much. Instead, what I do is try and process it as just a moment in time and not the end of the world. I look for the learning opportunities. I realize that sounds super cliche, but it’s really true. And this is why I say, “maybe a little bit lucky” because this is the way I’ve always been.
I’ve never been like others in saying “I wish I could…”. Instead, I ask “how…” and then take action. I try to reverse engineer the how.
How do you deal with rejection?
I think fear and rejection both largely fall into the same category. The potential for rejection can feed fear. And fear can feed the concept of rejection.
In my position as a business owner, the most common potential for rejection is the rejection of a lead accepting a proposal. Yet, if I lose the opportunity to work with someone, which is rare, I learn from it. The lost opportunity was either a) for the better or b) an opportunity for me to learn how to better educate my clients.
That’s the thing, I don’t sell. I educate. The more I can educate a client, the better they can help me help them. That fosters better client relationships and breaks down the sales walls at the same time. So if I lose a sale, I either learn how to better educate or it is for the better because the client wouldn’t have been a good fit for my company’s culture.
What’s the name of your company? What exactly does your company do, how do you help people?
In 2007 I founded a company called DAB Empire. You know, because being in your early twenties, why would you not be egotistical enough to reference yourself in your business name, right? Yet, I didn’t want to have too big of a head where I literally said my name. Instead, I used my initials. A year or two later I realized how ridiculous that was and rebranded as SEO National.
What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization. The goal of SEO is to show up higher on search engines for words that you can monetize, but without paying for ads.
What my team and I get to do is work with our clients’ websites to build up their credibility and reputation so that Google identifies them as the leader in their industry and rewards them by having them show up higher in search results. And the higher you show up in search results, the more exposure you get, the more clicks, the more sales or leads.
What’s been enjoyable about the process is growing with these companies that we help grow. SEO National still has our first dozen or so clients from 13 years ago, which is amazing for any business. But especially a marketing agency, where so many competitors are lucky to keep a client past a year.
I’m grateful that our clients have taken us along with their journey, some of which make more now in a month than they used to in a year. Their way of showing appreciation is by referring to their fellow entrepreneur friends. I could probably connect the dots from those first dozen clients 13 years ago to 90% of our clients today. Referral after referral after referral. As they’ve grown, we’ve grown.
It’s kind of interesting, for being a marketing company, we’ve never spent a dollar on advertising.
