This episode we switch it up and I take questions from my team. We chat about why I am doing a crap job on social, what I think about mentors and business coaches, morning routines and much much more.
[Transcript]
– [Adam] Are we good?
– [Brandon] We’re good.
– All right. On this episode, I’m taking questions from my team and I’m going to try and answer them.
[[00:00:10]]
♪ [music]♪
[[00:00:15]]
– Welcome to Episode 5 of the Steele Entrepreneur Show. I am surprised frankly that we got to five. And last week, the week before that, my inspiration was really suffering. I wasn’t on Snapchat even though I pretty much…I committed on Snapchat, to be on Snapchat. I wasn’t on Snapchat, still haven’t got back on Snapchat. I don’t know why. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just… Man, it’s just feels unnatural for me, but then again this felt unnatural for me and it’s starting to feel a little less unnatural for me. What’s going on? What’s going on this week? We’ve been screwing around a lot with Infusion Soft recently, trying to get away from it. And recently moved to MailChimp, way better. I don’t know what the fuck we were doing on Infusion Soft, seriously. It’s this big, powerful beast but it’s like, they hid all the knobs and dials. And so you’re just trying to figure out how everything goes. It’s like they gave up on user experience like 10 years ago or something and just left it as is. I don’t know what they’re thinking, it’s hard to imagine that they’ve got a big subscribership. I’m sure they do but that’s beyond me. Maybe they’re tremendous marketers. But developers, I don’t know. So that’s been my week. What else have we been doing? Launched Loganix University but that was a couple of weeks back, but we’ve been digging in and writing some new material for that. [[00:01:58]] I’ve taken the videos that I’ve been doing, I’ve been doing little videos in the middle of the week and I’ve taken those and I’ve put those on the Loganix website, loganix.net, loganix.net. Just helpful videos about SEO, that’s my trade, local SEO, search engine optimization and I think that is going to be helpful for people. You have to let me know if you think so. What else? I think that’s about it. It hasn’t been the most insanely productive week. My mind has been kind of stuck in jiu jitsu, whenever I’m not working I’m kind of… And even when I should be working, I’m looking at jiu jitsu gear, I’m trying to learn the rules related to points and things like that. I’ve got a competition in a few weeks or a couple of weeks so I’m super focused on that. Well, yeah, let’s get into it. We’re going to do something different this time and I’ve said a couple of times on some of the other shows, we’re gonna just keep sort of switching it up and trying new things and seeing what you think and seeing how it looks, how the end product looks. This time, I asked my team in a mad rush last night if everybody could get me a couple of questions each and most everybody did or rather a good percentage did and so we’re just going to go through them. Rheanna, welcome.
– [Rheanna] Hey. I’m just scrolling through here.
– Yeah, we’re having a few Google Document issues but she’s going to read them off for me. And hopefully I have some answers to them. It might be a bit of a mess but we’re going to give that a shot. So, all right.
– Well this one seems appropriate with what you said about Snapchat. So… Question from Alex. Question is, “Why haven’t you gotten your feet wet much in social? Aren’t platforms like Snapchat the next big thing for all businesses?”
– He’s calling me out. [[00:04:00]] Yeah, well good. Well, I mentioned that it is something that I want to do, it’s just… I don’t know, for some reason it just feels really unnatural. It’s for the same reason that I’ve never been really all that good at taking selfies or anything like that. It just feels hella awkward. So, I don’t know, maybe it’s just one of those things that just comes with practice. You do it over and over and over again and eventually… Kind of like this, Episode 1, 2 and 3, I was sweating profusely and that wasn’t just the AC although that didn’t help. So maybe it’s just something like that. But I do tremendously believe in it. I think everybody should be there. I suck at it. But, I’d like to get a lot better. And I think once I kind of get this show a little bit more organized, process, things like that. Then that’ll be sort of my next thing to tackle. I just feel like everything is a little bit disjointed right now and I don’t want… I want everything to kind of flow a little bit better before I sort of commit the time. So, I’ll get there. I’m on Snapchat, watching snaps a lot but I’m just not doing it myself. So, I’ll get there. I’ll get there, Alex. But that’s going to take me a little bit more time. So, next question. That was a crappy answer.
– All that stuff just takes so long, though, right? I mean, it’s…you can almost have… I mean, people do have full-time jobs doing social.
– Yeah, it’s just like… So what? I just get on here and I’m like, “Sorry guys, five minutes.” And just start, you know, 30 seconds I’m just going to do a snap or a 10 second snap. I don’t know, it just feels awkward. And some of the…like I see people doing it, well I see their snaps and it’s like, “So, what were you doing? [[00:06:02]] You just stopped what you were doing and you just took the snap and like everybody was watching you?” And you’re just like, “just a second guys. Hey everybody…” do something… It just seems really weird. I don’t know, it just feels unnatural to me, but that’s just me and I’ll get here and I will… I think as soon as it starts becoming a little bit more genuine for me, a little bit more authentic, then things will click. But, until then, it’s just…for me, it just comes off… For me, when I’m on there, it just feels kind of fake and I don’t want that so if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do right and it’s going to come off right. So, that’s my answer to that one.
– We’ll have to follow up with that one.
– Yes. We’ll see.
– So this one is from the [inaudible 00:06:52] together media time, Brandon and myself.
– Yeah, all right.
– “How important are mentors or coaches when building a business?”
– Good ones are probably good, real profound. Yeah, I mean there’s so many business coaches and things like that out there that… You know, I see them all the time on sponsored posts and things like that. It’s definitely targeting me. But I don’t know. I think you got to really pick and choose. You want to find somebody who’s been through what you’ve already been through. I think that’s going to be an important mentor so for me somebody who’s owned a digital marketing agency or… Yeah, for sure, someone’s who’s owned a digital marketing agency for a while, has been very successful, has hired people, has done all that and done it well, that would be an excellent person to be a mentor for me and then just somebody who’s like an all around entrepreneur. Someone who’s done a lot of different stuff, that would be a good mentor for me. [[00:08:03]] However, I guess you could say, I think it’s really important, I think everybody should aspire to have one or try and get one. And I think most people, like if someone asked me, I would be totally down for that, assuming I could set aside the time. But, I haven’t for whatever reason. I think I’ve reached out once to one gentleman and we were going strike up sort of a little deal where I give him a little bit of my time, he gave me a little bit of his time. And that’s actually how I would go about approaching it is, most guys worth their salt are probably, they don’t have the time to sit down with you one hour every week or even maybe one hour every month. So, for them, and they’re probably getting requests from a lot of people. And this is kind of going away from the question, but for them I would exchange something. What kind of value can you bring to their life? Or their business life? Or what can you do for them in exchange? And I bet you, if you were to put together kind of a pitch, and maybe not… I don’t know how this is going to work if you’re sort of cold messaging or cold emailing them, but if you already know the person and you found a way to sort of talk to them previously, that’s going to be a lot more easy. It’s going to be a lot easier to approach them and be like, “Hey, I have this idea. I noticed you’re doing this. I have these skills, I could do X, Y and Z for you and all I would ask is an hour of your time every, I don’t know, month.” And that would be pretty sweet and I would do that. But, I think it’s really important. I wish I had found one earlier. I still want to find one, but I’m not putting a lot of energy into it right now. [[00:10:01]] So if it happens, it’s going to happen organically. It’s just I’m going to stumble across somebody who I really, really admire and we will strike up a deal at that time. And if it sticks, it sticks, but I’m not going to put a ton of…and I probably should but I’m not going to put a ton of effort into it at this point, perhaps in the very near future, however. Does that answer the question?
– Yeah. What do you think about coaches as well? You know, coaches you can pay to coach you.
– I mean, there’s so much free information online these days, like a lot of these coaches are putting out free material and they’ll put like a pay wall in front of the rest of their material but I mean if a lot of the stuff, if I was to… I mean, there are SEO coaches, there are SEO communities you can join for X amount of money per month or per year. Like, there are these things that I’ve played with potentially joining where I’ve been given data access and checked it out before. But, I don’t know, a curriculum, which is usually what you get with these coaches, a curriculum, I don’t know that I could really follow that. It would feel too much like school I guess, for me anyways. But… I don’t know, I have yet to find one that’s kind of worth it. I’ve not really looked necessarily for that but I’ve yet to find one that I was like, “Holy crap, someone should pay them a lot of money.” I think what I would do is I would… I think, there are these Udemy courses and I can’t remember the other one. There’s like, Udemy has a competitor and they do courses as well, same sort of setup. I would check those out, just take like a micro-course, you know, on a particular topic that you want to soak up [[00:12:00]] if, and that’s only if you can’t find a material already online from somebody who appears to be well trusted. And that can be sometimes a hard thing to find because I find in that space… Oh man, I’ve got a terrible word I want to use to explain this, but it’s not appropriate at all. It’s kind of a, for lack of better phrasing, kind of an old boy’s club and they’re just like, you get a bunch of coaches and they’re all helping each other out regardless of whether their stuff is any good, they’re going to round up testimonials for the other guy when it’s his shot to promote whatever he’s doing. And so, you can never really trust the comments or testimonials or anything like that. So, because I’ve never done any of that, I don’t know that I’m sort of the best person to really answer that. But I would be very tempted and have been successful in finding stuff online for free. Most of it’s out there and if I have to pay for it, it’s usually like 20 bucks, 30 bucks, 100 bucks at maximum. Anything more than that, I don’t know, the person better be pretty freakin’ famous and pretty freakin’ successful and not just successful because he’s written books, but successful because he’s built businesses, built whatever, like that’s what I want to see. So, how did I do? Is that all right? Did that answer it more or less?
– That was good, yeah.
– Okay.
– All right, so from Simon we’ve got “Is it possible for a page to rank with little or no content?”
– An SEO question. Yeah, I mean if you’re Zillow or if you’re one of the big, big sites out there. If you have the inherent, I guess you’d call it domain authority then… Some of those sites, they just create a page and they just rank like that. But that’s because they’ve been around for so long [[00:14:01]] or they’ve put in the time to earn that trust and earn that authority and earn the links, links to their site, which sort of afford them that authority. So, yes. However on a brand new site… On a brand new site or a site with, let’s say… I don’t know DA20, DA30 or less, I always aim to put as much good quality content as I possibly can on a page without it looking like shit. So it has to be aesthetic, it has to convert well, but at the same time, it’s long seemed… I can’t really cite any proof or any data on it, but it’s long seemed that the more content you have on a page, assuming it’s good quality, the better it performs. So, on a new page, unless I had a really good reason not to put this much, I would have a minimum of 500 words, I would say, on any given sort of landing page or interior page or any page that I intended to rank. And then… I mean if you’re a DA20, DA30 somewhere in that space, you’re probably going to have to do some link building on top of that depending on the competition of that keyword itself. So, yeah content is important. What have we got?
– Sarah Jane wants to know, “What’s your morning routine?”
– I said no interview questions because I talk too much about myself as it is. That’s okay. Nothing fancy. Nothing fancy. What do I do? [[00:15:59]] I wake up, ideally earlier than later. I don’t have like a set particular time right now but if I had to pick one that I could stick to, I think it would be around 6:30, 6:45 but I’m not doing a great job of sticking to that unfortunately. And then just lemon water, squeeze two lemons into water, coffee, oatmeal. I like the steel-cut oats stuff, I like that because I don’t know I feel like I get… I feel healthy eating that even though it doesn’t really taste like much. And three eggs, just like sunny-side-up type thing. And a protein shake and that’s basically it. And I basically make that and then go to work. And because I work remotely, I’m not getting in a car and going anywhere. I’m literally going upstairs into my little nook of an office, which you’ll see on some of the… It really is a nook, it is tiny. But it’s cuddly, I feel cuddled in my little office. You’ll see it in some of the new little YouTube shorts that I’m doing on SEO and stuff, but nothing fancy. And then usually around 11 o’clock I’ll start to dip, my energy will start to kind of fall because I’ve been sitting in a damn chair forever and usually like… My first thing, I’ll hammer out email, I’ll hammer out customer support and that sometimes can take as much as like two hours plus, answer a little Skype, answer a little slack and a couple other things. And by that time, it’s 11 A.M. and I’ve just done like super boring stuff all morning. And so, like, my energy dips and if I can get into the gym then, or now to jiu jitsu class at 11:30, my energy is good for the rest of the day. I can very easily come home, work till 5:00 and then take a little break before dinner, [[00:18:01]] and then work till easy midnight, 1 A.M. Last night, 2 A.M. and if my eyes start hurting around 1 A.M. but have the energy to do that. So that’s more or less my routine. But it’s not much of a… The only thing that I do consistently it’s got to be the breakfast. That’s the only thing that I just never screw around with. I gotta have that.
– All right.
– How are we doing on time?
– Eighteen minutes.
– Eighteen minutes. So we wrap this up, I gotta hammer out a couple more questions and then…
-This one’s a bit of a long one from Sanchy.
– Santiago.
– “How do you manage to delegate work when you know you’ll do a better job? I understand that you surround yourself with better people, but that’s not the reality for every entrepreneur out there.”
– I’ll never be as good as you doing it yourself, he’s a developer. Like, I know him. He’s fucking awesome. He is never going to be as… Even if people are better than you, and there are obviously but rarely is it going to be up to your standards or what you think you can do or what you had envisioned because that’s very hard to communicate. But, I guess at the end of the day, you will get to a point if not already where you just can’t, like your business will fail, your project will fail if you have to touch everything, if you have to do everything. And I get the feeling, I guess…what’s the saying? Sometimes it’s better to just do it yourself, something I struggle with all the time. But I think you just get to a point where you just have to realize or you’re forced to realize that you can’t do it all. And so, my sort of litmus test you could say is, could they do it… [[00:20:01]] could somebody within my organization or outside of my organization do it at least 80% as well as I could? Because that final 20% generally doesn’t matter that much to anybody else. Maybe it matters a little bit to me, but to anybody else, it really doesn’t matter. And it could always come back to me and I could add that 20%, but then I only did 20% of the work instead of 100% of the work. And I talked about this in Episode 1 or in Episode 2 about creating processes. Ask yourself, could somebody else do it at least 80% as well? And if they could, don’t do it. Stop right now. And create a process and you may want to just walk through it yourself, just do it one last time and detail everything that you do throughout that process and then teach your people as they’re doing it to continue to update that process document so that it doesn’t become outdated because things change, processes change, you find new ways to do things. And if you have to teach someone later on because that person left you or whatever, then you’ll have that process document to fall back on. And you’ll have one that is up to date and you’ll be able to hand it to somebody and expect them to be able to do it just about as well as that last person, and then you put your 20% on if need be. But, yeah you just want to have a choice eventually. Like, literally you will be the person standing in the way of your success or that project’s success because there’s only so much time in the day. You can work your ass off but eventually you’ll crumble so, yeah. That’s about as good as I can get. It’s a good one actually.
– Okay, “How do you implement the 80/20 rule with clients and with personal projects, employees and relationships?” [[00:22:00]]
– Who’s this one from?
– This is from Josh.
– Josh. I’ve got a running joke. I’ve got one of my computers set up for remote desktop and when Josh has to use the company credit card, he logs into the computer and…man, this joke is not funny at all. My girlfriend and I, we were just like, “Oh, Josh is with us,” because you can see the computer light up and then you can see him doing stuff and we always worry just like, “Did you turn the microphone on? What if he can hear us?” And there’s like a camera on the thing, too. So we put a piece of tape on the camera. Anyways…
– You’re giving him some ideas now. He isn’t watching you.
– Yeah, dumbest joke ever. But I always laugh about it.
– Josh is somewhere laughing and saying, “Ha ha ha, it isn’t a joke.”
– Oh, no. All right, to answer the question… I forgot the question. I’m useless.
– It’s okay. How do you implement the 80/20 rule with–
– Business, life, all that.
– Everything.
– I don’t know that I do a good job with this because I thrive on chaos. I think that I can do 100% percent of everything that has 100% of the greatest value. I guess the question…the 80/20 rule is something like find the 20% that is going to make the largest impact kind of thing. And I guess sort of naturally I just sort of prioritize a little bit, like we’ve always got like a million projects, it’s absolute chaos and then I will just sort of try and figure out, “Okay, well what are our goals right now? What are we trying to accomplish this month or in this quarter and what projects are going to get us closest to that goal?” And then I just pick those ones. [[00:24:00]] I don’t know that I… I don’t actively think, “Okay, well 80/20 rule, Adam. Think about it.” I don’t really do that and that’s probably because when I started my business I didn’t know about the 80/20 rule. In fact, I probably didn’t learn about the 80/20 rule until like a year ago, probably, when I started to do some reading and perhaps I don’t even really grasp it yet, but I love chaos. That’s the only way that I find that I can get things done or continue to be interested in getting the things that I need to be done so I will just take on everything and if some stuff doesn’t really gain a lot of early traction, well that becomes outside of the 20% that’s no longer of interest to me and so the stuff that does gain, I keep working on that and that becomes my 20%. So, I think it’s just trial and error and just feeling it out and just trying everything. It would be… And in personal life, what…you know, small personal life I have outside of work, I just try and stuff it with as much as I can, but just the important stuff. But it just gets naturally prioritized. Like, do I want to go out with friends this week? Not really, so that becomes not important to me and then I just do what I want to do. I think it’s a constantly sort of changing thing. Yeah, not a great answer but hopefully that sort of answers a little bit.
– Chris asks, “What books are the best starting point for understanding consumer behavior?”
– God damn, of course, he’s our copywriter and he’s a total brainiac so he would ask a question that I’m no good at. [[00:26:01]] I think the best way to understand consumer behavior and I imagine what he’s trying to… The question is related to his consumers or his customers or our customers. I think the best way to understand them is just to ask questions. I don’t think there’s a book. There probably is a book, I haven’t read it yet. But just polling customers or potential customers. Finding 10 people that would buy from you and asking them questions. Or find 10 people that buy from your competitor and ask them questions, get to know them. There are lots of good… You know, if you don’t feel like sitting down with each one of them, there’s lots of good survey tools or good form tools like Survey Monkey or like Google Forms, I think it is, I used just the other day to get those questions answered. So, I think just the old fashioned way, belly to belly, asking questions and you learn about your consumers and about their behavior. And if you want to get really technical about it, you really want to understand your consumers, watch them. There’s lots of tools for your website where you’re able to record what people do on your website, like actual recordings of their movement on your website. Something like Hotjar, for example, comes to mind, where you can track all their movement, you can track all their clicks, you can track where their mouse stays the most. And that’s a good way to sort of see what they’re liking, what they’re not liking, that sort of thing. But, nope, never read a book on that, just sort of… I just ask questions. I think that’s the best way. One more. I like this format actually.
– I like this, too, getting lots of questions answered. Okay, so my question, kind of going back to basics is…
– Oh, yours to finish off.
– Mine, yeah.
– A little preferential treatment towards yourself, I see. All right. [[00:28:02]]
– Well, if you can do it, do it. “What are your top considerations when building a brand?”
– Be myself. I think I failed hard when it came to magistrate, when you go to the Magistrate website and you read some of the copy. And I think that might have been us at one period of time, this kind of like misfit group of people from all corners of the earth, which is true, with their own, like, specialty and we just like…and I guess this is in part… I don’t know, it’s just like we went with this like Mad Men type feel and that’s just not us, it just really isn’t. And I don’t think that really connected with our viewers or rather the people viewing our website. I don’t think they ever really clicked with that. And if anything, it kind of…they looked at it and like, “Who are these guys?” right? So that’s been actually pretty top of mind lately is, “Man, I got to rewrite this,” because what I noticed is with our Loganix website, loganix.net, you go there and that’s my voice. I may not have written everything. I wrote a lot of it, but that’s me talking essentially, that’s my tone, it’s my everything. And that resonated with people. I get comments all the time, “Who is your copywriter?” And I’m sure Chris had a role in it, no doubt about it. But a lot of that, it’s just… It’s a very sort of conversational language, it’s just real. And I think that makes all the difference. People read that after reading a couple other websites and they just, they feel like they’re part of a conversation, I think. They just feel kind of at ease. They’re not being sold, they’re just being talked to, they’re being educated, they’re just getting real stuff. [[00:30:03]] And so, when building a brand, I would aim for that, is I would just be like, “Okay, well what is our voice?” right? And I wouldn’t try and bend your voice or your tone or your whatever to suit a particular group necessarily because at that point, it becomes kind of fake. So I would just be yourself, be authentic, be genuine no matter what you’re doing, whether it’s your web copy or your social presence. People will… I mean, unless you’re a total weirdo and I resonate with weirdos, too. I like that. I would just be yourself, that’s what’s going to win every single time. So, that’s a good question. I like that one a lot. I’ve thought a lot about that lately. It’s been keeping me up at night, the Magistrate website, it… Have a read, have a read later tonight and you’ll see exactly what I mean. It’s almost off putting. Like we’re just too cool for school. Man, anyways we make mistakes. It’s all good. We’ll fix them and hopefully that will resonate better with people. So, that’s good. Like I said, I like this format. I think we’ll probably do it again but next episode we’ll probably change it up once more again as well. I have a question I wanted to ask you guys a question, what do you do to get the most out of your day? How do you start your day? What is the one thing you do… Yeah, this is the question. What is the one thing you do in your day that gives you the most energy or productivity for the rest of your day? I want to learn because I… last couple of weeks have really kind of sucked and usually I’m super, super high energy and ready to go [[00:32:00]] and these last weeks have been kind of low energy and just not really into it, and that kind of comes in waves but I’d like to boost that a little bit. So that’s it. I hope this show brought you some value. I’d love to hear what you think about the format. If we did bring you some value, please subscribe, please let us know on social. We’ve got all our social handles in the video and probably in the show comments. If you have any comments, leave me some comments, let me know what you think whether it’s on Facebook, or whether it’s on YouTube or whether it’s on one of our social channels and thank you. We do, all of us, appreciate, myself especially, appreciate your little bit of attention that you give us whenever you watch this show. It really means a hell of a lot that somebody gives, or has enough sort of interest in this kind of material because I love this kind of stuff. This stuff gets me really excited, so the fact that somebody else is excited is pretty, pretty awesome. So, like I said, if you got something out of it, subscribe, let me know and I will see you guys on Episode 6.
