May 9 (edited) in 💬 General Discussion
The One series of decision that changed everything...
In June of 2017 I returned home St Louis from living in South America to visit my family.
Instead of staying for 3 months like I usually do, I found myself having to make a decision that would affect the direction of my life going forward.
The decision I had to make was whether to start a new business because my current one was failing or buy an existing one.
At the time I was working with financial advisors as a marketing consultant. It wasn’t a bad business, the money was good, but I was exhausted everyday from the work. Because I’m very data driven, I found myself frustrated when my clients would choose to do the opposite of what the data showed, knowing that I would always end up taking the blame for the failure of the decision. I know I had to create a product or business that allowed the business owners to take responsibility for their bad decisions. So that’s when my mind started spinning.
I began to think about all of the things that I had been successful doing trying to find the one thing that I could help people with while also allowing them to take ownership of the results. I had found many of my clients by reaching out to them via email. I had never met them, but yet I was able to get them on the phone to talk about a problem that I could help them to solve. That’s when another light turned on in my head. Every business can use this. I can help people with cold email outreach.
Cold email is just as it sounds. You may have heard of cold calling, where you call strangers to try to set meetings with them. Cold email is the same thing, but instead of calling over the phone and getting yelled at, cursed out and hung up on, with email, they just don’t respond. So you basically get ignored by those who aren’t interested and those who really want to talk to you, they reply and ask for more information or a meeting.
So I started reading every book I could find on the subject. I read the top blog posts and tested all of the software sending platforms that were on the market. After 3 months of doing this, I arrived at the conclusion that, I was actually better at cold email than many of the people writing the books and I had the results to prove it.
But I didn’t want to make the same mistake that I had made with the current business that was on it’s last leg. My desire to help others is a fault, because I want them to be successful. But when you are doing client work, the client has the money so, you sometimes end up doing what they want even though it’s the wrong thing for them at the time.
This time was gonna be different. Being in the cold email business would allow me to change the metric of how my performance would be measured. Instead of being held responsible for closing the deals, I would only be responsible for delivering the message. In the past, it would be a message that I wrote, now it was no longer my responsibility to create the message. I just had to make sure it got delivered to the right person.
As a businesses owner its important to want to help your clients grow, but its also important to not sacrifice your integrity by doing the wrong things sometime or accepting blame for something that wasn’t your fault.
Ive been in the consulting business my entire life, so wanting to be the smartest person in the room is a hard habit to break. I still struggle with it now, but I know I’ve made the right decision to build a product that allows my success to be measured independently of the influence and actions of others.
So i’ve learned its ok to say No. It’s also okay to start over and do things right so that in the long run, you can sleep at night knowing that you will be properly held accountable for the good work you do.
It’s amazing that when you make a decision to change, things seem to fall into place. During my time researching cold email, I found a company that had a product that was good but was in a very crowded market.
So I made the decision to purchase the company from the founder that was happy to see it go.
The purchase of the business came with an incredible search algorithm and a lead database that is currently getting stronger by the day. It’s been a 7 years since I started this journey and I’m excited about the lesson I’ve learned.
That company I purchased is the reason you all are here.
It’s called PitchDB.
Thanks for coming along for the ride.
18
9 comments
The One series of decision that changed everything...
skool.com/pitchdb
Exclusively for speakers, coaches, authors, and entrepreneurs who are looking to book themselves on Podcast Interviews, Speaking Gigs & Media Coverage
Leaderboard (30-day)
1
+2
2
+1
3
+1
4
+1
powered by