My First Entrepreneurial Conference
I learned a lot then…
When I was a graduate student, I always attended a scientific conference. It’s not unusual for me to attend conferences in big cities like Philadelphia and Atlanta.
But as a budding entrepreneur, I never attended a live conferences before that’s related to business or entrepreneurship.
So here’s my first, and was investing my own money to learn. Unlike in graduate school, I was funded with grants from my mentors. Here, I was putting a skin on the game.
You know how I was sucked in to the conference?
It started with an email from Rachel Lee that asked in her subject line “You Want to Meet Me in Florida?”
As an email marketer, I subscribed to several email lists. Most of the time, I don’t open the emails, but this subject line caught my attention.
So I read the email and was telling me about marketer’s conference.
So I was in and I learned a lot about internet marketing.
The host of the conference, Timothy Lee, started with his talk about sending cold emails for lead generations for advertising agency owners. Cold pitching, no ad cost but can potentially generate $300k business.
Pierce Grimes, who specializes in LinkedIn marketing started the ball rolling. The talk was using the LinkedIn platform for business, especially lead generations. If I can remember correctly, the talk was “LinkedIn: The underdog of digital marketing.”
Who knew?
LinkedIn for me was a platform for looking jobs, but this open up to some ideas for digital marketing. Before the conference started, I met a marketing guy too and he told me he was generating leads using LinkedIn. He contacts professionals (Accountant, Lawyers, etc.) through the platform and hooked them to potential customers or leads. B2B.
One of the first day heavy hitters is sales funnel expert, Blake Nubar. He is known to have sold his product in the internet and hit a million dollars in revenue after 6-weeks (I believe). He always told the story that he dedicated his blood and tears in launching his product but it was worth it.
One message from Blake that resonated to me big time was “stop chasing clients, go for the wins”. And I believe this is true. People go to the business hoping to get rich but that’s the wrong approach to start a business. If you go for the win, that means helping clients and getting results, your business will naturally grow.
Helping is the new selling. I can’t remember where I got that but it’s true.
Blake is local, who graduated from the University of Central Florida, in Orlando, Florida, my Alma mater too. Go Golden Knights!
Blake’s talk was my favorite since in the panel of speakers, most of them are agency owners. Although blake was also an agency owner, he talked about sales funnel. Since I was a tenderfoot sales funnel marketer, the information was very relevant to me.
The talk on the first day was ended with Doug Boughton. When I started the sales funnel world (I came from Amazon Business part of the internet game), Doug was still starting. He told the crowd that he hit rock bottom (~400k) in debt in addition to his education loans.
Doug’s message is very fundamental to entrepreneurs. If you’re an entrepreneur, here are some of the rules he follows,
- Change your environment.
- Take care of yourself.
- Take one bad habit per week.
Change your environment meant clean-up your desk at home where you work. When I got his message, the first thing that I did was clean up my desk in my home office and remove all the distractions. Make it a place where you want to work.
Take care of yourself, exercise, eat healthy. I mean this is pretty fundamental but we don’t pay attention to it that much. Before, I exercise regularly. But with having a hectic schedule, I veered away from running. Now, I jump rope for 2 minutes, lift weights for a minute and repeat the cycle for 2 more rounds. It’s enough for me to sweat (our garage in Florida is warm during the summer so you’ll sweat for sure.)
The last message was take away one bad habit per week. The week I heard this, I said to myself to lessen my intake of sweets. So this is my first bad habit to remove from my system.
Next, I’ll discuss the second day of the conference.
