[Fully Managed] Geoffrey Kent from Think Big with Geoffrey Kent Ep. 189

Opening Game: Cancel or Keep

Daniela: Okay, let’s start. Sorry, I like immediately when we started the podcast, my throat got stuck. But let’s play this game called Cancel or Keep. So let’s do the first prompt. Standing desks for productivity.

Geoffrey: Keep.

Daniela: Counting macros instead of intuitive eating.

Geoffrey: Cancel.

Daniela: Yeah. Meditation apps instead of therapy.

Geoffrey: Cancel.

Daniela: Prescription weight loss drugs like Ozempic.

Geoffrey: Cancel.

Daniela: Okay, so we canceled almost everything. But that was great.

Introduction

Daniela: Welcome, Geoffrey. I’m so excited to have you on the podcast. You guys know the drill. This is Fully Managed. You know me. I’m your host and I’m Pantry’s Partnership Coordinator, Daniela. And you guys know what we talk about here, too. We talk about marketing, talk about business tips, and we help assist you guys with your business journeys. We have a really cool guest today, Geoffrey Kent. Hi, Geoffrey. How are you doing?

Geoffrey: I’m doing well. Thank you for having me.

Daniela: I’m so excited to have you on the podcast today. Looking forward to a great chat, but to get the ball rolling, get everything started. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, anything that our viewers and our listeners have to know in case they’re not familiar?

Geoffrey’s Background

Geoffrey: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess to give you the brief resume, I am a military brat, my dad’s career air force. He’s about to turn ninety eight years old, suffers from dementia. Mom’s about to turn ninety four. She’ll turn ninety four tomorrow, actually. And so I try to spend as much time with them as I can while they’re still here on Earth. But so today as we speak, I’m actually in their home. I tried to find a quiet place in their home to talk to you but let’s see outside of that I am a serial entrepreneur. Over five decades I’ve launched more than twenty successful ventures. I sold my last business. It was a private cloud computing business. I sold it twelve years ago and I’ve spent the last twelve years just mentoring other entrepreneurs, showing them how to do what I was able to do for most of my ventures.

But particularly with that last venture, it’s a venture that in six years I took it from when I launched it from zero, exponentially scaled it to a desired exit, sold the business six years after I launched it. And through that and other transactions, other entrepreneurial transactions have been able to secure my own individual future and create generational wealth for my family. So I actually have a methodology that I go about doing what I do. And so now, you know, I spend my time teaching other entrepreneurs how to customize a success formula to their strengths and likes.

But I attended the University of Oklahoma undergrad, majored in marketing, minored in accounting, started my career in corporate America with Xerox and AT&T in sales. Eleven years into my career, decided that I could do more with my career if I had an MBA, so stopped and went to the Wharton School of Business, got an MBA, triple majored in international business, entrepreneurial management, and sports and entertainment management. Post-MBA, had the opportunity to work with Julius Dr. J. Irving, the basketball player, for two years, and then went to Deloitte Consulting for six years.

The Leap from Corporate to Entrepreneurship

Geoffrey: And then at the age of forty-one, while I was doing very well in corporate America, I was not happy. And I was dabbling in entrepreneurship part-time, failing at it miserably, but I was incredibly happy with everything I was doing entrepreneurially. So I decided at forty one to basically prioritize being happy over being wealthy and left Deloitte and decided to pursue entrepreneurship full time. And everything that I have touched entrepreneurially since I left corporate America has turned into gold. So it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Daniela: I think what’s most inspiring is that you had the guts, I think, to leave. I feel like there are so many people that are stuck in corporate America or just in general jobs that they don’t like because they’re afraid of taking that plunge to things like that. With, I mean, with reason, I don’t think that their fears are completely crazy, but yeah I think talking to people like yourself who have been able to do it can be great because I think sometimes what we lack is direction and focus and understanding of what you can do within your constraints and your and your reality to actually make something worthwhile, right?

Geoffrey: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you do need a support system. You need a plan B. I was married at the time. So, you know, I lost my wife to heart disease four years ago. Thank you. But so, you know, I hadn’t been married all that long. We had been married probably six years. And, you know, our youngest, well, my oldest, I have two daughters who are now in their twenties, but my oldest was one when I made this choice. So, you know, newly married with a one-year-old, you know, not the easiest thing to do, but fortunately my wife was, you know, had her own career and was making good money.

And so, you know, I sat down and had the discussion with her and it’s like, you know, Hey, I, you know, I hate what I’m doing. And you know, I’m thinking about making a move. What do you think? And I would have stayed in corporate America if she’d, you know, completely resisted it. But, you know, interestingly enough, it just goes to show you how perceptive some other people are. Sometimes you’re too deep in the forest to see the trees. And when we had this conversation, she’s like, Jeff, you know you hate what you’re doing and I can see that. She’s like every time you do something entrepreneurially your eyes light up, you know she’s like if I were you I’d quit your job and pursue entrepreneurship I’m like okay. I’m not the person you give rope to because I will try. I literally I had that if I had that conversation with her on a friday I went into work on Monday and resigned. I’m that kind of person. You absolutely do not want to challenge me because I won’t take you up on it.

The Steps to Entrepreneurial Success

Daniela: No, that’s amazing. What I wonder is, how are you actually able to make everything I mean, I know it’s like a process. I’m assuming that it takes a while. But what are like the actionable steps that you actually had to take towards making something you know, profitable and worth like the investment for it to start to see the returns. I know I can imagine it took a few years or maybe a few months, but what were those actual steps that you had to make in order to make, to say like, okay, let me start doing my own business and being an entrepreneur full time.

Geoffrey: Yeah. Well, so by the time I got, so at forty one and I’m doing this, I had tried other entrepreneurial things, right? So I had just done them part-time. So fortunately for me, this wasn’t, you know, my first go around on the rodeo. So, so I understood what entrepreneurship was all about. You know, I just hadn’t done it full time. So, you know, having that prior knowledge, having failed and, You know, again, and this is part of the entrepreneurial journey, you as a prospective entrepreneur hear about successful entrepreneurs and you just assume that, oh, you know, they did something, everything clicked as overnight success and no such thing.

You know, if you dig into every one of their stories, you’ll find that there’s quite a bit of, you know, trial and tribulations associated with getting to the point where everybody, you know, hears about their success. It takes ten years to be an overnight success.

Daniela: Yeah yeah.

Geoffrey: Well the thing is when you’re successful everyone wants to be around you everyone wants to hear your story you know so you’re getting all this you know notoriety and and and publicity when you’re successful but when you’re not successful or when you’re leading up to that no one wants to talk to you so the reason you don’t hear about these stories is no one’s no one is interested in and you know talking to you when you’re struggling to get to your success. You know, it’s only when you get successful that they want to talk to you, which gives everyone else the impression that, oh, well, I didn’t hear about this person yesterday. I’m hearing everything about this person now. This must just have just happened, you know, but you don’t hear about the ten, twenty, thirty years of toil and tribulation that they went through to get to that point where now you’re hearing about them.

You know, so again, for me, you know, having already, you know, I had probably launched fifteen ventures before I, you know, I was forty one. So so I knew what to do as an entrepreneur, what I, you know, so the first venture I ran full time, succeeded. Every single venture I’ve launched post corporate America has succeeded. They’ve just been more successful each time around, right? Because I learned from the failures.

Learning from Mistakes

Geoffrey: Right. So one thing you definitely don’t want to do as an entrepreneur when you when you when you make a mistake, you just don’t want to repeat it. It’s OK to make mistakes. You’re going to make mistakes. You just don’t want to repeat mistakes. So you have to you have to stop, learn the lessons that the mistake is giving you, apply that to the next venture to make sure you don’t make that same mistake again. You’re going to make another mistake just don’t make the same mistake right so I had all of that you know kind of in my back pocket you know once I had decided to do this full time. Now it’s more I’m doing less of, you know, figuring out what to avoid and really kind of honing in on my strengths more so. So, you know, each venture at that point, it’s, you know, how do I become more successful? What can I enhance? What can I invest more of my time in to, you know, be more successful in the next venture, right?

The Formula for Entrepreneurial Success

Geoffrey: So and ultimately, you know, I came up with, there is a formula for entrepreneurial success. I tell entrepreneurs this all the time. There have been millions of successful entrepreneurs in the history of mankind. And every one of those successful entrepreneurs has been vain enough to write a book about their experience. You know, the books are easy to find. You can go on to Amazon, you can go to Barnes and Noble, whatever your local bookstore is. You’ll find tons of books about entrepreneurial success. You know, the books are made easy to read because the author wants to sell the book, right? So they’re not going to make it difficult for you to understand. So the formula is easy to find. It’s easy to understand. It’s incredibly difficult to implement.

But I discovered the key to that. And the key to that is taking the time before you launch to understand, you know, what are you passionate about? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? What are your likes? What are your dislikes? Spending all of your time as an entrepreneur on the things you like to do and you’re good at doing, understanding what you’re not good at doing and you don’t like to do, it’s more than likely still going to have to get done. It just doesn’t have to be done by you. So instead of wasting time doing stuff that you don’t like doing and you’re not good at doing because you’re not going to do it efficiently, understand it needs to get done and outsource it immediately, right? And if you do that, you know, you’re on a good trajectory towards success.

There are other things you need to do. You need to, as you’re going through this self-discovery process figuring out what you’re passionate about you know and building a business around something you’re passionate about because if you love what you do you know when you do what you do you love you love what you do right and the love you have for what you do is is incredibly attractive to the rest of humanity right so people want to be around people that they know enjoy and are happy doing what they do right so when when you have this passion for your business It’s incredibly easy to find people to work with you, whether they be employees, co-founders, people to serve on your board, customers, suppliers, it doesn’t matter. Everyone wants to be with people that they know are genuinely happy and love what they do right.

Finding Problems to Solve

Geoffrey: So you know that’s it you you have to you have to actually take the time to to find someone with a problem that you can uniquely solve right. You need to get confirmation from whoever it is whose problem you discovered that the solution you came up with actually solves their problem and then once you do that they can give you all the information you need to be successful and get the second, third, fourth, fifth customer. You can sit there and ask them, hey, why did you buy this from me? How are you using it? How is it impacting your business? Oh, quantify that for me. Is it increasing your revenue and by how much? Is it reducing your cost and by how much? And now that you have all of this, you have this case study of very valuable information, as to how your product or service adds value to the customer you want to serve you can go out you know exactly I know exactly who’s going to use this right because they’re going to be probably just like the customer I already have you know you know how they’re going to use it you know why they’re going to use it you know how it’s going to impact their business right and if you can tell that to someone it’s it’s the the process of making a sale to that person is incredibly easy.

Dealing with Market Challenges

Daniela: So what do you do when you have, this podcast is for a lot of small business owners and entrepreneurs and solopreneurs, this type of thing. So a lot of our listeners have questions about this topic. And I think something that really comes up that I notice is people having ideas and then not knowing, for example, like you have an idea of a business for, I don’t know, like you want to sell cookies, right? But you live in an area for some reason where they don’t like cookies. People don’t purchase cookies. They’re just not popular. Everyone eats, I don’t know, salty snacks there. And a lot of people I think have this roadblock of, of having these things of like saying, well, I don’t want to do another business. I really want to sell cookies, but I live in a place where they don’t sell cookies. And so what do I do if I like, realistically I would be thinking my logic tells me relocate to a place where they do want to buy cookies if you don’t want to do something but then that’s hard and you don’t have the guarantee that if you go to this other city where they love cookies that your cookies are going to kind of stand out right so what you do in situations like this where like that road feels like it’s I think always taking that first leap is going to be the hardest part. And then once you’re in the trenches, you’re figuring it out as you go. But how do you do that when all of these things start to present themselves? And I think a lot of the people that listen to this get like, well, what now?

Geoffrey: Yeah, well, again, so one thing entrepreneurs need to understand is there’s nothing wrong with walking away from a business, right? So if the business is not something you should be doing, you know, you’re wasting a lot of valuable time. Time is something we can never get back. Trying to pursue something that ultimately is not going to work, right? So, and the way you figure that out quickly, what the scenario you just described is, and this is actually very typical with entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs come up with ideas all the time. The problem is that, you know, you don’t want to come up with ideas and then try to find problems to solve with your idea. What you want to find you want to do this the opposite way. You want to find a problem and then let that let that help you derive a solution right so you know when you know and what you just described if someone’s you know selling cookies and goes out into the marketplace and they’re like no one wants to buy cookies well that’s because you you know you didn’t identify a problem you know the way entrepreneurship should be done go out into the market you know before you decide I want to be a cookie maker go into the marketplace and and just talk to people and and and ask them what kind of problems they have right.

And then you know You’re going to hear about a bunch of problems and you’re not going to be able to solve all of them because, you know, even if you could solve all of them, you’re not going to enjoy solving all of them because, you know, it’s going to require you to create a product or service that you’re not going to be passionate about, you know, a lot of times. Right. But if you talk to take the time to talk to people, find out what the problems are. You’re going to end up talking to someone that when you identify the problem, it’s going to be like, okay, well, I could solve that problem this way, and I’m actually passionate about that. I like that. I would enjoy having a business where I could do that. So now you’ve done those first two critical steps in entrepreneurship of finding a problem that you can uniquely solve and then being passionate about solving the business you build around that product or service you know you’ve you’ve solved those two issues right.

Building Market Dominance

Geoffrey: So and then you know once you have that business you create that business that’s an incredibly solid foundation now now you know what do you what do you want to do next now you know I want to laser focus on only serving you know, the customers that are defined by the customer you’ve identified that problem for. Yeah. So that you become, you gain name recognition, right? What you want to do is, and hopefully what you’re doing in that process is you’re finding either, you know, someone that is not being serviced you know and that’s why they have this issue or they’re being serviced but they don’t like the service they’re getting and that’s why they have the issue so and at the end of the day you’re you’re either saying hey I’m going to give you a product or service that you don’t have access to Or I’m going to give you that product or service you have access to, but I’m going to service you in a way that other people aren’t, that you enjoy being serviced with this product or service, right?

And again, however you define that customer, hey, I’m You know, this is, you know, women with freckles. Right. I know. Don’t get this. You know. OK, so I’m going to come up with this product that services women with freckles. You know, what I would tell people is you found your value proposition. Just laser focus on only serving women with freckles with this product or service in the short term. Right. Until you become the dominant provider of that product or service to women with freckles. Once you do that, you become known as the person selling X to women with freckles. And everyone will hear about you. And so now when you decide, okay, now I’m going to expand my market base, right? I’m going to service all women. You know, I don’t care whether they have freckles or not. While the women that don’t have freckles more than likely will have heard of you, you know, being the person that has this product or service just for women and freckles. Right. And they’re going to want to talk to you for no other reason. And it’s like, well, I heard that you’re the person that does this for women and freckles. I don’t have freckles. Why do you want to talk to me? And you take that conversation wherever you want, but the beauty of it is it’s opened you up to having a conversation.

Whereas normally you have a product or service, you’re considered a salesperson, regardless of what your position is with your company by someone who doesn’t know who you are. And just think of how we, if you’re at home and You get a robo call from some telemarketer. You more than likely don’t pick the call up or if you pick the call up, you hang it up pretty quickly. You know, that’s how we treat salespeople. We don’t trust salespeople, right? So as a business owner, you are considered a salesperson if someone doesn’t know you. And so you’re not going to get a good reception in most cases unless you have name recognition for what you do before you show up on their doorstep, right? And the way you do that is by laser focusing on a target market that you can become the dominant supplier to.

Sales Through Service

Daniela: Yeah, I think, like, unfortunately, salespeople get a really bad rep. And also I think, like you said, unless you have something to kind of back you up, regardless of what you’re doing, selling the service, selling the product is going to be the first thing that you want to do. And actually getting people to purchase it and then be happy with it and then recommend it. That’s like the first step. It’s the hardest one, I think.

Geoffrey: Well, the key word you just said in your sentence was service, right? I found out, I started my first eleven years of my career in sales with Xerox and AT&T. I became AT&T’s top salesperson globally relatively early in my career based on what I had learned at Xerox, plus having someone in the service department befriend me at AT&T when I got hired and showing me exactly how to do what they did. And then I was already kind of playing in my mind is like when I was at Xerox and wasn’t having success, I’m like, you know, I would go out on calls where a service person might be there with me and the customer treated the service person very different than they treated me, right? And talk to them very different. And so I was curious about that. And I realized over time, you know, with some maturity that, you know, Service people are viewed as people that are here to help, right? And that’s why customers embrace service people. Whereas sales people, the view is you’re trying to sell me something I don’t need, right? And so I don’t trust you. I don’t want to talk to you. And so what I took from that was that sales is best done through service, right? So if you focus on servicing a customer first, the sale will happen. You don’t have to focus on the sale. You focus on the service. And again, it gets back to this whole mantra of finding a problem that you can uniquely solve. Doing that, that will lead to a product or service, right? Sorry, go ahead.

Daniela: No, no, no. I was pretty much at the end of the point.

Geoffrey: No, and I also think that a lot of times, I mean, I’m not a business owner, so I’m really just speaking out of what I notice. So if I’m talking out of my ass, feel free to correct me.

Geoffrey: Well, even if you’re not a business owner, you buy from businesses, right? So you have a unique and valuable perspective because even if you don’t own a business, you purchase from businesses. And so you see what’s going on, right?

Product Development and Consumer Perspective

Daniela: I feel like sometimes when I see business, like new businesses trying to kind of put their name out there in a market, I think with B to B, right, is a bit different because you’re talking to someone who is like their market is another business, corporations, but at least as a consumer, like as a normal person that’s just walking down the street and they’re selling me mundane services and things that I’m going to be using on my daily life what I feel is sometimes that business struggle to make me feel like their product is worthwhile my time. Not necessarily I don’t mind someone coming to sell me because I can appreciate the hustle in a way I’m like I’m the type of person that I’m like you know what you want to get you want to get your your thing going like I can respect that and if you have something that’s worth my time, then I will help you out. And also because I know that a lot of these small business owners are people that are struggling that are, you know, like, and I want to support the local business and whatnot, but I sometimes feel like I feel a disconnect when the product I think should speak for itself a little bit, the service speak for itself a little bit.

And a lot of times it feels like, I feel like businesses are selling incomplete stuff. Especially with software, I feel like I get pushed a lot of apps a lot of stuff like this, but it’s always in the works and they’re already putting it out in the market and you have to pay for it. And then it makes me feel like, why would I pay for something that is not yet perfected? And I understand the financial side because I’m like, okay, well, probably these people have like you know deadlines and stuff that they want to meet so they’re just trying to sell it to make money and make it better but I feel like sometimes that’s where my disconnect comes in as a consumer which is how good or how much time does your product feel because I feel like all of these techniques are only going to be worth it if your product and your service are actually you speaking to me as a consumer, right? Like you said, I think like the sale would happen by itself if I genuinely believed in the products and the services. And I sometimes don’t. And I think that that sucks. But I do think that if you have something that is genuinely solving a problem and genuinely helping me, I’m not going to need convincing, you know, I’m just going to be like, yeah, give it to me.

Product Iteration Strategy

Geoffrey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so, I mean, and entrepreneurs should understand that their product or service is never going to be perfect and it should not they should not wait until you know they try to perfect it before they introduce it to the marketplace right so the software software the computer software industry is actually a really good analogy of how businesses should iterate their product because with software development, right? You come up with, you identify a problem, right? And you come up with a solution, you create software that does X. You know it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough, right? So you introduce it to the marketplace. And the way it gets better is through versions, right? So, you know, you have version one, version two, you know, and that’s all related to customer feedback. So you put the product out there, you know it’s not perfect, But you’re asking customers for feedback constantly, right? And customers are telling you, hey, it’d be nice if it had this. I don’t like this, whatever. And so you say, OK, well, now we’re coming out with version one. The initial design, let’s say, was version one. We’re coming out with version two or a one dot one. and we’re going to make some of these changes right and then what do you what do you guys think about that oh okay this is better all right but you still still some changes additional changes you want made all right we’re going to do version three or one dot two you know and it’s going to incorporate some of these and you keep doing that right until that product has it’s you know natural shelf life and then you come up with some completely new product that you know makes that product look you know it’s like I can’t believe I ever used that product you know.

Daniela: Yeah I think that happens with social media apps when I think of when I started using them like when instagram got introduced it was so different than what it is now I think with new social media apps it’s a little bit different because we’re in a different place technologically where apps people are a little bit more equipped to create stuff like this but when you think of facebook instagram like the older social media platforms and they were they’ve changed so much the new iterations with with positive and negative feedback for certain things. So like you said, I think where, what I, what I mean is that sometimes I feel like there’s, I guess there’s a fine line between making sure that you are, your product is ready to be put out, even if it’s not perfect and, and knowing when it’s best to keep it. Cause I’ve been like, I remember like, someone promoting this app for like shopping. It was kind of like the, the mod, the module was like a swipe type of thing. Like as if it were like a dating app, except instead of dating, you’re shopping for clothes. I thought it was a really creative idea and I downloaded the app, but the app was so glitchy that it was impossible to use. And I felt like, You know, you have a great thing, but you also have clearly not made it. You haven’t gotten to a place where this is able to be used because there’s way too many glitches. And I felt like it’s like, yeah, this probably needed a little bit more time in the lab because the idea was good, but the execution was still not there yet.

Geoffrey: Yeah. Yeah. So you can’t, you can’t introduce any product and there’ll be so many problems that you can’t physically use it. Right. So, so you, you, you, you don’t want to introduce, you don’t want to wait until you think the product is perfect, but you do want, you know, it does have to be usable. Right. And then, and then you, you, you know, again, it’s, it’s, you know, part of the process of getting towards success is you, transitioning customers from kind of the normal customer experience to points where they become evangelists for your brand, right?

Creating Customer Evangelists: The Girl Scout Cookie Example

Geoffrey: And the example I always use with people, it’s like, you know, assume you’re a parent, and you have a daughter, a young daughter who decides she wants to be in the Girl Scouts. And now she’s selling Girl Scout cookies. You know, it’s like when she has her first box of cookies to sell, who is she going to go to, to make that sale? I’ll answer the question for you. Her parents, right? You know, why? Because they have a relationship with her. They have a vested interest in seeing her succeed. They don’t want to see her fail. They’ll buy as many cookie boxes of cookies as she sells them or she, she, she, she shows to them, you know, so as an entrepreneur, what you want to do, you want to replicate that, that, that, that, experience or or whatever you want to call it you know that that relationship you you want to view yourself the entrepreneur as the girl scout And so your customer, how could I transform my customer into being like my parent and me being their child who’s the Girl Scout? How do I get them to have a vested interest in my success? How do I get them to not want to see me fail? How do I get them to buy everything I have for the duration of the life of my business and refer me to everyone they know, right? So what can I do in my business to create that kind of relationship with every customer I serve, you know?

The Italian Restaurant Story

Geoffrey: And then I’ll tell them about experience I had when I was, you know, I came out of college. I moved to Yonkers, New York, and my family’s from New York. And, you know, so I’m working for Xerox and, you know, you know, any given day, you know, got to get something to eat. So, you know, I tend to like Italian food. And so there was this Italian restaurant in the center of Yonkers downtown. And I would go there and I didn’t want to eat inside the restaurant because it was a hole in the wall. But I went there once, ordered something, took it home, ate it. And I’m like, oh, my God, this is fantastic. I love lasagna. So it was probably lasagna. But I eat it and I’m like, man, this is this is fantastic. This is some of the best lasagna I’ve ever tasted, you know. And when I went in there, I remember having a conversation with the owner. Right. You know, brief conversation. And so I told him my name and, you know, I don’t know what he asked me. So, but the fact that this was, you know, really good food, there was a couple of things. The food was great. He gave me more than I could eat in a meal. And I’m, you know, probably twenty one years old and I was an athlete. So so I could eat a lot. And but he gave me more than I could eat in a meal. And then he didn’t charge me much of anything for what I had ordered. Right. So so so I’m like next time I felt like eating Italian food, I go back to the same restaurant.

Now I walk in. hey, Jeff, how’s it going? I’m like, I don’t remember your name. How do you remember mine? You know, and, you know, and then he’s pulling up, you know, whatever we talked about, you know, hey, how’s this person doing? How do you know what happened with this situation? I’m like, how do you remember, you know, this, this conversation, but now here’s all, you know, here’s the, you know, you can imagine how good I felt, you know, walking into that restaurant, having that conversation with him. So he remembers his customers, remembers the conversations he has with customers, you know, great food more than you can eat at a price you can afford. you know it’s like I lived in yonkers for probably like nine years whenever I wanted italian food that was the only place I went I didn’t I didn’t step foot in any other italian restaurant in the entire city of yonkers in the nine years I lived there right so that that’s so how do you as a business owner create that kind of experience for your customers so that You know, however long they live in your town, you’re the only place they come to buy from, right? It’s doing those types of things, right? Give them something at a price that they can afford. You know, give them, you know, whatever it is you give them, make it great, right? So better than anything they’ve ever experienced, right? With that particular product or service. You know, remember, you know, engage them in conversation. Remember who they are. Remember what they tell you. You know, build a relationship with them, right?

Daniela: Yeah, I think also you get potentially nostalgic people who come back and then they’re like, oh, I really miss ex’s burgers and then they’ll run to your place and like or like you know when you hear about going to this town and then that person will be like oh my gosh you have to try this restaurant.

Geoffrey: Yeah yeah I’m going with the restaurant analogy but yeah no no I mean well it’s it’s powerful I walk people through because I I teach on alignable.com every other week. And one of one of the lessons that I do, you know, talks about, you know, transforming customers into evangelists. And, and, and so I, you know, I kind of, I walk them through how you do this. And I always tell them, everyone’s loyal to something. and has been for an extended period of time, you know, it could be, you know, I only buy Ford cars, I only buy Saab cars, or, or, you know, I only use this toothpaste, or, you know, I Whatever the case may be, but there’s some brand, there’s some company, there’s some product or service that you buy all the time. You’ve bought for more than a decade. 

Daniela: So when you’re buying that particular product or service, you’re only buying it from that one brand, right? 

Geoffrey: And so I always tell entrepreneurs, okay, well, if you want to understand how to transform a customer into an evangelist, think of that thing, that brand, that whatever it is that you’ve been incredibly loyal to. Now I want you to sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil. I want you to jot down. Can you still hear me? 

Daniela: Yes. I think you’re frozen. Yeah, I’m here. Okay, guys, that Joffrey, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. We had a great conversation. I think we talked about a lot of great things that entrepreneurs can learn about. But before we finish, I do want to give you the space to plug anything, promote anything. This is the moment if anything that we spoke about resonated with our audience, the space is yours to plug. 

Geoffrey: Yeah, yeah. I really don’t have much to plug. I try my best to help entrepreneurs. So if you’re brave enough to do what I’ve built a career doing, I want to help you in any way I can. So I will give you my website, which is www.thinkbigwithjeffreykent. Geoffrey is the old English spelling G-E-O-F-F-R-E-Y.com if I didn’t say that. Also, I spent a lot of time on alignable.com, and I have a group that I formed called Entrepreneur University, where every week I have events where I have people in the group meet each other. So it’s a platform just for online. But if you don’t know what it is, it’s a platform just for entrepreneurs. And then on top of that, I do a six part teaching series on how you take a business from nothing exponentially scaling it to a desired exit. And through that exit, securing your individual future creating generational wealth for your family, right. So I that series is taught every other week. But it’s all of this is done in my entrepreneur University group, and it’s all free. So you know, for any entrepreneur that wants to experience any of this. I also post every day I post content, usually questions sometimes thought provoking, you know, information on how to do something entrepreneurially in your business. But I do that every every single day in the group as well. So you know anyone can go to alignable.com you can get a free membership you don’t have to pay and once you get a membership just search for groups and search for entrepreneurial university and groups and join the group and then you can participate in all of this as well 

Daniela: Awesome. Yeah, I will be adding the links to all these things on the description of this video so that everybody can easily find them. All right. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Guys, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Listen to our podcast. Do everything to help us out. And thank you so much for being here. 

Geoffrey: Thank you very much for having me. This was a pleasure. Daniela: It was a pleasure having you as well. Guys, I will see you on the next episode.

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