Tag: Masterminds

Who’s Got Your Ear? 👂 (Average Of The Five People You Spend Time With In Business)

Posted on by brianjpombo

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

You’ll always spend time with family and friends, but in business, who are the top people you spend time with?

Transcription

Who’s got your ear?

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I want to talk about who has your ear?

In other words, who are you listening to, who are you paying attention to, what are you paying attention to?

Because that one little thing can make all the difference in your life.

I mean, really, it’s the smallest things, it’s the thin threads that make such a huge difference. I was talking with a friend that I hadn’t spoken to for a while, and went to go visit him today, had all my kids with me. And we were just we’re kind of running some errands.

So I visited a friend, our minds were thinking about a lot of similar things. And one of the things we’re looking at is rentals. And I’m relatively new to the concept of having rentals and so forth. But I know a little bit about it, I have family that’s involved in it.

I have family that’s involved in vacation rentals. And he was in the process of building out one of his rental spaces.

And I had mentioned to him about all those my dad has vacation rentals and telling him about my experience. And I knew a little bit about Airbnb, I was one of the earliest people involved in Airbnb before it was a popular or well-known thing to do, I was renting apartment spaces, and so forth.

When I’d go on out on business, usually, we would grab an Airbnb somewhere, so it was always always a fun thing.

So it’s something I followed along with quite a bit. And we were calling back and forth. And I can tell at one point, he like something switch, she’s like, Oh, well, maybe I should look at making this vacation, rental.

And all of a sudden, something changed.

By the end of the time, when we’re getting ready to leave, he was saying thanks for mentioning that because that might make all the difference that could change how I’m going to be doing everything here, so to speak.

And it’s not like I set out to do anything like that. But one little concept, one little tweak, one little splinter in your mind can change everything, how you do things or how you look at things.

So you really got to pay attention to who you’re paying attention to who you’re surrounding yourself with, obviously, it’s that old adage about, you know, the top five or six people that you hang around with. If you take it just on an income basis, you take the top six people you hang around with, and you take all of your incomes, and you multiply, you add them together, and then you divide them up by the sum, you’ll end up with basically what most of you make on a yearly basis.

If you just take the annual incomes of everybody that we tend to fit whoever was around, and whoever we surround ourselves with.

So what are you plugging into?

Are you listening to podcasts?

Are you reading books?

Are you doing any other type of stimulation that is helping to change your thought patterns?

Helping to direct your mind in a positive direction?

Or in the direction that you want to go?

Are you doing that, and if not, why not?

Have you thought about it?

Are you considering it sit down and actually think about Okay, what are all the different things that I watch and listen to all throughout the day?

Who are the people that I hang around, at work and beyond?

Maybe you should look at plugging into some other areas, working with a mastermind, working with consultants plugging into some people listening to the right podcast.

So I’ve got a podcast out there that be great for most of you out there that are in business, especially if you’re an executive of your business or you’re the business owner. You’re in charge if you’re one of the decision-makers in your business. I got one for you.

It’s called Brian J. Pombo Live you’re watching it right now or you’re listening to it right now subscribe, set this thing to be an automatic thing.

We could start having a conversation you comment wherever you check this out at whether it be on YouTube, or Rumble, or on the podcast itself.

If you’re just getting the audio feed for this go to BrianJPombo.com, leave a comment and give me a question.

Let’s have a conversation back and forth. Let’s see where things go.

These types of things helpful if you do them consistently, but you got to be careful about who you’re surrounding yourself with.

So check that out.

Also check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. If you haven’t heard about it, you can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

We’ll be back here tomorrow night. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Part 7: Bob Regnerus of Feedstories Interview – Brian’s Closing Thoughts

Posted on by brianjpombo

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Part 7, Brian gives us his closing thoughts on his interview with Bob Regnerus of Feedstories.

Transcription

Bob Regnerus of Feedstories, part seven, the commentary.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I want to take some time after if you haven’t if you didn’t get to see the interview I did with Bob Regnerus, go back and watch it. It’s great stuff, you can see the whole thing over at BJPchats.com.

And it was really a lot of fun because this was one of the first major interviews that we’re putting here out on this platform on Brian J. Pombo Live. So I have two other podcasts in which I have interviews, and I’m now starting to implement having some interviews of different caliber or different people on Brian J. Pombo Live.

So that’s a lot of fun, just unto itself.

But let me point out a couple things that Bob brought up. Great stuff. One of those you’ll want to go back to over and over again, because he has so much experience and brought in so many great points, principles and strategies that you can use.

One of the first things that I heard him say that I think really stood out is talking about exercising your, “what if” muscles, okay?

In a sense of not just looking at, well, what if this wonderful thing happens, which is, as entrepreneurs, we tend to be very positive to begin with, we tend to focus on the positive.

And we don’t spend enough time being skeptical and looking at, okay, what if the worst case scenario happened?

Or what if, you know, just a slightly more negative version came out?

What would we do about it, then how would we handle that?

And if you don’t take those steps ahead of time, you’re going to be in for a world of hurt.

If you do take those steps ahead of time, chances are a lot of those horrible things will never happen for some reason or another. If you prepare some, oftentimes you prepare for the worst and the worst never happens. But at least you’re prepared even when things start looking a little bit negative.

So that’s one thing I think is so important, you can write an entire book on that.

And Bob’s got some great experiences as far as that goes.

The other thing he said is, I don’t want to get involved in the day to day with my business.

So when I asked him the area that he loved most about what he does on a day to day basis, he basically said that he’s designed his life so that he’s only working on the stuff that he loves, and that everything else is being outsourced.

It’s being run by a system, it’s being run by people, it’s being run by automations, which is really a fabulous thing.

It’s the one thing I encourage all my clients to start heading towards, no matter where you are at in your business, whether you’re just starting, or whether you’re partway along, or whether you’re on the tail end of what you think is the lifespan of your business, you need to start pulling out of the things that you don’t need to be involved in.

And only focusing on those things you knew do need to be involved in and only spending the amount of time necessary to get those things done.

Having other pieces of focus, that was the thing that he put a whole lot of focus on.

You definitely want to go back and listen to that is having those alternative pieces in your life so that those pieces of your brain don’t atrophy. I love that analogy that was really good.

And the final thing, him talking about the power of books, both in the beginning of the interview from the author’s perspective, and then at the tail end of the interview from a reader perspective.

About starting with books that experts are writing first before you delve any deeper before you get into courses, high end courses, or before you even get into hiring somebody as as an advisor.

Make sure you take a look at their books and books around that subject matter so that you get a very well rounded idea of what they’re all about.

That’s fabulous advice.

It’s really is important.

All in all, great interview, can’t wait to talk to him again sometime in the future because there’s so many different directions you could take that conversation because he’s such a wealth of information.

Regarding books, I’ve got my own, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

You can get a free copy of that at AmazonProofBook.com.

And if you’d like to be on the show as an interviewee, if you’d like to have me on your show, or if you’d like to hire me as a speaker, go to BrianJPombo.com.

That’s all I got for today. You have a great one. Get out there and let the magic happen.

Relationships & Mastermind Groups (Bob Regnerus of Feedstories Interview)

Posted on by brianjpombo

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Bob from Feedstories talks about the value of relationships and mastermind groups and how he became a co-author with names like Perry Marshall and Robert Skrob.

Transcription

Brian: You’ve co-written books with some great names out there.

You have a book out there with Robert Skrob, you’ve got a book with Perry Marshall, how did you go about doing that? How did you go about co-authoring, with people that had a name in a different area?

Bob: Well, in that case, it’s about relationships.

So, you know, Robert Skrob is well known these days. I knew Robert before he was Robert.

One of the things I did early in my career, and I should say this, this is another thing I did is I took giant leaps by joining mastermind groups, not just like, hey, let’s get together on zoom five days a month, or, you know, this is like, I paid Bill Glazer, at that time, I think it was $12,000 a year, quoting Hamilton, I wanted to be in the room where it happens, right?

I was in there with people that were above my pay grade. But the reason I did that was I wanted the mentorship from a guy like Bill Glazer, mentorship from Dan Kennedy.

But then I wonder the relationships of people who are doing better than me, and there were some people that were below me. But when you’re in a group like that, it just pulls you forward.

And so that’s where I met a lot of people who I still consider friends and met friends that introduced me to others. By knowing Perry Marshall, I got to meet and become friends with Brian Kurtz.

I was in the same mastermind group as Ryan Deiss, before Digital Marketer was even a thought in his eye.

I got to know Jeff Walker before he was the Product Launch Formula Genius.

So part of it is you you know, there are these names that we all kind of revere, they’re just normal people. But I got to know them really, before they became famous, okay.

And they’re all more famous than me, by the way, which is fine with me. But I really was intentional about joining those organizations, attending conferences and networking, I’m not naturally drawn to do that.

Like, I’m really good with talking and sharing what I know I’m not really good at meeting new people, but I’ve had to force myself to do it.

And so writing the check and taking the leap really like makes you go I’m gonna make the most of it.

Outro: For full conversations, go to BJP chats.com.

Part 2: Bob Regnerus of Feedstories & The Ultimate Guide To Facebook Advertising

Posted on by brianjpombo

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Part two, of our seven-part interview with Bob Regnerus of Feedstories.

Topics covered in this episode

  • How Bob Co-Authored on Books with experts like Perry Marshall and Robert Skrob
  • How Masterminds & Networking: Establishing Relationships with good people
  • When Markets Shift: Hard times, Lessons Learned & Business Growth from it
  • Investing in Flexibility

Transcription

Brian Part 2: Bob Regnerus of Feedstories, part two.

Hi, I’m Brian pombo Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

This is part two in the series of an interview that we had with Bob Regnerus. You can hear the whole interview over at BJPchats.com.

If you’d like to be on the show, or if you’d like to have me on your show, or have me speaking at an event, go to BrianJPombo.com.

And now here is part two.

Brain: So you’ve co-written books with some great names out there. You have a book out there with Robert Skrob, you got a book with Perry Marshall, how did you go about doing that?

How did you go about co-authoring, with people that had a name in a different area?

Bob: Well, in that case, it’s about relationships.

So you know, Robert Skrob is well known these days.

I knew Robert before he was Robert.

You know, one of the things I did early in my career, and I should say this, this is another thing I did is I took giant leaps by joining mastermind groups.

Not just like, hey, let’s get together on zoom five days a month. This is like, I paid Bill Glazer at that time, I think it was $12,000 a year.

Quoting Hamilton, I want to be in the room where it happens.

I was in there with people that were above my paygrade. But the reason I did that was I wanted the mentorship from a guy like Bill Glazer, mentorship from Dan Kennedy.

But then I wanted the relationships with people who are doing better than me. And there was some people that were below me, but when you’re in a group like that, it just pulls you forward.

And so that’s where I met a lot of people who I still consider friends and met friends that introduced me others.

By knowing Perry Marshall, I got to meet and become friends with Brian Kurtz.

I was in the same mastermind group as Ryan Deiss, before Digital Marketer was even a thought in his eye.

I got to know Jeff Walker before he was the Product Launch Formula genius.

So part of it is you know, there’s these names that we all kind of revere, they’re just normal people. But I got to know them, really, before they became famous, okay. And they’re all more famous than me by the way, which is fine with me.

But I really was intentional about joining those organizations, attending conferences and networking.

I’m not naturally drawn to do that. Like, I’m really good with talking and sharing what I know, I’m not really good at meeting new people, but I’ve had to force myself to do it.

So writing the check and taking the leap really, like makes you go, I’m gonna make the most of it. That’s kind of how it happened.

So I met Robert in a mastermind group.

Perry I met through a connection in my mastermind group, a friend of mine also knew Perry.

Perry and I live eight miles apart, literally, I can draw a straight line from my house to Perry’s. We spend quite a bit of time together, we became friends.

You know, a lot of it like yeah, there’s gonna be another wave. It’s like, there’s always new people coming in. So want to be friends with people who are driven, who are successful, that can challenge you that could bring you up, that could kind of pick you up when you’re let down.

That’s another thing that’s been really powerful.

My career is just establishing relationships with good people.

And I’ve come across people that frankly, were terrible for me. Learned my lessons from them. You know, fortunately I could cut bait and move on.

But that’s what the entrepreneur life is about is like, you’re constantly honing your radar and your sonar and everything.

And it’s not a straight line. There’s a famous meme where it’s like a squiggly line. I mean, that’s really what it’s all about these days. That’s just another way to kind of do something like that, you’re not going to just approach a Perry Marshall and say, hey, I’m gonna write a book with you.

You’ve got to have some cred.

You know, Perry’s got a reputation in mind. But Perry has been known to pull people up who are kind of unknown, who’ve proven they’ve got chops, but all of them kind of have already established a little bit of a foundation of expertise.

But if you can do that, I mean, you can find somebody to kind of pull you up to their stage, very powerful.

Brian: Yeah, that’s fabulous.

So many great nuggets in there, so many great ideas that you brought forth.

Taken in a different direction. You talked about the highs and lows, and we always tend to focus on the highs, it just makes sense to do that.

But give us an example of something that you just thought was going to end everything. Whether it’s something recent or something from years past, where you just had a scenario where it just felt like everything was going to come crashing down.

Bob: I’ll share an experience that happened during the real estate crash.

So 2008, 2009, I had been speaking, I had been riding the wave from a book. Like I said, I grown my agency to seven figures in a year, it was amazing. I had a great team, a lot of clients.

Well, what I ended up doing though is I had a stable of a lot of information marketing clients, and specifically, a good portion of them were marketing real estate stuff.

As you know, real estate was the thing that crashed the market in 2009.

There’s nothing like having all your clients suddenly run out of money and declare bankruptcy and not paying you.

In a span of about three months, my business went from a million down to like 150,000 a year, had to lay off my entire team. So I spent probably two months like just hovering in a corner. Literally, I spent a couple nights in the hospital panic attacks.

Not being able to pay your staff, having to lay off people you love and care about. It was awful.

But I was either gonna let it break me or I was gonna learn a lesson, I decided to learn a lesson.

I learned that I needed to be more diverse and my client base, I needed to have a stool that was more than one leg. All right, you can balance on a stool with one leg for a long time. But eventually, you’re going to break and you know, if something knocked that leg out, you’re gonna fall.

I diversified my client base, I diversified my services.

But the other thing was that I was flexible with my team.

So I don’t have employees anymore. But I have a large team of contractors that I could go up and down in terms of payment. Like if I’m busy, I could pay them more, get more hours.

But if things pull back, we slow down. I don’t have that big nugget, right, like of the payroll and the benefits and things like that.

So I said to myself coming out of 2009 to 2010, I’m going to be much more nimble in the future. I’m going to have a value of cash in my business, I’m not going to be living on credit. And I’m also going to have a team that’s very flexible.

So COVID hits, right. And I’m like, okay, you know, I was ready for this. We had cash in the bank. We had a team and we had some clients that kind of pulled back for a time, we were able to pull back contractors, so I was not out a bunch of money.

But what happened was is we actually had a service which is remote videos, like you and I are doing this video right now. We have a service that does video through an iPhone or iPad, high quality.

And all of a sudden, once people got over the shock of COVID come April this past year, a year ago, our lead list absolutely exploded.

People who were on the fence about doing video came out of the woodwork.

We actually had our three best months of our company’s career, April, May and June of last year, because we were poised, we were ready. We invested in a technology that we thought was going to be important. People kind of push it to the side and then there was an event we were ready for it. So I was really happy.

Obviously wasn’t happy about the world situation, a lot of things changed. But I learned my lessons 10 years ago and I positioned myself to be flexible to be nimble, to be you know, value cash to not have a big piece of overhead.

I survived a couple weeks of like, what the hell’s going on?

But then we were positioned to really like take advantage of what was going on to be ready for the marketplace. You learn that through experience. You know I could tell the story and people are gonna be like, that’s a great, Bob is already prepared.

The pain I had to deal with at the start of the decade to be ready for that was awful but never want to live through it. But I survived it and learn from it. I certainly wouldn’t want to go through it again. Which is why I made sure I was prepared for kind of the next big thing that came along.

For full conversations, go to BJP chats.com.

Part 1: Bob Regnerus of Feedstories

Posted on by brianjpombo

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Our seven-part interview with Bob Regnerus of Feedstories begins.

Topics covered in this episode

  • What led Bob to become a digital marketing and paid advertising expert
  • The THREE POWERFUL THINGS Bob’s done in his career to help him thrive in business, and attract clients
  • How Victor Cheng encouraged Bob to write his first book, Big Ticket Ecommerce
  • What are the main advantages of writing a book?
  • Finding Your SUPERPOWER

Full Convo ➡️ https://brianjpombo.com/bjpchats/

Transcription

Brian: Bob Regnerus of Feedstories, part one.

This is a series of conversation that we had with Bob Regnerus.

You’re really going to enjoy it, you can watch all the other parts of it over at BJPchats.com.

And you can see everything else that I’m offering my book, you can have me as a guest on your podcast if you’re interested on being a pet guest on this podcast or the other ones we provide. Or if you’d like to have me as a speaker at your event, go check all of that out over at BrianJPombo.com.

Now, here’s the show.

Brian (Intro to show): Coach Bob Regnerus is the co-founder of Feedstories, a digital marketing expert and the author of five books, including, The Fourth Edition of The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising.

Bob, welcome to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Bob: It is so good to be with you, Brian. Looking forward to a lively conversation today.

Brian: Yeah, good deal.

So I like to jump into these things without a whole lot of research in general. But the issue is, is that I already knew who you were, because I’d seen you around. I knew that you had co-authored this book. And I’d seen your name around probably for years, because I think we have ran in similar circles.

Bob: Yeah, that’s probably likely.

Brian: Yeah, just tell me…we’ll get into the details as far as where you’re at right now, eventually. But tell me how did you end up where you are?

Bob: Yeah, well, I guess I took a little bit of an indirect approach to being an entrepreneur. I was a programmer by trade, I went to college, you know, studied computer science, studied business, I had a dual degree.

And I ended up working for a large corporation out of college doing programming on mainframe computers, that’s the computers that take up a whole room.

Did that worked at a couple different corporate jobs, and I met a guy at one of my gigs who was there on contract. And like, I was an employee, he was on a contract, I thought that was interesting. He kind of made his own hours.

And he was making, you know, I mean, he wasn’t getting benefits from the company but it felt like he was making more money than me doing kind of what he was doing.

So I became friends with him and eventually, I went on my own with him and was doing some contract work. I worked for TransUnion, the big credit bureau. That was about 1998, I really got the bug for the internet.

Obviously 1998 we’re going back a few years, internet wasn’t what it is today. Right?

But I was a coder.

I actually developed my first e-commerce website, I built a shopping cart for a business from scratch. By the way, there’s still a client today, there’s still a client. So it’s pretty awesome.

But we launched that thing in 98 and it was pretty funny. The business owner who I’m friends with is like, this is great, you know, we’re getting orders, like the middle of the night, you know, when we’re closed, it was a big deal.

He’s like, how do we get more people to the site?

I said, oh, that’s not a big deal, I know exactly how to do that. And of course I had no idea how to do that.

So that’s where I dove into the World of internet marketing and direct marketing.

Discovered Dan Kennedy and Perry Marshall and all those things. I really became a student of marketing.

And I shifted from being a technology person to a marketing person, just kind of felt really comfortable for me, it felt like the next step. And I felt like I could provide more value to the marketplace.

So I think was a pretty good decision.

I’ve done a lot of training and, you know, work with clients over the years. But yeah, I mean, I’ve been in the business now 20 to 23 years, written some books and helped 1,000s of people. So it’s pretty cool.

I really love the paid marketing, like paid search. I got really good at Google and then Facebook was just the perfect media for me, because I really love telling stories. We can dive into that a little bit. But I’ve been doing Facebook advertising and coaching for people now since 2013.

Have some really great successes over the years.

So I love the predictability of paid advertising, like put in $1 and make five, make 10 you know, whatever the case may be. Never really got into SEO, we never understood it, was too frustrating.

I like the predictability of paid advertising.

That’s what’s been paying the bills and what people have been paying me for over the last two decades and really proud to keep rockin on and teaching people all the cool stuff that I learned.

Brian: Wow, that’s fabulous.

For full conversations, go to BJP chats.com.