Academy Week #6

Hey Academites,
In week 5, I feel like I finally have everything in place to launch my funnel minus cash to run it……sad panda face. My mom and COO agreed that I don’t have the money with all my personal financial issues but it’s time to gamble on Halloween as my launch date so we hit it right at a spooky growth time for my funnel ghost behind me. At this point, only time can help me for growth and I’m maxed out on manpower hours with current cash flow or needing bigger paying clients in our current growth phase and revenue model. The funnel seems to be the only solution for now, but my team is pulling a marketing stunt this week with an application to the Mile High Pitch Competition for a 10K startup capital prize + 1 YR of free co-working space + Entry into Bank of Denver Startup lab for 1 year, which would be huge for us! I’ll include our final video submission next week as the deadline is November 1, 2019, to see if I’ll have the opportunity to pitch in a real-world “shark tank” experience.
Hopefully, if our funnel works, my mindset is I could make back the advertising dollars with a new client in 4 weeks to turn that sales and my COO agree my mindset needs to be that I can start selling a 5K contract to the right qualified leads. I’m a great marketer with the right qualified sales opportunities and have proven to experience closing big deals through my sales career. If people in the Academy are making 5K sales I can do it too. I feel like I have a good grasp on Schema, better landing pages, and feel as if I’m more engaged with The Facebook Academy Group this past week with videos specifically as a sponge learner. Here are my updates this week and would love to see any comments on this post if you find something of value that I shared:

1. 1. Check out our final pitch deck 🙂 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1syquNtSr0xvhBliCMGvu_ujf6O5PG_aJgq5Va4Jzmcg/edit#slide=id.g1f88252dc4_0_162
2. 2. It feels like our team is in the good flow right now and our clients are happy and getting results. It took me about 3 months to get the team where we need to be, but they are starting to put smiles on my face now with their creative work and my clients telling me how each member of our team is doing well. Many of them will be taking off this week to head to the World’s largest cocktail party for Halloween for UGA vs. FL (GO DAWGS!) so I’ll be holding down the fort. They deserve it though, overall our company is growing and in a decent place which makes me happier than this summer. I hope they get to enjoy travel and life to recharge for November.
3. 3. Still no video testimonial yet. After the entire month of October, maybe I need to try another client.
4. 4. I watched Cat’s Mastermind call this past week and it was very insightful.
5. 5. I got our first sales sheet back from our designer and we should have our second version by the end of the week. I’ll be sure to share.
6. 6. I broke all our biggest client’s YouTube Channel subscribers for a second week in a row and the client told me they don’t foresee me leaving now as their expert. I was able to explain my recent frustrations with them and I have an awesome case study in the funkadelic works.
7. 7. I have completed 41 lessons so far in the portal, 13 classes in the units Facebook group, and read about 70 posts in The Academy Facebook group.
8. 8. I had a great meeting with our other larger account and our YouTube Videographer this past week and was finally able to pump our next YouTube video for GSMM you can check out as the video post here from our Business Development Manager https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvOTIwoMYQQ. The plan is to close a strategic partnership with a virtual assistant company that execute this training video for our client’s rest of 2019.
9. 9. I worked on the landing pages, portfolio work, and website for 5 hours this week.
10. 10. Facebook numbers across the board are steady growth with consistent content.
11. 11. The automated funnel ️is ready to go and I built everything on WordPress. I like to think WordPress has made me an inventor and I’ll never forget how Dan Kepner thought I could make revenue from it or how I was burned by a Computer Scientist. I decided I would go with Calendly as my scheduler for the year and will be paying for that as a new technology tool for our company on my personal dime. Between redesign and scheduler I’ve now spent $400 I didn’t expect personally to pay so that has delayed launching my funnel another week.

Happy Halloween to those celebrating this week. It’s a weird Halloween for me this year since I’ve been in the swamps of Live Oak, Florida the last 4 years and this will be my first Halloween not there in Denver where it recently snowed. My COO pointed out I’m growing every month and changing. This year for Halloween I won’t be blasting off as buzz lightyear in a space helmet or saying Go-Go Gadget Kepner, but I will be saying:
TURN ON THE FUNNEL!TRICK-OR-TREAT AND LET’S GAMBLE!,Benjamin