Uncovering Your Superpower to Become a Successful Entrepreneur with Joshua Centers: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:02John Lee Dumas:Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here, and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. On today's classic episode, we'll be breaking down uncovering your superpower to become a successful entrepreneur. And to drop these value bombs, I brought to Joshua Centers and the EO Fire Studios. Joshua grew up on a small town farm, struggled in school, and served as an infantryman in the army and later became a successful six-figure entrepreneur. And today we talk about how if you're not seeing success, find ways to make it a little better and keep trying.

0:37John Lee Dumas:Change one thing at a time to improve results and to owe so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Joshua and our sponsors. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support. Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 50-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com. Highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, 50 days will fly right on by. The only question is, will you have something to show for it?

1:15John Lee Dumas:I created a free YouTube series called 50 Days to Something, a step-by-step path to build a real product, service, or offer in just 50 focused days. Start today for free at eofire.com slash YouTube. Joshua, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Well, I think people a lot concentrate on being successful. Like just they have to be perfect and be successful at everything. I really think if people would go and push more into not trying to be perfect and fail and learning from failures, you're gonna be a lot more successful, quicker than you typically would.

1:59John Lee Dumas:Well, Fire Nation, what a start to the episode about uncovering your superpower to become a successful entrepreneur. And let's be honest, Joshua, we all have weaknesses. Can you share your strategies for turning our biggest weaknesses into our strengths? What I like to do, for example, my biggest weakness is time management. it. And if productivity like was an actual sport, like I would be the biggest fan. I absolutely love the subject so much because it is my weakness. So for me, what I did was I actually started logging what I was doing with my time specifically so I can monitor it. So if you have a weakness or something, I highly recommend whatever that is, get a notepad out from time to time or use, you on your phone and whatnot, and just start logging the things that you feel you're weak at and start working on it one thing at a time, one day at a time.

2:56John Lee Dumas:Let's give an example or two of something that you've seen in your life, and then maybe something that you've seen in somebody that you've worked with, you know, throughout your business. So let's maybe start with yourself. Like what's something specific that you've done that's turned one of your weaknesses into a strength? What did that look like? My planning method was really chaotic when it when it came to my day. So what I did specifically, um, is I, I like, I had no direction in my day. So I would start, I started basically implementing time blocking, um, one part, one, one time. And then, um, from using time blocking, I went ahead and I started adding things that I was doing, um, that wasn't necessarily on my schedule.

3:42So I could see what was taking up my space. and it wasn't perfect by any means, but by the second week, I could absolutely see where a lot of my time was being wasted, where that was going and what I needed to focus on to actually get me results. So for example, specifically, I wasn't focusing on sales. I was helping build our fulfillment team up in one of my businesses, our marketing agency, and we wanted to hit a specific goal. So I started focusing on sales. And it was because I had a look at that inventory. And I was actually writing down things that I was doing in my day that weren't necessarily part of it, I was able to actually help us hit our goal.

4:24John Lee Dumas:Let's move on to another example of somebody who maybe you've worked with, or you've seen utilize a similar strategy to really have this kind of powerful results. My business partner, he would say he's not really great at necessarily productivity. But the one thing he is good at is sales. So what he did was he stopped focusing on the things that he was not good at and started focusing solely on that, which really helped our agency grow exponentially. So he just stopped doing what he was bad at. And he had other people do it. He delegated it to other people. And then he concentrated on the number one thing that he was good at.

5:07John Lee Dumas:I want to talk about growing and scaling because listen, as entrepreneurs, as business owners, we all want to grow. We all want to scale at some level. What's the one thing that we need to do to both grow and scale this year? To grow and scale, I mean, you got to, I mean, you have to have a product that people actually want. And you had mentioned earlier about like, what's a piece of device, which is the opposite. And our agency, people focus on lead generation. So number one, you have to have a really, really good offer that people want to buy. So we took our marketing agency and we turned it into almost like an e-commerce store.

5:51We developed a product. Instead of generating leads, we were able to actually get prepaying customers. So if If you could look at your audience, the people you're serving, whatever it is you're selling, and if you could try to figure out a way to deliver your product or service in a way that's different than anybody else's, that is what's going to help you grow and scale really fast.

6:16John Lee Dumas:So again, let's kind of go back to what you would consider a personal example of how you've utilized this strategy. Let's kind of go through that process. Yeah, absolutely. for my marketing agency, we work with local chiropractors, right? And everybody was going through and getting leads. The product that we were using was a weight loss product. And so I was like, I wonder if it is possible for us to be able to get people to prepay with this product. And then I wonder if it's possible if we didn't charge like an agency fee, just like everybody else, we just say we're so confident in our marketing, we're going to go ahead and we're going to say, here, the client pays, we'll collect that.

6:57You don't have to worry about an agency fee, we'll take on all the risk. And we started using this. And that's specifically what we did to help us grow exponentially.

7:05John Lee Dumas:So Fire Nation, we're gonna be talking about failure, we're gonna be talking about overcomplication, we're gonna be talking about this and so much more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Fire Nation, I already know two things about you, you take action, and you're always looking to learn and grow. That's why I'm excited to share a source of inspiration. I think you're going to love Blinkist. Blinkist is an app that takes the world's best nonfiction books and breaks them down into 50 minute reads or listens. So whether you're commuting, working out or in between calls, Blinkist delivers insights you can apply immediately without the week it takes to read a full book and get this.

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8:23John Lee Dumas:That is why High Level is Entrepreneur on Fire's featured partner. High Level gives you a website builder and hosting, funnels and landing pages, email marketing, appointment scheduling, payment processing, course and membership hosting, and so much more. Everything you need to succeed all under one roof. No duct tape, no juggling five platforms, just one clean system for your business. And their award-winning 24-7 support has your back when you need it most. When you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you also get my exclusive bonus stack, a 30-day free trial, a private 15-minute call with me, JLD, access to my weekly live office hours, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something Execution Roadmap, and more.

9:06John Lee Dumas:Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. So Josh, we're back. And as I mentioned, pre-break, failure is part of the entrepreneurial journey. We all fail. Failure is how we learn. It's how we adjust. It's how we pivot. It's how we move forward. How can we use these failures in our lives to our actual advantage? When it comes to failure, I mean, I don't want people to look at it necessarily as a bad thing because it's not. Anytime you try something new, you're most likely going to fail at it. when I started in the online business, I failed for two and a half years. And I'll give some of that to the military as they taught me how to thrive in chaos.

9:50And that was a really great experience. But you just got to keep getting better at it. So if you fail, and you don't see any success, it's not that big of a deal. Just try to figure out how to make that thing a little bit better. For example, our marketing funnels, they did not work out of the get go. We focused on our offer first, because that was one of the most important things to us. And we knew if I offer what it convert, we weren't able to collect leads. So we tried, you know, adding a guarantee in there. And if the guarantee didn't work, we removed it. And we tried a limited time guarantee.

10:29And we really had to walk our way up to figuring out how to get people to prepay because it didn't work in the beginning, we actually had to get people on the phone to prepay that way. And then from there, we were able to kind of reverse engineer the process. And it kind of took us like a three month period to be able to go from generating leads to getting people to prepay, then to getting people to pay inside of the funnel.

10:53John Lee Dumas:So Fire Nation, I really hope you're understanding that when you're looking to move forward, you are going to have these failures, you're going to have these struggles, but from that can be birthed great opportunities, really exciting things that can actually improve your business, that can make you bulletproof, that can potentially even give you ideas that are really outside of the box. Now, a little off topic, but on this whole thing about failure, can you remember a time when you were struggling and you were kind of hitting your head against the wall? And when we're doing that, I mean, it's just like we're continuously doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

11:30John Lee Dumas:Of course, we're getting those same results. But when we finally realize, hey, this is failing or this is a failure, we step back and we say, what's something else I can try? What's an outside of the box opportunity? Does anything come to mind when you're thinking about your journey, your business? The online arena and digital marketing, you know, for business owners is quite difficult. And there's so many little niches. And going from, you know, blue collar job into the digital marketing space, the first two or three niches that I tried absolutely failed. Um, and it was interesting because I was using a product.

12:07I had a really good friend in the CrossFit niche and he gave me a funnel that was working really great. And no matter what, um, it, it didn't work for the area I was in at all. Um, and I tried all these different things, um, tried all these different challenges, um, literally a challenge for that client and nothing would work. Come to find out that local area basically never did good. And then we moved to another location and it worked absolutely fine. So sometimes you just got to, you know, sometimes it can be luck. Sometimes you just have to keep trying and change one thing at a time to make things work better.

12:46John Lee Dumas:So overcomplication is something I also see entrepreneurs running into time and time again. I mean, it's just like we have this disease almost of continuing to add things to our plate to say, okay, this is working. So more of this will work better. Or I'm doing these five things right now. If I want to grow and scale my business, I need to now do 10 things next year. And they're always adding things to their plate. They're making their bandwidth more limited. Their focus is being spread across all these different things. And then everything kind of starts to slowly fall apart. So we just seem to want to make things so gosh darn difficult for ourselves sometimes when things are actually going quite well.

13:26John Lee Dumas:Let's talk about simplifying our marketing efforts so that we can become more effective and efficient. What does that look like? It's so cool that you brought that up. We were going through that like after COVID, basically. We actually thrived during COVID and we did help like a lot of people thrive, other business owners. But we came at that crossroads kind of from the aftermath. path and we had to build everything back up from beginning, from the start. It was like literally starting a brand new business over from scratch and we literally looked at it that point of view and I know one of the problems that I have and I still kind of battle with is trying to be efficient before being effective, basically.

14:12Taking on too much stuff, trying too much and I'm sure a lot of people know what the 80-20 rule is. We looked at our business and we said, look, 20 % of our income or 80 % of our income is coming from this one offer right here. And in the beginning, I kind of talked about how we stood out differently from the marketplace. Everybody else is selling leads, right? We're selling paying customers for this one business. So what we did is we were like, you know what? Let's just focus on that. and because we did that, because we just focused on that and we focused on solely being effective, that is what helped us grow exponentially and then without getting like too deep into it on the operations side, just besides building the marketing, we had to build the operations and a team side too to make sure that we could provide those results and that's a hard task in itself.

15:10John Lee Dumas:Very, very hard task. Now, Joshua, step back here for a minute because we've talked today about turning our weaknesses into strengths. We've talked about growing and scaling, using our failures to our advantages, how to not overcomplicate. And I love that whole idea about the 80-20 rule. It's something that is so true. And if more people that are listening right now really took a step back and looked at their business in those lenses with that 80-20 mindset, it would be so powerful for them. What do you really wanna make sure Fire Nation gets from our entire conversation today. Kind of step back, take the microphone, give us a wrap up of what we talked about, what you think is most important, what you really want to make sure our listeners get.

15:50When it comes to marketing, like looking back in the last five years from my failure to success and growing things, making marketing simple is what's going to help you grow. So we help our clients basically get more leads, more sales by using simple lead magnets and content. in the simplest form. So make sure that whatever it is you're using, make sure your headline is very clear. It speaks to your audience. And at the same time, make sure whatever creative you're using shows them that, hey, this thing is valuable. And it basically helps amplify the headline. Because I don't know if you guys know anything about Goldfish.

16:34They have an attention span of eight seconds and apparently humans have less attention span now. So your marketing has to be on point. And so one thing I've tested over the years and I really got into now is I don't even use a lot of ad copy. I don't even use a lot of text. I have a simple headline with a simple picture that basically amplifies the headline. Everything works together. And then when you're going to actually deploy your marketing, make sure that you don't have a really huge, long, drawn-out funnel with all this nonsense. Have it clear. Here's the thing you're getting in opt-in form.

17:13And we're finding that is what's working best for us right now. We literally have lead magnets that we use that generate paying customers. So it can be done even in this Facebook apocalypse area.

17:24John Lee Dumas:So here we are, Joshua, wrapping things up. What is the best way for Fire Nation to connect with you to learn more about you, your team, what you do, how we can maybe even learn more from everything we talked about with you today. And then we'll say goodbye. You could head over to joshuafcenters.com forward slash lead magnet or join our Facebook group, Ready Launch Scale. Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with JC and JLD today. So keep up that heat. Head over to eofire.com, type Joshua in the search bar and the show notes page will pop up with everything we've talked about here today.

18:00John Lee Dumas:Joshua, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Absolutely. Thank you. Hey, Fire Nation, today's value bomb content was brought to you by Joshua and Fire Nation's successful entrepreneurs accomplished big goals. That's why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal step by step. visit thefreedomjournal.com and I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform plus award-winning 24-7 support.

18:42John Lee Dumas:Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com. Highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, 50 days will fly right on by. The only question is, will you have something to show for it? I created a free YouTube series called 50 Days to Something, a step-by-step path to build a real product, service, or offer in just 50 focused days. Start today for free at eofire.com slash YouTube.