Josh Turner, Wall Street Journal bestselling author, Founder and CEO of LinkedSelling, has faced his share of trial and error to get where we find him today. He started LinkedSelling after noticing a troubling pattern in the businesses he worked with: Cash flow suffered from no reliable way to get quality leads and clients and they eventually give up.
This led Josh to develop a system that still generates leads for his clients today and has turned LinkedSelling into the world’s foremost B2B marketing and lead generation company. The company has grown to 50+ employees, named both a three time INC 5000 company and Entrepreneur 360 company, and helped thousands of business owners.
How LinkedSelling helps business owners find consistent cash flow:
LinkedSelling helps businesses simplify their marketing and get qualified leads and clients consistently, using a variety of online tools & systems (both organic & paid) to…
- Keep their clients’ brands and messages in front of highly targeted prospects.
- Build valuable databases of prospects through done-for-you services, done-with-you programs, and do-it-yourself courses and tools that provide solutions for every budget.
- Create and execute customized drip marketing systems through LinkedIn & email to maintain awareness with potential clients.
- Design, build and grow highly targeted, branded online communities.
- Build trust and sincere relationships with high-value targets through proven psychological triggers.
How Josh learned the lesson that led to his success:
As a teenager, Josh learned the importance of a reliable and consistent way to get leads… “My dad ran a remodeling business that reached 7- figures and things were going really well. My plan was to work with him and grow the business but one day, he took me aside and explained to me that the business was having trouble getting new clients and we had to close the doors.”
Later, as a CFO for a construction business that went from low 7-figures to $24mm in annual revenue, Josh watched as they closed their doors when the recession hit in the late 2000s… “I saw so many people lose their jobs… after that I went out on my own as an outsourced CFO, and decided that I wouldn’t let it happen to me.”
So Josh developed a reliable system to grow his business and keep a steady cash flow, which his CFO clients quickly took interest in. Leading to LinkedSelling’s mission, provide a simple system to generate leads, based on building trust and relationships with strategic prospects.
What does every entrepreneur need?
“While everyone has different talents and objectives, the underlying quality you need to have as an entrepreneur is perseverance. It’s hard and there are a lot of challenges, but you can’t give up. You need to be able to adapt, you need to be able to pick yourself up by the bootstraps, you need to learn how to figure things out, and you need to be able to persevere. Because you are going to fail, we fail all of the time. We’ve got a graveyard of products, services, and strategies that we’ve tried and failed with. But the key is to put you out there and to take action and constantly be moving forward. If you do… it’s just a matter of time until you strike gold.”
How have challenges made you better?
“Building a business is never easy... I started on my own and it was meager. I had a terrible website and some terrible business cards, but I was in the game. My first year was hard. I worked in my dingy unfinished basement, next to the spider crickets jumping around my desk. At times I felt like an imposter, and kept thinking, ‘who was I to think I could run a business?’ I felt the ups and downs of what I call the ‘cash flow roller coaster,’ where sometimes you have clients and things are great and other times you don’t have money coming in.
I learned you have to find a way to cut through the noise so you can focus on the things that will make the biggest impact. For me, it was focusing on sales appointments and how to get more of them. It took me a while to get to that point though. I was trying all the stuff people say you should do. Networking events, coffees, lunches, blogging, social media…you name it. But it just wasn’t moving the needle. In many ways, I was making it up as I went along. Trial and error was the name of the game. At the time, this was painful. But now I see it as a blessing because I can help our clients skip over that learning curve.
One of the things that really helped me was educating myself and getting help. Over the years I’ve invested over $1.2 million in consultants, advertising, testing, and people. Some of it worked. Some of it didn’t. There were times when it was scary, and I wasn’t exactly sure if it would all end up working out, but you just have to keep pushing on.”
How are you raising your standard of services?
“The main goal at this point is to realize LinkedSelling’s untapped potential. The organization is at a great place now, but it has been growing at a really fast rate and the team wants to continue to broaden the audience and serve more people. Our focus will be to double down on optimizing company’s marketing and sales so that it can happen. That means creating products and services that are broad enough to reach and serve a growing audience, understanding and optimizing the lifetime value of clients, and playing the long game with aggressive marketing.”
Your advice for emerging entrepreneurs?
“Don’t get frustrated. Too many people think they’ve got to have a brilliant idea so they never do anything. My advice is to just get in the game and one thing will lead to another. Taking action, even if you don’t know the end result is often the only way to figure things out.”