E24: Your Brand Must Differentiate or Die, Make the Hours Count, and Service to Software with Solomon Thimothy

Jim: What is up, Remote Start Nation! Let's get something started. I'm Jim Doyon, and I wanna welcome you to another episode of Remote Start, where I bring you stories and strategies on how to start a business, build a brand and create your desired lifestyle.

On today's episode, we're going to discuss how one entrepreneur went from service industry to creating software, to help streamline his agency. Which later led to him creating a new business altogether by helping other agencies use his software. Solomon Thimothy, is president of One IMS, an online marketing agency with proven track record in helping business, generate quality leads through inbound marketing.

He's also the co-founder of Click X, a marketing intelligence platform for brands and marketers to plan, execute, and measure all their online marketing campaigns. Solomon has been published as a thought leader in Forbes, fast company, entrepreneur, and other notable publications, and in addition to that, he's in USA today and wall street journal bestselling author with his books Game On Leaders who last and business success secrets. Remote Start Nation, I am beyond humbled and honored to have Solomon join us today. And I'm really looking forward to diving deeper into the understanding of what it takes to run a successful business. Without further ado, I would like to introduce you to Solomon Thimothy. So what's up my man!

Solomon: Thank you so much, I really appreciate it. That was a very long intro. But at the end of the day, I'm a grinder. I do what everybody should be doing, which is working on the business as opposed to working in the business. So those, you know, things that are happening as it's like, it's a byproduct of what you do, right? I don't ever go and say, oh yeah, I wanna go get published on boards, like that was not my thing, my thing was, well, how do I work with clients and make them successful? How do we help them grow? Because that's why they're paying you, that's all we did for the last 15 years, but thank you so much, I'm so excited to be here and just to have a quick chat with you, and I hope to drive like so much value out of this for anybody who's gonna watch this, listen to this, download it, you know, read the manuscript or transcript. I really, really honestly like we wanna make sure this time is well spend so that they can get maximum juice out of this time.

Jim: Solomon, thank you so much, I appreciate it. I'm so excited to get this episode started, my first question to you. What does it mean to differentiate or die?

Solomon: Yeah, so in the business success secret, my chapter is called differentiate or die, because as marketers where most of the time when a client gets clients hire me, I would say, well, what differentiates you? Why are you different? Why should somebody pick you over anybody else? And then most of the time they don't understand why I'm asking this serious question. This is the thing that I'm gonna use in my ads. This is my hook, this is the story, this is my everything but most of the time we are the same to our customer, they don't know why we're different, right? So I like to say that in my challenges, in my workshops and everything I do, even agents, I speak to agencies all day long, I say, look, you guys are generalist, if you're building websites and doing Facebook ads and Google ads and everything else that everybody else does, that's called a generalist. You need to actually get rid of that, you need to be a specialist. You need to say, this is what I do and that's all I do, if all you do is Facebook ads or if all you do is help this type of customers, if all you do is do Sales force integration for CRM, you know, people with, you know, a hundred employees or a hundred sales people or more, then that's your job, because the example I give them is that when you get sick on a Monday and you got shoulder pain or you got this pain or that pain, you call your regular doctor, they say, come on in, we have all the availability in the world and he or she might charge $250 to talk to you for 15 minutes, and they send you to a specialist, a shoulder specialist, a knee specialist, whatever it is, you're waiting four weeks out to talk to that person, they might charge $1,400 to your insurance for a 15 minute consult. Who made more money? Did the generalists make more money or the specialists make more money? So being a specialist is an upward spiral. The higher you go, the more you get paid, the more people just resonate with what you're saying, because guess what, you speak to a specific problem, you fix it and you're the best at it or one of the best in the world at it, right? Russell Brunson calls the category king, there's nobody better than you like that's what you wanna be. On the other side, you get blended in with everybody else, it's like vanilla ice cream, everybody's got the exact same thing, you can't really figure out why you versus anybody else that's a downward spiral, you make less money and in fact, the more generalist you are, you kind of become a handyman and handymen get paid so little for the amount of time to do anything and everything whereas, a specialist, somebody who's a pro expert that fixes only one thing in the house, they get paid way more for the same amount of time. So since we're exchanging time for money, we might as well get paid more. That's my thought process.

Jim: I like to look at it, like niche down, niche down, niche down and understand and be able to talk to your customer or talk to whoever it is in that niche to be an expert.

Solomon: That's correct, and also that's like, it's your passion too, right? You gotta have some sort of like, you have to have some idea of everything, but you don't have to be the expert in everything. I hire experts for running Facebook ads, I hire experts to running Google ads, I hire experts to do TikTok or hire video editors to do that, copywriters to do this, I can't be the expert in anything, but I know enough to say I need one of each, right? Like this studio was built by an expert who knows how to build studios. I didn't do it. But I know that I needed it, so that's the same outlet, like you wanna be that expert because after that need, they don't need you anymore, I don't need to go back to the shoulder doctor once they fix it, I'm great, I'm done, like that's what you wanna be known for. You see, like it's the whole blue ocean red ocean thing. Most of the time, we're just in a bloody ocean trying to pick just another fish. And what do we do? We lower our price. And that's the worst thing that you could do is lower our price. Because guess what? We're desperate, we need a little bit more money. So we say, you know what, I'll give you 50% off, but that's the worst thing you could do because now you're doing more work for less money, as opposed to saying, you know what? I only work with five entrepreneurs, I charge $50,000 a year pick and choose that's all, this is what I do, and I only work with five. You're paying a premium because I'm not out there trying to find every fish in the sea.

Jim: So increase your value and increase your price.

Solomon: A hundred percent, and you're spending the same amount of time, like my, you know, my shoulder specialist and you know, people are waiting, right? People are waiting. I mean, we're not old enough to know that specialists are four and six weeks out yet, but when we, when we get to Medicare age, we'll be like waiting for a specialist for our knee and our toe and her this and that. We'll be like, geez, and I'd rather learn that now, when we are still entrepreneurs, right? Like when we're still doing it, not when we're retired, the gee, I should have been a specialist, I would've made a boatload of money, I wouldn't have to work at Wal Walmart greeting people. Does that make sense? Like, that's the thing that we should be thinking about, do I wanna live home my life being a generalist or do I wanna be a specialist and then hire other specialists to fill in the areas that I'm not a specialist?

Jim: Solomon, that's value. Remote Start Nation, I hope you heard that become a specialist in something, figure out your why, figure out what you want to do, why you're doing it while you're starting a business and then niche down into the specific area of how you can add more value. So then you can add to your price and make more money.

Solomon: That's correct.

Jim: And now, work twice as hard to make that money.

Solomon: That's also true, right? It's easier said than done, but most people look at like, well, if I get rid of these clients, I'm not gonna have any money. What should I do? So we need to get like, change that over time. Well, I teach that to agencies, especially when they're starting so that they're not 10 years into it and they just have a job and not a business.

Jim: All right, so, you went from service industry, which is your IMS, right?

Solomon: Correct.

Jim: To creating the software, to help streamline your agency, which then later led to you creating a new business altogether, which is Click X.

Solomon: That is absolutely right. So here I am, college grad, right day after college. My parents wouldn't let me start anything before that because they're afraid that I'm gonna drop up. So I waited to make them make I really happy. And then I said, well, I'm gonna have to switch gear and pursue my entrepreneurial passion, which is at the time I didn't really know that I was gifted at the time, it was more about marketing service, does that make sense? It was, it was me learning how to build websites, it was me doing search engine optimization. That's what I was doing my early days. And so I hit this roadblock that is, I cannot get past about 10 to $30,000 per month. That's the problem. I can't get, I just no matter, it's basically where everybody's starting today, there's gonna be some sort of a glass ceiling that they just cannot hit. Like, no matter what you do, some people, it might be, I can't break the million dollars a year mark. Right? Some people, it might be, I can't get past $10,000 a month. I don't know what I'm doing right or I'm doing wrong, but I can't do it. So for me, that was the thing, and then what happened to what, what I did is I asked myself, there's got to be somebody else who's done this before, I can't be the only person that has the same problem. So when you it's, the, the questions you ask yourself is, well, how you get the result that you want, it's asked better questions. So my question was, what do I need to do to find somebody who's done this before and that's what led me to knowing this thing called the personal development industry and sales and marketing and all of the things, I was a technician if you read e-myth, I was not an entrepreneur, meaning I didn't really have a clue what I was doing to scale the business. So that's how I stumbled on e-myth, that's how I stumbled on all the books about you know, traction, that's how I stumbled on scaling up, then I went to conferences, I signed up for every coaching thing, you could imagine. I hired people that have done this before I hired people that sold businesses and I only hung out with people that knew how to grow businesses. That's when I realized that what I need to do is build a software because technically what I need is a system to put every single client through. So if I had consistent input, I can have consistent output garbage in garbage out. So then I realized that maybe what I need to do is find similar customers, local based businesses, maybe people that are only looking for lead generation and not e-commerce right. Those are apples and oranges, so once I started to do that, we built a tool in house and, you know, it was kind of like our digital marketing thing, because that's what it was like at the time I was web design. So we, we put brand like the digital marketing aspect of our business was Click X, but it was really a system that we built to bring customers in consistently onboard them and manage them and also give them a dashboard where they can see all their data, because for us, it was so many different puts inputs like Google analytics, Google ads, all this kind of other things, they didn't even have Facebook ads at the time. So it was like call tracking and all of these things was just too much data for us to put in an Excel spreadsheet and PDFs. We said, what if we just streamlined it and that was kind of like our pivot from being a service company, which is unscalable to being a product company, which is scalable.

Jim: That's incredible.

Solomon: Well, like I said, I, it wasn't easy. No,  right. I didn't know what I was doing half the time. Needless to say that cash flow issues trying to be a software company and you have service paid, like it doesn't work. You still have salary. So I was dumping everything I made back into this dream and then clearly, if you're an entrepreneur you're getting started, you know how exhausting it is? You literally, your battery's not empty, like you, you have no energy, you know what I'm saying? And then needless to say, like, you know, you're like, do I work on the software side? Do I work on the business? If you're asking that question yourself, who's listening to me and watching me, it's like, I don't know what to work on. Do I work in the business? Do I work on the business? I was literally to work, working in the businesses, doing the campaigns, doing the day to day, working on the business, build the system. Talk to my engineers to give 'em the thing that they need to do to code. It was literally trying to like, you know, you're pulled apart. Like, which one should I do? Do I do the thing that's gonna make me money? Or do I do the thing that's gonna help me scale? These are tough questions that every single person who's starting or thinking about starting or already started looking to scale, gonna have to answer. How do I invest my time?

Jim: So what would be the number one piece of advice you can give to a starting entrepreneur? Someone that's starting a business and you know, in that situation you were in where you're working on it like, what advice would you give them?

Solomon: I would say that, like, I wanna have some clear, like have clarity in your mind what you wanna accomplish. Let's just, let's just practical or let's get practical, if I'm trying to get $10,000 a month, that's my goal. I would wanna make that first, want to know what is it I'm trying to make and why do I want 10,000? It's the first thing I would just say, what is it and why? Then my strategy is how do I reverse engineer. Today, I help agency scale and I don't ever go into what product do you wanna sell? I don't go into, do you wanna do it in-house or outsource the work, I go into how much money are you trying to, and the reason is you gotta have something you'll never hit a target that you don't know, like you can't, you can't hit a fuzzy target, so you gotta have some sort of target, it doesn't matter what the number is bigger the entrepreneur, the bigger, the number smaller you are make, do something that's gonna excite you, there's a good payout, right? You're gonna be fired up to hit 50 cave, that's your number and then work backwards. That's what I would say, because then you'll ask questions, well, how do I get two leads a day, how do I get four leads a day? It all comes down to some numbers. I need four leads and if every single one out of four, which is 25% of them convert into a proposal or whatever it is that your company does or one of 25% of them buy or 25% comes into the store or 25% adds to card, whatever that metric might be, then you can say that to get to this number, here's what I need to execute against. And then if I don't know the answer to how to get four people at the cart, then you go hire somebody, you go pay somebody to tell you how to do it like I did right? I needed somebody else to tell me, how do I scale a service business? Or how do I scale a business as we're multiplying?

Like, I didn't know. It was literally, I don't know if you know, there's an episode of, I love Lucy. She was like putting candy or whatever, and then it comes so fast it's just like, things are all over, like, you know what I mean? Your assembly line is broken, right? There's more input coming at you and then you're just overloaded, you can't even juggle. That's what we were facing. We couldn't scale, if we kept doing what we were doing, if we kept doing Microsoft Excel or whatever it is, it wouldn't have done it. So we had to kind take a step back and figure out what is it that we want and how we're gonna accomplish it.

Jim: And you realize by taking that step back, you had the leads coming in, you knew the money was coming in as a service industry, but you had to put the systems in place in order to help and manage your growth, and that's what led to Click X.

Solomon: That is absolutely right. So we had to kind of say that, look, guys, we have our service business, we're gonna have to build a systems at the time, we had made $0 building this software, like it was just for us, it helped this scale. So we took a step back and said, look, we're gonna invest into this. This is gonna be an investment, when it's an investment short term loss long term gain, right? You invest, most of the time when you start a business, you make more, you spend more money than you make your revenue goes down and then it goes up. So we had to make it go down a little bit on purpose, you had to bleed a little and then you say, look, this is ultimately going to help us in the long run. This is ultimately going to help us be more efficient, and if I can save time and energy and payroll and whatever, then we will be somewhat profitable in that eventually like Tesla or any of those big companies, right? Any of the companies on public, if they're going public, they're spending a lot of money for growth, but then they're not gonna have be in profit. They're not gonna have profitability. And then eventually you start becoming profitable.

Jim: So as a leader on that, are you, did you kind of sit back and set your team and say, listen, you on the service side, you're gonna continue doing what you're doing, you're gonna continue, like nothing else is going on and then you had another team that you brought in of developers and experts in building software to, and you managed both of those.

Solomon: Correct. So our team would be involved to a degree that they needed to be involved. So like they would, I would ask them for input, what do you want this to be? What do you want that to be? But that's it. We would have a different team. We would spend tens of thousand dollars a month coding the thing, trying to make a prototype to eventually be making it work, you know, if anybody tried to ever create a product, it's like, it's impossible, it's like, pushing this ginormous rock up the mountain  at any given time, it could fall right back, you know what I mean? Like you couldn't, you don't have the strength to make it up. So, but that's kind of what it feels like being an entrepreneur, I'm sure you've been there and you know, just trying to make anything happen is nearly impossible. There's more coming against you, right? The headwinds are just too much, nothing seems to work, you know, you can hundred times you never get one reply.

Jim: For those starting a business, that's why I think it's so important to really truly understand why you want to start a business, what your purpose is behind it, and to your point of, of picking a number, I think it's a great thing to do, to have a number there at target that you can hit. But I feel like with all the things that could go wrong, starting a business and owning a business, if you don't have your why down of why you're doing it and your reason and that has to be above the money, the monetary side, like I think if you don't have that, figure it out, it's a lot easier to get distracted and ultimately want to give up.

Solomon: I agree. And that's why the statistics like 50% of the businesses are gone by year two. And then 90% of them are gone by year nine it's because they didn't work long enough to actually figure out. I think the, the goal of an entrepreneur is to keep going until like basically what everybody else is giving up well, you're the one's gonna try long enough that you'll be successful. You just wanna make enough money that you could keep doing it. If that , if that makes sense. Just enough money that you have enough money to keep going until you can figure out the perfect funnel or figure out the perfect offer, figure out the perfect niche, the perfect software just gotta keep at it. Because most of us, I would say even myself, I don't think we would try as hard as Elon has tried trying to get starship the, you know what I mean the rocket. Whenever it comes back blown up, we would be like, ah, this, I think this we're burning too many millions. Let's call this quits, we can come back to this in two years or three years, right? We're delaying our dream because we're not willing to risk more and keep trying, but absolutely you're right on point there.

Jim: So tell me, let's talk a little bit more about Click X as an agency, as a small business owner, what does clicks click X do and give us a little background.

Solomon: Absolutely. So back in the day, this is our product was helping, you know, customers get leads. Lead generation and customer acquisition, those were the two pillars. We helped them generate leads and the leads gotta be quality so that they turn into customers, a percentage of them, right, nobody's got a hundred percent conversion rate. So a percentage of them and obviously whatever that revenue that generated, it was worth it lifetime, the lifetime value was way greater than what they paid us and what they paid in ads and everything else, but it made sense for them to do it. So our job is to help customers grow. Now over timem, because we have a blueprint, we got the framework, we've scaled our agencies to multiple millions and we're like, Hey, other agencies, I was working with other agencies, I would be the back office, our efficiency was so good that they can like pay us to do it and I've helped other agencies scale to like millions, we're like, maybe there's something there. So we start to discover a process to help agencies duplicate the success that I've had, which is productization, lead generation, offer creation, niche, selection, all those things that they need to do, I teach it and now I help them execute it, I coach them and they also use our software, which we built for ourselves to then scale that if that makes sense, that's what the business were in today, before it was us doing the work, like people would hire us, then we would do their Facebook ads. People would still do, you know, a big chunk of our money is still executing campaign. So I'm still in the trenches on a day to day basis but our impact has changed significantly from doing to now teaching and helping others accomplish the same end goal, which is having a product service based business that can scale.

Jim: Have, is there a certain recurring theme that you've seen with small businesses that if they could just change or if they could do differently in the way that they're trying to reach their target customer? What would that be? What's something that you've seen that you could give advice to the Remote Start Nation, that if they aren't having success, generating those leads that they want, what could they change immediately that can make a difference?

Solomon: I think, I have a giant TV in my room, right? And that TV, I may have showed you in our last chat. It's my calendar. It's what my day goes. So I have meetings after meetings, after meetings, if that's the day with meetings, if it's internal, it's internal, so now it's an interview, and then go on to the next thing. Every minute, while I have my energy, we start with a 100% energy, like our dura cell battery is a 100% when we start at eight, it's at zero at five or seven or nine or 12, whatever it is, your energy level is. So you gotta figure out where your energy is invested during that time. Most of us are spending all of that energy in the business, which is making the t-shirt, which is the graphic design of it, which is the call in the warehousing, the storage like shipping, boxing, labeling, whatever it is that's called working in the business versus working on the business, which is, hey, how do I get more people to show up to my shop? How do I get more people to buy? How do I get more podcast interviews? If that's what you need to do, how do I get the word app? I have a giant funnel, do you wanna bring it real quick, I have a giant funnel in my studio, my other room where I show this to people, which is how do I get more people to go in my funnel to eventually buy my product on the other end. Does that make sense? So I would say that you need to figure out what's on your giant TV in your room, how is your time being spent? Is that time being spent working in the business, you're not gonna grow, I'll tell you that right now, if it's working on the business, you have much more likelihood of success, you have much more chance of doubling your sales, doubling your revenue, doubling the followers, doubling the amount of videos that's on their YouTube channel, doubling the subscribers. This is what I would say, right? This right here is precisely the difference between working in the business versus working on the business. So it's how big is your funnel? Your funnel can only get so big if you are doing it, it's this big. Does that make sense? If you have an intern helping you, it's slightly bigger, but if you really want to go giant, I wanna build a giant funnel and put it in my entrance, like when they walk in, like, what is this thing? Well, this is what business. If I can explain to entrepreneurship in one illustration, it is the concept of how big is your funnel, right? This, if you want a $50,000 funnel, that's a tiny one. Can I get the tiny one? All we're gonna have some little fun illustration now. Okay. This is the $10,000 funnel, you with me, right? Then you double your size, that's two exit, but you got $20,000 funnel, that looks like this, because your $20,000 funnel, this is you and three virtual assistants from Philippines. This is what you're capable because that's the resource, that's the time energy you got, and if you're working in the business, it's not gonna double. The only way to double this funnel is to say, you know what, I'm gonna hire a marketing agency, I'm gonna hire a consultant, I'm gonna automate, I'm gonna do some marketing automation, I'm gonna put out four tweets of, you know, an hour or four tiktoks or four days or whatever that is. Now, I'm gonna double my list size that's this big of a funnel. This is now my reach, when the reach is bigger, you're gonna make more money in the bottom. It's a law. You can't, you cannot put water in the top and not have some come out the bottom. You can't, it doesn't work. It doesn't just fall off, the fish doesn't jump over, if they're in, they're gonna, a percentage of them will come down, right? Now this is what you might be able to do internally if you get out of the business, see a bigger picture saying, man, this funnel is still not big, I need to make it bigger. Then comes the Gary V funnel. This would be, this would be the Grant Cardone funnel, this would be the Russell Branson funnel or whoever you wanna insert the name is, they just have a bigger funnel than you, that's it, they're working on the business, the reason why you go to LinkedIn, you see his video, you switch to Instagram, you see the video, you go to TikTok, can't get rid of them, you can't, it's because they figured out that the business is how big can I make my top, that's all they're working on. None of them are working on how many more it can get from the bottom, because they know if my top is bigger, my bottom is naturally going to be bigger. Was that a good illustration?

Jim: That was fantastic. So put the pieces in place for you to allow yourself as the business owner, to work on the business and not in it, create the team to help do all the other things. So you can focus your energy on the things that matter, which is getting traffic into the funnel.

Solomon: A hundred percent. And like I said, that's why my calendar is the first and foremost thing, I don't even turn it on, my team, they're cool enough to go and turn it on for me, because the moment I get in, I'm in go mode. I don't wanna have to think about, oh, what am I gonna work on today? If you have to think about what you're working on today, you're wasting your valuable energy. That battery do resell is dying by the minute, because at seven o'clock, when I ask you to come up with a marketing strategy, you're like, I don't, I can't, it's just too much, it's a blurry vision, right? So that's what it's like, if that makes sense.

Jim: It does. So, you've been published in a lot of business magazines, you have multiple books, if you could tell an entrepreneur, who's trying to grow, to read one of your books or to go and check out one of the publications, what would it be, what can you help them with to go and, and research more and learn more about what you've put out there already to help?

Solomon: You know right now we're just on, we're just having so much fun with TikTok. I'm just being completely frank with you. We're just having a blast with TikTok. And the reason is that I think for folks that are starting today, Instagram might be a little too late, year two, you just like, you know, you can't get the reach that you're looking for, unless you're doing YouTube shorts or something like that, trying to an edge. Remember that, back to this thing if you're trying to make a bigger funnel, if you're in the wrong platform, it's not gonna do anything for you. It's still gonna be very small. So TikTok has a potential for all of us, all of us to actually get in front of the right people that they're looking for. If you wanna learn more about me, I'd say, just go to Tiktok. It is raw, it is unedited content, and we're just having fun with it, not because we need it, we, I wanna reach a bunch of people don't get me wrong, I wanna help 10,000 agency owners, one on one to scale because at 10,000 means that if I can help them, each of them get 10 customers that's hundred thousand businesses, I am touching indirectly. I help you. And now you help 10 customers, that's hundred thousand entrepreneurs I can help, right, indirectly. And all of those entrepreneurs like us, what do we do? We hire people, Jim, we hire people, we hire at least 10 people in our day, so if each of those businesses hired 10 people, I've now indirectly helped a million people because of my tiny number of 10 thousands that you not that big but the fact of the matter is there's in indirect effect in everything that we do, right? We never see that part, we just end with the revenue, P and L we go home file our taxes done. there's a bigger, there's something bigger that's happening here, which is we're helping business owners just like teach a man how to fish, I can't fish for everybody, I can show you how to get customers and how to get them resolved because get all of us, have that purpose, like you said, that's my, why we, as a company, come to work every single day with our full a hundred percent energizer battery so that we can help 10,000 business owners, agency owners, scale, each of them can easily get 10 clients. I hope they get a hundred, but then every single client that they acquire, we're now impacting lives, that's not even seen, I don't even know who it's. I would never see it. So that's like our passion, that's our mission, right? So if you can figure that out, like you said, figure out that, why, why do you wanna do what you do? And by when I don't have an end date, it's not like I need to get it for in three months, but go to TikTok, you'll see me touching tens and thousands of lives because all I do is gift, there is no ask, there is no download my ebook, there is none, if they have a question they ask, I'm happy to give it, at some point, we're just gonna go live on, you know, TikTok all day. The reason I say that is that's what you, as an entrepreneur need to do, right? If you're learning, if you're starting, you're passionate about what you do, you shouldn't be asking, I'm gonna go get it, you should be saying, how much can I give, be a go giver, not a go getter. I heard that some somebody else like does is, I need to tell that to the world, right? Don't ask your followers, do anything or fans and say, here's everything you possibly could want to start and scale if that's me, so I help them. I'm doing a three day live challenge next week, three days of life and it's free, you can come in, learn what you need to learn, it took me 15 years to do it, you could have for free spend three hours with me. That's give, give, give, not take, take, take, right? So that's, and all of this content is gonna go on TikTok, that would be my platform, to get back to your question.

Jim: No. That's fantastic. And do you think from a business starting up, you understand your why, we went over that, and then next you think, understand your community? Or because before you get on a platform like TikTok, like you have to know who you're speaking to, right?

Solomon: A hundred percent, so most of my content's marketing, cause that's the only thing I know and live and breathe and passionate about and study and read by courses, and you know this, we're both like, we are the 1% crazy. So long story short, like we know we that we don't know everything. So we know that we wanna fill in those knowledge gap, right where we are today and where we're trying to go, the biggest gap is the knowledge gaps, like we're gonna figure that out. We're gonna execute it, so we can learn it, but yes, my audience is most of the people are entrepreneurs for digital marketing folks, entrepreneurs, meaning they're trying to scale, they learn a little tip from me about user experience, they go, you know, implement it, they get it, they teach them a tip about email marketing, they go implement it, they make more money, that happens to be my community, because most of my stuff isn't about, you know, relationships or something like that, I just, my people, my employees, my teammates ask me questions, how do I start a company? How do I set up an LLC? How do I do this? And I literally want every single one of my teammates to be business owners even if they're working with us, I want them to be an entrepreneur, I literally, I hope to make them a partner, so that like, but I don't care whether they go in or didn't do it, I want them to be massively successful because of their interaction with, because of their, you know, partnership, just working with someone like us, like I want them to be massively successful than any other company that they would've worked at otherwise.

Jim: Yeah. Empowering them, that's huge.

Solomon: A hundred percent, but they would start thinking like an entrepreneur, they start looking at cost like entrepreneurs, they'll start optimizing your company like an entrepreneur, but they have to first be taught, what's it like to be an entrepreneur? What should you be thinking about how do you build a bigger funnel? But if they don't know that they're just gonna do the same thing every day, it's monotonous, they're gonna get bored at some point, they're gonna quit because they never grown in their company, I think we owe to them to say, look guys, this is not the end all, you're an employee today, but someday I want you to be the employer, someday, you're gonna be the boss, I'm gonna put you in charge of this company while I go start the next one, or you're just gonna go start your own car wash gig, or you're gonna start your own restaurant you're gonna go start your own t-shirt printing and e-com and whatever else that you're passionate about. That's what you're here for, you're here for two weeks, two months, two years, two, 20 years, I don't care, but that's the thing that I need to first tell them that this is not the end of, but here, learn everything you need to learn about being your own boss and then go execute.

Jim: My business partner and I like to say, make the mistake on our dime, learn on us before you go out and do it yourself.

Solomon: A hundred percent, and when you do that, they, all of a sudden don't have the same pressure as like I gotta perform and I gotta do this and I gotta do that. No, you are here to execute, we're part of the same team we're gonna, we're gonna do it together, we're gonna win, we're gonna blow up, but take everything, learn everything, everything I know is like, I learned that, you know, I partner with a bunch of businesses and I learned from the wisest people, everybody that's running a business, we all got burned, we have entrepreneur, you know, it's like scars everywhere, it's like, then I know not to do that, and I know not to do that, and today, which is pass that knowledge onto the next person.

Jim: Yeah. So what's next for Click X?

Solomon: I don't. I mean, like I said, it's like, for us, we're already in like the group, we're just trying to scale what we already got, Right? Impact more lives. It's just really making all of us and we're growing by day, Like we got new people joining us. It's just trying to figure out what's the next thing for us. We're actually building a network of contractors, one of the biggest challenges that agencies face is fulfillment. They don't have people do the work for them to grow, they need people to do the work, right? We were in that space for the longest time, we're just like, whoa, we gotta think beyond W 2’s, so we're building a contractor network where an agency come and say, I need Facebook ads, specials, here's like 20 of them. You know what I mean? They're all us based and they're all ready to go, because of the pandemic, all of us are different states and countries, there's no agency next to them, they can't go work in them. So now, if I'm in Nebraska and I don't have a digital agency, just go to our network and then get hired by people. Same thing, we want to help agencies that aren't making money, we want some of the partners with clients to go use them to get, you know what I mean, get the fulfilment, so like it's democratizing the thing that we do, which is fulfilment, and so we can impact lives, it's really not about us doing everybody's work, it's about how do we help others find each other, how do we be the bridge if we can, so that others that would never have met could go through our platform, meet each other, grow, build partnership, do whatever they need to do so that they too can be super Uber successful.

Jim: The connector. I love that.

Solomon: Trying, trying, it is a lot of work.

Jim: Yeah. Oh yeah. You've got a lot on your plate. I love to see the success, the growth that's incredible.

Solomon: Well, like I said, when you put yourself last, you put the needs of your customer first, all of a sudden you start being greedy, it's not about us making a buck, it's about how do I help them make a buck? I don’t know, Zig Ziglar said this, if you give enough people what they want, you get what you want in life. So the last thing we wanna talk about is what we want, we wanna talk about, well, what does the agencies want? Agency want clients. What do these digital marketers want? They want jobs, they want money, right? Someday they'll make, be their own agency, but right now they don't know how to do that so they need some sales, so they need some people to pay them to do the work, they're God-given talent, they know how to run apps, they're analytical, they're copywriters, well, they guess what? They're probably really bad at getting customers, or they're really bad at getting, you know, a job or a gig if I may. So we wanna be that bridge to help them out, which is the individual side agencies just don't know how to sell. Did you know that the marketing people are the worst at marketing themselves? Right, like the cobbler's kids never have any shoes. It's like, it's been set over and over how we, the guys that are in the game typically do a poor job in the thing that we, you know, that we do so long story short, we wanna build that gap and help these agencies scale and grow and everything else that they're supposed to do at least know that big, giant TV, my office, where is their time going? Are they working in they're working the business? They're gonna grow, right? If they're working on the business, they're gonna go, but most of them are doing the client campaign. So most of them are the business, it's like named after them, does that make sense?

Jim: If an agency or an owner's watching this or listening to this podcast episode, should they go to Click X, where should, should they go find you on TikTok? Like where would you recommend?

Solomon: A hundred percent, Go to Click X, clickx.io. but beyond that, just to kind of follow along the growth and the journey, just, I would say TikTok, probably the platform we're gonna be publishing the most because we see the most uptick in activity and engagement, so it's kind of like we optimize to what. This is like, this is a good secret to growing business. You don't optimize the thing that doesn't work. If you can get 1% conversion rate, yeah, we got 1% now, how do we two exit? That's it, I wouldn't, I wouldn't play with all my other things at the same time, I would say, well, I got to two, how did we make it three? How did we get to three to four? And that little thing is what you try to do until you are really, you're really happy with it. I would mess with another platform. See when we're trying to do all of them at the same time we get like brain fog and we just, we said none of this stuff is working give up. But if you just say, look on for everything that happens for every action, there's a, you know, there's a positive and negative reaction, right. So we know that if I'm getting 1%, I'm pretty sure I can figure out how to get 2%, I can figure out how to make it 4%, 4-6, like that's the way we're looking at optimist. It's like we do that for client all. We just gotta look at ourselves and say, well, of all the thinking we're posting, what's working. We see, we see TikTok as our next, our game. And I think every, every single person that's watching or listening, this should really say it like what's working in my marketing. John Wannamaker said that 50% of my market doesn't work. The problem is finding out which 50%, right? So we're just trying to figure that out and then say, okay, well we know this 50 percent's working, how do we optimize it so we can get more clickthrough rates more. Opt-in clearly more conversions, if that makes sense.

Jim: Yeah, it does. That's great advice. So man, we talk about when you get in the office, there's that, your computer or, I mean your TV, which has your calendar on it, and you start from there. Do you have a routine in the morning that you like to follow personally to help with, you know, your personal self and you know, getting you ready for the day?

Solomon: Brian Tracy said, eat your frog in the morning. So all entrepreneurs was listening to me, gotta read that book, number one. Number two, for us, our frog might be prospect, our frog might be not exercising in the morning, our frog might be, we're not investing in ourselves, like there's no personal development, there's no book reading, there's no meditation, prayer, whatever it is that you need to do. So for me, it's exercising, getting off for a run, doing some exercise, that's my frog, that starts like at five in the morning, right? That's the thing. So I do all of that. Well, I get the office, it's go game, it's like it's it is not, my days already, like max to the Bri, is how many things can I do project management to people, management, to process management, what is, what do we need to accomplish to make today be the most successful day possible? How do we milk every ounce of today rather than say, ah, you know, it was an okay date, hopefully tomorrow will be better. I don't wanna do that. Does that make sense?

Jim: Yeah, yeah. Oh, absolutely. For and talking about that personal development and your schedule, your schedule is so important to you. What, how do you start? Do you just have a rolling schedule and you're constantly putting stuff in or do you, is it like Monday morning, that's the first thing you do is set your calendar up for the week?

Solomon: Yeah. So most, it's calendar it's blocking time. So we have times blocked for different things throughout the week, and there's obviously some open time for meetings and things like that, client meetings or partners, I call them, but most of the time it's already like devoted to whatever that thing is, whether it's a meeting to talk about five clients and you know, those are all set, so I don't really have to do anything, I just have to be there and be present and execute. So clearly, like we teach the same model to every single one of our employees. We come to work with eight hours of time or whatever many hours you wanna put in, like whether it's six or eight or nine or four, doesn't matter. That's your imput, right? So don't, it's not like you should ask what you got done in the day not how many hours you worked? Does that make sense? Oh, I worked four hours, but what was in the four hours? That's more important than the hours you worked. So I just try to make sure that my in the hours is everything that I needed to get done or everything that my team needed from me so that they can do their job successfully.

Jim: That's great advice. Well, Solomon, thank you so much. I know our time is coming to an end. A huge added so much value, I hope the Remote Start Nation, I hope you learned as much as I did today. It's been incredible, I hope we could take some of the value that Solomon dropped here, and put it to work for you right away. From the bottom of my heart, I think you all for joining me on this journey, as I help you to start a business, grow your brand and create your desired lifestyle. Remember to leave a comment, Go check out, Click X, go watch Solomon on TikTok. See what he's doing every day, see what he's putting out there. Remember to share this episode with your community, who you think could learn from what you heard here today.

Until next time, go start something start today and go build the lifestyle that you desire by taking action.

Solomon: Thank you so much. Thanks for so much for having me.

Jim: Thank you!