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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I once won an iPad from a Facebook contest, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I tell you about one of the reasons I’m thankful for opportunity.
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What I Learned Yesterday:
We’ve arrived at November. The leaves are changing, the air is cooling, men have stopped shaving, and, like it or not, for most of us, big meals and family gatherings are right around the corner.
My family has a Thanksgiving dinner tradition that I appreciate more the older I get. For as long as I can remember we’ve been going to my grandma’s house for thanksgiving dinner. She is an excellent cook and always prepares way too much food. Once the table is set with ham, turkey, cranberry sauce, salad, bread, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, fruit, corn, green beans, pickles, olives (green and black), and probably a few other things that I’m forgetting, we all take our place at the table.
Before we dig into the food, and before we bow to pray, we take time to say what we’re thankful for. One by one we make our way around the table and every person takes a few minutes to tell everyone else what they have in their life to be thankful for. It’s a bit awkward, but it’s also a great reminder. We all have so much to be thankful for. It’s too easy at times to put too much focus on the bad and negative stuff that happens in our lives. It’s easy to get down or lose perspective. By taking time to remember and recite the things we’re thankful for, we get a better balance of perspective.
I know our Canadian friends have already celebrated Thanksgiving, but for us here in the US, Thanksgiving falls on November 27th this year. Each Monday and Tuesday leading up to Thanksgiving I’ll be sharing things I’m thankful for. I hope you’ll join me each week by sending in Friday Forum contributions that reflect the things you’re thankful for.
I want to start today by telling you about why I’m thankful for opportunity.
Opportunity is defined as a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something. Last week was a great reminder to me of just how thankful I am for opportunity. Opportunity is what allowed me to leave my corporate job and steady salary to become an entrepreneur. I made that move 18 months ago tomorrow. My journey has had highs and lows, as I’m sure you can imagine.
Since TV Talk closed its doors back in May, we’ve struggled to make ends meet. We were prepared for this possibility though. We saved up a very nice safety net while I had TV Talk as a client, and that safety net has helped us get through the last 5 months. It’s now a much smaller safety net, but I believe we’re well on our way to getting to the financial place we need to be.
Why? Well, let me tell you about a portion of my journey. Last year when I set out on this path I wasn’t sure how to get my name out there. I’ve never been particularly good at marketing. I made a YouTube video, set up a page on my website, and tried to get the word out among my podcast friends that I was looking to add clients to my podcast production services.
I got mostly positive feedback on the video and website. Some told me that they could tell I was reading from a computer screen on the video and that the angle was off. They were right, of course, but it was the best I could do. The comments I got about the website were all good except that it was a bit hidden on the website. This was also a concern of mine. But it was the best I could do at the time. Golden Spiral Media was the only brand people knew, and I had been advised to use that brand name to help grow my podcast production and consulting services.
However, as time went on, I became more and more dissatisfied with the way I was presenting myself. I know that most people will never tell you their opinion, whether good or bad, so I cherish each comment I receive about my business. If someone gives me feedback, I try to look at it objectively and see what I can learn from it. So when I had a few prospective clients tell me that they found my website confusing, I took it to heart.
I mean, if it had just been one prospective client making the comment, then I may not have worried too much. However, it was more than that. One of them told me that because my services were not featured on the homepage of Golden Spiral Media’s website, it looked like that stuff was just a side gig for me. Another person told me that they couldn’t figure out if I was a podcaster or if I helped podcasters. They weren’t sure about using my services. Those were valuable comments!
I began asking lots of people what they thought about my presentation. I asked them if I should keep it all under the Golden Spiral Media name or if I should break them apart. To me it seemed clear that I should break out my consulting and production services into a new company. However, as I began talking to people the opinions came back split nearly 50% for keeping it together and 50% for breaking it apart.
Finally after some long conversations with some trusted advisers, I made the decision to break it apart.
It was invigorating! I got to take all the stuff I’d learned over the last few years and design a whole new package around the things I’d learned. I’m a firm believer that change is always an opportunity to reevaluate things, and this change was no different.
I looked at the way I communicated on my website, the services that I offered, the services my clients were asking for or outsourcing to others, my pricing structure, even the way I correspond via email. Everything got reevaluated.
You know what I learned? Opportunity for improvement could be found in every single aspect of my business! How awesome is that?!
However, knowing that the opportunity for improvement exists and knowing the best path to taking hold of those opportunities is not always easy. I have no idea how much time I spent evaluating, brainstorming, and plotting, but it was a bunch. It was scary. Despite the opinion of my former boss, I have never been at a loss for ideas. The problem is figuring out which ideas to act on first.
I decided the best course of action was to create a list of things that absolutely had to be included with the launch of the new website and do those things excellent. I poured over every single pixel on the website, evaluated various word groupings, watched marketing tutorial videos, and worked out new scripts for videos.
When it came time to shoot the 3 videos that I needed to have in place on launch day, I wanted to improve upon some of the production shortcomings of my previous video. This time I studied how to make a teleprompter and ran several trial runs to test the quality of the results. I could not have been happier with the final videos.
I launched the new website a week ago, and the response has exceeded my expectations.
Here’s what I learned.
I should have made the change a long time ago. For the past 7 or 8 months I’ve been working with Cliff Ravenscraft. As you can imagine, Cliff gets all kinds of emails and requests. When he gets requests from folks that want to start a podcast but don’t want his course, have a technical issue, or need a podcast consultant, he sends them over to me. I then respond back to the prospective client, introduce myself, and tell them how I can assist them based on the information they’ve provided Cliff.
As you can imagine, I don’t convert all of these leads into paid business. Many of them don’t know me. They know Cliff, and they wanted to get help from Cliff. However, many of them are converted into paying clients. Last week something happened that has never happened before.
Cliff sent me an email introducing me to a prospective new client, and I replied with the same email that I always use. It’s a precomposed response with a few sentences are are customized to respond to their specific need. So the only difference in this email and the one I’ve been using is the signature. My email signature now has the logo and and website of Pro Podcast Solutions, not Golden Spiral Media.
I sent my response and less than an hour later I received a response. He said that he had looked over my website and was eager to learn more about all the services that I offer. How’s that for confirmation!?
I don’t know if it’s just coincidence or not, but for the first time in about 4 months, last week I actually earned enough money to cover all our bills. Now, we all know there are 4 weeks in a month, so our safety net will still be getting smaller this month. However, I’m encouraged!
I’m encouraged by opportunity. The truth is that opportunity surrounds each of us. We all have things we can do to seize those opportunities around us. However, it’s also important to realize that our best today is not our best a year from now. If we allow ourselves to learn from each situation, surround ourselves with critical and honest peers, and open ourselves up to receive critical feedback, we open ourselves up to see and achieve opportunities that we couldn’t have reached before. I’m confident that a year from now I’ll take a look at the work I’ve done and be able to improve even more.
Opportunity surrounds each of us. I want to encourage you to seize the opportunities you can today and use those opportunities to propel you to new heights tomorrow. You’ll never know how far and high you can go, if you never take that first step to seize the first opportunity.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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