RWL048 How to Leverage Personal Authenticity and Values for Remote Work Success w/ Brian Lemmerman of Inner Sensei

Overcoming Barriers in Remote Work

Alex Wilson-Campbell

0:00

Hello everybody, it's Alex again from the Remote Work Life Podcast, and today I have another great guest with me.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

0:07

Today I have Brian Lemmerman, and Brian is the founder of Inner Sensei, and you can find Inner Sensei at innersenseicom. I'll leave the details in the show notes for you, but Brian helps entrepreneurs essentially to shatter their fears, live with purpose and get paid handsomely for it. Brian himself is a digital marketer and has been so since 2009 and has helped thousands of conscious business-like coaches, creatives and non-profits overcome barriers to serving their clients by understanding their fears, running, training and profit. Let's start again. I need to start again. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I didn't like that at all, sorry. Brian has helped thousands of conscious businesses like coaches, creatives Got you Okay? Training their attention and profitably sharing their knowledge online. Got it Okay, let's do it again.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

1:06

Hey everybody, it's Alex again from the Remote Work Live podcast, and I have another exceptional guest with me today I have Brian Lemmerman, who is the founder of Innocence. You can find Brian at Innocencecom, and Brian essentially helps entrepreneurs shatter their fears, live with purpose and get paid handsomely for it. Brian himself has been a digital marketer since 2009 and has helped thousands of conscious businesses like coaches, creatives and non-profits overcome barriers to serving their clients by understanding their fears, training their attention and profit profitably, sharing their knowledge online. He's spoken and offered workshops at venues such as world happiness festival and the mindfulness course as well, and he also developed that. He well yeah, in fact, he developed that, didn't you, brian? Uh, barry university, so got there in the end with the introduction. Thank you for joining us today about um bright. You know, oh my god, oh my, you're doing great man, you're doing great.

Brian Lemmerman

2:20

This has never happened to me before in 60 in 60 interviews.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

2:24

I've never kind of. I need to start.

Brian Lemmerman

2:28

This is the this is no, this is the beauty of it. I and I would invite you to keep this take in your podcast, because you know what? You know so, like speaking of understanding your fears and like, just like messing up right, like just being vulnerable enough to demonstrate the process of producing something like this and how it doesn't always go perfect.

Brian Lemmerman

3:06

Following looks up to you as an authority and somebody who brokers other people's knowledge and shares absolute value, with expecting nothing in return. And you are a community builder. That is who you are and from the outside, looking in, it looks perfect. You know like it looks like. You've got it all together. You've got a beautiful website. Your community is built. You're now growing your LinkedIn following and I guarantee people in your community are looking at you like man. I want to be like that guy. How do I do it? He nails everything for sure. Absolutely it's. This is like people show up to your calls because they they look up to you in that way.

Brian Lemmerman

3:41

And what a lot of people don't realize is there are a lot of mistakes that get made in the process. Absolutely, yeah, right. I think that's. This is a huge thing to share, and I go through it as well. Yeah, right, like I've. I've been doing this line of work since, I mean for over a decade and I'm still figuring things out. I'm still making mistakes, and I think that's the beautiful thing about being an entrepreneur, especially if you're working remotely right, because if you are whether you have already been successful doing that or you're listening to this and you want to learn how to work remotely. There's a lot to learn, absolutely, and you're not going to get it all right the first time, and that's okay. The important thing is that you're not going to get it all right the first time, and that's okay.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

4:27

The important thing is that you're doing it. No, I like that and thank you for the booster there. I needed that. I needed that. Man Dear me. Just reading off a script is gosh, gosh. Okay, let's go for it again. Let's do this this time.

Brian Lemmerman

4:41

Are we going to keep this one? What are you?

Alex Wilson-Campbell

4:45

going to do. I'll keep it as an outtake. I'll keep it as an outtake. Maybe I'm a bit of a perfectionist as well. I'm too much of a perfectionist sometimes.

Brian Lemmerman

4:54

That's my problem I mean, I think it might be worth sharing, even like that clip right there, for people to be able to see what goes on you know, I will actually.

Brian Lemmerman

5:03

It's funny, it's um I think I will go ahead, brian, sorry the the thing that the thing that I shared with you on the call last week this landing page about, like, setting up the workshop course, um, and all that it's like you saw the beginning of a process that developed over the course of a week and it's like I may not even use that right, but like here I am like creating it and sharing about it, and it's important to share about these things, just for the process of how these things are created sure it'll have some use in the near future, but not immediate.

Brian Lemmerman

5:34

This idea evolved into something else which is taking off this friday, right and but it what it took was going through this process of saying, okay, well, I'm going to do this kind of thing, and then speaking to people about it and then finding synergies between different people in my network and say somebody says, oh my God, I want to do this aspect of what you're sharing, and I'm like, oh my God, this is what I was missing from my thing. Let's just do this. And then the project evolves. And so it's important to share the unfinished work. It's important to share the sketches and the bloopers. Yeah, the sketches, the bloopers, the mistakes, it's all important.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

6:13

Yeah, I hear you. I hear you, should we go again?

Brian Lemmerman

6:17

If you wish, let's do it. All right, go for it, let's do it.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

6:21

Let's do it. Hey everybody, it's Alex again from the Remote Work Life Podcast, and I have today with me an exceptional guest. I have Brian Leberman of Innocence and you can find him at Innocencecom and Brian helps entrepreneurs shatter their fears, live with purpose and get paid handsomely for it. Now Brian has been a digital marketer since 2009 and he's helped thousands of conscious businesses like coaches, creatives and non-profits overcome barriers to serving their clients by understanding their fears, training their attention and profitably sharing their knowledge online. He's spoken and offered workshops at venues such as the World Happiness Festival and the Mindfulness Course which he developed at Barrow University. Very welcome, brian, thanks for joining us.

Brian Lemmerman

7:13

Hey, thank you so much for having me, Alex. This is really great.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

7:16

Real pleasure to have you, and I met Brian quite recently. How did we meet again? We obviously met somewhere online. How did that all happen?

Navigating Lead Generation in Remote Work

Brian Lemmerman

7:26

We met through your Facebook group, the Remote Work Life group, and I found that to be a really amazing community and full disclosure. The way that we met was part of my digital marketing efforts for this recent project that I'm creating, which is teaching entrepreneurs and professionals how to digitize their businesses using online education. Right now, and I don't know how recently, this podcast episode is going to air, but if you've been watching any sort of media or reading anything on the internet, you know that we're in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic. Oh yeah, think of it what you will, but this is such a wonderful opportunity for people like you and me to thrive because we're way ahead of the curve.

Brian Lemmerman

8:12

So many businesses right now are struggling to maintain their client base, generate cash flow and to even succeed. Many businesses are subject to fail right now because they don't have what it takes to go online, and for people like us, who everything we do is online, everything we do is digital we're in a position to show these, our fellow business owners, how to digitize their practices, and so, as part of creating a mastermind group to show people how to create their own microcourses, I was looking for communities that I could get involved with and connect with who might be looking for something like that. And then I found your Facebook group and then we just started talking and I just want to thank you so much for putting this community together, because it's helping so many people start or continue their businesses in an era where remote work is now the new norm.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

9:06

Absolutely, and I wanted to thank you for connecting, and that's the beauty of you know, this whole experience that we're going through is that there's so much more opportunity to connect online and for people to learn as well, because, you know, we're in a situation where we're many people in a situation where they're we're yeah, many people are in a situation where they're being forced to, to go online. I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing, as you've alluded to, brian, and it gives the opportunity to, to still stay that, you know, keep those connections open to, to build your business, to build your career in a different way that you perhaps not have thought of or maybe you've been putting off, you know, and now is the time to jump into it, because the tools are out there. The people like Brian are there as well to galvanize that whole thing, and today we're going to be talking mainly about lead generation, because I know that's a big question and that's something that Brian is really into, right, brian.

Brian Lemmerman

10:01

Yeah, yeah. So working in digital marketing, one of the questions I get asked most frequently is well, how do I get customers for my business? How do I use the internet to grow my business? How do I maintain relationships with people using the internet in ways that wouldn't be possible if I only had face-to-face interactions? Or if you're in a position where your business is relying on word-of-mouth marketing it, it's only a matter of time before a that network dries up. Or you have to keep showing up to different events and meeting new people, and if you're constantly networking and maybe you're an introvert, I don't know, but that could be exhausting to build your network in person and hope that you generate enough business that way to keep your company going. It's one thing to try to maintain your current level of success with word of mouth marketing, but it's another thing if you want to scale your business.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

10:57

And with that I mean that's a massive clue, as I said before, in terms of what we're going to be going into today. As I mentioned, lead generation an important topic that many of the visitors and members of the remote work-life Facebook community have asked me to really sort of put some meat on the bones to, and Brian is just the guy to do that today. But before we dive into that, I want to know a bit more about Brian and a bit more about you, brian, a bit more about how you came to be where you are now. So give us a bit of a background on how you came to be where you are now.

Brian Lemmerman

11:36

Sure, yeah, so there's a couple of stories that lead up to that, but what I could say first is that I graduated from the University of Miami in 2009 with a degree in architecture, which is really interesting. So I had this sort of traditional middle-class education. I had a really privileged and good early life and I was set up. Everything that I learned to that point was to go get a job in an office and follow orders and produce good work, and I was really happy about the kind of work that I did. I love design, I love creating things, and I did enjoy working together with people.

Brian Lemmerman

12:16

And in 2008, 2009, many of you remember that was the height of the previous economic crisis, we'll call it and I didn't really understand what any of that meant. At the time, I had very little economic knowledge, I knew very little about money and how the world worked that way, and I knew almost nothing about business. And there were over 60 of us in our graduating class from the School of Architecture. I think only three people ended up getting work and it was, yeah, most people graduated and they decided well, I guess I'm just going to go move back home or I'm going to I'll just go to grad school. If you can get into grad school, a handful of people found work, but not in the industry that they studied in, and maybe some of you listening have also had this experience where you studied one thing and you found it irrelevant to what you eventually come to do. Yeah, right, whether you made that decision consciously or your circumstances forced you to choose a different path in order to earn a living, and so I had zero business experience or knowledge.

Brian Lemmerman

13:31

And there were a couple of friends that I had who were designers One person was really good at sales and we got together one day and we said you know what? Let's see what happens if we start a business and it started out as a graphic design firm. Right, which is like super narrow in scope, like okay, we'll do logos and websites for businesses, and this is like 2009, right, so what did you do in 2009? Well, you would custom code websites for small businesses and, like you know, if you got into wordpress, you were a real professional. So back then, things were a lot different than they are now, and I remember we we didn't know what we were doing really, but we landed our first client. It was a shipping and logistics company and it was a family friend, as your first client usually is.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

14:23

No pressure then.

Brian Lemmerman

14:24

Right, yeah, no pressure right yeah, no pressure. And they said, well, we need a website for our business. Their business did not have a website. And we said, sure, um and uh. I remember the pricing conversation like how do we actually price? You know what it is that we're going to do, and there are many different ways that you can go about setting your prices for your services. My favorite method is to just put a sticker on it and see how it goes. So we said, um, yeah, we can do that.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

14:50

It'll have these things in it and that'll be eight grand okay, I'd love to be a fly on the wall at that conversation that's essentially how it happened.

Brian Lemmerman

14:59

It's like, okay, you don't have this. We understand the value that it has for your business and at the time we preferred not to bill by the hour. So when you bill by the hour, if you're really good, you either have to increase your hourly rate, which can scare people because they want to know what your hourly rate is, or you just take longer to deliver so that it looks like you're working hard. We decided to skip all of that and we said, okay, sticker price 8 grand, take it or leave it. And they were like, oh, absolutely, because for them they were doing so much business and it was worth it. And so you can actually price your products and services based on the value that it has for that company and then choose your clients like that.

Brian Lemmerman

15:43

And so that's what we did and that's how we grew our first business, by avoiding the trap of working by the hour and putting prices on our products and services according to the value that services had for the business. And if you target the right customers in the beginning it was word of mouth marketing we're going to chamber of commerce meetings and we were doing free workshops to get leads. But if you play your cards right and you go after the right people, you can be very successful at that. Now, of course, you're going to face rejection.

Brian Lemmerman

16:14

People are going to say no, there's absolutely no way we could pay that. And I think we got lucky with this one, and so that's the first part of the story. The second part of the story is after they said yes. Then we just kind of froze and we looked at each other.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

16:30

Did they really say?

Brian Lemmerman

16:30

yes, yeah. They totally said yes, yeah. And then, and then we're like, all right, cool, we'll do it. And we set like a deadline, I think, of eight weeks. And we got back to the office and we looked at each other and and one of my partners asked well, um, do any of you know how to code a website?

Alex Wilson-Campbell

16:49

I love it. I love it. So you must have been sitting there with your poker faces on in front of the client as if it was a normal sort of conversation. And when you get back to the office you're kind of all your exhilaration and all your sort of uh process begins to come to your, to your mind, in terms of what?

Brian Lemmerman

17:05

you've got to do now Totally so. This was a strategy that I have employed over and over again in the last decade to be successful and to get to where I am now, and it's this If you don't know how to do something and you are totally committed to getting it done, you make the commitment and then you figure it out. Of course, obviously, you have a little bit of understanding of like how it might work, or a huge willingness to learn the skill, to get the payoff and to make a difference for that person that you're serving, and that's how you grow. If you want to go, if you want to grow rapidly as a person, if you want to learn new skills fast, you just say yes to the things that you want to do, even if you don't know how to do them.

Brian Lemmerman

17:47

You just say yes to the things that you want to do, even if you don't know how to do them and even if it scares the crap out of you. Oh, yeah, yeah, right. And then you, you do it. You move mountains to get it done, and there's always somebody.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

17:55

Sorry, brian, there's always somebody out there who knows something that you don't Right, and you can always get them involved, right.

Brian Lemmerman

18:01

Absolutely yeah, so you can commit to something. Always get them involved, right. Absolutely yeah, so you can commit to something. And if your price point's high enough and you're getting paid well enough, and especially if you, if you make your payment terms so that you get paid upfront, then you can afford to outsource your work to people who know what they're doing. And so I remember for that first website, I scrambled to master HTML and CSS. That was the thing. So I got pretty good at it. We got the website up to a point, and then periodically, you get stuck, of course, and it's like you make anything on the computer and there's always a problem. And so we did end up for several of our projects in the beginning, just to get them done. We would outsource to experts in our community, like hey, you've been doing web development for 10 years, can you help us with this? And then, of course, they set their price points. Again, no problem, it'll be three grand, like. That's like 30% of what we just heard, but it's worth it.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

18:57

Yeah, yeah.

Brian Lemmerman

18:58

Right, and then you focus on growing your sales, and and then eventually you get little systems in place and so you sell a project.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

19:06

you know who to refer to do the work, and it's a matter of just making the connections at that point so you've got the the background then and I suppose, yeah, that kind of helps your own learning, it helps your development. You're learning as you go, but you've got the expertise that you're leveraging from your community and your, your collections. Yeah, how did you go from? I mean, did you then build upon that in terms of getting similar clients? Or how did your journey go then to where you are now? How did that continue, man?

Navigating Business Partnerships and Values

Brian Lemmerman

19:36

so from there, what we, what we did in the beginning, was what most businesses do. We didn't have much of a plan and we were just trying to grab at any kind of client that we could to do whatever kind of work that we could. There's advantages and disadvantages to that strategy. The advantage is you can land clients that are willing to pay you for your work. The disadvantage is your company doesn't have a solid direction and you have to learn a wider range of skill sets in order to accommodate that client base. This also has pros and cons to it, the pros being you develop a wide range of skill sets so you can serve more people or you can serve a niche of people better. But again, the cons are the amount of either time that you need to spend to learn these skills or growing your network of people that you outsource to in order to accommodate.

Brian Lemmerman

20:27

I prefer to focus now on a niche of people. My ideal client is the person that I was five years ago Like, looking at people who are small entrepreneurs, looking at people that are coaches, people that work in the nonprofit industry, and that's sort of been my world in recent years and, having grown and developed in that world. I know how to help an entrepreneur or a small business owner get to the point where they can automate certain parts of their business or generate income online and especially teaching, like what we're doing here in this conversation. You're not paying me to be on your podcast, but I understand that as a marketer or as a business owner in general, or even as a person who wants to be considered valuable in the market, if I have skills and knowledge that I can share, I'm going to share it, because what that does is it generates value for the person listening it, because what that does is it generates value for the person listening, for the person learning, and it builds trust and a relationship there and what ends up happening.

Brian Lemmerman

21:30

I love the, the Pareto principle, the 80 20 rule. It's like 80 of the people listening, but even 90 of the people listening and go oh yeah, that was a really nice podcast, cool, and they'll get value from it and they might implement one or two of the strategies and then they they go on with life and that's great and I get to help them. That way, ten percent of the people listening are gonna be like wow, that was really cool. I want to know more about what he does, and I'll get emails or I'll get messages on facebook from people that find me through things like this, because they'll say, wow, that was so valuable to hear about the mistakes that you made doing this process. Because what it does is it saves people time and effort, and so I can become valuable by sharing knowledge and skills, and that is one of the prime marketing strategies for anybody who's trying to be an entrepreneur, especially in the digital space you alluded to, happy to share their knowledge, happy to share what they've, what's good and what's not so good.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

22:39

Because I think that in itself can can help people, can help the remote work life audience to overcome any obstacles that they might have or at least go around certain obstacles that perhaps Brian or I have had in the, in the you know, in the years that we've been trying to develop our own brands, our own businesses. Yeah, because there's nothing more frustrating, actually, than coming up against an obstacle and you don't know not only who to talk to but where to look, how to remedy that situation. It's always best to learn, I believe, from people who have have been there and people who have experienced what you're going through right now. So that's of great value. And then, brian, so you've got to the point now where you're you've got some clients they're probably not the ideal clients um, that you've got different clients in different niches. So you and then you start to niche down, as you said before. Yeah, so what was, what was your plan then? What? What were you? What were you looking to do after that?

Brian Lemmerman

23:43

Did you have a plan, sort of. We started to create a plan and so this was the thing in my first business I mentioned to you. My early education gave me the skills to be an employee, not necessarily to run a business. A lot of my business ownership skills I kind of learned on the fly, and in that area I did not learn them fast enough to be successful in that first business and in many ways I took a back seat to the leadership of my own company, and so my partners wanted the company to go in one direction. I wanted it to go in a different direction and essentially I was outvoted and I was okay with that, because what I came to realize was that as we we started to pursue, uh, what we call lifestyle companies and, um, these were, uh, my, my partners wanted to create a big agency where they would eventually have clients like Coca-Cola and Papa John's and like these big kind of multinational corporations and that sounds really good. Except my value system is one of, like I want to protect the environment, I want to do things that are healthy for people, and I saw a direct conflict with that and so for months after, we had these planning conversations and I just wasn't like. I was the disgruntled partner in the room, I was that guy man Like I was the difficult one and I didn't have the awareness at the time to realize that I thought that they were being really challenging started my mindfulness practice toward the end of that era that I started to see that who I was in my business was somebody that just wasn't compatible with where my business was going, and up until that point I had to really accept that I was not actively leading my business and that's why my partners were taking such a strong hold of it, and so that realization was eye opening for me and it it stopped me in my tracks and I had to. I had to learn to a let go of the business that I had built and eventually I did step down from my role as a partner and owner in the business and and I learned a lot from that experience, just in terms of the process of actually selling off your shares and making the next transition in life and that that company still exists and it's still doing really well.

Brian Lemmerman

26:03

It's a um, it's an ad agency. It went from a graphic design firm, started in one of our partner's garages with some cheap Ikea furniture and our laptops, right, and it's now. I think they've got 10 employees there. They're based in Coral Gables, florida. They're called threefold T H R three, three F O L Dcom and you can check that out. They're pretty cool and they do work with lifestyle brands. Now they have like big appliance companies Um, it's uh international shipping companies. They worked with a banana company. I think it was like a direct competitor to chiquita for a while, so they design, yeah so they've got, they fulfill their ambitions.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

26:42

And it again is a lesson in that, because in fact we had a conversation about this yesterday on on our group, chat um, which brian is also a part of, actually. But yesterday we were talking about how conflict not sort of physical conflict, but how conflict can arise when you work in an organization where there is sort of differentiation in values and differentiation in sort of like the direction in which you're going. Because you can get people who just well, not just, but you can get people like just um, well, not just. But you can get people like brian who have real strong values and have a real determination in terms of the direction that he wants to go in, have a real strong opinion in terms of the types of people and businesses that he wants to work in.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

27:29

And if there's, if that conflict is, is there, is is present, then one side or another is going to feel frustrated and there's going to be at some point where you know there'll be a parting of ways. Essentially, and it's not necessarily a bad thing, I think it's sometimes it's a learning lesson in itself, because when you feel those feelings of frustration or feel like in some ways you may feel like an outsider, if you're in a current, in a business that you're in now or in a job that you're in at the moment, if you feel that that's just your the what, the universe telling you that it's time to sort of really break out and understand yourself more, so you can then go on a path that that suits you better. And that's exactly what you've done, right, brian right?

Living Your Values in Remote Work

Brian Lemmerman

28:16

yeah, that's absolutely true. So, going like touching on this thing about values that you mentioned, this is this is so crucial and the reason that any kind of relationship doesn't work out whether it's a a romantic relationship, a friendship, a business partnership it always has to do with a difference in values, and so it's really important at the beginning to have a conversation with whomever you're about to engage with or whatever kind of relationship, about the value systems that you share and to be aware of where the differences are, and you can have that work to your advantage as well, because one partner can complement the strengths and the values of another partner. You don't necessarily have to agree on everything, but it is really important to acknowledge each other, to respect each other's values and to play well with them, to hand off the right kind of work to the right people, because if you are expecting somebody to be responsible for something that they don't value, they're not going to be happy. If you engage somebody in a relationship and try to get them to be a certain way or to try to be different so that they can fit a certain role, they're not going to be happy. As human beings, our core values are our most deeply rooted subconscious beliefs and as somebody who deals professionally with people's subconscious and their mindfulness practices and having people go from feeling lost to finding purpose, the value systems. Identifying your core values is the very first step to getting the kind of person that you were about to become, and we see this over and over again.

Brian Lemmerman

30:00

People go into business because they're friends of a certain sort, but they don't share the same values when it comes to money, or when it comes to service or when it comes to delivery, and that creates conflict. So what I learned in my situation was that leaving that company, although it was painful, it was something that I had built. It was a blessing in disguise, because had I stayed, I would have been trying to mold my values to the values of the company as it was growing. And that just doesn't work. And you will notice if you reflect on your own life, you're always in transition. As much as you try to hold on to a good thing when you have it going, it's always changing in one way or another, and it's it's these times when there's a rapid change all of a sudden like we're experiencing now with this pandemic that people start to panic because suddenly circumstances are shifting away from their values and they're not sure how to bridge the gap. But if you can be aware of that, that is always happening.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

31:06

You learn not to panic when things like this happen and you can create something new within your set of values to then adapt yourself to the situation so don't fight the feeling, I mean, and I think this is, this is, um, something that's overlooked actually, and you probably I mean, maybe you're wondering why we're talking about values when it comes to lead generation, but it's like brian said, it's the top, it's the thing that you probably look at first before you even get into that, because I've spoken to people who own agencies or they're starting out with their lead generation and getting clients.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

31:40

They've got I don't know five or 10 clients in their agency, but they don't like working with their clients because even their clients don't share the same values and in fact, they're so exhausted by the complaints that their clients make about the way that they work or there's there's a conflict even between them and their clients. So it's like brian said, you have to be conscious of the changes that occur within you, because your values system it's there, but you, you're, you'll, you'll notice changes as you, as you grow older, because that enculturation, in fact, from your parents, from your family, where you've been told a certain thing, which kind of, is in conflict where you are now, you have to realize that those changes occur and therefore start to I don't know you will start to gravitate towards people who share your values. So don't, so don't fight that you know.

Brian Lemmerman

32:39

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And in that first business, I was somebody who was still at conflict with the expectations of my family and what I was going to do for work. I was 22, 20, 22 when I started that business. So, coming out of college, of course everybody's disappointed. Why didn't you go into architecture? What are you doing with your life when you're playing with your stupid laptop and making logos? And it's like, okay, guys, be patient, right? And after a couple of years, my family realized, okay, he's actually like doing this and helping people and earning a living, so we'll leave him alone.

Brian Lemmerman

33:09

But it can take you some time to demonstrate the worth of your values to the people in your life, right, and so if you are going off on your own and trying to do something new or different, don't expect that everyone's going to accept it right away. That's okay. I think what you said, alex, is so pertinent. It's like you do you right. You have to create and live within your value system and not adjust them to the expectations of others, including your clients. Don't bend your values just because somebody's going to pay you for your work, and that's why I think the idea of just slapping a price sticker on your work if I say if somebody comes to me and they says, hey, I need a five-page website just to promote my business and I don't really do that kind of work anymore, but I can, I do know where I can help somebody there. So I say, okay, my minimum price point is $2,500. If you want that, let me know if you could pay that, and then we'll talk about what you need and all of that, and so I either get a yes or no right. Then if they hesitate, hesitate and they say, oh, that's kind of high. They're like, all right, cool. Well, there are lots of people who can help you for a lower price point. I can't guarantee what you're going to get from them, but then I stand firm in what I know how to do and how I know how to do it well, because I can create a website that's actually going to sell people's products or services, versus like a five page template that is just going to be, you know, informational, with bullet points on it. There's a big difference, absolutely so, um.

Brian Lemmerman

34:45

So, yeah, I think holding true to your values, even as you're selling, and and knowing what you're worth and the difference that you can make for a potential customer is also really important. And if you don't have the experience yet marketing and selling your products or services, if you're a freelancer, if you offer these kinds of marketing design services, whatever it is that you do, that's okay. I totally invite you to start off working by the hour or setting a lower price point if you feel timid about that, and just see how it goes. But Notice we're in the process. You get frustrated. Notice to see if you can be aware of the conflicts and values between you and your client. I find that often the people that are willing to pay the least are the most difficult people to work with, because not only do they not get the value of what you do, but they try to cut corners everywhere in business and they expect the world, don't they even?

Alex Wilson-Campbell

35:38

yeah, even at a low price point, they still expect everything.

Brian Lemmerman

35:41

Yeah they'll want to have like a catch-up call with you every two days. They want to pick the colors of the thing that you're designing. They're going to want to say, okay, well, I know I wanted this last week, but I still need to send it to my mom and my cousin for their feedback. And then you get their feedback like three weeks later, after they promised it two weeks later, and then you know it just becomes this mess and it wastes your time and you barely get paid for it. And then sometimes people like that will say, yeah, you know what this isn't working. And then you do all this work and then they don't pay you at the end.

Brian Lemmerman

36:13

So you can save yourself a lot of pain by just setting a high price point up front, and that filters out the people that who are actually qualified to be your clients. You qualify your clients. Don't let your clients qualify you. You can. You set your terms for who you want to work with and how, and the people who are serious about their business will pay. They'll be willing to work with you because they'll see that you're serious about their business will pay. They'll be willing to work with you because they'll see that you're serious about your business and that you're confident in what you offer. Even if you're not confident in what you offer, you can still figure it out after they pay you up front.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

36:47

So know your value and your values as well at the same time. Absolutely, but no, so you've gone from then, setting up your business in, like you said, in a garage yeah, now you're, you're in. So you started out in America, in Miami, florida, is that right?

Brian Lemmerman

37:09

Yeah, I started out in Miami.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

37:10

Miami, florida, and now you're in Germany. How did that all come about?

Brian Lemmerman

37:18

now you're in Germany. How did that all come about? That's a great question. So fast forward a few years. I went through a whole. I went through two separate career transitions between then and now, and my evolution has taken me here. I fell in love with a beautiful German woman and we moved here. She's originally from here and we recently got married Congratulations, thank you and we work together as remote freelancers and what you're seeing for those of you who are listening to the podcast you can't see but this is our home, and so we have our little desk set up here. My wife is in the bed working right now, and that's the situation. It's very comfortable is in the bed working right now. That's the situation. It's very comfortable. Also, working from home in a foreign country is a skill that we threw ourselves into and had to learn on the fly. There's a lot about that that I can share. I think that the story is really quite cool.

Brian Lemmerman

38:13

After I sold my shares of the business and um, uh, over the course of the next month, I was in panic mode in a sense, but I got into this flow of like, okay, what am I going to do next? And I I knew that I wanted to pursue my passion, whatever that was. And um, and so I I looked first to architecture, cause that's what I studied and I wanted to get back into, maybe, that industry and develop myself there, and I had it for a while that I wanted to become a licensed architect. So I ended up landing a job with one of the world's top urban planning companies, which, ironically, did not have enough architecture training for me to get licensed. It was urban planning, but the work was fun and it sent me.

Brian Lemmerman

38:57

I got to travel to different places in the world. I designed cities, towns, neighborhoods in all across the US. We did the master plan for the area surrounding downtown Phoenix, arizona. We did work in Portland, oregon. We did work in Brazil, the Philippines, and I got to meet a lot of really great people and I got to exercise my design skills and my business savvy that I had developed in my own business in a way that wasn't that wouldn't have been available to a typical employee.

Brian Lemmerman

39:28

And the way that I actually got that job was I had interviewed with the director of business development for that company. He was the one conducting the interviews and you know, I went to a career fair and he was standing there and there was a line of college age students and I had been out of college for like five years. At that point, I had all this experience and I'm like listening to them speak and I was like, oh my God, like I get that the average college student has no idea about the world of business and most of the people standing in line are looking for a job. They're there because they want something, not because they have something to give, and that when I got that lesson in that moment, that was huge.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

40:16

And when I got that lesson in that moment, that was huge and I think that is a lesson in itself.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

40:19

I think, especially now in this whole scenario that we're in, where perhaps more of a challenge actually in terms of acquiring new clients or getting the role that you want to get, the role that you want to get um, I think if you go from a point of view of if you approach a decision maker from a point of view of um, of being able to solve a problem or being able to offer something that they want, instead of going there as somebody who wants something from them, then you'll stand a much greater chance of getting those leads or getting that person as a client or winning that job opportunity. Yeah, but I think, having that realization, that presence of mind that you had I don't think it's necessarily everybody thinks along those lines, but I think it's an important thing to highlight on top of the values it's that how can you position yourself within a niche as a problem solver um, and rise above, I guess, um, because you're obviously going to have competition as well. So right did that, brian, didn't you?

Brian Lemmerman

41:26

yeah. So I had a conversation with, uh, with the director of business development and um and it. I showed off my portfolio at first and it was funny because it was a portfolio that I developed five years prior when I was in school, and it was kind of embarrassing at that point because my design skills had leveled up several times. But I chose to center my interview conversation around well, how can I help your business grow? Because I get that we're at the tail end of a recession and now things are starting to pick back up and companies are hiring, including your competitors, and now you guys must be competing for projects all over the world. And he goes yeah, that's absolutely true. Tell me what you know about that. And I said well, I have x amount of experience writing winning proposals to get however many thousands of dollars of projects. And so when I got, I got hired for being a designer, which is what they were looking for. And, by the way, like I had very little skill being an urban designer, my most of my design was like graphic design and marketing, but I learned the core. Less of the core skills of my design was like graphic design and marketing, but I learned the core skills of my job while I was on the job and then half the time they had me working on these huge proposals that they would write for cities and different countries and big developing companies to pitch our planning services for these projects. That were several million dollars in scale and we won quite a few of them, and so I got to be, in essence, a salesperson. I was a marketer for this company where I was originally supposed to be a designer, and I really liked that job. From an employee standpoint it was a really nice situation. It paid well. I got to exercise my talents.

Brian Lemmerman

43:19

As I was there and as we got deeper into the work I began to realize that there were some things about the work that we do. Although the kind of urban planning we were doing was altruistic, it was environmentally sensitive. It was supposed to be good for building communities and bringing people together. It's part of a movement known as New Urbanism, which is a return to making places the way that they were pre-automobile, where everything was so spread apart. There were some times where we would be hired to do these ethically questionable projects. So there was one.

Brian Lemmerman

43:52

We worked in Brazil and this company had amassed some land in the Amazon rainforest. And they said, okay, we got this land, we want you to clear this portion of it and build high-rises. And we were all looking at each other like, is that what you paid us to come out here for? And you get paid and you do the work. And I remember having this conversation with the partners in the business about, like, something about this doesn't feel right to me, it doesn't sit right. We're still doing it, and everybody felt the same way, but they had been in it for so long that their justification was well, you know, like if any other company got the project, it would have been even worse. So at least we got the project, which, like I, get the justification, and at that point my intuition, my, my value system started to light up that's kicking in again, isn't it?

Brian Lemmerman

44:49

yeah, like I can't, I don't know, like I I can't numb that and and continue doing this. And we did a few projects like that and for the following six months or so, I was in this ethical quandary of do I stay here and enjoy my comfortable paycheck and the people that I love working with, doing creative work, but it goes against my immediate value system, or do I go to the next thing in my life, whatever that's going to be? And I resisted moving on and something happens when you resist your values, and it can come in the form of health problems we make ourselves.

Brian Lemmerman

45:31

Oh yeah, it's very uncomfortable. You live in a state of stress and, as as a result of stress, you get sick. But sometimes the universe gives you a little kick in the right direction. So, you know, god comes along and is like well, I'm not going to let you live that way. Whatever you believe in is going to force you to make a change one way or another, whether you get drastically sick or, in my case, whether you're riding your bike home one night and you get rear-ended by a lexus hybrid, oh wow.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

46:02

And I woke up in the hospital. Oh my god, that that is the proverbial kick in the backside, isn't it?

Brian Lemmerman

46:05

oh, for sure it was a huge. It was a kick so hard I don't even remember what?

Alex Wilson-Campbell

46:10

oh my gosh, wow. Well, there's a lot there, brian. There's a lot. I mean. I'm just just just recapping on what you were, you were saying there, just to bring it all into, into focus, because there's a couple of things. So we talked just briefly about rising above the competition in terms of um.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

46:29

You I you've identified your talents, you've got your, your values set. You, you you're pretty well-rounded person. Well, you were back then. Even then you kind of understood yourself pretty deeply and I think that's so important. Talents, values, hard skills, meta skills, all those kinds of things can come together nicely to form the individual. And now you've you know, even in your in the job that you won, where you're doing your business development and you, you had that knack for sales and bringing in business, which businesses of all shapes and sizes. They can't resist that. Even if you, if you, even if you can do I don't know um data entry and you can do business development. There's always going to be a business out there that wants people that can bring clients in, and brian has identified that. But then there's always going to be a business out there that wants people that can bring clients in, and Brian has identified that. But then there's this whole thing about values. Values has come back into the equation again.

Brian Lemmerman

47:21

Always comes back to values.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

47:23

And it's essentially put you into a situation where it's coming to hit you home. So what happened there with dyslexia? Tell me, I'm intrigued.

Brian Lemmerman

47:32

Man. So I spent the better part of a year recovering from moderate concussive symptoms. I had short-term memory loss for about three months and I didn't return to work for I think it was over a year. Oh wow, this company that I worked for for.

Finding Purpose Through Helping Others

Brian Lemmerman

47:53

so I was about to go to Japan to do work, and I had always wanted to go to Japan and I still never have been must have great architecture out there as well oh my god, I was going to go to Japan in three days and I got hit by this car and it was the greatest blessing of my entire life, because now I had this opportunity to reflect. I couldn't get out of bed for about two to three weeks and so I'm laying in bed and um, and I was married at the time, uh, to to somebody different and um, and I was living the kind of life where you know, I was gone all day, she was gone all day and we weren't spending a lot of time together. And as soon as I was stuck in bed and I couldn't be that go getter type A personality anymore like I had no work to do, there was no place to go I realized what kind of life that I had built in my personal life. Go, I realized what kind of life that I had built in my personal life and I really got to know the person I was married to and realized that we had a huge conflict in values. It always comes down to values. Now we're spending more time with each other and I began to question things in my personal life as well. And at the same time, something happens, and I'm sure 99% of you can relate to this.

Brian Lemmerman

49:18

If you don't currently have a mindfulness or a meditation practice of any sort, if you try to sit in silence and do absolutely nothing for more than 60 seconds, it could drive you mad, it could drive you absolutely crazy. And for me at the time, I had just started that practice and I began to notice that whenever I would be still, I had this nagging voice in the back of my head like, hey, you need to go do something, you need to be productive, you need to go be valuable, you need to like. This is boring, you're wasting time, people are going to judge you, you're going to be worthless. And it just started to go on and on, and on and on. And then, of course, I didn't go anywhere. And so, instead of resisting the voice which I had in the past, I just became super aware of it, to the point where it became so familiar and so a part of my being that I decided to make friends with it and I said, wow, like I, I acknowledge that you're here and I totally accept that you're trying to help me right now. And I just want to tell you like, as your partner in my mind, this is, this is not going to help us right now. So, um, if you could please, um, so if you could please, and, and after about two weeks it the volume got turned down so low and it began to listen to my request of it. And so, if it would come up and say, hey, you want to do the thing now? No, not right now, thanks, and um, and I became partners with that side of myself.

Brian Lemmerman

50:55

And so I, during that time, I created this, this amazing ability to utilize that side of myself when I needed to right, but if I wanted to just be, I could do that, and that gave me space to reflect and to create the next phase of my life from nothing, not necessarily because I felt the need to do something, to be seen a certain way or to avoid being judged or to avoid feeling bad. So I decided that I was just going to help people. I was just going to help people, and so, like here I am, I had short-term memory loss, I had lost the ability to visualize, and then, over the course of the next few months, I developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which I then had to crack by just being totally aware of all the sensations in my body and becoming partners with my body again, and that's a process that I can teach people who have been through that. Um, although I'm not a trauma certified professional, so that's that's kind of like a a very touchy area in the realm of the kind of coaching work that I do, apart from marketing. But having, but having this, this unique skill, I decided, okay, well, we're comfortable enough financially, I have some time now, and I was struggling with some worthiness issues, like I'm broken and I can't help people now, and so to overcome that, I decided to just help people and I started volunteering at a co-working space in Miami called the Center for Social Change, and presently they've got about 75 nonprofits in this place, and what I love about this space is it's such a warm, inviting and collaborative environment. And as I was volunteering there, this happened to also be the same place where my wife was working.

Brian Lemmerman

52:51

At the time, I learned that I had so many skills from my past that I could just contribute to these nonprofits, who were essentially an extension of myself that wanted to change the world and help people in so many different ways, and so I got to support people with marketing, with advertising, with, and then we built the website for the, for the, the co-working space, and I was doing so much there that one of the, the, the higher-ups, so the staff members pull me a sign said hey, so you're volunteering too much. And I said what do you mean? I said, well, you're like giving a lot of yourself. And I said yeah, but yeah, but it's great, they go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we want to pay you. What, what?

Brian Lemmerman

53:37

They want to give you some money for the work that you're doing, right, but that's how it works, and that was when I really got the lesson of when you just help people, when you genuinely give yourself to something, the money comes, and that's been true throughout my entire professional experience. When you just give without expectation, people will take care of you, whether it's financially, with lunch every now and then, with sharing their time with you and bonding and learning and reflecting together, we get to make new friends and grow. There are all these intrinsic values that you can't put a price tag on, that you can get as a reward for this, and I'm sure you experienced this as well as a leader of this remote work life community. I mean, you meet people that you wouldn't have had the opportunity.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

54:22

Yeah, it's amazing it is amazing and in fact, um, it's. We could, I suppose, this situation we do. You get people complaining about being locked down and again, you have to point to the opportunity to. You mentioned something about having an opportunity when you're isolated.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

54:42

I suppose when you're, when you're at your lowest point, as you were when you had your accident, you were reflecting. It gave you that opportunity to reflect and really understand yourself better and, in essence, um, really become even more rounded, more rounded individual than you were as you were developing so and then you've gone on to, like you said, understand that your purpose is to is to help other people. You put that into practice, um, and you're an example of what you've just said in terms of when you give, you know, things reciprocate well, not reciprocate, but just they come back and reward you in many ways, not just monetarily, but there's nothing better than giving somebody a piece of advice or, you know, know, giving them your time and they, they, they say thank you, that was really helpful and they put that thing into practice. Right, and I think that sounds like what you were doing at the, at the co-working space as well.

Discovering Purpose Through Personal Growth

Brian Lemmerman

55:42

Yeah, and this is so. At this point I had gotten that in. In being a contribution, there's a a, an unexpected reward, and it could show up in any form. And as I, as I was doing that, more and more different people were coming to me and saying, hey, can you do this for me, can you show me how to do this? And they were willing to pay for it.

Brian Lemmerman

55:58

And as I was going through the tail end of my journey with ptsd and I, I had realized that the tools that I was practicing was so effective that, like, I could also share this with people, and so I decided to create my first mindfulness course that I offered on my own. I created a flyer and a landing page and, like all using all the skills that I had developed up to that point to then promote this thing, filled my first class. And then one of my students in that class was a life coach who had the teaching position as the meditation teacher at Bayer University in Miami Shores. And he goes hey, I'm about to step down from this position. Your class is awesome. Do you want my position? I can recommend you, and I'm thinking like I don't have a degree in this, I like, if you want to be a professor, you typically need at least a master's in something. I don't have that, but sure enough it worked out. Where they were willing to hire me, they paid me. I became a professor there for two years, teaching the most popular and fastest growing class in the university, and this was more.

Brian Lemmerman

57:08

It was originally supposed to be a meditation class and what it ended up becoming was a class that was geared for people in their late teens, early 20s, to figure out who they are and create their lives before they get shot out of college and into this thing we call the real world, where you just have to tread water and hope it works out.

Brian Lemmerman

57:29

Yeah, and hope it works out, yeah. And so it's funny because several of the students I had over the couple of years while doing that class, they, many of them, changed majors, many of them dropped out of college, some of them started businesses, some of them just quit college and said you know what I'm going to go travel. And they were. They had developed the emotional intelligence through this class to have these kinds of hard conversations with their parents who are supporting their education and like have that be workable and so like that's the power of getting to know yourself and being confident in who you are and developing these kinds of skills. And then imagine taking that and starting a business right, versus like just getting out of college or even just getting a business degree. You're still only following orders at that point. They teach you how to be a manager, but not how to run a business Right. So yeah.

Brian Lemmerman

58:17

Go ahead.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

58:18

No, I was just going to say I mean, it's like you said, at the top of the or the middle of the course. Basically, sometimes I think the. I suppose the impression I get is that people approach this whole idea of lead generation and getting clients just from the from the wrong direction. In england they call it putting the cart before the horse. I don't know, do you have that expression in america?

Brian Lemmerman

58:43

I don't know, yeah, yeah, it's the same. It's the same. We don't.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

58:45

We don't have carriages anymore, but we have, you know, yeah, so putting a lot of automobiles in america Exactly, and I think, putting going about it the wrong way around, and it applies to so many like you alluded to yourself, brian, to so many aspects of your life, your personal relationships, your job and your employment. If you decide to go and find a job, your business, your life, your whole life, I mean there were times as well. I mean I didn't reach the potential that I could because I wasn't quite in tune with what I wanted to do and who I was. But when you are that, you know that to, to want to figure figure things out first and foremost, everything else all of a sudden becomes a lot more clear and you're able to understand it a lot, a lot greater, and it sounds like you're now at a point where you're literally in charge of your destiny, right, and you've. You've figured things out. You know you've got your business up and running.

Brian Lemmerman

59:54

Oh, yeah, you say, figure that's. That is a funny illusion um this idea that somebody's got their life figured out right, like it's somebody who looks like they've got it all together well, you know, I mean, I don't mean necessarily you've got everything perfect, because I don't think at any point anybody's got anything perfect.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

1:00:12

Nobody does, no yeah.

Creating Your Life Purpose Compass

Brian Lemmerman

1:00:15

I got to be really clear. If you're listening to this and you think that there are people out there who've got their shit together, no, no, no man. We used to do these gatherings, these tea gatherings, and we'd have 30, 40 people sitting in our living room in a big circle and oftentimes this would come up in a big circle and oftentimes, like this would come up, that people would say that to certain people in the group oh, it sounds like you really got it all together and all right, everybody stop, raise your hand if you've got your shit together. And, dude, nobody would raise their hand. Nobody that I've ever met has had their shit together, including me.

Brian Lemmerman

1:00:47

Even today, we're still I mean, we're this is the second economic depression that I'm weathering as a business person. We're still figuring this out. Yeah, I get what's valuable in the marketplace. That's a good piece of knowledge to have, but it's not everything. I think what we've been talking about this whole time is being really clear on your value system and your skill set, that you have to contribute and if there is a specific kind of person or business that you can help solve a specific kind of problem with your skills and your set of values that are compatible with theirs. That's where the magic happens. And like that formula using your skills and your values to help others that you relate with.

Brian Lemmerman

1:01:35

That formula took me over a decade to figure out, through all of these ups and downs, and so then I started thinking okay, I want to teach how to actually come to that conclusion and get at least that part of your life figured out before you go and waste the next 10 years trying to build a business that's not going to work and that you're going to hate right, or pursuing a job that you're going to devote your life to and you're going to be miserable. So, like, how do you get clear on who you are beforehand? So I put together this, this thing. It's a free thing. You can get it on my website. You go to inner senseicom slash compass.

Brian Lemmerman

1:02:11

I call it the Life Purpose Compass. It's a free PDF that you can download and it walks you, step by step, through the process of identifying your values, identifying your skills, identifying who you can best serve and how, and then ranking all of these different activities that you love doing, that you're good at in terms of how you might be able to monetize them, and then also ranking the activities that you love doing, that you're good at, in terms of how you might be able to monetize them, and then also ranking the activities that you should no longer be doing and how what those take away from you, and it, basically, it gives you a direction of like okay, pursue this, stop doing this. Very simply, and so you could very well Create your purpose for the next decade out of a 10-minute exercise.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

1:02:54

And I think that's what I was alluding to when I said things figured out. Is that, essentially, when you've got that equation, when you understand that equation, that is the recipe for your North Star? Essentially, that, that direction, that the direction of travel? Because there's nothing worse than having that confusion of should I go that way, should I serve that client? Um, you just end up sort of like a scattergun approach where you, you're totally unfocused and it just it's just so exhausting, isn't it you? But it's so liberating when you understand that actually you know what I get on with this guy, or these people, this group of people, they really get me, or I really understand what this person's all about. And I think that is what I suppose I was saying when you've got things figured out. Yeah, and it's like you're hip to this also right, that is what I suppose I was saying when you got things figured out, yeah, yeah, and it's like you're hip to this also, right.

Brian Lemmerman

1:03:55

So, like you just mentioned, if you're shooting all over the place trying to get this client here, do this kind of thing here. If you are scattered for lack of a better term if you are quote unquote all over the place, it can be exhausting. And the reason it's exhausting is not because you're working hard and not because you're spending a lot of hours. The reason it's exhausting is because you are constantly engaging in activities that don't directly align with your values, and as soon as you narrow down your activities with your value system, you could work for days, for weeks, for months on something and just be lit up and enthusiastic and excited and relaxed at the same time and you become this kind of person.

Brian Lemmerman

1:04:39

that's magnetic. People want to know what you're smoking.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

1:04:43

And you're like I don't need to smoke anything anymore.

Brian Lemmerman

1:04:45

man Like I am good, let me tell you what I'm up to, because this is what I care about, and it's true, and I think there are, and it's true, yeah, right, and I think there are many parts of this.

Brian Lemmerman

1:04:56

My meditation practice is so essential for grounding me in the morning and clearing my mind, because, I will admit, sometimes when I wake up I get so excited about shit that I'm doing that it's hard to just start the day at neutral.

Brian Lemmerman

1:05:12

I like to start at neutral, to be grounded so that I can create from nothing, so that I can create my path every day, as opposed to waking up and worrying about what I didn't finish the day before and then, all of a sudden, my day is hectic. I think that is so important, and meditation is also really important for reflecting on who you are, and if you can pay attention to those persistent thoughts, you'll notice that they repeat themselves. 80 to 90 percent of the thoughts that you have are the same thoughts that you had yesterday, and so it's a really good indicator of what it is that you're worried about, and those things point to your values. They'll actually tell you whether you are aligned with your values or not. You can ask yourself what do I really care about what's important to me and I could say well. My highest values are service, creativity, community right and and sharing knowledge and wisdom.

Lead Generation and Persuasive Marketing

Alex Wilson-Campbell

1:06:05

If I'm not engaged in those things, I'm not happy maybe we should get get all this on a zoom chat. Maybe we should have a zoom we? Yeah, I think we should have this on a call. Brian, I'm kind of digressing a little bit on this podcast, but why not put it out there? Maybe there's some people who are listening that may want to. Um, you know, uh, understand a bit more about this brian's mindfulness. Um, how brian goes about his meditation. I know I am for one, and maybe we could even introduce it to the, to the um remote work life group, who knows? But maybe we'll have a discussion after the, after the show, brian, about this, because this is something that is just like foundational, isn't it? It's the foundation of yeah, of, uh, of, of launching your career, of launch or relaunching your career, launching your business, all those sorts of things you know.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

1:06:59

So yeah it's really interesting. But now you're at a situation where you how do you go about getting your clients at the moment? Then let's talk about, about, I suppose, some of the, the um, I suppose the hard stuff we've talked about, I suppose that the the meta skills, for want of a better expression. But what about the um, the hard stuff, like Google and all that sort of stuff and landing pages and all that good stuff?

Brian Lemmerman

1:07:29

Like the real digital marketing.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

1:07:30

The real digital marketing yeah.

Brian Lemmerman

1:07:36

Yeah, so what we alluded to just a few moments ago where I shared that free downloadable PDF, this is something that I created that's for free and it generates leads for my mindfulness teaching business. So I actually do work with young entrepreneurs who are on this same path and I look back at the kind of person I was five or 10 years ago and I say I can help you completely fast-forward that process. I can help you ground yourself, get clear on your values, determine your direction and help you shatter the fears that get in the way of that. And so I do get leads from that and so Like point-blank when, when you download that PDF you put in your email, then you get a series of emails, then they make an offer in the emails. So I have a program that when I work one-on-one with people, depending on what they need either eight weeks or twelve weeks To get you from point a lost and confused and overwhelmed to point B, confident, assured and running in a direction, actually building something that's of value to you and other people. So that's on that side.

Brian Lemmerman

1:08:36

The other lead generator that I have is a podcast. So I mentioned earlier, I have a podcast it's called Mindfulness of Doom where we actually approach these sorts of like, these fears, anxieties, discomforts, all the things that get in the way of us being our best selves, that people don't necessarily want to look at because they don't feel very good. But it's totally uncomfortable to look at your fears and the things that you hate doing and like. But to actually make friends or to be partners with that shadow side of yourself is so essential for being a whole human being. There's this positivity movement where people are like no, no, love and light, just chill, everybody relaxes, everything's good all the time. I'm going to look for the silver lining in every situation. Dude, you can't have a roller coaster that always goes up.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

1:09:30

Of course.

Brian Lemmerman

1:09:31

Right, life is like that and so you're going to have it Every day. You could feel like crap, and that's great, because that indicates that there's a challenge which is an opportunity for growth.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

1:09:44

Of course.

Brian Lemmerman

1:09:45

Yeah, but if you're not willing to face that discomfort, you'll never see the opportunity and it'll be a lot harder to overcome the challenge. So the podcast is about that and your existence in this human body that goes through this, and so we get leads for that. And then, right now, what we're doing is we're putting together a 30-day micro course mastermind for entrepreneurs who already have a premium offering, for entrepreneurs who already have a premium offering. This is something that is so relevant right now in this post-corona era where businesses need to move themselves online, and one of the best ways to generate leads online is to teach for free, to just put your knowledge out there as a way to add value to your community, which becomes your customer base. Your community expands or narrows, depending on who it is that you can ideally help with their problems, and you create a micro course within 30 days that people can actually pay for and learn essential skills or solutions to their specific problems from learn essential skills or solutions to their specific problems from, and at the end of the course, you put a link to your Calendly or to your Acuity scheduler and they can book a call with you a free 30-minute or one-hour call with you to then get on the phone and you get to work with them one-on-one on. Okay, here's how I think I can resolve your problem in your business. Would you like to work together and you make an offer?

Brian Lemmerman

1:11:17

And so that's another way of generating leads with people that you don't necessarily know through word of mouth. So there are lots of ways to do it. If you want to talk about specific technologies, um, you can. You can, of course, promote any products or service you have using things like facebook ads and google ads. Um, I I will admit I'm not good with Google ads. I find like the metrics and the graphs and the little drop downs and things. I can do it. I don't like doing it. Yeah, I am not happy when I do it.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

1:11:45

That's a proper. I think there's people that dabble in it, yeah, but it's not the kind of it's not something to dabble in. It's something that you either know pretty well, know well, or you get somebody else to do it for you. Right, it's one of those things. Yeah, and facebook probably is. Put the barrier to entry with facebook is probably a little bit lower, although facebook in itself there's.

Brian Lemmerman

1:12:09

There's lots of things facebook blueprint can teach you or just actually doing Facebook, but I don't think Google ads is something that you can learn as quickly as you might be able to learn something like Facebook yeah, facebook is simpler, but what I would recommend if you're new to digital advertising is get on Instagram, like Instagram is the easiest way to promote content is through Instagram, because you can simply make a post and promote it through Instagram and as long as your Instagram business account is linked to your Facebook ads account, then you can pay for your Instagram ads, because, whether you know it or not, facebook owns Instagram and they use the same platform.

Brian Lemmerman

1:12:53

But the process of just creating a post and then promoting that as long as you have a clear call to action and what you write is compelling for your audience, you'll get clicks. And as long as your content is consistent throughout the entire process from your ad to your landing page, to your follow-up emails, to your offer, to even the service that you offer you will be successful. And what I will say about this is there is one skill that I see so many digital marketers missing when it comes to promoting either their own products or services or other people's products and services, and that is the skill of persuasive writing.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

1:13:35

And I suppose that is a big thing. Copyright again you get people dabbling in copywriting, don't you?

Brian Lemmerman

1:13:41

Yeah.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

1:13:42

Whereas I mean copywriting is it's not easy. If you're not naturally sort of inclined to writing, writing persuasively, then it's not something to dabble in, it's something to hire out to somebody else. And even you know, going back to values again and going back to mission and all that sort of thing, if you can, um, intertwine your which is not, again, it's not easy. If you can intertwine your deepest values, your deepest thoughts, beliefs, into a facebook ad or a, you know your, landing page, then it's going to hook, hook the people in that you're looking to, to capture in into your, you know, into your email sequence, your funnel, your calendly. So that, I think, is a lesson in itself, a whole web class in itself, wouldn't you say, brian?

Brian Lemmerman

1:14:34

yeah, yeah, that's, it's a. It's a huge skill, um, that even if you spend a few hours learning the basics of it, it will save you years of struggle and heartache. Um, and what I could say about it? What I could say about copywriting is this If you suck at writing, you can still be a good copywriter, because copywriting is less about sounding good or getting the grammar right. It's more about listening to the specific pains and problems that your target market has and speaking to that pain and offering a solution, a band-aid if you will, and the, as the saying goes in sales. Let me, let me rewind a bit.

Authentic Marketing and Values in Business

Brian Lemmerman

1:15:21

When it comes to persuasive writing, you're not trying to convince people to buy something they don't want or need. It's um, I think marketing and sales gets a bad rap. They're two different things, by the way, and people tend to lump them in together. The association that most people have is that sleazy car salesman that knows there's a problem with the car but tries to sell it to you anyway. If you're doing that, if you're trying to convince people to get something, to buy something that they don't want or need, or if you're trying to bamboozle people, you are not going to succeed. They'll see, yeah, they'll know. Maybe you'll get one deal in the short term, but it is not going to go well for you If you are inauthentic in your business practices.

Brian Lemmerman

1:16:07

It just indicates who you are as a person, because I believe that there is no separation between work and life, like how you do one thing is how you do everything. So when you are writing content or if you're making a video for somebody, you are being completely open, genuine and transparent about what works and what doesn't work. But mostly you're speaking to the specific problem that that person has and how you are qualified, or how you have something that is available to them, or how what they've been looking for, what they didn't know they were looking for, actually exists to solve that problem, depending on where they are. If they know there's a solution, then you say, hey, there's this solution and it does this and this, and they go perfect, I want that and they buy and it's great.

Brian Lemmerman

1:16:52

And as a marketer, you're doing a service. Because you're connecting a product or service with the person who's looking for it, you're doing a good deed. They're willing to pay money for it because it's valuable for them, and so money is nothing but energy and it measures an exchange of value. So if you offer something of value, you get handsomely rewarded for it, right, you're doing a good deed. If, on the other hand, if you're trying to lie and cheat people or in the case of um, like many people who pursue jobs or clients, just because they want to get the job or they just want to get the client or they just want to get the money, like yeah, I gotta go get that money, that's not going to work for you, not at all. It's not going to work.

Alex Wilson-Campbell

1:17:36

People are going to see through it. They do it's, and that's when you get people even probably going online to complain that they didn't get what you promised them or yeah, there was something quite not quite right or something you know. So it's all about being true to yourself and it goes back to this whole conversation, in fact, which has formed and has turned into one about values, which is essentially it's it's the root of generating leads for your business or whatever. You know so many different things that we've talked about throughout this podcast. And, brian, whatever you know, so many different things that we've talked about, uh throughout this podcast. And, brian, I just really wanted to say thank you for your time uh on the podcast today. It's been enlightening. It's been shocking in terms of your story about uh the lexus and all that, but I'm obviously a very happy ending to it and really excited to see um and stay in touch with you and have conversations with you, maybe on another podcast or on a Zoom chat somewhere. Sure, let's keep going with it.