There’s definitely some lessons to be learned in the world of marketing. 

I can tell you this, if you are servicing people and you’re trying to help them get results, the number one thing that you could do to put yourself in trouble with a particular client is false expectations.

Telling somebody that you’re going to accomplish something without actually having any reality on it.

It’s the one thing that would screw up your relationships faster than anything else out there, and that’s from experience. 

 

Overpromising & Under Promising

I was fortunately/unfortunately–depending on your viewpoint, spoiled by two incredible human beings.

One of them was my number one mentor, my idol that I admired my entire life since I was born, he was a magnet that the whole team rotated around.

It was my father, he was an incredible content creator, and I would take him for granted.

He was what I like to describe as a “content unicorn”, and you could say he was my first client in the world of marketing. 

Another one of my first few clients happened to be a content unicorn, and his name is Dr. Eric Berg and still with me today. 

These people, you can’t try to be like because they don’t really exist.

Just like unicorns don’t exist there’s a few of them out there, but it’s funny–it wasn’t funny back then but people would come to me and say, “I want to be the next Frank Suarez”

Or “I want to be the next Dr. Berg!”

I would say, “Absolutely, let’s go, let’s build it for you.”

And I would utterly fail, and it would disappoint people and some of these people were incredible people, they were great content creators, had great businesses, great brands, great messages, etc.

That’s a mistake I learned over the years.

I know some people talk about over-promising and then over-delivering, but I’ve adopted a different philosophy because I like to keep long term relationships with people.

I believe that if you over promise and as a result under deliver that relationship’s gonna be cut short.

So my philosophy is yes, don’t be negative about it, don’t be dark about your own ability to help clients, but temper those expectations. 

I now always say, “Look, this is a challenge building that world if you’re not willing to put in the work every day of your life, giving me 7 videos of this length, willing to do this for a whole year, without having to worry about where the revenue is or why you didn’t turn into Dr. Berg, then don’t come on with us, don’t hire me, save your money because it’s not going to happen.” 

 

Time, Dedication, Patience, Persistence

There’s a reason why there’s only a very small percentage of us that are CEOs, business owners or entrepreneurs. 

Most people join a group and they become a part of that group because what I do is very difficult.

It’s a big challenge to lead an organization and get people lined up with a vision and a purpose.

It’s a challenge, and it’s not something that you should be immediately thinking about if you’re just getting started and you haven’t been part of an organization for a while to really understand how it works.

It’s not the right sequence of action to just go on your own and try to build it yourself so it is a process that everybody needs to understand.

Everybody that’s successful out there has gone through time, dedication, patience, and persistence.

If those things are in place, you can win. If they’re not, you will potentially have a tough time and a wake up call in this particular area.

So I guess in my case, the number one mistake is giving people expectations that I felt that I could help them accomplish, but I was surely woken up and shown by the world that it’s not like that.

And we have to travel down that road and not everybody’s exactly the same, but we all travel down that road to reach success.

That’s how it works.