Hello, trailblazers. Doug Greathouse here, founder and host of the entrepreneur journey podcast streaming on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and now officially streaming on YouTube. Just wanted to say thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe. And after listening, please leave us a review. I hope that you were inspired or that you learned something new from today's episode. If something resonated with you from the interview, we'd love to hear about it in the comments. We couldn't do the show without the support of our listeners. Again, thank you very much. Hello. trailblazers, degrade us here. And I just wanted to talk about something real quick. Before we get into this interview, after talking to so many different coaches and consultants, both friends, clients, and prospects, what I found is that although many of them say that they're ready, or they want our done for you services, which is where we build out your funnels, start scaling your ads, along with numerous things, basically, we are the we take just about everything except for some of the content creation off your plate with that, what I found is that many of them need help with their foundational marketing before they're even ready for that stage of what we offer. So we have developed a foundational marketing package. And basically what we help you do is dial in your offer help with your your value, ladder and price points. We also give you access to a high converting funnel template that we help you fill in, we develop a marketing strategy, both inbound and outbound for you, so that you have all the pieces that you need to successfully launch your marketing so that you can get to the point where you're ready to start really working on scaling out ads and things like that. So if you're interested in talking about this foundational marketing package, it is not a retainer, it's a one time fee where we really get everything down. And then you can take it and run with it yourself. Or you can hand off and we can do a done with you or a done for you. package for you after that. So if you're interested in having a talk about this, go to team.salesforce.com/strategy-session. I look forward to speaking to you. And today I this is the first for entrepreneur journey, we have a returning guest, John Cormark Karami. And he is a expert at scaling businesses and a serial entrepreneur. And he had so much value to give last time that I said, we've just got to get back on the show. So I can't wait for this. Without further ado, I'm gonna dive in Sean, for those that didn't watch the first interview kind of tell everybody who you are.
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. And I'm glad to be the first return guest. Hopefully, I'll be returning more. Because I enjoyed last time we were together.
So I'm a serial entrepreneur, I started more than a dozen businesses from the ground up with me being employee one, and growing them to 789-figure businesses. Not every one of them. I've had plenty of failures along the way. But I started very early on. So I'll even go back to when I was a kid. So when I was when I was a kid, my dad, my dad had his own business. And we were immigrants were from Iran. And in Iran, my dad construction business, in any developing country, construction is a big deal. And so it was a thriving business at the time. And in what would be probably not acceptable in today's world, my dad would take me to construction sites as a seven year old, you know, a six year old seven year old eight year old, and you can imagine, you know, going to a place like that and then being able to climb on these construction equipment and things like that was a big deal to me. I just I was just mesmerised and from then on from as long as I can have memories, right? I thought I would get I would go have my own construction business just like my dad. Right? And then and that's what I would do I would do construction I would be it would be my own business. So that's where it started. We move to the US my dad was never never really put together that construction business in the same way. And you can imagine a person moving from one country to another all the way across the globe, different language, different economy, different political system, all of those things totally different. So I mean it's it's tough people don't really think about that and I didn't really think about it until I was much older about what a challenge that is and what a sacrifice it is that people make all the time. But anyway, I you know, we got we came over to the US and at this construction thing was in my head the whole time the whole time. My dad gets his hands on a couple of small income properties. And he was terrible at managing them. He thought he would be good at it. He was not I got added, it was giving them a very tough time at the time, professional management bringing that in didn't make really sense. Maybe in today's world it does. But back then it didn't. So out of just the desire to help my dad, I put together a system, I put together a very basic database program. That was when personal computers were first getting into homes. And this, this really worked for my dad, my dad says to me, Hey, you know, I have other friends are in the same boat as me. Can you help them too? And that's how it began. Right? And a lot of times, right, it was quite by accident. It was not what I thought I was going to be doing right. I thought I was into construction. Wow, this was a little related. There was there was some maintenance to do on these properties. But But I mean, it wasn't construction. And I thought I have my own business, but not not in this. And not certainly not when I was 16. Because in my head, my whole thing was going to school, I was very into formal education still am. Even though I will tell you, as I've grown older, I know for a fact that formal education is not only no guaranteed, but not even a requirement to be successful in life, or in business. But for me, it made a lot of sense, because I liked that kind of cramming of information into my head. And I like that, getting an overview, even if it's theoretical of how something works. So I went to school, I got degrees in mathematics in computer science. And economics, I got a law degree, I've had formal education, which means not a degree, but substantial coursework, in marketing, sales, accounting, and all of that, when you put it together kind of together, it's kind of the backbone of how you the skills you need to sort of run a business, right? in very basic terms. And so that's, that's what I've done my whole life, I sort of, I get into a business, and then from there grow other businesses. And so, like, you know, I'll see some process, I'm an assembly line guy, I'll see some process and I'll say, you know, that we can do better. And then that doing that better becomes a business either, because it cost so much to do it better that I really need to market it out somewhere else, or because it just makes sense. And so I've marketed to my competitors, different processes that I've come up with. And those businesses have become bigger than the business that I that gave me the process to begin with.
07:42
So, over time, what happened was,
07:44
you know, I tell the story, family came to me and friends of family and friends of friends, either because of some, something I did well, and they and they were they were having some sort of an issue with like they were growing too fast. And they didn't have the infrastructure, or because of some crisis I was in, right? Because they said you got through that crisis, how do I do it, because I'm in trouble. In that same way, I'm seeing the same crisis. And so from there grew a lot of business ventures. And what I noticed was I love doing that. And so now what I do, this is what what it all transformed into is I run a multiple different businesses. But among those things, what I do is I help SMEs, small and medium sized businesses. And I partner with them. So we do it through education, consultation, and investment is the way I talk about it. But we really partner with businesses, and we have different products that we put out. And from there, what we want to do once we decide to partner with a business is to start small, work together, see results and then grow from there into a more robust relationship, which is what my my real sweet spot is.
09:00
Nice. can do it.
So you so you said small businesses, is there a particular types of industries that you typically work
09:07
with? You know, I like
obviously, I like consumer goods. But I've worked across a lot of different things. So everything from food products to apparel, GS apparel, apparel is a big deal because I always tell people I have I have more relatives that have apparel businesses that I have relatives. It's just people, people love doing that business. It's a tough business. They don't realize how tough it is a lot of times, but accessories, apparel, food products, different types of consumer products. And what we really concentrate on is creating a direct to consumer relationship. And it'll lead into some of the stuff we're going to talk about in a little bit, but But creating that direct to consumer relationship. So you may have a company that has a distributor network and you're having all these wholesale, you're basically whole selling all your, all your stuff. And your your products are getting into consumers hands, consumers may recognize your products, right? But they have no relationship with you sort of like how Nike used to be right? You go to footlocker to buy a Nike product, you wouldn't go to Nike itself today you do. So that relationship, creating that relationship for small and medium sized businesses is really what we like doing.
10:39
Nice. Oh, I have another question for you. Because you are a serial entrepreneur. And we've had we had another guest on the show. And it's kind of carrying over from that question. Oh, he tend to his most perspective on it was once you create someone been successful, know how to get to six figures, seven figures, etc. It's easier to repeat once you do it once, you know the processes and systems to repeat it.
Listen to this podcast now!
LISTEN NOW