Thanks for having me, Matt. It’s a pleasure.

I would say artistically, I was not the perfect sit-in-a-seat kid.

I was more, less late to class. I had everything done but got bored quickly. One of those, Yeah. Kind of challenge, I would challenge the status quo nonstop.

That was something that piqued my interest in being someone hands-on and inquisitive. Yeah. It was something that, and I had no idea we were going this direction back in those days, but it was something, it was new, it was fresh and I wanted to, I wanted in on it. I saw these computers and it was like, Hey, I wanna get in on and learn how it all works. Absolutely so that’s kind of what got me started.

Okay, my journey was pretty forced. I’m gonna say. Oh. I worked in the IT field as an IT manager, help desk supervisor, so I had a bunch of IT experience going in. I also, had a dual major in school, so I also took behavioral analysis psychology.

I didn’t realize what my skill set was, which was computer science. Okay. I was able to put the behavior behind the technology and, make those analytics work for companies. There was no data science role or even an existence of data science at the time. I just had a special set of skills. So I was being pulled in different directions by referral for people who say, Hey, we have this girl who can do this. She can help you. She can help you make sense of this chart that we have. We can put that data together and figure out how our team is working on a specific project.

So with that being said, I, at the time worked for a small, really small organization, a consulting firm in the Jewish community where we consulted for synagogues which was something I was comfortable doing so found me as we go into companies, we start working, we never do what we are hired to do on paper.

So it’s like I was fixing printers and repairing inkjet stuff. It was just all over the place and crazy, oh, yeah. I spent time there for a few years just managing the office operations helping my, rabbi with his laptop, which he had and could not work at all. So it was like, I can’t work this.

Enjoyed that environment and I learned a lot. I got great info just the consulting edge had a big impact on me. Ok, Later I left there after getting sick. So I was diagnosed with cancer. Oh goodness. I can’t go back to work because I’m in treatment 90% of the time.

I have two little girls at home. Wow. I can’t be a mom, go to treatment and still go to work. Almost impossible. I knew I had to leave work, but I knew I also had to make money to pay bills ofcourse. I was managing a kind of like clinic, a mental health clinic.

And a lot of the specialists there needed help because they were more or less behavioral specialists, excuse me, behavioral specialists. Therapy therapists, things like that. Yeah. They needed help getting their notes into the computer system because this laptop thing was new to them and they’re like, okay, so I can take care and I have to put my notes in the system and I have no idea how to do this.

So I’m eight clients backed up. So I offered to assist them. I said, Hey, I, you can bring them by my house. And I could do those for you and X amount of dollars. When we started, I did what work with one person, then referrals came in. I said, oh my goodness, I can’t risk having a whole bunch of income coming in this way.

Because at the time I was getting medical assistance and I needed my medical assistants to stay in place. A big struggle, Of course. Yeah. And I ended up starting a business to separate myself from the company itself. Oh, okay. So that was my, that was the beginning of my business consulting. Same name. I didn’t change anything. It was just my business consulting and we sell it. I knew that I could do a bunch of things from different job sets experience and just regular knowledge I had from school so I implemented those things, I sat and handwritten a list of things I could do, and that was like my sales. This is my sell sheet. I can do these things for you and here’s the price list. And I lived like that for about two years. Okay. Treatment was up. I went into remission. I was back at it.

Found another job with a large company. I mean a major corporation here in the States and I ended up back in it. This time it was more or less help desk, sales capacity, selling small businesses selling internet service to small businesses. And I ended up learning a lot about the backend, even more, I became more of on the engineering side of how this all works, but also selling these services and supporting small businesses.

The first thing that hit me was these people have no support. Yeah, they have no IT support. They’re a small business. They’re calling this company and saying, Hey, you provide my internet service. Can you fix this? Can you come to hang out, hang up my screen, or do this in my office? And we’re like, no, we have a demarcation.

We can’t do those things. Yeah.

So I decided to start an IT company where we strictly supported small businesses. We would be the actual IT firm for small businesses. From there, I did that I’m saying for about three to four years. And eventually they of course got on my nerves. It became outrageous.

Yeah. They wanted the thunder, moon, and the stars. Yeah. Together all at once today. So, that doesn’t surprise me. We were able, not at all. From there, we learned, just a lot took on a lot of information. I had a little team that I built. Who was working from home, just basically just doing customer support tech support type?

Stuff. It’s it was a simple setup and I decided to do something completely different. I’m like, I wanna get into, I see these companies they’re struggling on and different angles, and having a website and being visible online was like one of the major issues small businesses were struggling with.

Aside from that, They had no SOPs in place, 90% of the small businesses that I spoke to, I would say how do you do this? Or what’s your process? And they were like, oh they showed me I do this, and this.

I’m like, do you have this written down somewhere? And they were like, no. I’m like, okay. So having that clear understanding of what a SOP is, and how to put that in place, I started to consult them because I couldn’t do my job of getting that website up and putting, helping them to put the visibility in place without understanding what the company did. I switched things up a little. And mind you, my business was already my business consulting and I became a small business consultant for technology. So really helping them to grasp and I’m the pivot queen. I like to call myself because I’ll pivot in a second when I see a knee and I’ll go to that meet.

Oh yeah. Because it, it’s, in, in our field it’s okay. It’s beyond technology, it’s beyond right now for me as I see it, what a lot of small businesses here in the States are opening, every single day. So yeah, it’s okay, how much do you know about business? I’ll get calls and they’ll say, Hey, I wanna get SEO

And I’m like, okay. Okay. So what level of SEO are you looking for? Are you looking for local? Are you looking for national SEO? Do you have an e-commerce website? Do you have an informational website? They have no idea what I’m talking about. So with that being said, I realized I had to go back to the drawing board and say, okay, anyone that calls or comes through my door, I wanna assess them and see what their needs are before we talk social media or SEO or web design or anything.

Yeah. What is your or anything else? So I created I took the behavioral portions of it, and the time management portions of it. Pretty much everything a startup business owner should understand and know. Yeah. And I created a I’m gonna say a process. Okay, so what it is, it’s business development, sales, marketing, communication, and an action plan format.

Okay, what I do, instead of just selling digital marketing, you get a bus, a small business consultant as well as a digital marketing expert. So you have the two together. And we start small because a lot of people come in, they’re not ready, their business is not ready to go public, let alone, push a nice website and.

They have no actual idea of how their process is gonna go. They have no intake process. They have a good business set or a good idea, but they have no forms. They have none of these things in place to allow the business to run smoothly. So starting with that intake process. And then helping them to understand who their target audience is.

Cuz I’m sure you’re aware that if someone comes in, they’re like, Hey, yeah, I market to these people. And it’s no. Yeah. What’s their age? What does she look like? Explain her to me. Who’s your market? Yeah. Where does she shop? Where does she eat during the day? Yeah. So to show them and take that deeper dive and help them to build out those personas has been very beneficial and that’s pretty much the overall of my journey and where I landed today.

Being a radio personality back in the day I was a rapper, so Oh, cool. It was, just a thing. So of course, radio, back when I started, it was in the early 2000’s. We didn’t have podcasts. Podcasts weren’t, it just wasn’t a thing. It was just like the internet, radio, or whatever you called it. And it was mainly done by us techies because it was on the experiment side. If you could plug this into this, and make it work for the internet, you’re a genius. So that’s what it started as and Rolling into the tech and the business side of it. I decided to start doing business podcasts to use that as SEO to help businesses push and tell their story, tell who they are, and tell their journey.

So I started to use, my already popularity for the radio for being online. And used it, to create a business show on my podcast station as well okay? That’s, why I still use it today.

It’s very responsive for businesses because they get to tell their story. And a lot of times small business owners, unless you’re already popular, they’re not popular. They’re like, yeah, scuffling. They’re not able to get online some of us are, and really put ourselves out there and tell our story and share our journey or even have that interview in our portfolio, which is a huge success for a startup business to say, Hey, yeah, here’s a little bit about me.

I did an interview here. And I think that it gives them some collateral to have with their journey or their presentation. And so I have that in my package, though. That’s part of the package. You get a one-on-one interview with me.

Not budgeting for it. The biggest pitfall for businesses right now is they don’t have a budget for it. They don’t have it written into their budget.

There’s no marketing written into their budget. They’re pulling money from places that they didn’t, plan for. That’s where I started to offer the virtual CIO role for us for smaller businesses. A lot of times they don’t have that IT person to even communicate with to say how much, should I allocate towards marketing or internet or, for technology.

And they just don’t have it there. They have, they don’t know. So it’s just we don’t know. We don’t know what to allocate there and they do it ad hoc.

I would say really, they know who their target audience is and use the questions that I use. It helps me to identify, I use a lot of psychology, that was my major and Oh, there you go. Yeah, so psychology was the major and computer science was minor, and just really saying, asking the right questions and going through a, a understanding of who their customer is and writing it out I’m a whiteboard user, we’re on the air, we’re active getting them excited about the last person you sold to.

Okay, let’s describe them to me. What did they look like? Where were they located? Where did they live? And writing that information out to help them hone in and build those personas out because we have to first teach them what a persona is.

Yeah. Telling them, Hey, You have to build a persona out and they’re looking at you like, I have no idea what this girl is talking about, She’s crazy. But to go back and show them how to build a persona, that education is key.

And that’s the part they don’t understand the waste. They don’t really, and I think that having the business development portion allows me to educate the customer on how marketing is done. How we can drill down into your customer and only target them saving you tons and tons of money.

That because you don’t wanna just throw up an ad, no, you don’t. These are things that I use as techniques not just to educate the customer, but to get the information that I need to move forward. Yeah. My hope goal is to keep that customer with me too because they feel like, Hey, I’m empowered, I’m educated. Jamilah’s my go-to girl. I can call her Yeah. And ask those questions, and we’re changing every day there’s something new.

Yeah. It’s a very common thought process when you’re dealing with a business person who thinks that their target market is their neighborhood. Yeah. Or the neighborhood in which they’re businesses, and that’s not the case. That’s not true. And that’s the educational part. That’s the part that I feel like I have to provide before I can say, I can be your marketer. I can do your SEO, or I can do your digital marketing. I can’t give you what you need unless you give me what I need. So now for my business, it’s mandatory to go through that part. I don’t care how big your organization is, we need to build up those personas. Yeah, I need to know that information. Without it, I can’t perform. No. Okay. So that’s a requirement because I felt like, some customers in the beginning, before I implemented this portion of it were dissatisfied with what they asked me to do. You asked me to market, you gave me this information, and this is who we’re marketing to. And they’re like, yeah, I’m not getting the leads that I want. Of course, you’re not, because none of your stuff makes sense.

That’s part of what my intake is about. So it starts generally with what we call the discovery. So they go through discovery, okay?

The discovery is simple, can we work together? We get some people who are not gonna listen. So psychologically I need to figure out who I’m dealing with first. So it’s let me see if this person’s ready to get started or, Is this something they’re just exploring?

Because we don’t wanna waste our time either. We don’t wanna waste our resources. So we have that discovery call to find out, hey, and then, I asked them straight, straightforward what is your budget to market? How much money do you have to invest in this? Because I can’t properly build you out a plan.

They don’t like to. No, they don’t. But If you bring it up, and this is what I found if I bring it up and say, how much money do you have to market? It kind of triggers something. It triggers. It triggers why are you asking me that?

Because I need to know what type of marketing we can do for you. I don’t know. Can I do could I market you to the world or could I just market you to the neighborhood? Who are you looking to reach? So I use that, that man, as a main focal point to get back. It’s okay, let’s come back to that. Let me ask you some other questions.

And it also helps with the commitment. So if you’re gonna put $20,000 behind your marketing campaigns, yeah. Are you willing to commit to providing the information that I need to move forward? I don’t want you to waste your money. I don’t want you to lose money. I want you to see ROI of this campaign.

So really bringing that up early makes them start to think, I need money. Because you’ll get someone who doesn’t have money, who has the best idea, they’re eager and excited to get started, and then you give them the price and they’re like, oh, can I call you back?

I don’t, there’s no way in the world because they don’t have, they’re not educated on marketing and how marketing works. Going through that intake, going through that discovery, releasing that information, digging in their pockets early. I say, and I tell people, my joke is, I’m a gold digger.

I’m like, I’m a gold digger, so I need to know how much money you got to put that is I can make, it breaks the ice with them to say, and I’m like, listen, you, I joke about it, but at the same time it’s I’m joking, but I’m serious. Because if you don’t have money, I want you to look up. We Google I have a screen set up in my office where they can sit at a table. So this screen is this big screen facing them. They’re sitting at the table. I’m over here on my computer. I’m doing a cast, I’m casting to that screen and I’m showing them exactly what marketing costs. So I’m showing them some of the things that I can offer them, but here’s the cost.

Can we make a package that makes sense for you? Yes. If you tell me your budget, If not, I have to give you these general costs. Yeah. And of course, they wanna play ball by then. It just makes it a lot easier. So yeah, sharing a screen, showing them statistics and averages, and I’ll sometimes even let them type it in, type in average SEO for 2023 and they’ll type it in and go, oh my gosh, I can’t afford this.

And I’m like, wait, you can. But here’s let, I wanna work with you, but I need to, I need more information and they’re more than willing to go through my program at that point. To learn. Be educated on it. So they’re not just hearing terms and trying to buy into what’s popular.

Yes. Because what happens is you ask those questions, those questions are leading questions, and they, nine times out of 10, they have no idea. Yeah, they can’t give you an actual accurate answer or they’re gonna be asking you because they’re trying to get you to lower your price or whatever that may be.

Yeah. So just direct I’m writing numbers down. I’m like a pen in hand. I’m gonna write this number down. This is your number. This is the goal number. Yeah and throughout our conversation are they gonna change that number, and I always revisit, so this is affordable for you monthly, you can handle this number, yeah. It’s being direct. I think builds the relationship. I’m gonna say it opens that trust relationship because I feel like either you like me or you wanna work with me or you don’t. And yeah, I don’t like gray areas. So it eliminates the gray area. If money is the issue, when you are coming into, get marketing done, then, this is pro marketing’s probably not for you. Yeah. You can hire your niece to do some tweets and go on Facebook and post things. We have 90, a lot of my customers come from that type of environment where they’re like, Hey, my niece did all of the postings. And then I’ll go on and say, I’m looking at your accounts.

None of your accounts are even business accounts. So let’s start there creating business accounts for you and then, we can move on. But they don’t understand the value in having a business account versus just a regular account or a business account even exists, so it’s really, is that still common today?

Absolutely. Especially the mom-and-pop type businesses where Yeah, they’re just getting into technology, just trying to be innovative right now, and they have no idea. Oh yeah, I wanna start an ad campaign for this event that I’m having on Tuesday and I’m like, but it’s Thursday.

You’re having it in five days and you want me to do what?

four months ago. Understand how off, and when to get started. So I just feel like education’s the key to understanding the money that you’re spending. A lot of people say, Hey, SEO is expensive. It’s okay. Here’s a list of things that’s in there that have to be done to properly do SEO and no, the 99, I call it the $10 rack does not exist. No, it does not. Cause you cannot do, Hey I, this guy told me he can do my SEO for $99, and I’m like, $99. Tell him to call me and see if he could do my SEO for $99. because I would appreciate that. What are you ranking? Like we didn’t tell me that. Yeah. So I just run into those people who follow the internet myths and go for those things. And so my challenge is real.

First of all, getting with I would say a marketing company that offers the business development side.That really can, be someone you can talk to, a lot of times we go online and we click the button and I’m getting marketing now, but you have no idea what you’re spending your money on. Yeah. And if you’re not educated on that, so I, for my business, we focus on smaller businesses, the ones who don’t know, the big ones who understand, the big companies, the Fortune 500 s, they, yeah.They know what to get, for sure, but the smaller companies, they don’t know. They don’t have that direct person to talk to. They can’t pick up the phone, they can’t walk into that office. I tell people my big advice to smaller businesses, the mom-and-pop businesses to start small work with an agency, a boutique-style agency where you can talk to your social media manager, and your marketer directly.

Yeah. Have that conversation. Get educated on what’s happening on the backend under maybe have a sit-down and understand the reports that you’re getting a month. Just, it has to be a relationship-building strategy involved in your marketing before you know you’re gonna even have them, they want to put more money in, cuz you’re, right now it’s spending a thousand dollars a month on marketing, which just boggles people.

What am I getting? That depends on you. Depends on how much information you gimme. They wanna see instant gratification, so don’t expect instant gratification and work with an agency that you can connect with. And that’s, that’s my advice if you working with an agency and you cannot pick up the phone and call them and get some questions answered, it’s not gonna, you’re not gonna be comfortable in the long run.

I was gonna say I create the courses, so that’s one of the things that I do. So that’s one of the things I do. I’ll do private webinars and workshops for those people who wanna learn where I’ll share my screen and I’ll show you how to do some basic stuff to increase your SEO. Some people just wanna buy the code because they may have an IT person who can insert the code for them.

So it’s ways of working around it, depending on, yeah. And this is why you would wanna work with a smaller agency, because you can say, Hey, I don’t have that kind of money. I have a lot of family who own businesses who won’t dare call me because they see me and they see zeros behind my head, and I’m like, no it’s not that bad.

At least talk to me. So it’s really about taking a chance and again, being direct and saying, this is my budget, this is my budget. This is what I would like to see. Where do I start, educating yourself and try, I, I do find that even all business owners don’t have time, so let’s be realistic. You can teach them a million times. They’re not gonna be consistent as we are with knowing. The process and putting it in place because I got a business to run. Exactly. And that’s yeah, go ahead. And realistic, it’s a very, we’re very realistic excuse. But at the end of the day, it’s about really communicating.

I’m big on communication for sure. And I feel like we just don’t do it enough. So if you communicate that to me, we have interns, I tell small mom-and-pop agencies, to listen, and get to the nearest college. Get you an intern who’s studying, this stuff or whatever you need. There you go and you pull that intern in and one hand washes the other. Hey, you might have, an employee coming along, maybe. Yeah. And if they do good work, you may be able to afford to hire them and pay them to keep them as an employee. So there, there’s a lot of, ways to handle that.

But I try to give them that general advice. Getting with someone in the field that can instruct you on which direction to go. It all boils down for me to consulting. Be consultant. Yeah. Don’t be afraid to speak to a consultant because if that consultant is an expert in their field, they can direct you. So you’re not wasting money.

And I’m on everything. So right now I’m geeked out with chat GPT. You talk about really taking artificial intelligence now. I’ve been in with artificial intelligence for about 10 years now. Wow. I started working on one of them, I was a beta tester for what we called back then, Amy.Ai, which allowed my calendar to be booked properly. So Amy would go back and forth with customers who sent me an email and they would book that appointment for me, which was amazing.

Back then, 10 years ago it was like boom, this is amazing. Yeah. Super duper powers over here. And then as we evolved, so I stayed in the mix testing a lot of the products. On the backend. Staying in the groups, you still wanna, I say hang with the hackers. You still wanna hang with the hackers because you don’t ever wanna lose it, because, I tell my husband all the time, Hey, cool, you see this technology that came out? And I’m like, yes. Oh, came out Thursday. It’s now on Tuesday. We gotta, it’s, oh, something else was released. It’s, you gotta get 4.0. Like GPT chat.

He’s just getting on the bandwagon of that. And he’s did you try it yet? I’m like, try it. I’m on. I just used 4.0 today when it came out. Yeah, me too. And Google released its own AI this morning. So yeah you go back to those things and you get people, they’re like, oh my gosh. Like, how do you keep up with these things? But you have to stay in the groups. I call it the college groups, the groups that I was in with the developers, the all the different, the white hats, the black hats. I stay in the groups of those guys and figure out what’s going on. And then I lend a hand, of course, to support you in your development journey so I can test out all of your new cool software.

Because if developers, they don’t wanna talk to you. They don’t, they’re not talkers, and they’re not, the friendliest people. They don’t wanna, they’re not sellers. Managing my IT departments I learned who they were and, their personalities. Yeah. And I realized, Wow. If I stay connected to them, I don’t have to learn, but so much I could be a salesperson for this stuff.

Yeah. And just learn the technology itself as they develop it. Yeah. So that’s where I position myself. Wow. And I stay ahead of all the latest and greatest technologies in which we use our agency.

And that’s why my program starts with the development of the business. Yeah, where we address the SOPs. How do you walk away from your business for the day, how do you take a day off? Yeah. And then the sales. What are your goals? Most people don’t even set goals throughout the quarters.

They don’t even know how to set a quarter or put a goal in place for a quarter. Yeah. To me, it’s unrealistic. I wanna make a million dollars. And I’m like, yeah, me too off of you, but I need to help you understand how to get there. And then really to market, and that’s why I created my program. My program hones in, and everybody gets the same steps. And of course, we customize. According to the business, but those steps, they stay in tune and we help them focus on those things. And yeah, I haven’t found anyone yet who said, Hey, I don’t need that part as, yeah, no, they all do.

They all need it.

So I work for a company called Regis. Oh yeah. I’m not sure.

Okay. I know they’re, yeah. Now that I’m here, now I hear where I live.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that’s where they started, so when they came to the States, I was in the pilot program that started Regis. So I had no choice but to learn how to sell meeting rooms. Oh, wow. And. Yes. So I was in the pilot startup for the United States here in Berwyn, Pennsylvania.

Wow. Running an actual Regis Center. So running Regis was like, we had no idea. And then we would get on the phone to Canada through our headquarters and they would tell us about the success of this. And we’re like, yeah, it’s not working here. So it took a lot to sell a meeting room to sell an office.

And that’s where I honed in on how to sell. I got my bearing straight on how to sell and how to be direct. And then I’m gonna say the second place where I mastered it was selling lots when I worked for General Motors. Working for General Motors in the marketing division.

I was the executive assistant to the V S M of marketing for the region at General Motors and Wow. I had no idea what I was doing. I was a highly titled secretary. Okay. That’s it. And, okay, this is our department. I have three executives. Of this large, huge corporation that knows nothing about marketing, they know sales.

Wow. So I knew a little bit, a thing or two about marketing, but they knew sales. But we had to make those things work together. They could sell an empty lot and place cars on it, making it look good. Yeah, I had to learn all of those different things. So I was taught, I was strategically taught sales from Wow, the best.

And what I took, my takeaway was being direct. Everybody. You can’t sell to everybody.
Everybody’s not your customer. Yeah. And I try to implement that when I’m teaching as well. You have a customer base and even if you wanna make a million dollars, you can just find your tribe.
These people aren’t your tribe. I’m a disruptor. I’m not gonna try to sell to everybody. I’m not gonna try to market to everybody. I wanna disrupt what you think sales is. I wanna disrupt, if you tell people they need it you need this. I’m not giving, I don’t have something that you want. I don’t do sales.

And I tell people I don’t do sales. And they say you’re not gonna give me a counteroffer. No. If you can’t afford what I get, my price is my price. Yeah. Oh, there you go. Yeah. My price is my price. We said it in stone and we walk away. And I cried. I cried the first time I had to do that because I let money walk out the door.

And then I realized later that money would’ve given me the biggest headache because. That was not my customer. Ah, that wasn’t my customer. There you go. And it, it would’ve Dr. Driven me crazy trying to please that customer because it, he wasn’t for me. Yeah. I had to understand in sales that you have a particular customer and your customer will be more than happy to give you their money because you have a product or service that they need.

Yeah. And it’s just that simple.

to do they can connect with me everywhere because I do SEO. Okay. So actually they can reach me on my website. We do have 24-hour assistance that is on, so agents are on 24 7, okay?

And they’re willing to take your information, get you into my c r m set you up with an appointment. So we have them on our website, which is MyBiz consulting.net. Okay. And. That’s the best way to connect with me, if not, okay. Anyone can go to any of my social media. I’m very active online. It’s me behind the scenes.

I don’t hire a team of people because I still like to be in a mix, and this is how I, yeah, I stay fresh and I learn everything, but I’m everywhere on all platforms, and you can always reach out to me, shoot me a DM or inbox and I’ll get back with you.

I’m on LinkedIn and Twitter, and everything in my biz consulting. Okay. On Twitter, it’s my Biz Consult 3 0 4 because they kick me off at one point. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. So at one point, and you personally though

Everything is Jamilah Laurie on everything else.

Thank you. A pleasure being here today, and you guys have an awesome time. I look forward to talking with you again.