Entrepreneurship is not always easy but having mentors, a dream team, a business plan, and the courage to build your brand, your success journey will continue with fewer hardships.
Watch this jammed-packed video of timeless success tips below. I speak about entrepreneurship -and how some legendary mentors helped me take my business, profile, and brand to the next level.
It’s your turn to rewire and build your brand. Let me ask you this: Do you have the courage to build your brand, increase your profile, and success efforts?
Why I Built My Own Brand:
Back in the early eighties, I helped with the selling of Tony Little’s products, on to selling Billy Mays’s products, and to launching Jack Lalanne’s products. They were all massive successes.
So I said to myself, “wait a minute, I’ve built all these brands for a lot of people, but nobody knows who Kevin Harrington is…”. What’s wrong with this picture?
So you know, I’m usually the guy behind the camera. But then I said, “I need to build my own brand”… so I set out and I started with a book.
How Mentors Helped Me Execute My Brand:
It started with my friend from back in the day, Tony Robbins. I decided to reach out to Tony and he said to me: Kevin,
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.” —Tony Robbins
“You need to get together with some great mentors, maybe someone like Richard Branson” -which I ended up connecting with which is a very interesting story.
Everything changed and for the better!!
Mentorship is a powerful tool for success. —Kevin Harrington
When I went down to Necker Island to hang with Richard for a couple of days, I also connected with Russell Brunson -and this is going back way before ClickFunnels.
Basically, I said, “I need some new help”. I need some people to come into my business and give me a supercharged way to go about taking the old business of As Seen On TV and transitioning it to a new model.
After spending time with Tony, Richard, and Russell, I came out with a new game plan and I picked up 4 new things that I needed to do for my business in order not just to survive -because I didn’t want to just break even- but to thrive and generate more success in the modern business world.
Why Step #1 is Important For Business:
During my awesome trip to meet Richard Branson, he said to me:
“You know, you’re probably paying a lot of money to those TV executives that you hired”… he was right because some of these guys were making 250K, 300K, 350K and I had a half a dozen of these guys. I also had people from the magazine and the newspaper industry.
Richard continued on and said, “you need to get a new dream team, a new advisory board”, etc.
Now, what does an advisory board do for you?
I sit on about 20 public companies and advisory boards -in exchange for doing monthly, quarterly, and various agreements, I sometimes get a little piece of equity in the process.
And what can a great team of advisors do for you?
They might help you as tech advisers, some might help with their notoriety as celebrities and influencers, and some might help you as digital marketers.
This is what I call the new Dream Team and these are advisors too who can help you make introductions for new executives, recruiting executives to help you raise capital.
I started getting these tech folks -and again, because I wasn’t familiar with digital, the amazing thing that I found, was that I now have 8 or 10 people making $300,000 a year. When I started getting tech experts, they were much younger and they were getting a lot less money.
So we were able to start transitioning our company over into more of a digital tech company.
Next, we sold off our customer service center, sold off a media company, and trimmed everything down. We had a lot less payroll, a lot less overhead and also started using the power of influencers.
Watch the video here to learn more about the power of influencers.
With these kinds of mentors in my life, I was able to build a board of advisors and a solid dream team.
Why Step #2 is Important For Business:
The 2nd important thing here is raising capital and this is very important!
At this moment, I’ve raised probably about $300 million for my own companies over the last 15 years.
One of the things that I say is you have to understand how to talk to investors. It’s different for every single investor -and why does this matter?
It’s because many entrepreneurs don’t realize what their investors are looking for and what it is that they really want to hear… and they just say, “Oh, I have a business plan. Let me send you my plan. Let me give you an example.”
Most people think an investor wants that and it’s exactly what we don’t want to hear about. Most investors, want to know that when they’re raising money, the money and the profits are guaranteed!
Investors want you to answer this question:
“Hey, is it profitable?”
This is just one kind of investor. There is another type of investor and that is to know that there’s exponential growth.
Let me explain.
When Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Randy Zuckerberg, a good friend of mine, interviewed on my podcast, she shared with me the story about Facebook and how she and her brother Mark approached investors in the very beginning.
She said, “We had no money. We were raising capital. We had a million users on Facebook and we were meeting with a big investor named Peter Thiel and Peter could write a check for 100 million if need be, but we were pitching him for a $5 million investment.”
So when they sat down with Peter, they didn’t say that they had any profits. There was, not only, no profits… there were no sales.
So, how do you pitch an investor to give you $5 million if you have no sales and no profits?
She told me that this was an investor that wanted exponential growth.
So what Mark said is, “Peter, I’m not here to tell you about profits. I’m not here to tell you about sales. I’m here to tell you that with your $5 million, we’re going to go from 1 million users to 5 million, maybe even 10 million users.”
And Peter said, “if you can get to 10 million users, I’ll give you the 5 million – and I want 10% of your company.”
They did that deal. And what does 10% of Facebook worth, do you think today? A lot of money. I mean, hundreds of billions. It’s unbelievable.
So to make a long story short, you have to know how to talk to investors to raise capital.
Learn more here about investors and how to get their attention!
Why Step #3 is Important For Business:
From my conversations with Russell Brunson. Russell said, “Kevin, you do all this As Seen On TV stuff, and it’s changing and you already know it’s changing, therefore, you need to embrace digital.”
We all know digital works, but it’s how you execute it that matters -with the creation of solid content and videos.
I feel very lucky because I started shooting videos 35 years ago with Arnold Morris selling the Ginsu Knife, Tony Little, Jack LaLanne, and George Foreman. These were 30-minute videos.
Now we’re doing 10 to 45-second videos. Overall, the world of embracing digital has become very, very powerful.
At this point, I got my new dream team, I put a new business plan together, we raised some more capital, and we started embracing digital.
Why Step #4 is Important For Business:
Then Richard Branson said to me, “Kevin, you’ve done some pretty cool things, like how you created Tony Little’s brand, Billy Mays’s brand, Jack Lalanne’s brand, George Foreman’s brand, and for all these other people. You crushed putting them on TV every day. Thousands and thousands of times. But who did you forget?”
“YOU”
He said, “You didn’t build your own brand, right?”
And so it hit me square in the face. I’m like, “Richard, you’re exactly right.”
I then said, “I didn’t think I needed to build my brand because I was making enough money.” It didn’t matter. But guess what? Sales dry up and the money dries up
Well, the guys that I created the brands for did very, very well. So now I said “I need to do what… Build MY brand?”
Would you have the courage to build your brand if you had mentors and my dream team to help you? If so, check this out!
How Did I Start Building My Brand?
So my next step was how do I become a Key Person of Influence by raising my profile and building my brand.
So I started with a book and it’s called How to Become a Key Person of Influence.
There are five amazing steps and one of the major steps here to publish- and it’s about what makes you credible!
I started coming out with books, my first book Act Now -how we turn ideas into million-dollar products. Then I created a digital magazine. Much like Forbes did: people give you the articles for free because they get profiled in your distribution.
My digital magazine is called Sharkpreneur. I get free content. There aren’t printing or distribution costs because it’s delivered over the internet… so, it’s absolutely free across the board.
Between creating books, creating digital magazines, building the brand, and creating content, I started generating action by going on radio stations everywhere.
In fact, here’s an example of how I used the radio to get sales and followers from my book:
I started with one radio station and I said to the station, “Hey look, I can come on and do a little radio segment but at the end of my segment, I want to be able to send people to a website to get a free chapter of my book.” It was awesome because I never had to leave my house and I was only doing anywhere from 3 to 10 minutes spots… basically, whatever they would allow.
The radio station said, “Oh, so you’re not selling anything, you’re giving it away? That’s great value to our listeners.” I said, “absolutely fine -no problem.”
I started on a couple of radio shows, to 5 radio shows, to 25 radio shows, to 50, and to over 125. It was AWESOME! And what was I doing… I was generating hundreds of thousands of leads going to a funnel. M audience was growing digitally by the second.
There are many ways to create good content. Right now, for my brand, I speak on small and large stages, I get articles into trade journals, I attend conferences, I do two live podcasts called Sharkpreneur and Startup Millionaire, create content for my blog and social media, help empower entrepreneurs, I’m a guest on other podcasts and social channels, and so much more.
What Happened When I (Finally) Built My Own Brand?
Once I started to build my brand, it got the attention of Mark Burnett. This gave me a great opportunity to grow my profile with people coming to me for everything entrepreneurship. Mark asked me to be on the show, Shark Tank!
In fact, I was so inundated that I had to start turning down opportunities every single day. There’s only so much time in a day -and I want to focus on the real winners and focus on the real people that can make a difference in my life.
The core thing, right now, that you need to do -that moves the needle, is to continue to raise your profile by following the steps in this article and by building your brand.
Watch the video here to get more on mentorship, business planning, raising capital, creating a dream team, having a board of advisors, embracing digital, and building your brand.
Do you have the courage to build your brand?
Do you need help with building your brand?
It’s your lucky day because I’m looking for Entrepreneurs to Partner with for Future Business Opportunities.
IT’S TIME TO BE SEEN!! We have Created a Proven System that will help you Build your Brand, Influence, and Income!
Leverage my Dream Team, specifically, the Emmy Award-Winning Producer, Brandon T. Adams…… To Become the Best you have to Learn from the Best (aka: My Dream Team)!!
Let’s get started!! Here’s to Your Success!
