Follow the Podcast on iTunes and Spotify
Excerpt
This is a reverse-guesting episode where I was interviewed about my experiences as a seasoned digital marketer, entrepreneur, and leader, and how the skills I’ve learned can be applied to other industries.
Today’s guest is none-other than Ms. Jazz Rivera. She will be the one asking questions to me about leadership, entrepreneurship, and management.
What If I Don’t Have the Capital to Start a Business?
The thing is, a lot of people will tell you you have to have money to make money. I don’t completely agree with that because I did have money, but all I had was PHP1300, which you probably have on you right now or sometime this week. It’s easy for you to spend that.
You don’t need capital. What you need is knowledge and wisdom. You get that through investing in yourself, by reading books, listening to podcasts, going to seminars, conferences, getting mentors.
How Many Times Did You Fail and What Were Those Failures? What Did You Learn From Those Experiences?
When I started a business, I failed so many times by starting up.
One of my failures was hiring. I hired some people who were not good, yet I trusted them. I’ve hired a lot of wrong people and the wrong people will make for the wrong team.
The wrong team will make for the wrong company. The people that I hired initially, I failed in the interview process because of my strength and weakness as an entrepreneur is that I trust them too much. I learned from my failures, when you look back and people look at me now and tell me, oh, you’re so high up the mountain, you’re standing at the summit of your success.
This mountain is a mountain of failures and a lot of people get buried under it and just quit. But I was able to pick myself up and climb on top of it until I got to the summit. And still more failures are coming down on me. I have to have that discipline of just picking myself up and climbing up again.
What Are Your Principles? What Is the Structure That You Use to Get People to Work for You?
Other principles that I have would be mastery. You have to have 10,000 hours of practice. That’s really how to go about it. 10000 hours is usually five years. For SEO Hacker, I went overdrive. I went for 80 hour work weeks and I would always consciously and deliberately improve myself in terms of my craft in SEO, writing, and conversion optimization.
This is a culmination of deliberate practice.
That’s something that I want my team to also be able to do. And with all of these principles, we wrap them up into our core values. So we have Grit, Unity, Respect for Work, becoming a Challenger. You challenge the status quo. You challenge yourself. Challenge other people; having Clarity when you communicate with each other and with the clients; and being able to always try new things in the spirit of having a positive outcome, Experimentation.
We have six core values that are the pinnacle of all of these principles that I have.
What Is Your Personal Brand? How Do You Think People See You?
I have been working at my brand for a long time already since I had the seansi.org website (now, sean.si). At the start, it looked really bad. It looked like all of my stuff was there because I intended for it to be an online resume. When I was starting as a public speaker, a lot of my inquiries for talks would ask me for a résumé, which is weird now because no one does it now.
But if you look at sean.si now, it is nothing like a resume for me. It is about who I am and how I do it.
I am best known for SEO Hacker because it is a business that I started up. A lot of who I am still tied up with.
And, you know, for me to be able to build that, it took a lot of years and consistency. The thing about branding is you have to be consistent. If not, then it’s a hodgepodge of different things.
What can people identify with when they see you or when they hear your name?
Mine is “digital”, “entrepreneurship”, and “author”. These couple of things, it’s not going to reach ten items. It’s just a couple of items that they can associate me with.
