903: Do this and I PROMISE everything will change... (probably THE secret to success)

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Hey, what is up?

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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento, and in this Solo Sunday episode, I just really feel like we should talk about something that doesn't show up in strategic conversations, it doesn't show up in marketing campaigns, it doesn't show up in your financial statements, but what I truly believe powers, successful leaders, entrepreneurs, businesses, brands something that is lacking in today's society.

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But I promise you gosh, this is probably the secret to success.

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I'm excited about this one.

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Let's dive in.

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So for these solo Sunday episodes, every single week I really sit down and I do a bit of self reflection and I ask myself the big question of what are some of these things that I don't think we talk about enough in the world of entrepreneurship, or even just societally, to be honest, a lot of weeks I sit down and I reflect, or really I extrapolate way beyond just business, because the truth is and you all know that I feel this way the truth is that what's good in life is also good in business.

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I think that the two are so intertwined.

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I think everything is intertwined with life.

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Everything's a microcosm of life.

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It's why I always pull on lessons from the tennis court or from chess, or from travel, or from literally anything and everything can give you insights into life, and all of those insights are also super valuable when it comes to business.

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And the truth is, most of these insights are super simple.

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That's why, every Sunday, I feel like I say this is not rocket science, it's a simplistic concept, but one that, if we can actually do the hard work of implementing it in our lives, that's where the challenge becomes, and to implement it not just once, not just twice, but but to make it a habit, to make it something that we do consistently for a long amount of time, it's where we really get those compounding benefits of anything simple, because we can have a lot of strategy conversations.

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We can have a lot of conversations about tactics with regards to growing your business, but, at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter how smart you are, it doesn't matter how clever your marketing campaigns or your ad campaigns are.

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There's so many different things that go into the success of any business, of any product, of any service, and I love talking about those things and we love bringing those things to you each and every week, but really, in these Solo Sunday episodes, I love taking a bit of a different approach and this week, when I really reflect on my inbox, that is the start of a lot of my self-reflections, because I love hearing from so many of you listeners.

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I love interacting with all of you one-on-one.

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If you listen to this podcast and you've never taken me up on it, drop me a one-on-one email.

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Hello at imetbriancom.

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It goes directly to me.

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Nobody else is in that inbox, it's purely just me.

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Hello at imetbriancom.

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Now that you met me on the podcast.

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I'm not the quickest at all times.

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I have a busy schedule and it's always changing.

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I'm always working on a ton of exciting projects and interacting with a ton of people, but I do love getting back to you.

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And in those emails, what really stands out to me is it's something I hear a lot in feedback from people is that they're just like Brian, most people, they don't react to the way that you do, they don't have this energy in their email responses.

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Like, I feel like you see me, you hear me, you understand me, you're listening to me and and I so appreciate the amount of effort and energy and care that you put into your replies to me.

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Whether it's to be honest, my email inbox.

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It's a mix.

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A lot of people ask me hey, what do you think of this idea?

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Hey, this is what I'm struggling with.

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Do you have ideas for that?

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It's a whole mix, people who want to collaborate on projects, and we line those things up.

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But I'll tell you, yesterday I shared with you in the Action Saturday episode one of my favorite tricks, if you will, which is sending people a selfie video.

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If I'm super behind in messages or in follow-ups, I'll just fire up my phone and literally just record a quick selfie video, upload it to Loom and fire it away.

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So if you didn't hear yesterday's Action Saturday, definitely go to go and tune into that one.

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It's five minutes and I promise you that trick is going to do you a world of wonders when it comes to your sales and your marketing and your follow ups and your revenue growth.

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But that's not what I want to talk about today.

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It is very closely related because when I think about the secret sauce of all of these things that I get to work on these days and I'm super appreciative of that it really comes down to one thing because the marketing strategies they change, the channels they change.

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But I think what we don't talk about enough, quite simply, is caring Caring.

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I don't want you to turn this episode off right now because you're thinking well, brian, that's it.

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It's that simple.

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I really, really want to take some time to talk about it.

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I think that that's something that is lacking the most in the marketplace today.

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I think it's lacking the most in marketing and ad campaigns and customer service and literally all the ways.

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Is caring, and I'm not saying that part of your businesses or your brand's persona should be caring as a value.

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I'm actually going way beyond that here in today's episode and I want to talk on a personal level.

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I think we need to very deeply care at a human level, person to person.

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Forget business, and you might be thinking well, brian, I'm tuning into the entrepreneur to entrepreneur podcast to talk about business and to learn about business and to implement these things in my business.

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And yeah, precisely, I actually think when we talk about business, we need to get back to caring as individuals.

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It's something that has become a cliche when we watch old movies or movies set in older times, where we see the quintessential you know, main Street USA, those small local businesses where everybody knows each other's name.

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I'm from Boston.

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I've never seen Cheers, but that's the one thing from Cheers that I think we all know is you know where everybody knows your name, and it is a bit of a cliche In today's day and age.

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A bit of that has been lost because we all have CRMs, we all have these technology tools, we all have AI, we all have all these different things.

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But I find in my real daily life yes, in the real world when I close my laptop lid is that I love going to coffee shops where they know my name.

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I love going to coffee shops where they know my order.

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I love going to stores where, when I haven't been there for a while, they say hey, we haven't seen you in a few months, what have you been up to?

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For example, the Flan Factory.

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It's one of my favorite businesses here in Tampa, florida, and the owners are so present.

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It's not just one owner, it's the whole family.

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Doesn't matter who you see.

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When you walk in there, they'll ask you like, hey, where have you been?

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Hey, that flavor that we had last time you came in.

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I honestly, I really don't remember, or I don't understand how they remember all of these things.

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It is outrageously impressive, but the reality is they can't possibly refer to their CRM from the six feet it takes when I walk through that door to smiling and saying hello to them at the register.

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They're not leveraging a CRM, they're not using some tips or tools or tricks.

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They are literally just remembering these things.

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Why?

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Because they care.

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It really is that simple.

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Because they care, and it's something that I try to do in every single email, that I send every single email in my inbox.

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If you say something in your email, no matter how insignificant it might be, if you're, the first sentence of your email says hey, brian, sorry for my delay, I was on vacation with my family.

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Anyways, here's you know X, y, z about this tool or about that conversation we had, or about this opportunity to collaborate, whatever it may be.

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Yes, the bulk of the email.

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What that email is really about is about whatever the actual meat and potatoes is.

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But what I want to pay more attention to, and what I make a very conscious and strategic and intentional decision to acknowledge and pay attention to, is that you told me in that first sentence, however quickly you may have glossed over it, you told me you went on vacation with your family.

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I wanna know about that that's going to be in my reply, 100% guaranteed.

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Even something as simple as acknowledging what people say to us, hearing what we say, hearing what they say, that is I cannot quantify it.

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It is perhaps the most important thing in business and perhaps the most important thing in life is just caring about people, caring about what they say, caring about what they do, caring about what they express to you and acknowledging the fact that you see them, you hear them and you care about them.

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We all appreciate that If I tell you oh, you know, sorry, I got caught up because I was doing this and you don't even acknowledge that, well, it makes me feel like you didn't care about that.

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It makes me feel like, okay, you clearly care about business and I appreciate the fact that you care about what we're looking to do together.

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But beyond that, we all like to be cared about personally.

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We all want to feel cared about.

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I love the customer service reps.

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When I'm engaging with, for example, I use a tool called El Bato.

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It's very similar to Zapier.

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It's a tool that a lot of my business automations rely on and I frequently because all of my businesses, quite frankly, leverage that tool.

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I quite frequently am engaging with their support staff in live chat and even when their customer service agents just ask, you know, in that weird interim period, over a live chat which is text-based on the internet, with complete strangers who knows where they are in the world, when we're just waiting for an answer for somebody else and they say, hey, how's your week going?

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By the way, do you know how that makes me feel?

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It gives me such brand loyalty, which is funny, because it's just one customer service rep who just cares not only about their job, but they genuinely care about me.

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They're curious and I think that is so important for us to bake into the way that we operate.

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When I talk about the way that we operate, I mean this in literally all the ways business life, conversation, relationships, interviews.

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I try to incorporate it into all the things that we do behind the scenes here at the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

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In a world where so many people we get to leverage formulas and templates and examples and AI, it's so easy to strictly go with those things that we know that work.

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But it's so important, it's so imperative for us to inject manually, human to human, a bit of care.

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When we care, it shines through in every single thing that we do.

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I love that Theodore Roosevelt quote where he said nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

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I'm going to say that one more time Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

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Sat down to record today's episode, I couldn't help but think about all the objections that we all have, all the excuses that we all have for why this stuff is hard and it is hard.

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Business is hard, life is hard, sales is hard, marketing is hard, customer service is hard.

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All of these things are hard.

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You need to be smart, you need to build things, you need to use technology.

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There's so many things that we have to do.

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But when I think about what actually is the common denominator amongst all the incredible entrepreneurs that I'm very fortunate to know, I'm so grateful in my network, in all the entrepreneurs that partake in the entrepreneur to entrepreneur podcast, because they share our belief that a rising tide lifts all boats.

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But when I look at all of these amazing and inspiring entrepreneurs and business leaders and just leaders in life, what really is that common thread that I see is that they care.

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They really care.

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I can also personally tell you on the other side of this, that when I work with clients or when I'm a client of somebody else's, when they care about me personally, gosh it just.

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Everything else blossoms, literally everything blossoms, those projects blossom, the results blossom.

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And even, looking inward, as an entrepreneur, when I look at how deeply I care about all the people that I get to work with, that I get to network with, that I just get to have in my network, it's funny the more that I care about their success, the more that I genuinely care about making other people shine, the more that I genuinely care about other people feeling great, feeling confident, feeling supported, feeling seen, feeling acknowledged.

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It's just inevitable that my own personal success also follows.

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I feel it, and I'm really grateful for it, that I feel that other people also genuinely want to see me succeed, and I think it's so important and again, we can't quantify these things.

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They're not going to show up when you search for a podcast episode or you go on YouTube and you look for a video about a marketing funnel.

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This won't show up.

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This topic of caring it's not going to show up, but it needs to show up in every single thing that you do.

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I've given the examples of my email inbox abundantly here in this very short time you and I have together for this solo Sunday episode.

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It shows up, I hope, in every email I send.

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I hope it shows up in the way that my team operates.

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I hope it shows up in these episodes.

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I hope it shows up in the way that I interact with my clients.

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I hope it shows up in these episodes.

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I hope it shows up in the way that I interact with my clients.

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I hope it shows up in every single way, and I think that it's a high barometer.

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I think it's a simple barometer for all of us to aspire to is just to care and to make sure that that caring shows up in all the ways.

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So it's not your typical strategy episode.

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It's not your typical tactic that you might be hoping to learn when it comes to growing your business, but I promise you inject this into all the things that you do, even the little things.

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Even sending an invoice when you're collecting payment from your clients on the first of the month.

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Show that you care in some small way.

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Send them something in the physical mail a gift card to a movie theater if they're into movies, if you somehow know their favorite restaurant.

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Do something special.

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Show them that you care and it's going to do wonders, not only for your business but for your life.

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Super simple, but the challenge is for us to implement it.

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That's it from me in today's episode.

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Gosh August is here.

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I really have no idea where this year is going.

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Last week's episodes were so exciting for us here.

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Sabina joined us in episode 900 this past Wednesday and this week we have just got some incredible guests for you, guests who really do care.

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I think that this Solo Sunday episode it's a great transition into this week's content because we've just got incredible guests for you, three amazing guests.

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Kicking things off with Angelo Farrow in tomorrow's episode, where he's going to talk about AI powered conversion optimization.

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But the big twist is that you're going to see that his business, in an AI world, focuses on personalized experiences giving each and every individual user that personalized experience to show them that you care, to show them that you understand them.

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Wednesday's episode with Sheena West gosh.

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This is someone who is outrageously talented and skilled and insightful at all the things she does with regards to Facebook and Instagram ads.

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If you've ever wanted to demystify the world of paid ads, sheena is incredibly transparent in the way she talks about this stuff.

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I love her attitude towards marketing, towards advertising, towards showing up like your brand is of service to others, because that's the real key behind getting all of these things to work for you.

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And then, on Friday's episode 906, with the very wonderful and generous and transparent Leila Fatalian, you are going to hear an interior designer who really identified her own personal passion for helping others, and it's no surprise to me that she's turned it into a very successful business doing very cool things in the world, with not only a beautiful aesthetic but an attention to detail that shows how much she cares.

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So you're in for a real treat.

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All of that is just a bit of a teaser for me to say.

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Make sure you pound that subscribe button, because you already know we're going to be coming to your earbuds, your speakers, no matter where you are in the world, as always every Monday, wednesday, friday, saturday and Sunday here on the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

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Hey, it's Brian here and thanks for tuning in to yet another episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

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If you haven't checked us out online, there's so much good stuff there.

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Check out the show's website and all the show notes that we talked about in today's episode at thewantrepreneurshowcom, and I just want to give a shout out to our amazing guests.

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There's a reason why we are ad free and have produced so many incredible episodes five days a week for you, and it's because our guests step up to the plate.

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These are not sponsored episodes.

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These are not infomercials.

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Our guests help us cover the costs of our productions.

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They so deeply believe in the power of getting their message out in front of you, awesome entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs, that they contribute to help us make these productions possible.

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So thank you to not only today's guests, but all of our guests in general, and I just want to invite you check out our website because you can send us a voicemail there.

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We also have live chat.

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If you want to interact directly with me, go to thewantrepreneurshowcom, initiate a live chat.

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It's for real me, and I'm excited because I'll see you, as always every Monday, wednesday, friday, saturday and Sunday here on the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.