Many businesses fail across different industries. Many entrepreneurs fail because they don’t know how to market. Marketing will set you apart from failing businesses. In this episode, Amel Kilic, the Founder of GenTech Marketing, emphasizes the value of AIM (Always Innovate and Aim) to prevent your business from failing. Amel sees the importance of attacking your customers’ pain points and offering solutions to sell. Learn to separate yourself from the competitors and start building that WOW factor with Amel Kilic today.

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Amel Kilic Talks About Marketing

I know you are going to enjoy this episode. The reason I know that is that everybody comes to me and says, “Michelle, I need help.” Every business, no matter what industry you’re in, always seems to have the same problem. I call this lack of AIM. When I started in this industry many years ago, 95% of businesses will go out of business.

Now only 30% of businesses and new startups will go out of business because the business landscape has changed. It’s business owners who have been in business for over ten years or longer who are going out of business. Seventy percent of business owners that have been in business for ten years or longer are going out of business because of a lack of AIM. AIM is Always Innovate and Market.

We have a special guest who’s going to teach us about marketing. Many of my clients ask me, “Michelle, you have a great marketing resource. Whom do you recommend?” Let me tell you something. I’ve wasted a ton of money on the wrong marketing firm. I want to introduce a very special guest that’s part of my mastermind. He is here.

Amel Kilic is the Founder and CEO of GenTech Marketing, which is home to Scalable Revenue Ecosystems, a proprietary marketing strategy that has a 98% success rate. We’re going to make him prove that. He has many years of experience in the paid ad space. His company has helped thousands of companies double their revenue annually.

Amel is also the author of the book, How To Grow Your Business Using Instagram. He is in the process of publishing his second book, Limitless: Discussing Life Principles to Create a Limitless Life. In addition to being featured in Forbes, I’ve been in Forbes so we have something common there, Inc. and Entrepreneur, he’s also started to make regular appearances on TV, such as Bloom and multiple businesses going to podcasters.

He has worked with a bunch of companies over the years. His team has worked with small companies making seven figures to Fortune 500 companies by developing strategies that work at any stage the business is in. Here’s the bottom line. All of my readers are building our business to exit rich. We need to always AIM, Always Innovate and Market. Welcome to the show, Amel. I’m happy to have you here.

Thank you so much, Michelle. I appreciate it.

Tell me a little bit about your life and story. How did you end up in America and marketing?

I’m originally from Bosnia and I was born in 1992. The war in Bosnia started in 1992. It was three months after the war started. We escaped to Germany. I was roughly six months old. I lived in Germany for eight years. After eight years, they said, “It was nice having you here but you have to go back home.” Bosnia still wasn’t safe but it also didn’t have a future. It was war-torn. There wasn’t a good government that had potential. At that time, America was still accepting refugees and people from Europe. We decided to move to America. My mom always says that this was probably the best decision she ever made because of the opportunities and the things that we were able to achieve.

Being foreign, your parents tell you to become a doctor or a lawyer. She pushed me down the medical route. I knew that I didn’t want to be roughly 40 years old and then start to make money. I didn’t want to have $300,000 in debt. My game plan was like, “Let me find something that is a little bit below the doctor. Let me go for my registered nurse license, like RN.”

In the meantime, I’ll try to find something on the side that has been proven to work for me so that I can tell my mom, “I have a business that is generating me money. There’s potential here. Are you open to letting me quit the medical field and focus on this?” That’s where I am. I gave up the medical side and shifted over to the business world.

At what age did you come to the US?

I was eight.

You grew up here and went to college here, right?

Yeah.

How did you get into marketing?

While I was on the medical journey, I had a close friend that had a knowledge-based software company. That was the first time I was exposed to the business world. While I was in school, being foreign, you’re always scraping to make some money. I used to sell things on the street, like fake watches, fake sunglasses and fake things. He said, “You’re good at selling but how about you sell a legitimate service? How about you come to work for me and work in my sales department?” That’s the first time I sold. My biggest client at that time was Harvard so I closed Harvard.

You were the guy that would hustle us on the street to sell us a fake Louis Vuitton or Gucci?

I had to make a living.

Go back to Harvard.

That was my biggest client to close.

How did you close Harvard?

Just a sales process. They came in as a lead and I saw the domain. The domain at that time was Ashley.HarvardUniversity.com. I said, “There’s no way it’s Harvard.” I hopped into a meeting and there were 3 or 4 of them in that meeting. I went down our sales process. It was a knowledge-based software company that my friend had. It was a good service. All I had to do was explain the benefits to them and I was able to lock them in. That’s when I realized I could make money and a lot more money working with professionals versus selling fake stuff on the streets.

You did make money doing the legal way.

That was the first time I made some decent money in my life. I was roughly 22 at that time. I always knew in the back of my head I was going to finish Nursing because I wanted to make sure that my mom knew that I have a secure job. In the meantime, I was always trying new businesses. I wanted to be my own CEO or business owner. The first 3 or 4 businesses failed. Some of them were in the tech space. Some of them were in the eCom space. I realized that they all failed because I didn’t know marketing. I was like, “Let me sit down and figure out how to grow my business using marketing.”

That’s a huge point. They failed because you didn’t know marketing. Many business owners fail because business owners don’t understand marketing. They don’t know what marketing company to hire. They don’t know what questions to ask. They don’t know if they’re getting good company or bad company. We’ve all wasted a tremendous amount of money, me too, hiring the wrong marketing firms. This is important. I want readers to pay attention to this.

We get clients as well. They come to us and say, “I have an amazing product but no one’s purchasing.” It’s like, “Your product can be amazing.” There’s probably a system out there in a business owner that developed better software than Netflix, Amazon and Facebook but never blew up because they didn’t know how to put it out there.

The same thing happened to me. At that time, I thought I developed the best three businesses in the world and they all failed because no one knew about them. I took the time to learn how to scale my business. I realized a lot of business owners need help scaling their business because they’re at a point where they have an idea of what they want to develop and they have a goal of, “I want to take the idea to $3 million a year. How do we get there?”

That’s where we go in there and fill that gap of an idea to $3 million in revenue. We do work with clients that have a system in place already because then we can scale it but at that moment, it’s still like a fresh start for them. Our main goal is to understand the sales process, going in there and scaling their business through a predictable method.

Marketing: GenTech Marketing’s goal is understanding the sales process, going there, and scaling its business through a predictable method.

What makes you different than everybody else? I’ve wasted over $250,000 hiring 1 marketing firm. They said, “We’ll give you results. We’re going to do this and that.” What are some of the biggest mistakes that business owners make when it comes to marketing? Maybe we should start there.

Doing research with whom you partner as a marketing company. As a marketing company, you’re good at marketing. If a novice business hops on a meeting with a marketer, the marketers know how to sell their service. I see it happen over and over again. They get sold and sign up for their service. It doesn’t work and then it leaves a bad taste in their mouth. Next time, there might be a good opportunity to partner up with a marketing company but they’re afraid to take that step because they had a horrible experience.

My biggest thing is doing research and looking at their honest case studies. Not the case studies where it’s random numbers where it says, “7X return, 20 booked appointments.” What does that truly mean? How much revenue have they generated for their clients? At the end of the day, the revenue is all that matters. That’s why in our case studies, we showcase revenue for our clients. Even though sometimes our clients don’t like sharing that number, we ask them to be open to allowing us to use their case study to showcase that. We know what we’re doing.

The second thing is interviewing the team that you are deciding to work with. Marketing involves the full process of it being a cold lead or someone seeing your brain for the first time to them converting and paying you. To make all that happen, there are so many steps in that process. A lot of marketing companies, for example, focus on the initial step, which is I had the call audience, I got them to see your ad and they convert it as a lead.

Great but how are you working the lead? Who’s nurturing the lead? Is the lead even qualified? What’s your sales process? What’s your upsell? Do you know your lifetime value? The reason we are successful is that we were a new marketing company as well years ago. We did not understand everything. We asked ourselves, “We have a client that’s in the same industry. This one’s doing super well and this one is not. Why?” It’s because this one has a full process in place while this one reached out to us. We launched ads. It’s the same ad, format, copywriting and everything but he’s not hitting the same revenue goal. It’s because he’s missing everything else.

He doesn’t have his processes. To all the readers that have been following me and my book, Exit Rich, I talk about the six Ps. Process is the third P. It’s very important to have those processes go. Go ahead and explain the processes.

To go back, what we did was we ended up building a process that we can copy and paste for businesses. Before this interview, I told you our success rate is 100% but in the intro, you said 98%. I don’t like saying 100% because it sounds misleading. The reason we are 100% accurate in our marketing is that we are able to implement this whole system that has proven to work. The only thing we don’t do for our clients is close the deal. If we see that you’re getting qualified booked appointments but you’re not closing, we’ll still sit down with them and see what we need to improve in their sales process.

When it comes to the scalable revenue ecosystem, it comes down to 3 to 4 main sections. The first one is the awareness side and the ad side. This works for any business. For any readers that are looking to replicate our system, I’m going to explain what we do that you can replicate. Within the ad and the first step of someone seeing your business for the first time, they need to understand what is unique about you and what is your offering. There are 100 businesses in the same industry. There are 100 marketers. There are 100 people that help businesses exit.

Most business owners don’t take the time to understand what’s unique about their business. We all have something that separates us. We take the time to find out exactly why you are unique and what offers you provide that no one else in the space can offer. You then separate yourself from pitching a service to offering a solution that they can’t go to a competitor and say, “Someone else is offering me the same thing for a cheaper price or something.” They can’t find another scalable revenue ecosystem. We’re the only ones that developed it. Even though they might replicate the process, they still can’t replicate every single foundation that we have for it. The first thing is to separate yourself from every other person in the industry.

I call that your superpower.

Pitch that within the app. After that, we tap into copywriting. With marketing, everything’s about copywriting. When I say copywriting, calling out the pain points for your audience. For us, many times the pain point is businesses hitting plateaus and not being able to scale. We offer the solution of, “Are you facing an issue surpassing your plateau? Are you facing an issue of taking a business from $3 million to $5 million? Take a look at our Scalable Revenue Ecosystem.” I plugged in the pain point and my unique mechanism.

The offer is if you don’t make your money back within the 90-day program, we’re going to work for free until you do. That’s our guarantee. When you have that foundation, we use the same copywriting for every single other step in that process. Even a salesperson and whoever is doing your sales needs to have the same terminology while they’re in the client meetings. Between that, for example, we have the ad, we send them to a landing page, a funnel where we have a video sales letter explaining a little bit more about what you guys do or what we do.

We have testimonials. The whole point here is to disqualify the people that aren’t qualified. A lot of our clients are busy. The thing that I hate the most is hopping on meetings with people that aren’t qualified to work with us. That’s why for our clients, we focus on disqualifying. They can’t book a meeting unless they truly are qualified to work with you.

Let’s go back to copywriting. I’ve always said that copywriting is an art. It’s not a science. Many people say, “I’m a copywriter.” No, you’re not. There are very few good copywriters. Perry Belcher with Ryan Deiss is probably one of the best copywriters in the country. What makes a good copywriter from a non-good copywriter? How do you have the best copywriters on your team? Talk a little bit about copywriting because everybody thinks it’s so simple but it’s not. Copywriting is more difficult than writing a book.

I’m writing a second book. I hate writing a book but I want to share my knowledge. Copywriting is not simple but we overcomplicate it. There are three main components and it depends on the audience that you’re speaking with as well. You need to have their terminology. If you dumb it down and have your copywriting at a third-grade level, everyone’s going to understand it.

Some people think that you need to overcomplicate it so that only a certain spectrum of your target audience understands the terminology. To get the qualified booked appointments, it’s not true. All you have to do, specifically for the copywriting that we do, is call out the pain points and mention your solution. A lot of copywriters or marketers pitch their service way too much. They don’t call out the audience and their pain point.

For example, we work with a lot of life insurance agents. In our ads, we say, “Life insurance agents, are you having an issue with quality leads?” If you’re scrolling through Facebook or LinkedIn, that speaks to you if you’re a life insurance agent and you’re struggling with quality leads that you’re buying from lead vendors that are selling leads to ten people with the same lead information. That’s the simplest way of copywriting. The more you can elaborate on their pain points, on speaking and calling out the audience and then offering a solution at the end, the more of a call to action. That’s all that we focus on in our copywriting.

It’s to grab their attention, make sure you address the pain points and the CTA, Call To Action.

Offer the CTA like, “I am a better solution. Click Learn More to learn about our Scalable Revenue Ecosystem.” You want to also include some testimonials and numbers where at the end will say, “Click Learn More to learn about our Scalable Revenue Ecosystem and how it has helped Eric scale from 50 agents to 150 agents within 3 months.” Include a quick little testimonial of the client that you’re working with to show your credibility as well in space.

Copywriting is the biggest thing, as long as you figure out that main copywriting sentence and all this should fit in a sentence. If it’s more than a sentence, it’s way too complicated. We can elaborate when we go down the sales process. In a funnel, we have a video that’s roughly 3 to 4 minutes where you are explaining a little bit more elaborated on what the ad itself was. In the ad, we called out the audience. We pitched them and told them exactly what we do and how we can help. In the VSL, you’re doing a three-minute version of that same process but you’re diving deeper into what makes you unique and what separates you from everyone else. You talked about 3 or 4 different case studies within that video, explaining what you did for them.

You’re also placing a video in that ad.

The main ad is a video. Sometimes we do photos and videos to change it up.

I’m sure you test.

You need to always test. I’ll throw on an example. A lot of our clients come to us and face this issue as well. They have established businesses. They’re running marketing ads. The ads are doing super well and out of nowhere, their sales plummets because they haven’t tested new ads to replace the ones that are working. Ads are workers, for example. Someone might be doing well and then maybe they get married and get lazy. Maybe they get a child and their performance goes down.

That’s why you always need someone to replace them. We know that. This is why we’re always testing. Twenty percent of our client’s budget, we dedicate to testing. In case this one dies out, we have something else to throw in there. Within the VSL funnel, we have the video. We have a few more testimonials and then we’re saying, “If you don’t have this budget and fit in this criteria, do not click the next button.”

What I find is that they always click the next button.

There are going to be people that do. It’s frustrating but we tell them.

If you tell somebody not to do something, they want to do it.

They want to learn about it. They’re curious. This is why we know that 10% of the leads that go through are not going to be qualified. We know that. We can’t have 100% accuracy on the quality of leads but a lot of our clients are going from 50% unqualified to 10%. They’ll take that but you can’t be 100% quality leads through this process because there are going to be people that go through it no matter what. You can’t control it.

The goal is to get more quality leads than not.

Upon them scheduling the appointment, we have a CRM. People say they have a CRM but it’s like having a Ferrari.

What is the CRM? Explain a CRM because some startups are reading this that might not even know what a CRM Is.

What does it stand for? It’s Customer Relationship Management. Ultimately speaking, the CRM, as we explained it, is like having Ferrari. Some people leave it in the garage so that looks nice. They say, “I bought a Ferrari. It has an amazing engine,” but they never use it. To make sure that CRM is utilized correctly, most people need to be trained in it. They have to understand how to ultimately use it to their benefit.

What we do is create a sequence there. As soon as a lead comes in, we have a 25-day sequence where they’re getting text messages and emails nurturing them. This isn’t a sales text or email. We send a case study informational stuff to keep them hot within your pipeline. The thing is so many people get leads and they’ll call the lead and maybe they didn’t answer because maybe they were busy or maybe they were still thinking about it because only 3% of people are willing to purchase their service at any given time.

There’s a 70% group that would be open to your service but we’re not hammering them down. The pipeline is super important within a company. Having stages where your salespeople go in there and the CEO can oversee and say, “These leads are in a new category. We have these leads in contact. We have these leads qualified. We have these leads and proposal sent or invoice sent.” Every morning, you should be going in there and saying, “What’s going on with this lead?” Make sure that you’re working those leads.

What we see is that CRM itself has increased a business’ revenue by 20% by implementing CRM. When we are able to take this full setup and implement it into a business, you can see where the value is. All the clients or business owners do is hop on those meetings and update CRM. That’s the only thing that we don’t do. Everything prior to that, we do for them. They can do it for themselves as well. I can explain everything. You guys can replicate this process and you’ll see a change.

Is that the whole process?

That’s it.

One thing you said is that you offer a guarantee. In some companies, that’s what I always told the head of our mastermind, that you should make them guarantee their work when they’re pitching their services. I love guarantees. I love it when business owners put their money where their mouth is but not all businesses can do that. What is another approach to a guarantee?

The guarantee is there so that people trust you with their money. That’s all it is. Typically, if someone doesn’t trust you and says, “I’ll guarantee it,” it fills that gap. The other way you can do it is through credibility. Why do we get featured on Forbes and PR and go and use channels and talk? Just for credibility so that people are like, “This guy, girl, lady or business knows what they’re talking about.” If you can combine all of that, you dominate the space. If you can’t guarantee, at least be very credible. If Amazon is selling you something, you’re not going to ask for a guarantee. They’re trustworthy. You’ll buy their product or service.

The problem is our vendors are not.

That’s the difference. I feel like all of them offer a guarantee. Even when you buy a product or service, they’ll say, “If there’s something wrong with the packaging or the item, send it back. We’ll take care of it.”

Credibility 1,000% goes a long way. That’s why you write books too for lead generation, credibility and exposure. Larry commented, “People don’t want to read a book.” Larry, I’m going to agree to disagree with you because lots of people have read Exit Rich. I do agree that people want information very quickly and video seems to be the way to go. More business owners need to get with the program and start innovating in marketing and creating videos on TikTok or YouTube and putting them everywhere. What is an example of an irresistible offer? Tony Robbins always says, “Make that irresistible offer that they can’t say no to.”

I was part of another mastermind here locally and they say the offer should scare you. As a business owner, it should scare you. People will offer an offer that they’re comfortable with. It’s like, “I’ll offer this. It doesn’t hurt me if it doesn’t happen,” but then it’s not strong enough. What’s an offer that scares you? That’s a good offer because the viewer, the reader or the person on the other side of the screen or the phone, wherever they are, needs to be like, “I’ve never had this presented to me before. I want to sign up.”

It needs to be a wow factor. The reason our ROI guaranteed is not a crazy wow but it showcases that we’re going to dedicate everything that we can to make sure this is successful because other marketing companies wouldn’t do that. You have to find something that separates you from your other competitors. To answer your question, try to get the wow factor and find something that scares you.

Do you have an example of one?

There’s an example of one. I don’t know when it went live but it was a commercial of a real estate brokerage firm. Their offer was, “If we don’t sell your house within 30 days, we’ll buy it from you.” That was a very powerful offer for that. It’s scary but there are contingencies there as well. They’ll buy it from you but at 30% less than what it’s listed at. I’m sure they’re still protected but from the reader’s side, they’re like, “That’s pretty cool. Let me reach out to them.”

From the business owner’s side, you want to be ethical. You want to be true to that offer. You want to make sure that you fulfill that.

Transparency is the key to every business’s success. If you do offer an offer, be super transparent because you don’t want people coming back and saying they lied about what their guaranteed offer was.

Marketing: Transparency is the key to every business’s success.

Why do so many marketing companies fail? Marketing people too always say, “If the marketing person is responding to your ad, they’re probably not very good at marketing. If they were, they would already have a position. They would already have a job or they would own the company.” It’s hard to find good marketing people when you’re trying to place ads and recruit. Marketing companies are very difficult to find good marketing companies. Why is that?

The level of entry is super low. Anyone can watch a YouTube video on how to run Facebook ads. They create an LLC for $150 in Florida. They create a website on Wix for $50 a month and they have a business and marketing company now. Does that person have any backend credibility or have they gone through the trenches to showcase that they can grow the client’s business? They don’t.

For everyone that looks to hire a marketing company, you guys need to vet them. Understand how long have they been in the space, who they have worked with, what’s their expertise and so forth. The biggest value for a marketing company or anyone that partners up with anyone that’s focused on growing a business is that person’s or business’s ability to say, “I’ve faced this issue before. I know how to overcome it.”

The only reason a business partners up with a marketing company is to hand off the workload but it’s also to skip the learning curve because most businesses go through the same issues and learning curve. When you partner up with a marketing company that has worked with someone in the same industry, they can say, “We’ve already gone through all this. We don’t need to test it with you. Let’s implement what’s working.” This is why I always say, “Ask if they worked with someone within your industry and let them showcase what they did for that client.”

Not only that but also check their references and see what they grew the revenue. When marketing companies are willing to share some risk when they charge a certain management fee and then take a percentage of your revenue growth, I always think that that’s good. If they’ll discount their fees and take a percentage of revenue growth and discount and then take off all the marketing costs from that, that means that they have some skin in the game. They believe in your company and the success that it will have. What other ninja secrets do you have in the marketing world?

One quote that we use all the time is if you’re looking to save money by stopping marketing, it’s like trying to stop your watch to save time. It doesn’t work. Everyone needs to market. Ultimately speaking, the reason that big companies go out of business is that they stopped innovating and implementing new marketing strategies that allow them to keep on growing. My biggest fear is that there’s going to be another marketing company that comes down and tries to take the market share. The only way I can control that is by being so much ahead of them at every stage of the business that they can’t catch up. That’s my recommendation for every business. Always innovate.

What did I say about AIM? Always Innovate and Market. When COVID hit, I had a lot of clients panicking. Everybody panicked and the last thing you should do is panic. One of the biggest things I did is I went through the financials with my clients and said, “What can we cut? We don’t need a water fountain in the office. We can cut that. We don’t need to have pizzas delivered every Friday. We can cut that. We can cut this and this.” They always wanted to cut marketing. I’m like, “No. Marketing is the last thing you cut.”

You do want to go through and audit your marketing. Do a thorough audit of marketing and see what’s working and what’s not. Get rid of what’s not working in your marketing but double down on what is. This is when you should spend more money because other people are going to tighten their belts and decrease their marketing budget or stop it together. You can’t stop marketing. When you stop innovating and marketing, that’s when you start dying and you die. Chaps asked, “What is the next marketing trend?”

I hate this question theory of the next trend. You always want to stay ahead of the curve. The marketing space moves so fast that even things that are old in the online space, which might be a year old, still many times have not been implemented by the big corporations. There’s still a lot of companies that come to us and they’re saying, “We’re still doing TV ads and flyers. We’re thinking about maybe tapping into Facebook ads.”

Facebook ads have been around for quite some time. I don’t like hopping into the next trends. I like to dominate what’s working. As humans, we’re always looking for the next shiny object thing. “I have a car, I want a better car. I have a house, I want a better house. I have a relationship, I want a better relationship.” You always want something better.

The grass is not greener on the other side.

It’s always like that. It’s good to have that mindset because it makes you want to explore. I feel the strongest and most powerful foundations are built when you invest a lot more into what’s working and what you have working. Many times, I’ll ask my clients, “What are you guys doing at this moment for marketing? Are you guys doing Facebook? Are you doing affiliate marketing? How can we multiply that before we tap into new things?” To give the marketing side’s view of that, it’s doubled down to what’s working. To answer Chap’s question, platform-wise we see TikTok taking some space. The government’s looking to ban TikTok so we’ll see how that lays out.

What’s your philosophy on TikTok?

We have clients making money off of it. While it’s out there, we’ll keep on squeezing it and then when it’s gone, we’re going to go back into what’s the best converging platform.

We need an American adoption of TikTok.

It is what it is.

Do you think that the government’s going to shut them down?

I don’t know. They say a lot of things that they’re going to do. I feel like some key players also make that decision. There was a bill that got passed in regard to the government’s access to people’s accounts and their privacy policies with people’s account cameras. We knew they always had access to pretty much everything around us but there’s a bill that got passed in regard to that. They’re going to have more access to all the information out there in the world. The more information you have, the more money you make in this world. That’s simply what it is. Amazon, marketing and all that is built on data. The more data you have, the more powerful you are.

It seems the best platform for you has been Instagram, is that correct?

Facebook and Instagram.

Is that B2B too or is that mostly for B2C?

For all. It’s our job to test all platforms at all given times and then we recommend the best converting for our clients. At this moment, Facebook and Instagram is still the top-performing one. Google is 2nd and 3rd at the moment is TikTok. Fourth would be LinkedIn and so forth. A lot of people love LinkedIn. They say, “All my B2B relationships are on LinkedIn.” Yes, but it does not convert. Trust me, we’ve tested it. We thought the same thing but it does not convert as well as Facebook or Instagram does.

How many times do they say you have to see an ad before somebody responds?

Roughly seven times.

It’s hard to rise above the noise. Many people place ads and there’s so much coming at a business owner at one time. How do you rise above the noise?

Call them out. There’s a study where if someone is in a crowded space and someone calls out your name, you’re more than likely to hear that. Amongst all the noise, we recognize our identity. If you recognize that, you’re more likely to get triggered by it. The more you can tap into what I was talking about when you call them out, the more likely they’re going to hear and see your ad.

Marketing: Among all the noise, we recognize our own identity. If you recognize that, you’re more likely to get triggered by it.

You call out their pain points.

Even before that, you call out at least what their role is because you don’t know everyone’s name but you know whom you’re targeting. For us, it was life insurance. When I say, “Life insurance agents,” they’ll at least give me two seconds so they can see, “What does this guy want?” Hone down to calling out your audience and understanding your audience.

That’s all great advice. Any other ninja tips you got?

There’s so much information out there. My biggest tip is understanding that in the business world, all we’re doing is turning out fires. As a CEO, business owner, CMO or CFO, it doesn’t matter. You come up, log into your computer and see a whole bunch of things that you have to resolve. That’s marketing as well. In that journey, while you’re resolving, you’re progressing. When you’re working out, you can’t go to the gym once and then get upset that maybe you didn’t hit your goal. Maybe you’re going three months and then you hit a plateau. Maybe you have to adjust your food.

Understand that marketing, business and everything in life follow the same trend. Some things we give up on and some don’t. I don’t want anyone to give up on the possibility of what their business can achieve because they maybe had an issue with their marketing. All you’re doing is improving. We have a 1% rule within our business. Whatever you do, improve it by 1%. Over time, it’ll continue compounding. That’s how everyone can scale.

Don’t quit. Many people quit. There’s a book called Three Feet From Gold by my friend Greg Reid. You came from Bosnia. You went to Germany and then came to the United States. You’ve had a lot of challenges to overcome. What drives you? What made you so successful? Many people go through life and say, “I would be successful if I didn’t have this childhood. I’d be successful if this person didn’t do this to me. If I would’ve had that opportunity or if my father didn’t leave,” or this or that. It’s always a but. Everybody’s got big buts. What is the key to your success?

The people that are giving out the buts and excuses are able to and privileged to have excuses. A lot of people don’t have the privilege to make up excuses because when we came to the States, we had $200. Excuses weren’t going to feed me and my mom. She was raising me by herself. The biggest driver for me and I feel the biggest driver for a lot of people is pain.

I’m sure a lot of people feel this as well. You have a goal that you set and then when you hit that goal, your happiness doesn’t grow that much. Weirdly enough, you might have a goal. For example, my goal was to buy Lamborghini. As soon as I bought it, I wasn’t any happier like any financial goal that I hit. Every time I do hit that next level in my life, I’m pushing myself further away from what I fear and the pain. I’m like, “If I made $3 million this year, I’m $3 million away from not having anything. Next year, I’m $5 million away from not having anything.” We’re always trying to push that barrier of staying away from our fear. The big driver for a lot of people is fear.

What about the people that have no fear?

A lot of people are comfortable. There’s nothing wrong with that either. Some people want a normal life where they clock in at night and leave at 5:00. They have their 401(k).

What about the people that don’t even work or aren’t capable of working?

They probably don’t want to. I feel like in America, you can truly become anything that you want. If you want to be unemployed, you’ll be unemployed. If you want to be self-employed, it’s out there. The thing is like, do you want it or do you not? It’s that simple. A lot of times, we’ll make up excuses saying, “I want to be employed but maybe I don’t have a car. I’m in the wrong neighborhood. My parents didn’t teach me this.” You can learn everything. There’s Google and books. You can do everything that you want.

There’s a masterclass for everything.

There it is all free. That’s an amazing thing.

That’s so much information. You had that know them. It used to be you had to go to the library. Now, you can Google it. You can find out how to do anything practically by watching YouTube videos. Any last-minute thoughts?

No.

How can my readers get in touch with you?

I am big on Instagram, @AmelKilic. My email is also AmelKilic@GenTechMarketing.com. Those will be the two best platforms. I’m on Instagram because they can see my day-to-day stuff. I can see their day-to-day stuff and then we can relate more.

Amel, you’ve been an amazing guest. You’ve dropped lots of golden nuggets. I hope some of you readers have picked them up and you’re going to implement them. Knowledge is power but implementation is key to success. Thank you to all of our readers. If you like this episode, which I know you did, please share it with your influencers, circle of influencers, network and fellow employees and entrepreneurs. Get the message out there. Reach out to Amel and do business with him. He gave you all the golden nuggets you need to improve your marketing team, if that is your desire as well. Thank you for reading. We’ll see you next time on another episode. Thank you again, Amel.

Thank you, Michelle.

Important Links

• GenTech Marketing
• How To Grow Your Business Using Instagram
• Exit Rich
• Three Feet From Gold
• @AmelKilic – Instagram
• AmelKilic@GenTechMarketing.com

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