Nigel Thomas – What It Takes To Grow A Business With CEO Nigel Thomas

Tim Melanson: Hello, and welcome to today’s episode of the Work at Home Rockstar podcast.

Excited for today’s interview. We are talking to the CEO of Alpha Inbound. What he does is he helps, uh, people find customers on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, through their paid ad platforms. Very excited to be rocking out today with Nigel Thomas. Hey, Nigel, Are you ready to rock?

Nigel Thomas: I’m born to rock. Glad to be here Tim

Tim Melanson: Right on. So let’s start off in a good note. Tell me a story of success in your business and we can be

Nigel Thomas: inspir. Yeah, sure. So this time I know we’re gonna get there as well, but for the context, this time last year, like 12 months ago, I was actually chewed up and spat out of another startup. So I was staring unemployment at 29 years old.

Didn’t really know where to go. I kind of got some experiences from different start roles or working from home and yeah, there I was not really knowing what to do next. Then basically I made a phone call to some guy I used to work with called Josh, who’s a founder of Alpha Inbound, and he was kind of spinning his wheels a little bit, wasn’t quite sure what to do him.

And he had the experience of actually running ads for these big director consumer brands, and I had that experience, but I more so enjoyed the business development side of building and leading teams. So we have zero reputation whatsoever within the last 12 months, all through cold outbound sales working from home.

And I’ve never actually met Josh, just to be, um, completely frank. And we’re gonna meet for the first time in a month, so that’s exciting. But we managed to go from nothing to a seven figure run rate in 12 months. It definitely wasn’t easy. But yeah, that’ll be my story of success and I’ll thoroughly enjoy the ride and learn a lot along the way.

Nice.

Tim Melanson: Isn’t it amazing we can do with just technology, right? You don’t meet the guy. Yeah, .

Nigel Thomas: Yeah, I know. It’s crazy. Like, honestly, I mean, even not just Josh, we’ve got a, we’ve got like over 10 people on our team now. We’ve never met anyone, which is insane. I mean, prior, like 10 years ago, this wasn’t possible.

But now post Pandemic world, you know, this is. The norm, and obviously for the next generation that grew up online, they’re completely used to this. So it’s a crazy world, but you gotta learn to adapt, you gotta learn to be comfortable, and you’ve gotta learn to love zoom.

Tim Melanson: Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it’s, it’s level, the playing field.

Anybody can you start ginormous businesses right from, right from zoom, right from home.

Nigel Thomas: Yeah. Crazy. Crazy. Right

Tim Melanson: on. Well, you know what, So it’s not all sunshine and rainbows for everything. And every once in a while we’re gonna hit a bad note. So I’m, I’m wondering like, what was something that didn’t go as planned for you and how do we avoid or recover

Nigel Thomas: from it?

Yeah, so actually the reason I knew Josh was four years prior, we’d actually been working on a project together. So I run my own agency and I brought Josh in as a contractor to help me on a big client that I had. Now, this client, they were doing my 20 million a year. They wanted help. I somehow managed to blog over a cold email that I was the guy who was gonna run their Facebook adss, and it was one of my first ever clients.

So it was a bit over overwhelming. So I brought Josh in. But the problem was, was, and as again, a lot of start entrepreneurs face, I was a one man business and I got complacent on the sales side. So one day they had a call with me and the woman, Jennifer, her name was said to me, Nigel, bad news, we’ve actually been acquired.

Well, that was good news for them. But the team that’s acquired us has an internal marketing team. We now no longer lead. Need your services now at the. Because there was so much work. The money was great. I hadn’t been doing any sales or prospecting, so that was 90% of my revenue gone overnight like that.

And I had racked up from different things, like 50, 60 grands worth of debt, lots of credit cards and all that kind of stuff. And I just didn’t know how to pay it off. And I’ll be honest, I mean, we talk about the like the truth. The truth was, I’m not ashamed to say it now, looking. I fell on my knees and I started crying.

I didn’t know what I was gonna do next, but it was a great lesson, a lesson that you never, ever get complacent with sales, no matter how good you think it’s going. And yeah, you know, that’s why I love business because it keeps you honest. But it definitely wasn’t easy going through that. But yeah, that’d be my, my lesson of hardship.

Um, there’s plenties to go along the way, but that’s one of the ones that’s defined me most.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Uh, I identify completely with that. I mean, the whole sales thing, Ugh. Like I, I find that, I know in my journey and, and many of the people that I’ve had on the show, like it’s, it’s just, it’s up and down, right?

Cause you know, you’re spending, especially if you’re self-employed, you, if you’re a one man band, I mean, you’re, you spend all this time, you know, working the sales funnels, trying to get to the point where you’re bringing in some business, and then you gotta work on that business. So the sales kind of falls away, right?

Yeah. So like what would be something that you would do to make sure the sales keeps moving forward even when you’re working on something else?

Nigel Thomas: Yeah, so one thing I’ve learned is everyone who’s great. Does the basics, right? And when we’re talking about building your own business, if you’re not gonna build a team, I mean, we’ve obviously kind of started recruiting people and stuff now in this agency, so a little bit different.

You have to get involved with management and leadership. But if you’re doing it on your own, if you’re asking me that, Going back to what the greats do, the basics right? It’s just really small, repeatable actions every single day. There’s a fantastic book called The Slight Edge. I dunno if you’ve heard of it, but it essentially talks about doing these little actions every single day that over ma, like massive amounts of time compound into huge things.

Now, if we look at sales specifically, that will be just blocking out, let’s just say 30. Some, you might not enjoy it. Let’s just say it’s cold email, for example. Do you block out like 10 min or 30 minutes each morning to essentially do five to 10 cold emails every single day? And a lot of people might be thinking, Yeah, well that’s not a result of that many sales.

Yeah. But the thing is, is you’re building up a pipeline and even when you’ve got clients, No one here is telling me that, you know, they haven’t got 30 minutes every single day for something that’s so important to the health of their business. So my advice would just be, do something that’s extremely simple.

If you want a real hack around it, you wanna know how to form a habit, then what you need is a trigger. So a trigger could be, I don’t know, you’re long going off in the morning doing the task. And then a reward. So maybe having your favorite coffee. Do that every single morning. Do it for 90 days straight.

You will build a habit so strong, you’ll almost start just doing it on autopilot. And no matter how busy you get, just always keep doing that. And I build from there. And if you do have sales people, Train them to do that because again, in a slight edge of that book, the author actually owned a sales company and he taught them all of these principles, and guess what?

They went on to be a multimillion dollar company. So that would be my advice to him. Wow. Uh,

Tim Melanson: wow. That’s awesome. Yeah. There’s another book that is similar to that that kind of brings both of those things together. It’s called Atomic Habits.

Nigel Thomas: Yes. Just been reading it recently is amazing.

Tim Melanson: Very, very good. One of the best business books I’ve, I’ve read, I’ve.

I actually got the, uh, the audio book and I keep listening to it every once in a while. It’s fantastic .

Nigel Thomas: It is surreal.

Tim Melanson: Um, so now, okay, so imagine we’re doing that. So now you know you’ve got this, this sales thing going, but you got too many projects on the go. What do you do about that? Like, why would you keep on sending emails out if you’ve got too much

Nigel Thomas: work already?

Yeah, because like I said, I. You can get complacent. And then the thing is, is it’s much better to have too much than not have enough because maybe you’ve hired some people on and then you’ve run out of leads. And like I said, some people get acquired or things happen outside of your control and then you’ve not got any food to put on the table, so to speak.

And if you make it really extreme like that in your. You know, if you’re gonna be feeding your family food, you’re not gonna stop going out there and buying food for them, are you? You know, no matter what cost. So you’ve gotta make it really extreme like that. And at the end of the day, if you’ve got too much work coming in, you can always refer some out and get like a commission off it anyway.

So I don’t think it’s a problem to have that. What I would say is if you are smart and you leverage your time, and we’re here on a podcast, Is start out with the whole cold outbound approach, but then ideally you want to try and leverage a media platform so you can kind of transition that business to inbound, and that’s where you can use them.

The same approach, which might be writing little piece of content every day on LinkedIn or wherever it is, Twitter is a good platform as well, or TikTok, and that over the course of a long period of time and making sure you’re connecting the right people. Could also build you up a little community, a little audience, and then that could result in inbound needs.

And that’s probably a better place to be. But obviously it takes a long time to get there. But to answer your question, having two business, like it’s not a bad thing. So I still think it’s important to do and it’s a much better situation to be in than not having enough and then having to cut back and everything.

Yeah.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. And I, I think the other thing to keep in mind too is that, Not every email you send out is gonna lead to a sale, actually, not even close. Right? Yeah. So, so it’s, it’s one of those things where, uh, and, and there’s also, I mean, depending on your business, I suppose, but most businesses have sort of a, like an onboarding process as well.

So you know, from the time that you actually get on, you know, this person expresses interest and you. You know, the sales process with them, it’s gonna take some time. So, you know, you can be continuing to finish the project that you’re currently working on while you’re sort of working on the onboarding of a new project, right?

Nigel Thomas: Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, the analogy I like to use is banging on doors. So, you know, let’s just say you bang on a thousand dollars, it could be sending out an email, but you have, Cause here’s the other. Not every single door’s equal. Let’s just say you’re going to a random neighborhood. You know, by looking at all those houses, like some of them are different to others, they’re not all equal, and you don’t know what’s gonna happen when you’re gonna bang on that door.

You could bang on a door, you can get a slam shot in your face. Probably a lot of time that’s what’s gonna happen. But you gotta keep going with enthusiasm to the next. And you don’t know which door is gonna open because there could be one door that literally opens a hundred thousand doors. And that could be the next door that you open.

And obviously an analogy we are using, it’s some sort of cold outreach, but how do you know that you might be connected with someone who knows 10,000 of your ideal customers? And if you stopped because you’ve. Got too much work, you’ve now lost an opportunity for five, 10 years worth of business. So that’ll be my response to that.

Thanks.

Tim Melanson: I, And I can also think of another massive benefit to doing that, you know, small amount of work every day too. Is, is just with your. With your enthusiasm. Cause you just mentioned, I mean, you know, you could get your, the door slammed in your face a few times. So if you are desperate because you didn’t do enough sales and now you need to get another sale and you keep getting that, that door slammed in your face, you’re gonna get, your energy’s gonna go down.

You’re not gonna be as excited to be talking to this new person who could be, you know, that person you just talked about. However, if you’ve got like this habit of just making a few calls per day and all of them, you know, all five of them say, say it’s five emails, well all five of them go nowhere. You’re not, you’re not discouraged.

You’ve got work to work on next morning, you do the same thing, right? So you can kind of keep your energy up because you’re, you know, taking just a small bite out of it every day, right?

Nigel Thomas: Yeah, a hundred percent. And one of my favorite quotes, me being typically British, Tim, is from Winston Churchill, which.

You know, success is going from failure to failure about loss of enthusiasm, and the thing is, is I’d always also ask yourself. What’s the alternative? The alternative is, you know, don’t send out any emails, you know, sit on the couch, watch tv. Do you think something’s gonna come to you? No. The world owes you nothing.

Whether you like it, like to think it does or not. The world does not owe you anything, and that’s the mindset you need to have. You need to get up off your ass and you need to start banging on some doors, and sure you’re gonna piss some people off. But if you want to get what you want in life, you need to be brutally honest of yourself and understand that if you generally think, again, you don’t just wanna be spamming people, but if you generally taught the time to do your research and you think you can help that person, then you should go for it.

Take a risk on yourself.

Tim Melanson: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, as you mentioned, if you got so much work coming to you, then like you said, you can, you can start handing some of that work away and which means that you can make choices on what client you’d rather work with right now. Now you can actually choose the best client to work with rather than just a client that will work with

Nigel Thomas: you.

Yeah, and I, I’ll tell you what, Tim, me and you both know that most like businesses, they don’t have the too much business opportunity, especially now going to recession. So if you’re that good at getting business, then guess what? You can probably start another business at B2B business helping other businesses get work.

You can probably make hell of a lot of money off that. So I don’t think that’s ever something that’s gonna be a problem, or is it definitely a good problem.

Tim Melanson: No, No. I think we’ve convinced people that they should keep on prospecting. Yeah. So, so let’s talk a little bit more, a little bit about your jam room then.

Um, Nigel, like, so what, what do you Sure. Where do you get the

Nigel Thomas: magic done? Yeah, so you talked about Atomic habits. Now one of the things that he talks about in Atomic Habits is all about the environment. You know, the best people. Let’s just say people think like the greats. They have great discipline. Just think of someone great in what, whatever field you are in and whatever field that you follow, whether it’s business, whether it’s sports, whether it’s music, whatever it may be, they have the best environment.

You know, at the end of the day, if you are looking to lose weight and you’re constantly put junk food out in front of you, you’re gonna cave and you’re going to, you know, one day you’re gonna be tired, you’re gonna be down. Something life’s gonna happen. But if you just don’t have that junk food, I think this is an analogy he uses and you put fruit there, eventually you just start eating the fruit and vegetables, and that’s an environmental thing.

So do not underestimate how important your environment is. And if you need to pay $200 more for rent, and I know this might be contradicting our advice from going through recession, but you put yourself in somewhere that’s a better environment then actually, that could have. Really ha like the second, third for or four fold consequences on how you approach your work every day, which again, could result in a lot more business, could be way more than that extra $200 you’re spending because I don’t know, for example, you are putting yourself in a place which is near nature.

So you can go out for a walk in nature and clear head every day. That might be one example. So I think people do massively underestimate the impact of a really good environment and something for me. Which is kind of contrary to what this podcast is about is after working at home for five years, I want to try and put myself in environment, Tim, with other entrepreneurs and who are all kind of hustling and starting and just put myself in that kind of environment now.

But yeah, environment’s so important. I’m sure you would agree with that too, Tim, right? Yeah, Yeah. Hi,

Marc Mawhinney: it’s Mark Moen from Natural Born Coaches, and I want to give two very big thumbs up to Tim Melanson and his. Crew agency. I have been using them for a long time and I am 100%. They get the job done right.

They’re fast and they let me focus on my business. I don’t have to worry about anything, so again, I want to give them two very big thumbs up. I have no problem recommending them. I don’t give testimonials for everyone because my name is attached to it. But I gladly do so for Tim and the Creative Crew Agency.

So use them. You won’t regret it, and good luck.

Tim Melanson: Well, one of the big ahas from that book that I got was, uh, it talked about how yeah, you, you see these successful people and you think that they must have this, you know, an an amazing willpower and the, the aha from that book was that No, that’s not true actually.

The, the people. Uh, have a lot of success in whatever it is, you know, whether it be, you know, health or whatever. They’ve constructed their life in a way where they don’t have to actually use their willpower. Their willpower is actually less than a person who has to like, not junk food that’s sitting on the counter.

Because they don’t have the junk food on the counter in the first place. Right, Exactly. Yeah. So that was a huge, huge thing. And, and yeah, like you say, when you’re setting up your, your office, your jam room, make sure that, you know, even for me, with my music, I have guitars out , I have instruments out. Cause if it’s not out, I’m not gonna play it.

Exactly. So, you know, just make it as simple as possible to just pick it up and play it, make it as easy as

Nigel Thomas: possible to get your work done. Yeah, just cut distractions, you know. There’s, uh, an interesting one from Steve Jobs, and he actually, I don’t know if you know this, but in Steve Jobs houses, he actually just used to have no furniture whatsoever.

And there was two reasons for that. One was because, so he could think expansively because there was no furniture there whatsoever, Just literally like nothing whatsoever. So he could walk around these big empty spaces and it, it would force his brain to think expansively. That’s what, so he thought. And the other thing, To just kill distraction and he didn’t want to become upset with material items.

And if someone as good as Steve Jobs is doing that, then I’m all, I’m all for exploring, you know, those kind of crazy ideas. But I just think, again, what a lot of people doing correctly is they try and do all these productivity hats and all the rest of it when actually the inverse is just lemonade. Just eliminate distraction and you will get focused.

Just do the opposite. Yeah.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. If it’s good enough for Steve, it’s good enough for me. , ,

Nigel Thomas: you know?

Right

Tim Melanson: on. So now let’s talk a little bit about the band. So, uh, tell me who you have around you and how you find them.

Nigel Thomas: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think as we’ve now kind of, we got close to hitting the seven figure run rate in our first year of business, and the next thing to get us to our next stage of growth is gonna be continuing to hire great people.

And I’ll be honest, I kind of struggled a bit. Because at the end of the day, when you’re a startup, when you’re working from home, you haven’t got limited finances. So you know, to compete with the bigger companies who have these big graduate programs, it’s hard to find those people really good at what they do.

And the other problem is, is sure there’s rise to fantastic freelancing platforms. You know, we’ve gotta be grateful for those opportunities, how easy it is to connect with people. But because there’s so much supply. It’s hard to figure out who’s good and who’s bad, because at the end of the day, a lot of people aren’t that great as well.

So I think having some sort of filtering system is important at the start. You’re gonna need to go out there. You’re gonna be talking to a lot of people, but something I found really helpful, Tim, and especially we go back to the whole prospecting for new sales, and not a lot of people talk about this, but prospecting for.

And doing that consistently. So instead of having to do these huge, like real massive recruitment pushes last minute, when you are desperate and you know, you’ve got all these huge projects, which, you know, at the end of the day if you don’t find these people, you’re gonna have some serious issues delivering though.

Then kind of build up a bit of a waiting list and always be trying to connect and you can kind of see it’s a networking opportunity and that’s what I try to do. Definitely not perfect. It’s you. Now I’m saying, Yeah, I, I, Nigel, you need to do some more of that. But if you can try and find people ahead of time and you know they’re really good, then that’s also a way to kind of get ahead of the curve on that.

Because at the end of the day, the people are everything. And if you find people who are fantastic at what they do, they’re worth their waiting goal. Yeah.

Tim Melanson: I heard a quote once that says, The best time to build your network is before you need it.

Nigel Thomas: Right? Yeah, exactly. But no. We say that and then people just, they still don’t do it and you just gotta learn from experience.

But yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Yeah.

Tim Melanson: And, and then I think it’s just a matter of trying to figure out, uh, Maybe, maybe having, uh, something on your, on your, on your phone or whatever. Just, just to be able to take those regular notes of like, Hey, just met this person, this person’s good. You know? And, and, and have them on, on the, on a back burner for when you do need them.

Right?

Nigel Thomas: Yeah, so I actually have this really great podcast I did with Drew Green, who’s the founder of In Not Founder, CEO of In Chino, who is the second fastest company, uh, growing company in Canada. And this guy is like a serial entrepreneur, an absolute beast. And something that was really interesting that you told me, Tim, was when, Cause I asked him, How do you hire your leaders for like your huge company that does like, I dunno, hundred million plus a year?

And what he told me is, The most important thing, and this just was great advice to me, it really helped me in recruitment and finding people, is make sure that you admire that person no matter what it says on their cv, no matter what it says. Of the experiences that they’ve done so far. Do you internally, can you hand on heart, say you admire that person for something?

Cause if you do, You’re way more likely to trust them and to give them the opportunities in that, you know, your baby that you’ve created. And that, that was the best advice I’ve ever had in recruitment to meet them. Wow. Wow, Wow.

Tim Melanson: So now what about like, so, uh, like have you hired anybody that you’ve admired before in your, in your business?

Nigel Thomas: Yes. Yeah, we recently hired some great people and obviously long may not continue. Hopefully it doesn’t change. I’ll talk about it. But yeah, we’ve actually hired, so we’ve got this guy who’s from. Incredible. Like one of the biggest marketing agencies. And he just wanted to really have more growth because we are a startup agency, so he can kind of be the main guy.

And then there’s also this girl, and she’s from Albania. You know, she’s grown up like, no, no one gave her a chance. She’s 22 years old. She’s already built a team of like five people. She’s got perfect English. She’s doing it all to help. She’s actually got a younger. And she’s doing it a lot of it, to raise money for a younger sister and she’s got all these incredible ambitions and she has been one of our best high, and I generally really admire that person.

And yeah, just having a lot of conversations, like it really motivates you and inspires you to do more and not only to be responsible for their, you know, growth paths, but also just to do more of yourself. I mean, I think what I was doing at 22 years old, dad was going out and getting drunk at university, so fair play to her.

But yeah, it’s amazing to see what people can do.

Tim Melanson: Wow. Did you approach them or did they

Nigel Thomas: approach you? No, so this is what I’m talking about with the, the prospecting. I called, messaged that person on LinkedIn. So I, and I’ve actually been called messaging a lot of people on LinkedIn and profiling those people because again, you know, if you think these people are just gonna turn up at your door when you turn on a job ad then you know, you, you’re gonna be what?

There’s, you’re gonna be in for a nasty shock because again, When you’re a startup, you need to sell people on your business because no one knows about it there. And it’s gonna take some convincing cuz the best people, they’re usually employed, this particular person was, and we have to have a lot of conversations and it just got to the point where we managed to find that alignment and it wasn’t easy.

But yeah, like like I said, I messaged them on LinkedIn and I was prospecting and yeah, it just so happened you managed to find that alignment. After some negotiation and, uh, long conversations, we managed to, to find a fit for her. Right

Tim Melanson: on. So let’s talk a little bit about cash flow and sales. So yeah, what is your approach to, uh, you know, making sure there’s more money coming in than going

Nigel Thomas: out?

Yeah, sure. It’s a great question and obviously we kind of touched on a lot of the, the principles behind it. So we built most of our business from cold outbounds and a lot of that’s called email. So in my mind, You’ve got to be doing some sort of outreach nearly every day. And in the past few months, to be honest, it’s been a bit more up and down because we’ve had a lot of demand.

So we’ve had more inbound coming. But I always like to try and keep the outbound going there because you know, we’ve, I do a lot of content on LinkedIn now and that’s been steadily building up. And also we do a podcast and whatnot, so we do get a little bit of inbound as well as referrals. Cause it, you know, you do great business, you will get referrals.

But having said that, I still like to do outbound. So we focus mainly on cold email, just because that’s where most of my experiences. But I think it’s key to really build systems. You know, at the end of the day, it’s not just about how hard you work. We talk about systems and atomic habits. It’s about how smart you work.

So you’ve gotta have systems around it. So can you systemize a lot of what you do? When you say systemize, I don’t mean. Copy and paste a template to send out to thousands of people. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about if you look at what you do every single week, can you build a system around that so you can potentially get someone to assist with at least parts of it, maybe a subcontractor.

So it is a little bit more manageable, but the main thing is that it actually happens on a consistent basis. So that’s what we’ve been working really hard to do, to build some systems around our outreach. And then Mike, I said, Try and build some sort of content system for LinkedIn and to try and make that a little bit more manageable because I’ve been posting every single day since March.

But I’m gonna be honest with you, Tim, it is quite hard to keep up with it. Um, but I think, you know, it’s really building some strong foundations for the future because like I said, regardless of all the cold outreach, I think it’s smarter. To leverage media for what it’s worth. Because if you can do one thing, which has the same input, I e, I can do a post on LinkedIn or go to a podcast with you, but the output can either be one person or eight, 8 billion people.

You know? That’s a good way to spend time. Yeah, of course. At the start, your output is not gonna be 8 billion people, but the thing is, compounds, I’m sure you’ve noticed, and the growth of your podcast over time. So I think you have to also put time into doing that because that, you know, Like everyone should really own a piece of the internet in 2022 and like up to 2030 and beyond, because that’s where this world’s going.

So I’d say a mixture of those two things, if that makes sense. And then just making sure we don’t miss any opportunities because time kills deals. Yeah,

Tim Melanson: I think, uh, Yeah, I think what, what, uh, because people get confused by the word system, and I think another way to talk about it would be like a procedure, just something that you can write down.

Like, like steps follow, I guess, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And, and I think that, uh, yeah, what you said earlier makes sense. Like if you can figure out a way to make it simple enough that you can hand it to somebody else and they can follow it, then it’s a system.

Nigel Thomas: Yeah, exactly. And this is the thing, everyone’s already got a system.

You’ve got a system for opening up your phone and going on social media, but you just haven’t written it out everywhere. And that’s

Tim Melanson: the, and that’s the point. Yeah. So I mean, uh, uh, like, uh, some ways to do that, you can, you can do a screen capture of what you’re doing, hanging know and there, and then you can go back over it next and, and write up the steps that you’re doing.

I mean, everything that you do, you know you’re doing it, uh, in a systemized way, even though you might not know you’re doing it in a systemized way.

Nigel Thomas: Yeah, exactly. And you’ve also gotta just be honest with yourself and think, is what I’m doing really the best use of my time? Because if you can outsource what you are doing, for example, it might be, I don’t know, finding some leads on by looking at them on LinkedIn.

And that could be, for example, a five or $10 an hour job. Are you valuing yourself at $10 an hour Maybe, because you might just be getting started. But if you’re not and you’ve got better things to be doing for your time, you are now almost irresponsible to your clients because you are now spending your time doing work, which isn’t actually that important.

Tim Melanson: Totally. So it’s time for your guest solo. Tell me what’s exciting in your business

Nigel Thomas: right now. Yeah, sure. So like I’ve said, I mean, we’ve had a lot of growth and we’re really going for that, for that next stage. So me personally, being the ceo, I focus on the business development, the sales, the leadership side.

So what we’re looking to do to get to the next stage of growth. And to really transition into kind of that multi seven figure agency in 2023 is focus on building a sales team. And that will be my kind of big, like Targets building the sales team and a content team. November and December, getting ready for the new year and I’ll probably go into 2023 is very complicated task, but that’s just a skill set that I wanted to learn for a.

And that’s my big focus. We also have, like, we’ve just brought on a load of new team members. So actually seeing these new team members take on like what we’ve done and their, you know, they’re better in us in a lot of areas and then make the business even greater and we can see this great work. For our clients, the brands that we work with is incredible to see.

When obviously, like I said, 12 months ago, there was nothing there, like zero reputation, nothing there. And now to see other people coming into this environment and we’re all being passionate and having that song together and making this thing bigger, like that’s really exciting to see if meeting, Cause look, we put a lot of hard work in a lot of late nights.

A lot of, I’ll be honest, shit days. But it’s, you know, it’s all worth it if you just keep going. But when you are in it together with someone else, and that’s something I have found really hard as a solopreneur, actually having those other people, even if it is online, just to interact with and people, again, I always measure my relationships of how people show up in bad weather and when it is really bad to have someone to go to.

For me that’s so important. And now having more of a team, of course, it’s a lot more responsibility. You asked me what I’m excited about. So yeah, they’re the main things. Um, but yeah, you know, there’s a lot of like tasks and challenges and obviously we’re going through recession, all the rest of it. But my opinion now, it’s time to see the real entrepreneurs are, so I’m excited.

Tim Melanson: Yeah, exactly. Some of the biggest companies have come out of recessions and depression, so really this is the time, this is the time to, to buckle up. So yeah. Who, who would be the ideal customer for, uh, for Alpha

Nigel Thomas: in. Yeah, so direct to consumer brands, you know, any brands who are selling physical products, doing between five and $30 million in revenue.

We tend to work with health and wellness brands, but we’re not opposed having conversations with others and anyone who really needs new customers. Like I said, we come in there, we have a heavy focus on content ready, getting your content ready for these pay platforms and Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, they’re the ones you maybe concentrate on, but we don’t just look at that single planner.

Uh, Attribution. We look at everything from a macro perspective and we like to talk to the brands that we work with, Tim as business owners ourselves. Cause we know they’re gonna do that themselves and they look at their entire ecosystem. We like to do that for them to make their life easier. So that’ll be our icp.

And we usually tend to work by the founders, the CMOs, the CEOs, or the director of marketing.

Tim Melanson: Right on. So how do we find out more about your company

Nigel Thomas: then? Yeah, so alpha inbound.com. You can go there, you can book in a discovery call. We do actually offer a free audit for the right brands, and the other place is LinkedIn.

So LinkedIn I post every single day at eight 30 while the time recording 8:30 AM e. I’ve revealed the truth behind paid social. But regardless if you are ICP or not, I’d love to connect with any entrepreneur, anyone who’s doing anything great. This industry is passionate about their mission in life. I love connecting with people on LinkedIn, so feel free to shoot me a message there.

Let’s have an honest conversation. I

Tim Melanson: love it. Nigel, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you for rocking out with me. No

Nigel Thomas: worries. I really appreciate Tim, been absolutely blessed. Let’s rock and roll, rock and

Tim Melanson: roll To the listeners, make sure you subscribe right and comment we’ll see you next time on the Work at Home Rockstar podcast.