Intro 0:02
He found his bold vision podcast where we only talk to entrepreneurs with a bold vision of their business’s future. While listening to today’s episode, we want you to think about yourself as it relates to our guests, and their entrepreneurial journey is always something to learn. So if you’re interested in growing your business, getting a few golden nuggets, or simply learning more about entrepreneurship, this is the podcast for you. Show Notes of today’s episode will be available on bold vision podcast.com.

Brent Simpson 0:40
Alright, so you heard the story. If you listen to podcast episode number two, you know, what was the beginning? And the beginnings is kind of different than how did it start? The beginning is what led me to business consulting what led to bold vision enterprise. So I gotta say, now is the question. How did it start? It started extremely rough, as most entrepreneurs will tell you, I had left the world of finance, and I was now a business consultant. And I really didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know what my unique value proposition was in the marketplace. I just knew I could help businesses grow. I had experience in working with a company in, you know, Washington, DC, we went from roughly 130,000 a year with three employees to about 14 point 6 million. Now figured if I can play a pivotal role in that company growing, I can help any company grow. And, again, most entrepreneurs know you, when you first, you know, kind of put yourself out there, you’re figuring it out, you don’t know if it’s if you really can handle it, you don’t know that it’s going to make money. It’s so many unknowns, only thing you can keep doing as a new entrepreneur is continue to push on. That’s it, so many of us do it. I didn’t know what platforms I would use, how would I take appointments, how would have, you know, charged people for my services. And I had one of the worst beginnings of any one.

Brent Simpson 2:14
So it probably was roughly September the say 10th, that the decision was made, you know, I was going to become a business consultant. And that meant letting my licenses you know, go putting them on the shelf. I had one employee who had started Quan Glover who started working with me from college, he was already two brain surgeries in just things that have happened since he interned for me. And I’ve probably had three knee surgeries from just complications were phonies. We decided to go forward. And we both agree. Like I told him the direction I was heading. It was purely business consulting, I was leaving finance alone. He said he would he would take the journey with me, you know, and he was a bank and a finance major from University of Maryland. And he he was like, Yeah, let’s let’s take a run in. About two weeks into us making that decision. He said he had a headache. And that headache led to a third brain surgery, in which case, I honestly thought he was going to die. And, you know, it was one of the most traumatic things you know, I’ve been with this kid since you know, he was in college, and you know, your his first year out. I’m thinking while interning for me this, this young man who was incredible is incredible.

Brent Simpson 3:44
I thought it was gonna die. And it broke me it broke me up. And so now I’m not doing my main business, I’m trying to deal with the emotions of what might happen to Kawan. And I’m trying to figure out who I am in this world of business consulting. Everything was just, it was just not a good situation for me mentally, emotionally or economically. So, you know, what, what do you do to you know, kind of right the ship, I decided to take out a home equity loan just to cover his salary because, you know, we weren’t making money. And I I did not want it to be an environment where I couldn’t pay him anything. So you know, you take that first this is the first month of bold vision enterprise becoming a organized a company, if you will, it was the worst. So from there, we we eventually were able he was able to get

Brent Simpson 4:41
surgery lined up and it was it was such a long process. I won’t even go into it all. But you know, if you want to check out Quan Glover, he actually wrote a book on the whole thing. It’s called overcoming adversity. You can find it on Amazon. Again, Quan Glover and the book is called overcoming adversity. But you know, in All, I think after he had surgery a month after he had surgery in roughly October, November, I found out that I had a ruptured hernia. And I needed to have immediate surgery to correct it. So that’s coming on until end of year for other three, four other knee surgeries. And it just felt like a lot emotionally, mentally. It felt like a lot, and I still trying to figure out what Bo vision was going to do. And I knew the unique value proposition was I thought differently than most entrepreneurs. And that meant that I consulted differently than most business consultants. But was it really enough? And I didn’t know if it was, it felt like the right direction for me, but life was happening at such a rapid speed. I didn’t know what to do.

Brent Simpson 5:46
So, you know, for anybody that knows, this is that part where I tell you a little bit about me? I’ve always been a believer that I 100% control what happens to me, you know, I don’t I’m not a fan of the world is conspiring against me. If anything, the world is conspiring for me. And from that stance, I felt the weight of it all. And, you know, it’s it’s one thing to be entrepreneur, when things are going well, it’s another thing to be entrepreneur when the world is collapsing around you. So I have this surgery turns out, I need some rehab from a prior surgery that I had on my knees. The business went into hiatus for about two months, and we had three months, four months, four months, we had just launched, we had about three clients who were paying us enough to to eat lunch. So it’s, it was definitely an uphill battle. Soon after, qualm recovered, you know, he came back to work. And it was he was he was in about 50%. I was about 75% in the game. But we started to get traction bold vision was growing. We our client base was growing. And you know, when when you feel gross? It seems like it would just feel great in everything Life is good. But the pressure of knowing like what is this company? You know, what is our purpose? How do we? How do we separate ourselves from the patent? How do we continue to get more clients in the pipeline?

Brent Simpson 7:23
All those questions needed to be answered, but we didn’t know how to answer. You know, just to be honest, like no clue. So it was it wasn’t as if I grew up in an entrepreneurial environment, not you know, my mom was a single mom, she, you know, had a sister, we grew up in Washington, DC. It wasn’t easy all the time. You know, she, my mother tried to put herself to put herself through school went on to you know, acquire masters as well. But my father who was absent most of my life, he would be in and out and individually found out that he was spent some time incarcerated. And so it wasn’t the ideal environment where it was, it was just rosy. It was great. And as a kid, you know, you have the best life that you know, so you don’t know anything else. So you don’t know that it’s another way to grow up.

Brent Simpson 8:24
But it definitely wasn’t the place where I learned entrepreneurship. Later on around college, you know, I have an older cousin who taught me a lot about business and, you know, took me under his wing in me, he exposed me to the ways to negotiate that I didn’t even conceive. And although even with my father, I will go back to say, even with him being incarcerated, I knew he owned a business before he was incarcerated. And I didn’t know no legitimacy of it or what was going on, you know, behind closed doors, but I knew he made his own rules. And that did intrigue me that did kind of spark a well how did he do that question in my soul. So you know I will say it definitely sparks something in it also watch my mom work. It was it was a situation where I just didn’t understand how it’s it seems so hard for her. So now all these things are spinning in my head I’m you know Kwon surgery me surgery, Bo vision now is seven months old, we’ve had the same three clients since you know, our, our birth, if you will of the business in those clients was starting to wonder if we were going to progress. You know, what’s next? How else can you consult me? How else can you help me grow? And these are questions we all ask ourselves clients are asking us, we’re asking ourselves, and I still you know, honestly internally, six, seven months ago, I was still fighting imposter syndrome. And you know, for any entrepreneur listening to this in this moment, you’re thinking wow, you know, I can relate you know, sometimes I feel Like, if a person were to say I want to see your financials, or if one of my clients said, you know, show me what you’ve actually done to grow your business, we will feel like just the sheet was ripped off of us and everything was exposed. And I felt like that, and it’s a hard and a heavy burden to carry. And I always knew it would be better if I can just endure, but you have to think, at a newborn, you know, at the house and my wife, you know, we had a, you know, a young child also. And she was pretty much maintaining the household for, for us in that two ways on your mind thinking that you should be contributing bigger, giving more doing more, but you you have to leave and Zig Ziglar said it in one of his discussions.

Brent Simpson 10:52
When you’re an entrepreneur, you kind of torn into these two worlds, when you’re in the office, you feel you feel like you should be back home. When you’re at home, you feel like you should be in the office. And that was absolutely correct. For me, it was 1% how I felt most of the time. In looking back at it. It wasn’t, it wasn’t until all these things melted against me in the company. And I realized we were still surviving. And I still wanted to do it in my soul. I realized I wasn’t going to give up. And I realized there was no way that I was going to allow circumstances to stop me from you know, living a life of entrepreneurship, that I want it and I think I was listening to Gary Vee podcasts every day at this point. And I would wake up and listen listening to Les Brown and Zig Ziglar and Earl Nightingale. And I was just trying to make sure I had a positive outlook on everything that was happening, try to always stay positive. And things they started to get better. You know, listen to a lot of entrepreneurs on fire with John Lee Dumas if you haven’t heard it, I think it’s an amazing podcast.

Brent Simpson 12:02
You know, I was listening to his episodes every day. And it was, you know, I got to see his progression, and that his guests were fantastic, his content, fantastic. And I thought, you know, I could do that, too. So all these things are happening. And I started to realize that I needed a bigger team, I needed not necessarily inside of both visions business, the actual business of both vision, but in my circle, you know, I recently worked with, um, soska Tino, he’s a psychotherapist. And he talked about regression to the mean. And that is just essentially, you know, it’s been said you, you become the average of the people that you spend the most time with. And I wasn’t spending time with people who are highly successful, and have battle scars, but also had the successes behind them to say, You know what, they did it. And I didn’t even know what the boldest thing I could do in business was, until I gave some consideration, the boldest thing I can do was to own my position as the CEO Bo vision and realize that I was a solopreneur for the most part, and that I had to give everything in the head to every client and use the creativity, I had to actually grow businesses and apply, you know, create these asset allocation model for clients. I need now to apply that to business development for everybody who was willing to trust the vision to grow their company. And that’s what I did is it was good for you know, a while it helped me get on the path to being a more confident business consultant. But I still didn’t have that moment where I felt like business turned a corner. And you know, that moment of turning the corner probably came in late 2019. This is just talking two years later, after the company started. It was 2019 when I had about least 1415 clients. And I was doing well over 10 to 13,000 a month on the books. And that’s what I learned is the difference between you know, it was written in the books and what’s actually in your account. I was doing all this work for these clients and many of them weren’t paying me. You know, my accounting system accounting system. It could have been improved. I wasn’t tracking who was paying, who was it? I was continuing to consult regardless. And I noticed something that was a deficiency in me. I was getting satisfaction just from being active.

Brent Simpson 14:50
I wasn’t profitable. But I was active and I just wanted to keep being active because it gave me the facade the false feeling that I was profitable. I was like, Man, this this, this is crazy. Like I can’t keep, I can’t keep doing this. And I knew looking at every month what should have been coming in versus what was in my account, did I was not aligned with the clients that I was getting. But I was too scared of letting them go, even though they weren’t paying me, I was too scared of letting them go, because I thought, then I just wouldn’t have any clients. Or I would have to tell my wife that I lost clients or did you know, these people who hopefully one day might pay me are now definitely not going to pay me. And that hope was it was allowing me to continue. And that’s, that’s exactly what I knew I turn the corner. Cuz, you know, when I walk into the office, and at this point, coohom was no longer able to continue working here. He wanted to pursue the book that he wrote, which he accomplished. But I walked in, I was like, wow, I’m really in this by myself. And I had to shed the clients that didn’t make sense. For me, it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. And even to this day, now, if I know a client isn’t aligned with the mission for Bo vision, I don’t entertain it, it doesn’t matter how much they’re paying, it does, it’s not worth it. And for those people who were believers in bow vision, there was a difference between people who believe that people who actually helped me grow, I had to understand that as well. In this, when I began to truly digest regression to the mean, I needed to start including myself, in groups and around people who are doing things bigger than myself. You know, I wanted I wanted to treat me as if I were the worst house in the best neighborhood, you know, it was a lot of potential. But right now, I’m not not there, and it’s okay.

Brent Simpson 16:47
It allowed me to be free. In my thought process on how to grow. It allowed me to humble myself to those who were doing more than me, and could actually guide me along a path of success. It was the moment where I turned the corner. And I’m, you know, I’ll stop it there for today. But we all have that moment, when we turn the corner, we know, we know who we are in business, we might not be there yet, we might not have the income to match the knowledge we have. We may not have the client base that justifies our confidence. But we know it’s coming. We know we reached that place where business feels good, and is heading towards profitability. That was my moment, you know, 2019, when I started shutting those clients that weren’t in alignment for me, are in alignment with me. And I started to really believe in myself as an advisor. And I also understood my value. Understood what, what I can do, and I have, I’ve had people tell me all the time, I you should be doing more, you should be charging more. It’s very scary to charge more, when you don’t know if the person who receives the invoice is going to pay you. But when you finally do in fact, for most entrepreneurs listen to this, I promise you, if you write a bigger number down on your invoice, most people will pay, you will be surprised, shocked astounded at how ready people were to pay you more money, you just weren’t ready to say a bigger number when you were talking to them. So if you listen to this podcast make today, the day you really give it a try, you write down the bigger number, and see what happens. Now I created a little system. And this is the freebie for today that I call the five and five. And what I would do is every five clients, I will increase my price by 5%. And I wanted to see when I would hit a place of resistance. And whenever I hit that place of resistance, I knew I was priced for the right for that community. And either I had the option to change the community at that point. Or to level off with my pricing is stay at that range. So every five clients, I increased my price by 5%. And I was that was my way of testing the market and having a systematic increase without you know, having any justification for how I grew. That was my system. That’s my freebie to you all today. I hope some entrepreneur listen to this thought about it and say you know what? I’m going to try that for my business. Thanks for being with me. See you soon.

Outro 19:24
I hope you got as much out of today’s episode as I did. You will find the social media links for today’s guests and the show notes on bow vision podcast.com. There are also resources on the site to help you accelerate your success. Please be sure to share this episode with friends and subscribe to our podcast. We’re growing fast. Our goal over the next 12 months is to reach 5000 entrepreneurs. To do that we need your help. So again, share subscribe and comment. Remember, be bold and always have a vision for your best tomorrow.

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