Franklin Taggart's Blog

So you paid for the LinkedIn strategy course that told you that you should be sending direct messages (DMs) to potential leads, and you've paid extra for the search bots, LinkedIn Sales Manager, and the one-on-one coaching session. Now you're diligently sending your copied and pasted initial contact to the people who unwittingly accepted your connection request, and the first thing you do is make an offer for a package. Get the hell off my lawn! There are so many other ways to initiate contact with a potential client that don't piss them off and don't end up with them blocking you. In this Coffee Break, I have a few suggestions. At a minimum, look at my profile before you send me a message; send a uniquely written note that shows me you've found something about me besides the fact I came up in your initial search that suggests I might be interested in what you have to sell and don't push. I'm a busy guy with systems that work. Don't assume anything until

Your Own Best Company has featured over 40 interviews since May 2021, and it's time for some reflections and some highlights. Add to that the 90 Virtual Coffee Break shows and you've got a lot to sort through. Join Franklin for some memories, some encouragement, and some gratitude as he looks back on the first year of Your Own Best Company.

Rethinking and repurposing how we package and present our skills for new opportunities is on my mind tonight. Why couldn't a trained journalist bring her interviewing skills into a role where she is interviewing customers of a business for well-articulated testimonials? What if the person who has been waiting tables for ten years repackaged his ability to remember specific people, their requests, needs, and desires and translated that ability into meeting facilitation? What if the music producer who can take apart a $5000 microphone and put it back together again in working order could learn her way around wiring homes for electricity? In yesterday's video, I was wondering about how solopreneurs and freelancers can break free of the idea that their day jobs and side hustles need to be minimal and low-wage. In today's video, I ask the following question in the sequence. What do you already know that you can get paid really well for? #careerdirection #freelancecareers #making

Canva Pro offers a bunch of amazing features not available in the free version. One that I use most frequently is the Brand Kit. This allows me to pre-select brand colors and fonts that then show up on the top of my options lists for both fonts and colors. Now I don't have to go looking for them or enter them in a search bar every time I need them, and for colors, I don't have to guess or go looking for hex codes. In this short tutorial, I show you how to create a brand kit, starting with uploading an image from which Canva can find my brand colors, and then I can add colors to the palette as well as select Heading, Subheading, and Body text fonts. #canvatutorial #branding #branddesign 

An important conversation with a friend today who's been giving his business 1000 percent and finds himself needing some steady income. This isn't an uncommon experience for solopreneurs, freelancers, and artistic creatives. Many of us find times in our lives when we need to just line up a steady income to cover our basic needs until our businesses can get to the point where they are doing that for us consistently. I don't encourage people to just take any kind of day job. It's tempting to take whatever we can get, working an hourly gig for a low wage. This can be dangerous for a business owner for several reasons. Low-wage work requires you to work more hours and takes you away from your first work priority, your own business. I know a lot of people who have done this and have not only experienced burnout, they've lacked the energy and enthusiasm that their own business requires after they've spent their best hours in the day job. I share a few thoughts and exe

It was a five-client day with a sideways wind-blown trip to the airport and back, and I'm feeling it. I even forgot to bring my coffee to this Coffee Break.  For much of my life, tiredness has been a good reason not to follow through. So has depression. So has sadness. So has every other reason.  My commitment to making one video a day has been mostly to see for myself that I can actually follow through on a commitment.  I'm making this video tonight because I said I would. If you want to check out the two Steven Pressfield books I mentioned, here are a couple of Associate links to follow to get them. They are worth reading more than once. The War of Art: https://amzn.to/36RCHVL Do the Work: https://amzn.to/3KrcwU4 I love and recommend both of these books to anyone who wants to make their creative work, their life's work. #stevenpressfield #commitment #followthrough

   Duct Tape Marketing is the first resource I recommend to new business owners who are just getting started. I've read it a dozen times and I learn new things every time through. Strategy Before Tactics!

I'm creating a course on starting a blog. No, I'm not twenty years too late. Blogs are enjoying a comeback and long form writing is gaining traction in places like Substack, Medium, and some of the old standby collections like Elephant Journal and Huffington Post.  I'm creating the course because I believe blogging is the best way to form and nurture client relationships at a very low cost. While some businesses are trying their hand at TikTok and doing very well there, I'm still a proponent of having a well-written blog as a cornerstone asset for your business website. Blogging also offers unlimited flexibility in possible formats and content combinations. I love that I can have text, images, videos, and audios all in the same place so that people can experience what I offer in the ways they like most. I also like the creative challenges of making multi-media experiences available on my website, We don't ever have to run out of new ways to deliver valuable and memo

  Marilyn Corrado RIP

  I used to feel guilty about not being productive all the time. But we're not designed for full-time productivity. There is also a cultural tsk tsk about "wasting time" that I want to challenge. As I've gotten older and faced more physical and energetic challenges, I've realized that my downtime is equally crucial to my creative process: time spent writing, speaking, making music, doing these videos, or any other activity I might label as productive. My imagination is most available and receptive when I'm not actively making something happen. I'm amazed at how easily ideas come to me when I'm otherwise idle. Those three ideas I had this morning while driving home from the airport are good examples. They would have been less likely to arrive had I spent my time productively. Today, my other realization was how I tend to see my low-energy days as useless when they're often my most productive in unexpected ways. I've started the habit of finding

  ▼▼▼Watch or Listen Below!▼▼▼ LeAndra Foster encourages women to take vows of wealth to replace their past habits of scarcity and poverty. It starts with educating themselves about money, then working out the relationships they have with money, and leads to allowing themselves to be wealthy. You'll hear her story of realizing her wealth had surpassed seven figures but still living like the girl from the farm community where she grew up who didn't want to lose her sense of belonging. You'll also hear about her coaching programs - Double Your Profits in 30 Days and The Practical Magical Millionaire, which will be starting very soon. To learn more about LeAndra and her upcoming programs, visit https://linktr.ee/elanlyfe To attend her virtual presentation of the Wealthy Women Don't Pinch Pennies talk on April 11th, register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wealthy-women-dont-pinch-pennies-tickets-296854889967 #wealthywomen #financialeducation #newrelationshipwithmoney

I recently had a wonderful conversation with Jürgen Strauss of InnovaBiz that wandered through a winding path of some of my favorite topics. Jürgen is a delightful interviewer who does his research thoroughly and brings some of his guests' best ideas and insights to light. I was honored to be on this show! You can hear the whole episode on the InnovaBiz website:  https://innovabiz.com.au/podcast/franklin-taggart-innovabuzz-507/ , or you can listen on your favorite podcast platform. This slideshow features some highlights:

Dear YouTube Subscriber! If you are struggling to find the right words to get people to buy stuff, you're going to want to watch this video! You're about to hear something that will change your world - FOREVER! You'll learn how to breathlessly mesmerize readers step-by-step as they progress toward the one goal - buying stuff! You'll learn these great things: ** How to sound enthusiastic about anything! ** How to use bullet points to drive home your logic! ** How to think in short, meaningless phrases! ** How to manip- er, persuade people to do things they don't really want to do! ** And how to make it all seem innocuous but exciting with the generous use of exclamation points!!! This Virtual Coffee Break is the best thing that has ever happened, ever!!!!! #communication #directresponselimitations #adspeak

Half or more of the people who contact me for career coaching are nearing retirement and are starting to plan for their next phase of work after they retire. In this Coffee Break, I share some of the most common ideas and directions they come up with and some insight into a few of them.  By far, the most satisfied and successful of my retired clients have been those who found an outlet for their creativity in the work path they chose. Many finally allowed themselves the freedom and chance to take their artistic, crafty, or musical dreams seriously. Some people have come to me asking about buying food franchises or joining network marketing programs. I have some pretty rigorous questions for people who are interested in either of those areas. They are definitely not for everyone. If you are nearing retirement but not ready yet to completely stop working, I offer a four-session coaching program to thoroughly identify and evaluate all of your work options so that your retirement years wil

How is it I can take a three-ingredient recipe for pound cake and make it so difficult and cumbersome that I spoil the cake and hate the process? Three conversations today happened on the topic of simplicity. Solopreneurs, especially us creative types, have a tendency to make everything much more grandiose and extreme than things really need to be. And it's wearing us out. From the teacher with the new business model who just made herself physically sick because she felt she had to be on all the time in order to fill her class. The class didn't get all the way full and she ended up with digestive problems. And then there's the new freelancer who has so many ideas and not enough time to finish even one of them, feeling overwhelmed because she's imagining and offering more options than she can manage. And then there's me, who wants to create an online course but ends up making it include everything. Translated: the course never gets finished because it's just too

Four different conversations today centered on the challenge of planning for the ends of things. There's so much we can't know about our futures so we're creating a projecting an imagined future and constructing a plan for that knowing full well that life never goes exactly according to plan. In our businesses, so much energy and effort go into planning for the start of the business, and we get to the middle stages of planning soon enough, but I haven't met many business owners who plan for the end of their business, or for their exit from it. And then there are the times when we find ourselves in the midst of unplanned endings with no vision for the next stage of our lives. How can those times be planned for?  And ultimately there are plans for the ends of our lives. Some of us don't want to think about this at all. Too scary and too painful. But if we neglect these, our families are left to deal with messes that could have been made much easier had they been plann

This morning was a low-energy morning as many of my mornings are. I used to be thwarted by these kinds of emotions. Depression and anxiety are a kind of baseline for me. Over the past few years, I've learned some valuable things about the way our psychology and physiology work that have given me some useful tools and techniques to get myself out of the morning lows and into some useful highs. The first time I read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, the part of the book that was most important for my life at the time was the section about the pain body and how to bring attention to the painful places in our being. I've worked with that ever since then and it's my first tool of choice. I believe that our attention is one of our primary superpowers.  Another helpful resource I found was the understanding of psychology called the Three Principles, articulated by Sydney Banks. In a spiritual awakening experience, he saw the relationship between three constant principles of our p

Pretty bowled over by the news of Taylor Hawkins' death today. He is definitely too young, too soon, and yet he's made a lot of people feel better through his work here. I'm grateful for his music, his smile, his kinetic energy, and for the connections I share with my son through our mutual love for the Foo Fighters and their music. If you have a big idea or a big dream you've been sitting on, waiting for the right time, tools, or circumstances, please get over your fear and just start. Write, play, sing, create, paint, dance, sell stuff - whatever you want to do - DON'T WAIT! Don't pass up this one-time opportunity to enrich and enliven yourself and those around you. You'll create experiences worth having, and you'll be missed more significantly and deeply when you're gone. DON'T WAIT! If you need someone to talk you into it, I'll be happy to help. Get in touch and you'll be doing your thing an hour after our call is finished. #taylorhaw

After two years in business as a brand strategist, Dre Beltrami became a mom. She tried to operate her business according to her pre-parenthood terms and the latest advice from the business gurus but found herself stretched too thin and needing a long break. Like every other business owner, Dre was challenged by pandemics and quarantines to reevaluate everything about her life and her business. Facing her existential crisis head-on, she made some critical decisions about her business model, her marketing strategy, and her online accessibility and visibility. Hear the rest of the story in this full-length interview that was inspired by an email Dre sent out just Wednesday morning. You'll want to join her weekly email list by clicking the orange button on her homepage: https://thesolopreneursociety.com . While you're there take a quiz or two to discover some valuable insights about yourself. And don't forget - The Mom Bundle will only be available next week - March 28-April 1

Sing to the tune of Daft Punk Is Playing At My House. Yes, everything that worked yesterday is not working today and it's thrown a kink into my works. I'm hoping the tech gods smile upon us and the technician visit tomorrow afternoon will do the trick. This is an expensive service that is costing those of us who depend on it a significant loss of productivity and income. The people have been nice, but I'm ready for the promise of yesteryear that technology will be the solution to our problems to actually come true. Herein lie a few tidbit insights on customer service. People remember these experiences and talk about them. Let's see if Comcast's social listening is on point. If I hear from them as a result of this video I'll let you know. #comcast #customerservice #brandawareness

The first question to ask when you're not filling up your programs, selling enough products, or enrolling enough clients - How Many People Know? I have a client trying to get ten people signed up for a class. So far there are only three. We can assume those three found the offer attractive enough to enroll, so lets go back to the first question. How many people know? She emailed her list of 500 people and has gotten around a five percent open rate. So 25 of her email followers have heard about the class. This class is not the same thing she's been offering all along so it's new to her audience. So many of the people who have taken her classes before won't immediately understand the need to look more closely. She also has a small personal Facebook following and a dreadfully small Business page and Instagram following. She's posted several announcements there, but they haven't received enough engagement to be favored by the algorithm. Our strategy that we came up