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Have you noticed how some full time employees are able to simultaneously balance having a side hustle as an influencer? How do they do it?
And what about the folks who quit their nine to five and lean into their role as an influencer and full time creator…
Does that sound frightening to you, and maybe just a little bit exciting?
Because the truth is, the creator economy is booming and there’s ample room for influencers, particularly B2B influencers, whether they’re full time or working on the side.
Whether you’re a budding creator, or a CEO who wants to support and retain their employees-turned-influencers, stay tuned, because that’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of Partnership Unpacked.
Welcome back to Partnership Unpacked, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing, and relationship building… oh, and you get to learn too! Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy – with a solid takeaway every episode from partnership experts in the industry.
And today is going to be interesting. On the one hand, you have people like me who have been working full time for the same company – I’m now celebrating five years working for Agorapulse as Head of Strategic Partnerships – and throughout that entire time I have kept and developed my personal brand and content at The Social Media Hat.
On the other hand, you’ve got employees who want to strike off as full time influencers, and leave the safety net of a regular paycheck behind.
Both scenarios can be frightening and stressful, but it helps to talk to people who have been in those situations and get their insights.
So that’s exactly what our guest today, Norman Farrar, is here to help with.
Norm is currently an entrepreneur who started his own marketing agency and has worked with major, major brands. Fortune 500 companies. And he’s now leaned into podcasting and is building up his personal brand as an influencer, even using platforms like TikTok. How’d he get there? What challenges did he face?
Let’s find out.
Partnership Unpacked host Mike Allton talked to Norm Farrar about:
♉️ Why he waded into product recommendations and influencer marketing.
♉️ How he has leveraged relationships to achieve success.
♉️ Which channels have delivered the highest ROI, and why, for his agency.
Learn more about Norm Farrar
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
Full Notes & Transcript:
(Lightly edited)
How This Serial Entrepreneur Became A Product Influencer with Norm Farrar
[00:00:00] Mike Allton: You noticed how some full-time employees are able to simultaneously balance having a side hustle as an influencer. How do they do? What about the folks who quit, they’re nine to five and lean into their role as an influencer and a full-time creator? Does that sound frightening to you? Maybe just a little bit exciting, because the truth is the creator economy is booming and there’s ample room for influencers, particularly B2B influencers, whether they’re full-time or working on the side.
So whether you’re a budding creator or a C E O who wants to support and retain their employees, turn influencers, stay tuned because that’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of Partnership Unpacked.
This is Partnership unpacked your Go-to Guide to Growing Your Business through partnerships quickly. I’m your host, Mike Alton, that each episode unpacks the winning strategies and latest trends from influencer marketing to brand partnerships and ideas that you can apply your own this as to grow exponentially.
And now the rest of today’s episode.
Welcome back to Partnership Unpacked, where I selfishly used this time to pick the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing and relationship building. Oh, and you get to learn, too. Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy with a solid takeaway.
Every episode from partnership experts and influencers in the industry. Today’s gonna be interesting. On the one hand, you’ve got people like me who’ve been working full-time for the same company. I’m now celebrating five years working for a Gore Pulses as head of strategic partnerships. And throughout that entire time, I’ve kept and developed my personal brand and content at the social media hat.
On the other hand, you’ve got employees who wanna strike off as full-time influencers and leave the safety net of a regular paycheck. Behind. Both scenarios can be frightening and stressful, but it helps to talk to people who’ve been in those situations and get their insights. So that’s exactly what our guest today, Norma Farra is going to help with.
Currently an entrepreneur who started his own marketing agency and worked with major, major brands, fortune 500 c. And he is now leaned into podcasting and he’s building up his personal brand as an influencer. Even using platforms like TikTok, how to get there, what challenges did he face? Let’s find out.
Hey, norm, welcome to the show.
[00:02:30] Norm Farrar: This is so professional, man, . [00:02:35] Mike Allton: Thanks for that. I appreciate that. I’ve worked hard to kind of polish how I, how do these shows, so I appreciate that. Let’s start way back in time. Let’s go back to your most recent, however far back that is full-time job. What was it that you were doing and what made you decide to strike off on your own and be an entrepreneur? [00:02:54] Norm Farrar: I’ve always, ever since high school had my own business, except when I first came out of college. I was in the reserve for a couple years. So other than that, I pretty much worked for myself the whole time. [00:03:08] Mike Allton: Got it. All right. So you were with the reserves. Okay, very cool. What kind of work did you do initially when you were in school and just kind of trying to do your own? [00:03:16] Norm Farrar: Let’s see, high school. My first incorporated company was a rock promotion company. I got together with four friends and started that. Then I went through school for cinematography and started a film company with a buddy of mine at school and started working for a government agency, which helped pay our tuition, which was pretty nice.
And right after. Let’s skip a few cuz there’s a lot of small things that happened, but ended up getting involved and starting a promotional marketing company, which is the company that creates the coffee mugs, the key chains. You know, it really is kind of a commodity. You get a big pen or you get a mug.
How do you make more than the guy decide? You’re the person beside you. And so my partner and I ended up coming up. Creating value? Well, first of all, creating a vertical integrated model, which cement? We bought the embroider, we bought the screener. We bought a courier company, we bought a fulfillment center, and we wanted to figure out how we can make more margin and everything.
Came around perceived value. So how do you make perceived value out of a mug? Well, you package it in a really nice box, nice and clean. The big pen, same thing, a t-shirt. You’d put your own label in, you’d poly bag it. You’d have a logo on it. You put it in white boxes with your name on it. And what we found is that, People ended up paying about 20 to 30% more for the exact same big pen.
So kind of carried that on. And by the way, as that grew, we found another problem that occurred hypergrowth. , all these Fortune 500 companies really wanted to deal with us because we, all of our orders were on time every time, and that’s what they wanted. They didn’t care if they paid more as if they got on time.
So perceived value was everything. And what that led to was all these extra sales. , how do you handle them when you’re working 25 hours a day? So looking at a book that just came out back in 95, it was Emmys and understanding systems and automation and being able to scale a company and how to scale a company.
So all of those things now are with everything and anything that I touch. So systems and automation, and then perceived value and the ability to grow like vertically.
[00:05:39] Mike Allton: That’s so interesting because not only are you a serial entrepreneur technically, right, but you also mentioned a type of partnerships that we don’t often talk about on this show and that’s acquiring cuz it’s not something just anybody can do.
But that is a very true and legitimate way to grow the business through partnerships. It’s acquiring other businesses that can fill the gaps in what you can do. between you and that other business that you’re acquiring, fill a need and bring to market a unique proposition. So that’s fascinating. What are some of the other challenges that you had early on?
In your career, particularly when it comes to, you know, building up these businesses?
[00:06:18] Norm Farrar: Well, especially the promotional marketing company, and I have to explain that a typical promotional marketing company throughout North America back at that time, had $300,000 worth of revenue. There were two people and there was 23% gross margin.
And that didn’t cut it for me and my partner. So anyways, we had to find a d. Way of doing this. The problem was for us to do this, we had no cash. We were trying to grow. We knew what we wanted to achieve, but we had a couple of people that we’ve been working with over the years that knew that whatever we said we did, and one of them was Hershey’s.
So we had our initial order with Hershey’s for a bunch of different items, but we had no cash, and we told them that we had no cash, and whoever the brand manager was at the time ended up giving us our first break by giving us cash flow we needed, which was paid up front. Cash, like we got, I think it was 15,000 bucks up front.
That allowed us to not only buy their product, but to start working on two or three other orders. So cash flow is the first hurdle that I think every entrepreneur has. And if you don’t have a good manage or if you don’t understand, and maybe going into the battle, you have enough cash flow. But what happens if you have a home?
You won’t have the cash flow to cover yourself, and especially nowadays online, like you have to have that cash flow to first of all, cover off your landed costs, cover off your second and third orders possibly, especially if they’re coming out at, let’s say China. Then you’ve got all your marketing costs, you’ve got all these costs that a lot of people don’t take into consideration.
So that would be probably hurdle number. Cash flow. Cash flow, more cash flow. So that was the biggest thing. The second thing back in those days was this new concept that we’ve never heard of before and is even a bigger hurdle nowadays. That’s voicemail. When I first started getting into sales, I’d go, I’d meet people at trade shows, I would call them, and they would pick up the phone and they would either say no or, yeah, I’m interested.
So it was really interesting learning the technique of leaving a message on voicemail. . And if like anything, like a well crafted email, if you didn’t have that technique down, you either came off as a goof, like just a squeeze ball, a goof, or not knowing what you talked about, , and, and people wouldn’t return your calls.
So it was interesting how everybody was, you know, rushing, trying to figure out the, the, the magic of the script just. right now, people are trying to figure out G P T Chat, G P T. Mm-hmm. , how can you use it? How can you manipulate it? How can you use it to your benefit? And the people that get out there, the innovators, they’re gonna be the ones that are gonna be able to leverage everything and everybody else is just gonna follow along.
They’ll make money, but they just won’t be these innovators out there creating all these strategic partner.
[00:09:27] Mike Allton: That’s so true. It’s something I’ve seen time and again when there’s a new social network that comes out like BL and Clubhouse and Vine, there was a immediate rush of folks who took the time to learn those platforms and then turned that knowledge into product.
Skill, something along those lines. And I love that you mentioned cashflow. Other people watching and listening are marketing agencies, CEOs and CMOs, and that’s always a big concern as they’re growing. We’ve got thousands of agencies that are customers of ours at a Gore pulse and their number one issue is always, How do I grow and scale by agency?
But we find that that changes with the size of the agency. Small like boutique, solar printer agencies, they’re just looking for the next client. But as they grow, as they get bigger, they’re looking for their recurring revenue, they want those recurring retainers, and now churn becomes an issue because they wanna maintain cash flow.
So if you’re listening, and I just described a real problem for you, make sure you subscribe because in a future episode we’re gonna have Rachel from Vata, who is their ambassador to. Come and talk to us specifically about churn. So you’re not gonna wanna miss that episode. But now Norm, I want you to share a little bit more, cuz you’ve kind of just painted around the edges of what you’re doing today.
But I’d love for you to tell us exactly what it is that you do today with Amazon, because I’ve found recently that ecosystem is just. Massive. It’s crazy for those of us who just buy stuff from Amazon. We don’t really think about all the things that are happening behind the scenes with other businesses and other players.
Tell us what you do.
[00:10:59] Norm Farrar: Okay, so really briefly, I, I’ve got a. Couple of different companies that work on Amazon, Walmart. One is a sourcing company, so it’s called Honing Worldwide. It’s a sourcing company that solves the headache of supply chain management. We take sort of medium and larger companies and we control their supply chain management.
For smaller companies, we’ll do their sourcing. We’ll store their product. We have a warehouse and take care of the logistics for them. Another area where we specialize is our, our specialize in are working with peer people and finding out whether they’re applying the right tariff codes. You won’t believe how much money you can save with a tariff code if you have the wrong tariff code.
You could be. Being charged a ton of extra money when you could be charged very little. And also within that company, it’s a product innovation company, so you can’t have a me too product on Amazon anymore. It’s gotta be innovative, and that’s what. The company does on the other side, again, vertical integration carried over from the promo company.
It’s getting brands onto Amazon. You can either work with us a la carte, or we manage your whole brand, and that’s right from start to finish. Building the brand, building the brand consistency, getting the product on Amazon, getting the packaging done properly, and retail ready, by the way, which is retail’s not dead.
Some people think it smells funny, but it’s not dead. It’s actually very popular still. And anyways, getting them on Amazon. Product listing, product optimization, ppc, even doing their customer service, you don’t wanna be stuck on a as a one-legged stool. So we also carry over to Walmart, even over to Shopify.
So we take care of all of your headaches. And it’s exactly like I was talking about before, going out, either strategic partnering or buying the companies and making sure that you’ve got, if you’re trying to do it all your. You’ll probably never become an expert at anything, but if you acquire the right people and the right companies, then you can do this.
And that’s what we’ve tried to do. So that’s what we’re doing for Amazon and Walmart and Shopify right now, and even a bunch of retailers.
[00:13:14] Mike Allton: Fantastic. So you’ve got two agencies that are highly focused on helping e-commerce brands, but lately you’ve been focusing on growing your own audience as an influencer.
Tell us about that. How’s that going, and what are you doing?
[00:13:28] Norm Farrar: Okay, so last year I have a podcast called Lunch With Norm. It’s primarily for amazon e-com sellers just becoming how to become better online sellers. So during a trip to Mexico, one of the biggest influencers in the space was held over at Mexico with me.
And so I said, well, I wish I could be an influencer like you. She said, you are. And I said, no, no, no. You’ve got millions of people following you. Like I have Amazon sellers following me. She goes, you could be an influencer. Look it, you’ve got a beard, you can go out there. You’re unique. You already have those set of followers.
So about three or four months later, my son challenged me on a podcast that, why don’t you become a product influencer? And during the podcast I said, well, how many followers do I have to get? And he says, A hundred thousand. I started out with zero. So I said, okay, let’s see what we could do. So anyway, We launched this thing called Zero to a hundred thousand Follower Challenge.
I started with not really knowing anything about TikTok. I had the challenge was I had to learn these social media channels, learn the demographic in my audiences, and that’s what I’ve been doing. So the challenge is I go on to my channel on TikTok, which is just Norm Ferra. And I tell people like document, uh, 30 seconds to a minute a day what I did right, wrong.
And how Amazon sellers can benefit and how they should approach influencers. How you can become your own brand’s influencer and if you wanna do a side hustle and make money, this is what you do. So there’s all three of those kind of tied into it. So then I had to. Creating social media channels, and I got approved for Amazon Live, their shoppable videos, TikTok, Facebook, got a Facebook page.
Facebook group just got it all and created a deal page. So we went crazy. I built a new, like, I’ve got a podcast studio that way. I’ve got a photography studio with seven lights, three different cameras. I mean, we spent money on doing this right to make sure by December 31st. , I have a hundred thousand followers, so the only part I was missing was product.
And this is kind of the sacrifice I made to do this. And again, this isn’t being monetized. I told anybody who was willing to listen that send me your product and I will do an Amazon Live with it if you’re on Amazon. If not, we’ll do whatever we can with you. We would create a shoppable video, put you on all our social and put you on our deal.
Now we created a hook on our deal site. If you sign up at lunch with Norm deals, you get a new deal every day, and they’re heavily discounted. It’s anywhere between 30 and 70% off, and then you get all the deals in the back end, and then these deals are also carried over to all the social media. So, I am trying to become a product influencer.
I’m building my brand and hopefully December 31st you’ll see 101,000 people.
[00:16:38] Mike Allton: That is an Admiral Goole. I love it. Now, with the influencer work, the actual influencer work that you’re doing is, is that basically focused on Amazon, or would you say. You’re also leveraging some of the other platforms. [00:16:49] Norm Farrar: I’ll take it where I can get it.
know Amazon. The reason Amazon Live is so popular right now is because people are hearing that Amazon does this. I mean, there are other areas that if I create this Amazon Live, you can take. Clips of this, or you can take stills and put it on your Amazon posts, which are gonna get the brand. And this is where my expertise comes in.
The brands should be using it to help build their own followers on Amazon because Amazon wants to build brand communities. So I’ll do it for Amazon. Walmart’s got their own, I’m on a waiting list right now. They just started live and wherever else we can find lives, if we find other platforms, we’re gonna do that.
I’ve been really lucky. I’ve been working directly with TikTok on a couple of things, so I think they like this concept and I’ve been able to say, Am I doing it right? Am I doing it wrong? But really there’s no help if I’m making a mess. Like, you know, when I did my first podcast, I can’t even look at it.
It’s bad .
[00:17:58] Mike Allton: It’s bad. I know. [00:18:01] Norm Farrar: And I think that’s the same with my, like I’m looking at my TikTok going, oh gosh, these are horrible. You know? And they’re starting to get a little bit better and a little bit better. You know, I’m an older guy, my hand’s trying to fit. Edit and do all that TikTok stuff, but you know what?
I get a kick out of it. It’s a lot of fun, and I have to tell anybody who’s out there. If you think becoming an influencer is easy, it is a job. I think you have to really come up like the content is so important, consistency is so important, and just being on top of the new trends, all the. You have to be able to do that and education.
I am signing up with different ways to learn. Like I’m pretty good with digital marketing, but on the influencer side and on some of the newer content sides of things, I have to learn that I have to learn better SEO techniques. I have to get my word out there, the branding, the personal branding. , what is best for me?
What are the color choices? What looks good with this beard? You know? And is that the brand that I’m gonna go with? You know? And then you’ve got that demographic. Who is my demographic. There’s lots of research, just like on Amazon, when you’re researching a product, you’ve gotta do proper competitive analysis.
And I don’t know about you, but do you know Rand Fishkin very well? Spark Toro?
[00:19:27] Mike Allton: Rand is amazing. Yeah, the brand. You know, for those of you listening, norm just mentioned this brand that Rand started. He was with Moz. He founded Moz, which is a search engine marketing giant in the industry. And then he went off and he started Spark Toro, which helps you understand your audience and where they’re getting their information. [00:19:45] Norm Farrar: Very inexpensive and I think he does a six to eight minute tutorial and after he, he explains it, you’re off and running. And that’s one of the key elements to how I understood my competitors and how I had to approach things. And then there were little things like understanding Facebook library. Okay.
Like, let’s see what my competitors are doing and why not just copy that. So there’s a lot of interesting shortcuts here that if I didn’t go and continue to learn, I would’ve been left behind that a hundred thousand. It would be for sure never a hundred thousand. And by the way, I’m nowhere near it yet.
But my goal is to, and this is another technique that I learned, is to help leverage the brands that I’m working using their existing customers. And how do you do that? Well, these are all things that I’ve learned how to do without the brand thinking I’m stealing anything cuz it’s the last thing you want, but already great repeat customers that love the brand.
That the brand says, okay, I’ll help you out. That’s what I’m leveraging to get me to a hundred thousand followers. And then hopefully that starts to snowball because they start to see some old guy with a beard.
[00:21:00] Mike Allton: Right, which is just what we were talking about before we started, you know, the actual recording that you know, a lot of the things that you can do today, they will have cumulative effects.
So that tactics that are just bringing you tens of followers will start to bring you hundreds of followers and then thousands of followers by the end of the year. So your growth. Chart if we were charting how many new followers per day that you’re adding, you know, by December 31st of this year will look very different than February 15th of this year.
And for those of you listening, Norman’s mentioned his beard a couple times. You gotta look up to the podcast thumbnail image, cuz I’ll have Norman’s picture there and you can see this, this lavish long white beard that he’s got going. But you mentioned working with partnerships and I want, I wanna drill down into that or working with brands.
And I wanna drill down into that a little bit because I’d love for you to share how you’re actually connecting with the brands today that you’re building partnerships with.
[00:21:54] Norm Farrar: There’s a variety of different ways. One way is leveraging agencies. So I will literally contact an agency, say, this is what I’m doing, can you connect me?
Or do you think that this is something that you’d like to be involved with? This is a challenge for me, but for influencers or people who want to do this, it’s very simple for you. People want companies, brands want influencers, and for you to reach out and start talking to a brand now, You have to make sure that the brands that you’re reaching out to fit your personality and vice versa.
But if you’re reaching out to a company and you suit their brand personality or their cultural personality, brand culture, then everything should be good. Everybody wants an influencer. The hard part is finding the influencer. So if you’re contacting them and saying, Hey, I’ll do this. Let’s say you’re giving like a a price right now, I can’t give a price.
I don’t have those followers. I’m doing it for free. But if you’re a nano influencer and you wanna charge a few bucks, or maybe you just want the product, You can say that you reach out to the brand, go on LinkedIn, find out the brand manager, throw it a, a message to them. There’s all different ways that you could reach out, but I’d probably start with different agencies, aggregators, people like that, like in the a Amazon space.
There’s tons of aggregators out there, and especially if you want free product, there’s a lot of ways that you could do that. As you’re growing up, you’re following and put out good content. Just make sure it’s consistent with what the brand’s looking for. The other thing is, what we’re doing is we’re putting out the word on social media, so we’ve got press releases.
I read a press release every time I put out a brand. I should mention, I own a press release company, so that’s one I didn’t mention before. So I can do that. So when I get a brand, I can announce that I’ve got a partnership going with that brand. If you can do that, let’s say that you have three or four or five different brands that come on in a week.
You can do that very inexpensively and that’ll get the word out there. Usually, you know, you’ll get onto the four to 500 different media outlets that should have the information on there about the brands. And you can also do that with con uh, content syndication. And just to give you just another example, if you write a blog article, publish.
About the brands and it could be the benefits of X, Y, and Z. And then you write a press release about that blog article and you’ve got the links in there going back to the same spot. You’re gonna get the benefit of a syndicated press release and the syndicated blog article that’s gonna get you lots of seo.
[00:24:52] Mike Allton: Fantastic. Love that. So now as you’re thinking about the brands that you’ve been partnering with and where they’ve been coming from, what would you say would be your most successful channel? Where are you getting most of these brand partnerships from? Women’s Beauty, , women’s Beauty. Okay. So you went, so I said that it’s a very open question, right?
People can interpret however they want. So your interpretation was product channel, women’s beauty. How interesting.
[00:25:18] Norm Farrar: Yeah. Now think of it this way. Okay? So. You can go on and this is a, a strategy. You can go on and have one TikTok channel. You can go on and have your TikTok channel like me just going on there and bunch of norm D L W N deals.
You can go on to TikTok with a, I’m kind of a burly type guy. I usually drink outta my Harley mug, and so I thought of why don’t I do a women’s review for. So what to buy your partner spouses, and I’ll do it. And so, uh, anyways, there’s one, and then there’s another one that I shouldn’t even reveal, but I will to your audience, the master reviewer where I wear different.
Facial toning masks, uh, and
[00:26:06] Mike Allton: nobody I knew that was you. Oh, did you? , [00:26:10] Norm Farrar: that’s, that is a fun one of mine. So, uh, anyways, I, I have different personalities for these channels and just seeing what’s gonna hit. And these are all done within the last month and just seeing which one’s gonna hit. But by far, when I talk on Amazon, the brand managers that come on.
Or the owners come on and talk about women’s beauty, and I ask the questions and I try the stuff on. Those are the highest performing Amazon lives we have.
[00:26:44] Mike Allton: I love that you shared that first. It obviously shows an element where we’re not taking ourselves too seriously. We’re willing to try on some women’s beauty or do something that’s a little out of the box, you know, for the benefit of the audience, which is fantastic.
I also love that what you’re talking about is something good friend, friend of the show, drew Davis, who’s speaker, author of the Referable. . He talks about this idea of fractals where, and he’s talking about it from the speaking perspective. You’re talking about it from like an e-commerce, an influencer marketing perspective.
It’s the same idea where once you start to get into a specific niche, you keep drilling down into that niche like he’s talking about Andrew, like if you start speaking in front of real estate agents, now you start looking for more real estate agent and related. Industry events that you could speak to, cuz now you’ve developed that expertise and in your case, you could continue to create more and more videos right in the women’s beauty vertical and continue to really just explode in that fractal as, as Drew would call it.
Love it. That’s fantastic. Now folks, I wanna share with you, we’re talking with Norm Farar about his most successful channels for partnerships, and I’ve got just one more key question that I wanna ask Norm. But before I do, I’ve got a message from our CMO to Agorapulse about another channel that you should be thinking about.
It’s the Arc de Triumph. Can you imagine if you’re in charge, if you’re the CMO of marketing Paris, what are your main channels? The arc of Triumph. There’s the Eiffel Tower, there’s the Louv. Those are your channels you’re gonna use to drive tourism dollars in. Okay, now, but you’re not the CMO of Paris. In fact, you’re the CMO of your company product service.
So what are your main channels? So I’m gonna guess there are things like Paper click, maybe Trade Joe’s events. Maybe content. Those are all pretty predictable, right? Let me ask you this question. Are you treating social media as a main channel? By the way, only 1.8% of you today measure social media and can prove an ROI in that investment.
HubSpot and Gartner say social media is the number one channel to invest in this year. Are you doing it? If not, I can tell you why you’re not doing it. Because you don’t have the tools, you don’t have the mentality, and that’s okay. We’ve got you covered. You changed the mentality. We’ll give you the tool word pulse tracks all the ROI for you.
One place to manage all your social media activity, your number one channel, change your success. Treat social media as channel one CMO to another. My name is Darryl. I’m with Agorapulse. I’ll talk.
All right, norm, we’ve been talking about strategic partnerships. We’ve been talking about leveraging influencers, becoming influencers ourselves, and you shared with me over this whole time all these different businesses that you’ve ever, even to this day, how many businesses do you have now? Technic.
You’ve mentioned at least three, I think. I suspect you’ve got more that you’re hiding.
[00:29:38] Norm Farrar: Yeah, there’s probably about five or six. [00:29:40] Mike Allton: Five or six. Five or six. Okay. So he is got five or six businesses, folks. He’s not sure he is got two made account. So don’t tell us. I’m really curious, what role has relationships played?
Not personal, but professional relationships played throughout this journey to help you get to where you are today.
[00:29:59] Norm Farrar: Probably the most vital thing learned at a very early age. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Hear it all the time. It’s absolutely the truth. My network is everything and even when I go out.
So it’s interesting when I spend the money to go to an event and you can go to free events, but usually the quality of the people and the people. That have that open mind, that might be your next partner. You never know if they’re gonna be sitting beside you, but it is a completely different feel.
Breaking bread and getting to know people. And by the time I just was on an on a business cruise and I think I walked off the, uh, cruise with about two or three new deals, possibly a, a new partner to consider or bring ’em in as a strategic partner. So you’re finding good people. And for me, the only reason I have these companies is not that I am running the c.
I have good people running the companies. They make all the decisions. I only find those good people and partner with them. So relationships is everything.
[00:31:10] Mike Allton: Love that answer. Love the story. Thank you so much for sharing that. And you know, I never, you know, folks listening, you should know I don’t. Talk about what I’m gonna talk about with these guests beforehand.
I may show them the questions, but we don’t have conversations, so I don’t know how they’re gonna answer. You know, I ask my guests every time, you know, what role has relationships played? Or some variation on that, and they keep coming back every single time. Relationships are the key. Totally a lesson, totally a takeaway that I want all of you to come away from this with now.
Norm, this has been fantastic. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your time. Let everyone know where they can find you. Follow you. Do you want them to be one of the hundred thousand people that are following you and building your audience? This.
[00:31:53] Norm Farrar: Yes, because I only have 999,991 . So, uh, anyway, not true.
Not true. . First of all, if you’re interested in sending me product, just hit me up either on any of my social or. Norm a mz, so like Amazon, amz.club, or any of the social, just let, let them or let me know that you heard about it here and love to do all of that. And again, it’s not gonna cost you anything.
And the other thing is I’ve got a podcast. If you want to hear from a seller’s side what’s going on, you want to become a better online e-com seller. It’s lunch with Norm. It goes live, uh, Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays at noon Eastern Standard time. But the podcast is on any. Of your favorite podcast platforms.
[00:32:44] Mike Allton: Fantastic. Thank you so much. And folks, that’s all we’ve got for today. Don’t forget to subscribe and follow the Partnership unpacked podcast on Apple. And if you love what you heard today, please leave us review. We love knowing what you think. Until next time, bye-bye.
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